The Dundurn Group – förlag

In the summer of 1993, people in Ontario were shocked by one of the most bizarre murders in the province’s history. A patient at the Brockville psychiatric hospital was brutally killed in a forest grove on the grounds of the institution. One of the killers, a nearly blind psychiatric patient, walked into a nearby police station and turned himself in. The other murderer lay near the body in a sleeping bag, drugged into unconsciousness. Police found that the myopic suspect is one of the Canada’s most dangerous killers, David Michael Krueger. His accomplice was Bruce Hamill, a murderer who had been freed after years of treatment at Penatanguishene’s Oak Ridge Institution for the criminally insane. Brockville hospital authorities had let Hamill escort Krueger on his first day pass in thirty-five years. How could this killing have happened?The bizarre story of Krueger’s life unfolds in this tightly-written book. It explores how Krueger allowed his strange fantasies to run his own life and how he was able to dupe psychiatrists, lawyers, and fellow inmates of the country’s toughest institution into doing his bidding.

How does the Canadian government handle information about UFOs? Veteran UFO researcher Chris Rutkowski reveals all.Polls show that millions of Canadians believe they’ve seen a UFO. Are these strange phenomena alien visitors? Meteors? Advanced foreign technology?Chris Rutkowski has been researching Canadian UFO reports since the 1970s and has gained an unparalleled understanding of how UFO reports are handled by government agencies. While the Canadian government and military establishment have taken UFO reports very seriously, they were unsure of how to manage them and looked to Rutkowski and other Canadian researchers for advice.With a public hungry for official UFO details and politicians asking the prime minister pointed questions about UFO reports, it’s clear that UFO sightings matter more than they ever have before, and Canadian researchers have become integral to international UFO studies.In Canada’s UFO Secrets, Rutkowski reflects on decades of investigation, tracing the development of Canadian UFO policy and detailing remarkable sightings, including cases never before revealed to the public.

The Cold War struggle against Soviet communism is over, but a new conflict — one within liberal democracy itself — has taken its place.Contemporary liberalism is in a bad way. But most advanced thinkers misdiagnose the problem. Few can see that liberalism, like any other ideology, suffers from tensions and contradictions, which threaten it from within. Malign actors attack liberalism from outside. But they do damage only by exploiting what is essentially a liberal civil war — a conflict of antithetical freedoms and individualities. A large part of the problem is that the origin of liberalism and the main assumptions about human freedom that nourished it have been obscured or forgotten.In The Crisis of Liberalism, Michael R.J. Bonner proposes that a renewed understanding of freedom, and its philosophical and theological foundations, can point the way out of the present mess.

Here is a list of three dozen of the top literary locales in the country. The selection of sites is necessarily subjective, yet it attempts to represent geographical, historical, social, and cultural concerns as well as strictly literary interests. Had this list been prepared by the editors of Michelin Guide, they would have added asterisks or stars to the entries:* Interesting.** Worth a detour.*** Worth a journey.It is the opinion of the author of Canadian Literary Landmarks that all thirty-six sites are "Worth a journey." It is recognized that the average person is unlikely to visit No. 1, not to mention No. 36, but as these sites happen to be the first and last entries in the book, they mark a convenient and symbolic beginning and ending. (No. 1 being L’Anse aux Meadows, Epaves Bay, Nfld. and No. 36 being the North Pole, NWT).

When did you last have a psychic experience? Are you in the habit of seeing – or sensing – the presence of spirits and ghost? Have you ever spotted a lake monster or sighted a UFO? When did you last consult a fortune-teller, approach a medium work an Ouija board, or read an astrology column? Have you ever had a premonition that some odd event would occur, and then witnessed it actually occurring? Did you ever experience a sense of déjà vu or a moment of pure bliss? Extraordinary Experiences: Personal Accounts of the Paranormal in Canada is a collection of over seventy short yet curiously gripping accounts of experiences and events that may be regarded as abnormal or paranormal. Colombo has collected highly readable accounts of unusual experiences from the past and the present. The supernatural practices of the Indians of the 18th and 19th centuries are described by Samuel Hearne and Paul Kane. From the turn of the century come accounts of "crisis apparitions," poltergeists, and haunted houses, as reported by spiritualists and other observers. But the majority of the personal narratives derive from letters sent to the editor in response to his requests featured in daily newspapers across the country, for first-hand accounts of the supernatural and the paranormal. Over one hundred readers responded; here are some of there responses… Extraordinary Experiences is an extraordinary reading experience. No book quite like it has ever before appeared in Canada.

