Brad Steiger is a prolific writer on unexplained phenomena. His work has been geared toward non-critical readers, but he’s always been thoughtful and cautious – until now. This volume would be better entitled “My First Big Book of Monsters”. It could be a children’s survey, except that it frequently veers from introductory material to crackpot theories, all presented as “unbelievable yet true”.
Snippets from Steiger and more than a dozen contributors are collected under thrilling headings such as “Bigfoot – North America’s King Kong”. Also included are werewolves, vampires, ghosts, lake monsters, aliens/ancient astronauts and the Deros, the evil robot denizens of inner-Earth made famous in 1940s pulp magazines as The Shaver Mystery.
Given so many chefs in Steiger’s kitchen, the quality is wildly varied. The old standards are here, including Betty and Barney Hill, the Dædalus sea serpent and the Patterson-Gimlin Sasquatch film, and there are also some genuine new finds, such as 1930s native Inuit reports of Bigfoot in Alaska. Too often, though, Steiger is sensational and plain wrong. There’s little effort to weigh or analyse. Speaking of US National Guards and shape-shifting Tibetan demons from another dimension, Steiger breathlessly asks: “Could our guardsmen from New York have come face to face with such a being?” Umm… maybe? Or, later, embracing early, naïve archæological excavations: “Could these huge skeletons of gigantic ‘Indians’ be all that remains of a proud prehistoric race?” Well, no. Mammoth and mastodons remains were often mistaken for those of “giants” in the 19th century.
That’s all harmless fun, I suppose, but Steiger’s grasp of evolution is alarming. The orang-pendek, for example, could be a “newly evolved species of ape”. As opposed to a previously-evolved species?
It gets worse. Discussing inhabitants of the inner Earth, one of his correspondents alleges “birth defects and malformations exist which, doubtless” point to “the human family or gene pool being interbred” with underground beings. Steiger concludes: “Could it be [..] the worst among us are not completely of us”? (Emphasis in the original.) No. It could not be. A more likely excuse is shocking bigotry. Birth defects as “evidence” of inner-Earth interbreeding?
Nor, speaking of those pesky Zeta Reticulans, is there “a very strong possibility that the reptilian genetic engineers who helped program early humankind may have been the very same ones who were responsible for the great cataclysms.”
Another correspondent helpfully points out that the reptilian “hive” mind-control can be fought using “sixth sense, gut instinct.”
My own sixth sense, gut instinct says to avoid this book. There’s some gold here, but there’s also an awful lot of sensational idiocy.
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