This Friday, December 15, is the last day to order from Amazon.com using free Super Saver Shipping and still receive books in time for Christmas giving. So I’m gonna put aside my regular look at the New York Times bestseller list this week and instead point out some matching sets of books perfect for readers of your list.

Monday: books for conspiracy buffs
Tuesday: celebrating the season
Wednesday: armchair traveling
Today: on the lookout for UFOs and strange creatures
Friday: lost classics of literature


The Flying Saucers Are Real, is a personal, no-nonsense look at the UFO phenomenon by a man who was there from the beginning. Aviation writer and retired Marine Corps Major Donald E. Keyhoe was asked by True magazine in 1949 to look into the flying saucer enigma, which had burst onto the scene just two years previously. With information from his friends in the military, Keyhoe concluded that the objects came from outer space and that the Air Force was covering up the story to prevent panic. That astonishing article was expanded into this landmark book, in which Keyhoe provides the details of his investigation: he talks with the witnesses, reviews the history of the phenomenon, and attempts to pry open the secrecy lid the Air Force had clamped down on the subject.

As a study of 17th-century folklore, the mysterious and remarkable The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies is fascinating. As a document of the popular mindset of a time in which the odd or the outcast were still condemned and punished as witches, it is wholly astonishing. Here, in one book, is Robert Kirk’s “A Study in Folk-Lore and Psychical Research” — dating from 1691, it is perhaps a hallucinatory and delusional labor of love by a minister obsessed with psychic phenomena — and commentary written in 1893 by folklorist Andrew Lang that both celebrates Kirk’s passion and wonders at his “savage metaphysics.” By turns bizarre and enlightening, this little book continues to bewitch today’s readers.

In Left at East Gate: A First-hand Account of the Rendlesham Forest UFO Incident, Its Cover-up, and Investigation, by Larry Warren and Peter Robbins, is the astonishing story that has been featured in Sci Fi and History Channel documentaries. In December 1980, Larry Warren was a member of the Air Force security police stationed at RAF Bentwaters, a NATO base in Great Britain. On the night of the 28th he was on guard duty when he was taken by truck to join other Air Force personnel to investigate a disturbance in a Rendlesham Forest about five miles away, which turned out to be a landed UFO. This was the third night of UFO activity in the area and by far the most profound. When the men were debriefed the next day, they were warned to tell no one about what they had seen-as “bullets are cheap.” And so began what would turn out to be the best-documented and most significant military-UFO incident in history. This remarkable story, told with the help of investigative writer Peter Robbins, was the basis of the SciFi Channel’s documentary UFO Invasion at Rendlesham.

The Great New England Sea Serpent: An Account of Unknown Creatures Sighted by Many Respectable Persons Between 1638 and the Present Day, by J. P. O’Neill: In August of 1817, members of the New England Linnaean Society found themselves in the unique position of conducting the first ever scientific investigation of an unknown marine creature, supposed to be a sea serpent, which had appeared in the harbor at Gloucester, Massachusetts. This was not the first sighting of a strange creature in the Gulf of Maine; nor was it the last. Is it a strange mammal related to the seals, a descendant of a prehistoric reptile, or a new, unidentified animal? Whatever it is, or was, the witnesses call it a sea serpent. Remarkably similar descriptions of a creature with a long body, undulating motion, and horse-sized, snake-like head have left a trail of clues and controversy going back three centuries.

If UFOS don’t exist, then they can’t crash. But something did crash near Corona, a tiny town not far from Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. In Crash at Corona: The U.S. Military Retrieval and Cover-up of a UFO Crash at Corona: The Definitive Study of the Roswell Incident, aviation/science writer Don Berliner and nuclear physicist Stanton T. Friedman — the original civilian investigator of the so-called Roswell incident — delve into the controversy to find the truth. They sifted through once-classified government documents, interviewed military and civilian witnesses, pieced together evidence, considered alternative theories, and concluded that a UFO crashed near Corona — and the U.S. government knew it and covered it up. Crash at Corona proves that what was found in the New Mexico desert wasn’t a weather balloon or a secret weapon — it was a UFO.

(Technorati tags: , , )