SIGHTINGS

GHOSTS, eveybody loves to hear stories about them but nobody wants to actually have an encounter with them. There are friendly spirits and heart-stopping vile apparitions. So depending on how lucky you are on a particular dark and cold night, this book is a safe exercise in knowing more about happenings on the dark side.


"WHAT a spooky book!" was my reaction as I pored over the first of its
three sections, aptly named `Hauntings'.
Sightings is a spectacularly successful TV series in America. Until
recently, it was shown in Malaysia over Metrovision. Then it vanished from
the schedule as mysteriously as it had appeared.
For those who dabble in the inexplicable, this book is a mother lode of
actual eerie happenings that baffle the logical mind and probably will
elicit a few knowing nods from your grandmother back in the kampung or
remote hometown.
Take, for example, the haunted castle of Berry-Pomeroy near Totnes,
England. For three centuries, this 15th Century castle has festered in the
bowels of its evil past. Stories of incest and murder abound. Visitors who
accidentally stumbled onto this castle fled its boundaries terrified,
vowing never to return. It seems that the very walls of the castle reek
with an overwhelming sense of wickedness. The violent misdeeds that took
place centuries ago had left a residue of evil that refuses to leave the
cursed premises.
The chapter on Pomeroy castle is certainly one of the most frightening I
have ever encountered.
In the other chapters are recounted happenings, sightings, unnatural
phenomena that have stood the tests and trials carried out by
investigators of the paranormal. Even the list of equipment used in the
process is impressive - Goss meter, Geiger counter, negative ion detector,
night vision lenses, and devices used to measure atmospheric changes in a
room.
We have stories on UFOs and even abduction by aliens. Victims of alien
experimentations have revealed under hypnosis that they were probed by
sophisticated tools which sought scrapings from various parts of the
anatomy. Communication seemed to be effected by a highly developed form of
telepathy that transcends the barrier of language difficulties. Abductees
have disclosed how they were compelled to feel strong human emotions
generated through alien technology.
Halfway through the UFO section, I could not help feeling that perhaps
the popular X-Files series hijacked many of the stories from Sightings and
made them its own.
There have been so many cases of UFO sightings down the centuries that
only a fool would deny the mystery that surrounds a credible number of
testimonies that defy human logic and scientific explanations. This book
certainly does not have the capacity to cover them all or even attempt to
clarify them. What it does have are pictures, documented evidence of the
many strange incidents that have taken place over our skies.
If the happenings actually took place, it is quite understandable why
governments of all nations have denied they did. It is a monumental task
to explain things literally out of this world to people who are barely
coping with problems of day-to-day living.
Most authorities, as this book reveals, fight shy of dealing with
matters beyond their reach. A Russian top gun pilot Maxim Chyrdakov was
forced to eject from his plane after he trailed a UFO which retaliated by
rendering all the equipment on board his plane inoperable. When Chyrdakov
filed a written report of his close encounter to his superiors, they
promptly interrogated him and instituted criminal charges against him.
This probably goes a long way to explain why pilots, fighter or
commercial, keep their outer limits experiences very much to themselves.
A little brat of a thought did make an attempt to make me sceptical, but
then I had to consider this fact: Thousands of years ago, somewhere in the
region near present-day Mexico, several Aztec tribes accurately predicted
the July 11, 1991 total eclipse of the sun. The forecast was duly
documented and the evidence recovered in the 20th Century, much to the
astonishment of our already very clever scientists.
That brings to mind the query: how in heaven's name could a bunch of
sun-worshippers pinpoint with uncanny accuracy a celestial event that
would occur several millenia in the future with their jungle technology?
Perhaps they had a little help from some friends down the Milky Way?
Sightings is not all about ghosts, poltergeists, werewolves and psychic
hunters. At the tail-end of the section on `The Unexplained' is a touching
tale of a mother's love.
A woman born 21 years after the death of another woman begins to have
visions of children not known to her. The memories that embraced her
growing years since the age of three plague her unceasingly. Finally, in a
desperate attempt to seek answers to the bewildering emotions, she
journeys from her home in Northamptonshire, England, to Dublin, Ireland.
There she finds the answer. The pieces begin to fall into place. As the
other person in a past life, she had suffered an untimely death leaving
behind eight children. The ninth died at birth.
Gradually she is reunited with her `children'. If you like to believe
this tale, as many of us would with little reluctance, it lends strength
to the suggestion that love, especially a mother's love, does not cease at
the grave. Strong love conquers death, transcends time and can return from
the hereafter, to soothe loved ones.
This is a book that aims to shake your old beliefs. Certainly, it
entertains. It intrigues to the nth degree. The dose of unadulterated
reality or the unreal it dishes out may alter your concept of this life
and the next and the next.