Ink from an Octopus is a book of poetry by Leonard Gasparini.

Personal Accounts of the Mysterious in Canada.

Toward Wisdom addresses the nature of wisdom, humanity’s need for it, and ways and means of developing it. The situation the world faces today is extremely complex. Long-cherished values have begun to conflict with each other: material comfort vs. an uncontaminated world; economic growth now vs. economic well-being for our grandchildren. Toward Wisdom takes the position that the only way to make the world a better place is to make it a wiser place. Wisdom is no longer an option or a frill. We, and the world, need wisdom-based analyses of our problems followed by wisdom-based action. In the past, becoming wise was left to chance; a few people became wise before they died, but most did not. This lackadaisical approach will no longer do. Wisdom can be developed intentionally, and Toward Wisdom shows us how. The book examines some of the key impediments to wisdom; what they are, how they work, how they came to be; and introduces us to techniques for getting beyond them.

Contrary to popular belief, ghosts do not necessarily reside in draughty old castles and ancient graveyards. In this book, the author has collected ghost stories specifically from Alberta where she has discovered strange tales of hauntings in schools, restaurants, theatres, hotels, government buildings and modern houses from Calgary and Edmonton to rural areas and the Rocky Mountains. Several spine-tingling tales are legendary accounts of native spirits who still inhabit the land.In Edmonton, two former firehalls are widely reputed to be haunted; the McKay Avenue School is said to have at least half a dozen spirits; and employees of radio station CKUA have experienced a ghostly presence. "Alberta’s Most Haunted Place" is probably the Deane House and Tea Room at Fort Calgary, where a number of different ghosts are taken for granted by the staff.This eerie collection of supernatural tales includes, among others, the story of the Medicine Hat ghost train; the strange phenomena in a rural "castle" that cannot drive its owner away; the hauntings of the Banff Springs Hotel; the ghostly arsonist in a photograph at Chateau Lake Louise; evil ghosts of the Alberta Badlands; the beautiful lady in white who haunts Prince House in Heritage Park; the Canmore Opera House spirits; and the ghostly bookworm.

Quiet pleasant communities, sparkling under the clear blue skies of Alberta, have witnessed bloody murders and violent mayhem. From a wide variety of accounts, Babara Smith has selected eight intriguing stories that will astound and amaze you. Mystery still surrounds the fate of pro golfer Frank Willey who disappeared in 1962. Two men were convicted of his murder, but his body has never been found. No suspect, however, was ever found in the case of MaryAnn Plett. The pretty, young real-estate agent disappeared after going to show a property to a client — but some skeletal remains were discovered seven months later. In 1948, a family could hardly have guessed that their newly purchased home would come complete with a corpse; and, in another case, Winnie Wanner’s bathroom was found splattered with blood. Although her estranged husband was seen leaving the apartment with a suspiciously large bag, Winnie vanished from the face of the earth. These chilling tales, previously little known outside Alberta, also include matters of greed, rum running, shoot-outs, and hostages. They will be every bit as fascinating to the crime buff as those found anywhere.

