After a long month lost in the Bermuda Triangle we're back, with another of Brad Steiger's titles in his series of Forteana for the Popular Library. This one has a pretty modern focus, with long chapters on Bigfoot, UFOs, and the Bermuda Triangle. The Bigfoot chapter includes a profile on Roger Patterson written up riiiiiight before the release of his famous filmstrip - as such, he's just another hopeful searcher and a former "skeptic" who knows in his bones that Bigfoot lives. Don't worry, there's still plenty of old fashioned ghost stories and psychic premonitions too, and an unsettling chapter wherein one Ingara Nakling, Lutheran missionary, performs an exorcism on a Malagasy man. The exorcism isn't so bad, the truly creepy part is where she earnestly informs us that prior to her arrival the Malagasy people had no word for "love" - because you see, their original heathen Gods were exclusively beings of "fear and hate!" One wonders what other shocking revelations are available in Nakling's memoir My Life and Service Among the Malagasy.
The Astral art of Eckankar also gets a chapter, as does Wyatt Earp (psychic), railroad mogul Arthur Stilwell (also pyschic), and the good Dr. Luis Gomez do Amaral (performing surgery 19 years after his own death) ... along with too many other tidbits to list!
Strangely enough, two of the cameo illustrations on the cover are MIA inside the text. There's neither hide nor hair of the mystically inclined "Hottentot" or the ESP King of the racetrack! Now where'd they get off to?
Popular Library, 1967
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