| Book Review: Unexplained! | |
A New Hampshire man, a veteran outdoorsman considered reliable by those who know him, reports a daylight encounter with a nine-foot-tall apelike creature. A game warden explains it, with neither investigation nor specific cause, as a moose... Suppose the witness had seen something else, say a fugitive on the lam, and reported it to the sheriff. We may safely assume that the latter would not have said - at least without investigation and specific cause - that the witness had mistaken a moose for a man. Far more likely, the sheriff and his deputies would have raced to the site in anticipation of an immediate arrest.
The above excerpt from the introduction to the new edition of Jerome Clark's Unexplained! (Visible Ink Press, 1999) pretty much defines the approach that Clark takes to the great amount of material in this book. It's more than just a compendium of the "strange, sightings, incredible occurrences, and puzzling physical phenomena." Clark does not just lay out the various paranormal topics in encyclopedic or categorized format and leave it at that. Instead, he takes a very thoughtful, level-headed approach to the subject matter, advising that the reader should neither blindly accept the phenomena (which can vary widely in degree of strangeness) nor skeptically dismiss it out of hand.
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| Clark takes a very thoughtful, level-headed approach to the subject matter, advising that the reader should neither blindly accept the phenomena nor skeptically dismiss it out of hand. |
I find the book very appealing because Clark takes the same approach to the unexplained that I've tried to take at this website: there's a lot of strange stuff going on out there in the world, and it's worthy not only of our curiosity but also of careful investigation. "The stakes are so high, we would do well to be cautious," he writes. "Very cautious." And Clark has been doing that kind of investigation of paranormal claims, say the liner notes, for nearly three decades. He's a board member of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO studies and the former editor of Fate magazine.
Unexplained! is arranged in six sections:
- Cosmic Enigmas - lunar anomalies, the Tunguska event, and missing planets.
- Shapes in the Sky - mysterious airships, Area 51, alien abductions, and UFOs.
- Strange Showers - anomalous rain and other strange falls.
- Earth Mysteries - ball lightning, crop circles, earth lights, and teleportation.
- Cryptozoo - lake monsters, living dinosaurs, and other mysterious creatures.
- Out of Place - Animals found where they shouldn't be.
- Other Incredible Entities - Bigfoot, chupacabras, thunderbirds, and Men in Black.
- Things That Are Not - Bermuda Triangle, Jersey Devil, and Noah's Ark.
- Phenomenal Resources - websites, books, periodicals, and organizations.
There's a lot of good information here. Even with the extensive reading I've done over the years on these subjects, Clark still manages to come up with some creatures or topics that I'd never heard of. The tatzelwurm, for example, is a creature seen for at least 200 years (mostly in the Alps) and is described as having a thick, cylindrical body, a catlike head, four legs with three toes each, and a wide mouth sporting sharp teeth.
Each topic is presented with as much background as Clark could gather, and he often comments on how reliable the information is, how likely the incidents are to be true, and possible alternate explanations. The most telling chapter, perhaps, is "Things That Are Not" in which Clark exposes several stories, encounters, or phenomena as being hoaxes - or at least not having sufficient evidence or believability to be considered truly unexplained. This kind of forthrightness is very welcome in this field.
This kind of book is precisely what is needed in helping us think about the paranormal. Considering the quantity and variety of bizarre episodes that people report seeing or experiencing, it's clear that there's still much we don't know about this existence or how things really might work. Yet gullibility and blind acceptance can be just as useless as dismissive skepticism in allowing us to investigate and understand the many unexplained wonders that people encounter every day on this planet. Perhaps science will explain some or all of them eventually. And perhaps some will never have a satisfactory explanation.
In the meantime, what is more fascinating than exploring all of these puzzle pieces
that don't quite fit in to the accepted picture of what life and the cosmos really are?
It's these unexplained exceptions to the rule that challenge us to consider that life
-
or at least the way our minds perceive life - is far more than what it seems.
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