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This book introduces several new or newish themes into abduction mythology. When we last heard from Betty we had not heard about hybrid babies, now we have.
Betty has too. Giving birth to the hybrid herself would by now be rather passe, so she introduces the motif of the midwife's visit to the fairy birth, with herself as midwife or attendant. These Visitors are size shifters, and she is reduced in size to meet them (a motif only known previously in the British cases of BS near Warminster in the early seventies, and a male member of that family from North Wales whose name we dare not mention for fear of a long anguished letter from a certain UFO magazine editor, possibly followed by one from m'learned friends).
The Andreasson stories become increasingly religious in tone. The aliens proclaim themselves 'The Watchers '. I'm sure that Andreasson and Fowler are aware that in Jewish apocryphal tradition The Watchers were the sons of God who lusted after the daughters of men, as mentioned in Genesis. They were supposed to be the lower order of angels closest to earth - which surely will be announced as a shock discovery in the next volume, in which Betty announces the Second Coming.
Fowler has another card to play: he is becoming an abductee himself, in rather a vague sort of way. This includes the large 'biopsy holes' which have replaced strange scars as the mark of the abductee. Abduction book authors becoming abductees may be the theme of the nineties. Randles has put a tentative toe in the water, and you just know Budd is going to be next. How long can the full story of Rimmer's encounter in the summer of 1972 be kept secret?
- Peter Rogerson, from Magonia 42, 1992.
1 comment:
Reading this at the end of 2021, I am greatly amused. Such a short review packed with so much "inside baseball"! Well done.
Hynek said ridicule was not part of the scientific process. But as I told Hynek's biographer, Mark O'Connell, Socrates would disagree!
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