Tuesday, April 14, 2020

THE DEVIL'S SEA by Elizabeth Nichols











Nichols gathers up a crackerjack collection of wild rides through the Triangle via UFO, ghost ship, and dimensional vortexes! It's all packed into 155 quick and dirty pages, with the much ballyhooed psychic sleuths consigned to a brief final chapter. The five psychics interviewed are Otto Binder, Maxine Asher, Fay Clark, Ted Owens, and Irene Hughes.  Also includes two nicely drawn maps by Clarice Borio.




Award Books, 1975

Monday, April 6, 2020

TRIANGLE OF THE LOST by Warren Smith











Another wild ride from Warren Smith, this time through the Bermuda Triangle. Highlights include a Cuban counterrevolutionary's UFO/USO sighting while on business for the CIA, some vicious hairy dwarfs that launch a freakish attack on a Venezuelan hunter, and Smith's now de rigeur detour through the Hollow Earth by way of Shamballah.


Smith extends John Wallace Spencer's Limbo of the Lost (calling it the Triangle of the Lost) to capture shoreline territories, allowing him to include the aforementioned vicious hairy dwarfs and Ivan T. Sanderson's infamous giant penguin, here identified as a dinosaur. Globsters and a spooky bigfoot are given brief mention as well. Triangle buster Lawrence David Kusch likely had Smith in mind (among others) when he tracked down the radio transcript for Flight 19's flight to oblivion, which Smith claims is nonexistent in this text.



Once again, Smith isn't above recycling. This time it's his chapter on Shamballah and Theosophy, lifted from his collaboration with Brad Steiger on This Hollow Earth, which would turn up again next year in The Hidden Secrets of the Hollow Earth. There's also a chapter made up of one of the shabbiest of the paranormal subgenres, psychic predictions about a given subject. 

Table of contents:

1.  The Mysterious Triangle of the Lost (5)
2.  Christopher Columbus in the Triangle of the Lost (17)
3.  Sea Serpents and Maritime Monsters (31)
4.  Mystery of Underwater UFOs (44)
5.  An Undersea City for the New Race (61)
6.  Bizarre Giants in the Triangle (74)
7.  Shamballah: Land of the Smoky Gods (88)
8.  Monsters, UFOs and Bizarre Beings (110)
9 . Flights to Doom (123)
10. The Evidence for Alien Intelligence (138)
11. Mysteries of Ancient Mariners (157)
12. Psychics Predict Triangle Mysteries (170)
13. Mysteries of the Devil's Island (182)
14. Ghost Ships in Satan's Sea (193)
15. What's Happening Out There? (205)
16. Mysteries of the Devil's Sea (216)

Zebra Books, 1975

Thursday, April 2, 2020

IMPOSSIBLE YET IT HAPPENED! by R. DeWitt Miller









Charming old collection of Forteana makes no bones about its scattershot structure, flitting from mystery to mystery and never overstaying its welcome. Interesting to see the state of General Weirdness just a few years before the Bermuda Triangle, Bigfoot, and the UFO explosion. Miller writes with a light touch, leveling things with a wry sense of humor whether the subject is sea serpents or seances. There doesn't seem to be a lot of information out there concerning Miller, besides his published works and the fact that he died at the age of 48 in 1958. Going by the past tense of his author description, this paperback was published at some point after that. 

The excellent UFO blog The Saucers That Time Forgot has a a very thorough article on this book and its early flying saucer influence under its original title, Forgotten Mysteries.

Ace Books, circa 1960 (original pub. 1947)