MA-22 - A Star to Steer By: Music from the Great Beyond

This collection of music about "out there" features front and rear cover art depicting the "star map" produced by Betty Hill under hypnotic regression. You may recall that after a bout of missing time after seing a light in the sky on September 19, 1961, Betty and Barney of New Hampshire eventually went to a hypnotist under whose influence they recalled being kidnaped by alien critters.

Betty later "recalled" that during their experience, she saw a three-dimensional image similar to a "map" that she later tried to reproduce. Later "analysis" tried to make Betty's sketch match stars, with results shown in the CD cover art.

The Hills' recollections were different from each other's in many ways -- such as no-nosed aliens versus big-nosed aliens and so on, but both Betty's and Barney's recollections (again, I emphasize, influenced heavily by the hypnotic state) still fit with the classic parameters of an "Encounter with the Other:"
- a bright light induces paralysis;
- strange yet humanoid beings apparently give physical examinations;
- special attention is paid to reproductive/sexual aspects (Betty's "pregnancy" test involving a large needle's insertion into her belly button);
- an attempt to retrieve an artifact that is thwarted;
- some physical residue that can be interpreted various ways (the strange circle of removed paint on the trunk lid of their car);
- a foggy recollection that later solidifies into a codified story

-- and many other aspects. I agree with the viewpoints expressed by Jacque Vallee or John Keel and others, that the reality of "the UFO phenomenon," and especially encounters with their supposed occupants, have a lot more in common with ancient legends of Faeries and demons than with scientific explorers from the planet Kwatloo.

These are the selections in this clumping of songs:

1 - (When You) See Those Flying Saucers The Buchanan Brothers 1947

2 - Rocket Joe Bennett & The Sparkletones 1957
3 - Tiny Space Man Bill Carlisle 1957
4 - The Flying Saucer Goes West Buchanan and Goodman 1958
5 - Outer Space Santa The Lennon Sisters 1958
6 - Mope-itty Mope Boss-Tones 1959
7 - Asteroid Hop Jimmie Haskell And His Orchestra 1959
8 - Beep Beep Loiuis Prima 1959
9 - Beep, Beep Tom Glazer & Dottie Evans 1959
10 - UFOs Soul, Inc 1967
11 - Have You Seen the Saucers Jefferson Airplane 1970
12 - Supersonic Rocket Ship The Kinks 1972
13 - UFOs Undisputed Truth 1975
14 - Waiting for the UFOs Graham Parker 1979
15 - Flying Saucer Safari Suburban Lawns 1981
16 - The Alien Song (for those who listen) Milla Jovovich 1994
17 - Subterranean Homesick Alien Radiohead 1997
18 - Fell in Love With an Alien The Kelly Family 1997
19 - Space Robot Five Brave Saint Saturn 2000
20 - Outer Space Song Pinky and Perky 2002
21 - UFOs, Big Rigs and BBQ Mojo Nixon 2005
22 - Devil Woman from Outer Space Rezurex 2006
23 - Space Craze Rick McGuire 2006
24 - Pluto Clare and The Reasons 2007
25 - The Planet Mars The Corillions 2007
26 - Robot Monster Damon Alexander & the Ten Cent Rentals 2008
27 - The Ballad of Davy Crockett (In Outer Space) They Might Be Giants 2009

(Though they share the same name, the two tracks named "Beep, Beep" are NOT the same song.)

Here we have the typical wide array of views about critters from space, from blind optimism (#11 and #14 for instance) to more pessimistic views (#22 or #26). There's the sincere (#1) and the silly (#4 and #5) -- in other words, in the words of the sheriff in Superman II, "they have a wide selection."

And I don't expect you to eat fish!

Here is the link: http://www.mediafire.com/?0ez25pzo2z5u4e7
See you later, gator!

Book Review - Dead Wrong by Richard Belzer & David Wayne

This is a great and valuable book!  Here are more detailed comments:

Did the Conspiracy Win by Making

the Book Impossible to Read?

 

This is a book full of investigations of supposedly “closed” incidents that were declared “solved” despite tons of evidence otherwise.  The most shameful truth is that the lies that smoothed over these murders were almost always told -- and still maintained -- by honorless people in our own government.

 

However, the book is almost ruined by the terrible LACK of proofreading and copy-editing.  A mistake or two is proof that a human being wrote the thing.  But this book is so full of simply correctable formatting errors that it makes you wonder if it was DELIBERATELY SABOTAGED by “the Man” -- to make the book’s message of truth (and American shame) hard to understand.

 

Here is my chronicle of frustrations:

 

Simple misspellings are found, like using “sights” for “sites” and “throws” for “throes.”  On page 255, an idea “was posted at one point.”  Since there is no mention of the internet or mail in the sentence, I bet that “posted” is missing the letter “I” and should be the word “posited” -- that is, “theorized or suggested.”

 

In many places, paragraph indentations don’t happen.  Several times, the font size changes from one line to the next, as in the top line of the Trafficante quotation on page 139.  The first line is slightly smaller than the next seven lines of the transcribed recording.

 

In several places, there is an uneven amount of space between lines, often between a paragraph and the last line of the paragraph, as on pages 162 (top paragraph); 164 (second paragraph); and 174 (second paragraph).

 

In a couple of places, there is NOSPACEBETWEENWORDS on a particular line of text, as on page 166 (two lines after boldface Baden quotation); and page 176 (the only indented paragraph on page, about two-thirds down).

 

The caption for the photo on page 169 talks about yellow and red lines on the photo, but this is a black-and-white photo with only light-colored and darker lines.  We know what the authors mean, but a proofreader should have caught this.

 

On page 192, we have a paragraph break in the middle of a sentence.  The third “paragraph” of a quotation is actually part of paragraph two.

 

On pages 227-228 and 270, the word “absence” is misspelled “abcense.”  And on the earlier pages, it’s in BIG CAPITAL LETTERS.

 

On page 264, the sentence regarding source material is given; then the source is cited; then the sentence regarding source material is given AGAIN, and more sources cited.  The sentence saying “the following sources were used” didn’t need to be there twice!

 

On page 298, the last bullet point has no closing parenthesis.

 

Can you see what I mean?  This book looks amateurish because of all the mistakes.  Looking like a third-grade production (no offense to third-graders!) makes the book seem easy to dismiss.  I can imagine a lot of conformist types looking this book over and saying, “If the editing is this sloppy, what does that say about the arguments and information here?”

 

Another trouble is that oftentimes the same information is repeated two and three times, in the same words or phrases, to repeat the same rhetorical point.  This may be a result of an editor not blending together different angles of an argument, I’m not sure.  This is very apparent in the chapter on Marilyn Monroe, which also has a very hard-to-read formatting problem.  For many pages we have side-by-side dueling text blocks.  One side of the page will have a running timeline of Marilyn’s last days, while the other column of text has other information.  You have to use several bookmarks or something to keep your places while trying to read two simultaneous pieces of text, for five or ten pages!  After a while this is like listening to the Beatles in one ear and Beethoven in the other ear.  You want to hear both but you’re too distracted to get the best out of either!

 

Once again, the book’s CONTENT is important, disturbing, and should be confronted.  It’s the presentation that makes you cringe.

 

This could be a dynamite book!  I beg Belzer and Wayne to let me proofread/copy-edit any future editions FREE OF CHARGE.  (I have been a professional copy editor/proofreader.)   But a book that comes out like this is irritating, and it makes you cringe to realize that a book full of silly blunders like this dilutes its own message by looking like “an amateur hour production.”

You should read this book!