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by Jim Brandon 
A Buffet of America's Cosmic Strangeness
In 1978, I had been retired for several years, and was looking for adventure. I came across this guide to sites of mystery, packed up my Travelall and took to the road. I have used this book for over two decades now; I have followed Jim Brandon's trail across this continent from one end to the other, and seen and experienced many amazing and wonderful sights as a result. I can never repay the author for leading me to the Integratron and the Santa Cruz Mystery Spot in California, Mystery Hill in New Hampshire, and the Serpent Mound in Ohio. Brandon has dug deeply into archives to ferret out information forgotten by mainstream thinkers in these matters, in order to find places where these phenomena concentrate. Though this book is in fact a guidebook, there is beneath that surface a deeper story, like the mysteries to which Brandon points. The basis of the entire work is the hypothesis that a materialistic or hardware approach to these phenomena--i.e., UFOs are extraterrestrial craft, Bigfoot is a material creature, all earth mounds were built by Indians--lacks the ability to explain fully these phenomena or why they appear with regularity in certain places (this idea is explored further in Brandon's The Rebirth of Pan). One can ignore all that, if one chooses, and still enjoy the book for what it purports to be: an invaluable guide to places of power and mystery in the United States. Brandon's sense of humor and open mindedness about these matters makes the book an enjoyable read, and the material is at times creepy enough to be a source of not merely late night chills, but also gives a sense of the strange character of the land in which we live. |
