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In this book the Bord's examine the idea of interstellar communication less through the lens of science than through the eye of popular folklore - the stories of people who claim to have encountered, contacted or been abducted by space beings. Though older readers will be aware of many of these stories, others will be new: included are a couple of 'lost abductions'.
From their round-up the reader will grasp the essential continuity between contactee and abduction lore, despite what is said across the Atlantic. What separates them is not some objective standard of believability but a vastly increased sophistication of imagination between, say, Buck Nelson and Betty Andreasson. Scientific opinion about extraterrestrial life tends to polarise between those, principally astronomers, who seem to regard the universe as teeming with surrogate Los Angelinos, and those, often evolutionary biologists who regard human beings as probably both physically and psychologically unique.
The universe may indeed teem with 'life' but that life will be very different from us. 'They' will not be building computers and spaceships, but pursuing their own life ways, products of their own evolutionary history. Computers and spaceships are probably just two of a vast myriad of ways in which lifeforms adapt to their environments. Janet Bord tends to agree with this approach, so does Colin until halfway through his conclusion when he seems to reverse course and talk of cosmic intelligences.
Unfortunately the idea of 'parallel universes' is dragged in to avoid the inevitable conclusion that ufonaut stories represent an internal reality. It is not clear what is meant by 'parallel universe' in this context: none of the ideas about such universes which are discussed on the edges of physics describe 'places' one can pop in and out of in downtown Neasden. Some of the more accessible might be found on the other side of a black hole, others involve playing with energy on the level of the Big-Bang itself. 'Inhabitants ' of such realms would be even less like the patrons of a Los Angeles health food shop than the strangest inhabitants of the fifth planet of Tau Ceti.
- Peter Rogerson, Magonia 42, 1992
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