Author: Michael Tellinger
Publisher: Music Masters Publishers
Price: £14.99
Isbn: 1920070133

“This is too much to handle for the strongest of character, so I suggest you put aside every ounce of everything you ever believed in, and prepare to digest some interesting facts.” So advises Michael Tellinger. Tellinger is not a scientist, writer or academic (he’s a musician), but this did not prevent him from writing more than 500 maddening pages of Zecharia Sitchin-inspired muddle.

Slave Species proposes that aliens created humanity to mine the gold they needed to repair the damaged atmosphere of their home planet. Here, “god” and “God” are two different forces, the former being the aliens who created humans and controlled them by limiting their intelligence and lifespan. The capitalised “God” is the true creator being with which, once our evolution is complete, humanity will one day unite. Think gnosis achieved through evolution of mind and genome.

Each reader’s tolerance of far-out rantings will determine their level of enjoyment. At times entertaining due to its sheer over-the-top oddness, Slave Species is also opinionated, repetitive, rarely referenced, and full of unreadable lists, quizzes and charts. It’s fascinating to view religion, economics, history and biology through the lens of alien engineering, but this worldview allows us to blame all our shortcomings on faulty alien design. It becomes conspiracy theory distilled to a highly potent universal level.

In Tellinger’s world, the pyramids were a control tower for spaceships, and Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by nuclear weaponry. Whether the theories contained in Slave Species of god are true or not, they are thought-provoking. Unfortunately, I gave the psychological causes of such a speculative, complicated and irrelevant theory more contemplation than the nature of ancient UFOs.