John A. Keel (1930–2009)

Originally published in 1971, John Keel's Our Haunted Planet is, quite probably, a more hilarious read than the author intended, especially when dealing with planet formation, outdated scientific knowledge, and unexplored areas of Earth and other planets.

All I could think while listening to this actually enjoyable book was how Keel would write such a book now with NASA having sent probes to Venus, Jupiter, and Mars, how the Hubble Telescope has given us visual evidence of pulsars and neutron stars (sources of radio signals) and the number of satellites which have given everyone access to the inaccessible parts of our own planet. All the guesses, based on dodgy science of an earlier era, made in this book, like the idea that Venus was actually a comet originally and that it was torn out of Jupiter's atmosphere (the source of the Red Spot) have been overturned by new, better theories about planet formation in recent years and that the realization that the Red Spot is actually a storm in Jupiter's atmosphere.

The rest of the book is a mix of ufology, MIBs and ultrahumans (paranormal), a conspiracy of world domination (called WoW - and I couldn't help but laugh at the initials because the narrator is very careful to say W-O-W and never "wow", but let's face it World of Warcraft is a more fun version of world domination) a bit like the Illuminati, and lots of rather random anecdotal information about alien abductions, etc.

All in all, a fun read.… (más)

uh...this is a ridiculous bunch of tripe. i have no idea why this even came to be on my to-be-read list, but i suspect that if i wasn't listening to it, it would have been the first book i ever stopped reading. (listening was more passive and i sped it up so it didn't take too long and i didn't have to pay too close attention.) i do think i could be made to be interested in these things, although i'm not a believer, but this book didn't do it.

keel seems to go back and forth with his theories, where he says that some people are obviously crazy and are unreliable, so their visitations with creatures aren't true. but then other people (who sound an awful lot like the first unreliable people) are totally reliable and their accounts are true. as, of course, are his own. (nope, he doesn't sound crazy at all. eye roll.) i assume this is supposed to build his credibility, to make us think that he doesn't just accept all of these stories at face value. it is unclear what criterion he uses to differentiate between the ones that he calls crazy and the ones that he believes.

i actually could be made to believe in the existence of extraterrestrials (or ultraterrestrials, as he wants to call them) but i have a pretty hard time believing they'd appear the way he describes them in this book. it's a super american-centered, kind of racist description of these beings. (they're all "oriental" looking or "negroid" and either outright malicious or scary or just weird and discomfiting.) why would beings from another world care about our phone lines or a car accident in a random city in america? why would they not want to be discovered if they're trying to affect goodness in the world? (why would they interfere with electrical signals and jam cameras and video/recording equipment?) why would they know how to speak english? why would they not be obviously in existence with the technology we have now to detect them? it's just utterly ludicrous from beginning to end.… (más)