AJG, the author of THE CHAOS CONUNDRUM: ESSAYS ON UFOS, GHOSTS & OTHER HIGH STRANGENESS IN OUR NON-RATIONAL & ATEMPORAL WORLD [Redstar Books, 9.99] is a kind of Hoosier compatriot.
He once lived in Columbia City, Indiana, which is stone's throw from our media offices and he now lives near Flint, Michigan, where this writer has a brother, who is also in news media.
AJG is also part of the new influencial ufological breed, consisting of Paul Kimball, Nick Redfern, Greg Bishop, and the departed but not forgotten Mac Tonnies.
Should I look at his book favorably for all that?
I don't have to. The 145 page book, for a lousy ten bucks, is a gem, flush with informative footnotes (something I extol, as you know) and insights that are personal but reek of substantive knowledge about UFOs, ghosts, and the paranormal generally.
I found much material that I never knew before - and I've been around the UFO block - and many suggestions that led me to new discoveries.
Moreover, I was reading along, and suddenly the book was over! I was entranced but snapped out of my reverie when the bibliography and index sneaked up on me. I was saddened that the breezy sojourn Mr. Gulyas had provided was done.
But let me talk about specfics.
Nick Redfern offers the Foreword, in which he gives a laudatory salute to Mr. Gulyas' effort, of course, while presenting his own paranormal pr'ecis.
There follows ten chapters, among them "Ghosts, Barker & Moseley, Space Demons,...Wild Bill Cooper, Exopolitics, Breaking Roswell, et cetera."
I, like Mr. Redfern, am not a ghost aficionado but Mr. Gulyas, in a take off about a family photo, from 1932, that contains an uncle who died several years before the photo was taken, his image inserted, spookily (as I perceived it) well before Photoshop was extant, was actually quite interesting
This allowed AJG's riff on ghosts and uninvited events that he finds intriguing and necessary to understanding the "non-rational and atemporal" world we live in.
In Chapter Two - Experiences - when AJG lived close by us, he writes about his UFO Information Agency, Strategic Investigation Team 1310 and his agency's "paranormal energy detector" providing dialogue as if it was being replicated from tape recordings.
I laughed (not out loud) at his comical, but half-serious account of checking out a crop circle in the area in 1996.
The chapter contains AJG's mild obsession with the haunted and mysterious and the intersection he found and finds between paranoia and irrationality inside things we all find disturbing or mysterious.
The Gray Barker and James Moseley chapter (3) offers little know factoids about both men, and some of the people they interacted with, among them Adamski and Albert Bender,.
Recently deceased Mac Tonnies gets extensive paranormal honorariums from AJG, who truly admires the brilliantly obtuse thinker, a favorite pal of Paul Kimball too.
Nick Redfern and the satanic aspects of the paranormal get a nod, but I skimmed, not being particularly enamored of that fringe element of the intrinsically fringe paranormal world.
The Strange Journey of Wild Bill Cooper (Chapter 5), a man killed by sheriff deputies in Arizona, 2002, was an odd fellow truly, and AJG presents his story in full dress, the MJ-12 fixation and political conspiracy bent addressed rather completely, for the newbie who needs to know about the fastidious details of MJ-12 and those who find it true and worthwhile.
Billy Meier and contactees or abductees, such as Villas Boas [neither, as recounted in Redfern's book Contactees] get their due.
And, of course, Roswell (Chapter 9), is put in its place, sensibly and rather completely, AJG not accepting it as a valid account of an alien UFO crash but allowing that the story is important within the UFO context, and he explains why.
And Exopolitics (Chapter 8) gets a good explication.
He closes the book on a personal note about, ostensibly, "ghosts of the mind" and how we should deal with things non-rational, paranormal, or just weird.
It's a good read I can assure you of that.
There is a dearth of pictures of illustrations and, as I noted about a New Page book (that got me blacklisted), a typo - just one I noticed - on page 82: politcal. A small error that is excusable. (I don't want to get blacklisted from Redstar Books too.)
So let me suggest that for 10 measly bucks you will get a book full of information that a charge card ad would say is priceless.
It's available at bookstores, online and off, and by way of http://www.redstarfilmtv.com/booksor 2541 Robie Street, Halifax. NS, Canada B3K 4N3