As recently as the middle of this century, cancer was still a mysterious disease. It seemed to strike with reckless abandon, and once it had gripped its victim, doctors could do little more than relieve the pain, steady the pulse and ease the breathing. It is all too easy now to reflect on this sad state of affairs without realizing that cell biology itself was also a rudimentary science. In the past few years, a vastly different view of cancer has emerged. The highly sophisticated tools of genetic engineering have allowed biologists to look deep into the inner provinces of the cell, and what they have learned is taking biology and medicine in a completely new direction. Only a decade ago, the concept of gene therapy was unknown to most scientists and clinicians. The problems of such therapy were thought to be insurmountable and not given serious consideration. The striking advances in our understanding of cancer in the recent past have, however, changed all of this. It is astonishing how much progress has been made in such a short time; biology has moved from strength to strength, and what seemed daunting not so long ago can now be confidently tackled. The road to this new understanding of how a cell works and what makes it malignant has not always been easy, but the great achievements are undeniable. With today’s cell biology comes the promise of a totally new kind of treatment.

Here is a book to thrill and chill you!It brings together sixty-nine stories of haunted houses, ghosts, poltergeists, apparitions, and other eerie events and experiences.What is amazing is that all the stories are true - they actually happened - and they happened in Ontario!Did Sir John A. Macdonald give advice from the dead?Did William Lyon Mackenzie King engage in a friendly conversation with a veteran newspaperman at Kingsmere two years after his death?Is Ottawa’s Laurier House haunted?What happened in Toronto’s Mackenzie House?Did an apparition of Walt Whitman appear in Bon Echo Provincial Park?Does a beautiful lady in white haunt old stone houses in the north Woodstock area?What was behind the Baldoon Mystery and the Dagg Poltergeist?Do such things happen? Are they happening today?In these pages there are ghosts aplenty. They appear in the villages, towns, and cities of Ontario - among them: Goderich, Hamilton, London, Toronto, Niagara-on-the-Lake, North Bay, Oakville, Oshawa, St. Catharines, and Sarnia!Perhaps there is a ghost near you…

Alongside its golden wheat fields and shimmering northern laskes, Saskatchewan holds a rich folkloric collection of ghost stories; until now, no one has paid much atention to these tales.Geographically, they range from Kenosee Lake, where the resident ghost of a local dance hall had strong objections to renovations, to Shell Lake, where the identity of a mass-murderer was revealed to a group of teenagers through a Ouija board.In nature, they vary from charming spirits haunting a community arts centre to the menacing presence that drove a Rockglen family to burn their home to the ground.This eerie collection showcases Saskatchewan’s most intriguing ghost stories: accounts of misty apparitions, unexplained noises, violent poltergeists, and startling premonitions. Together, the stories create a fascinating addition to the province’s colourful history and disprove the notion that for there to be ghosts, there must be traditional old world settings. Saskatchewan’s spirits haunt its weathered prairie farm homes and nondescript suburban bungalows, its overgrown cemeteries and tidy small-town churches, its hospitals and museums, and its very landscape.It’s proven in these pages: you needn’t look far to find a ghost in the haunted province of Saskatchewan!

Ninety Fathoms Down is the first collection of Canadian stories about the Great Lakes, the inland seas that shaped the development of Ontario. This fascinating book explains the history of the Canadian side of the Great Lakes by telling the stories of people whose lives took dramatic turns on the vast lakes. In these pages you will meet people like Paul Ragueneau, the Jesuit priest who tried to save thousands of starving Hurons in 1650; the seventeenth-century dreamer Rene-Robert Cavalier de La Salle, whose luck always let him down; and Lt. Miller Worsley, who takes revenge on the loss of his little supply ship Nancy by capturing two of the American warships that sank his schooner in the War of 1812. The people whose stories are told here are often at odds with the power of the lakes themselves. For instance, the three hundred sailors who lost their lives in the great storm of 1913 and the passengers of the steamship Algoma, torn apart on a Lake Superior beach by hurricane winds in 1885, learned that there are times when the lakes are unforgiving. Politics, too, play a role in the lore of the Great Lakes. Confederate pirates once prowled Lake Erie, hoping someday for a chance to attack Buffalo or Cleveland and change the outcome of the Civil War. Politicians, including Sir John A. Macdonald, have been at the mercy of the lakes in shipwrecks that have changed Ontario’s history. The Great Lakes have been a stage for courage, greed, misfortune, and murder. Ninety Fathoms Down fills an important void in Ontario’s popular history by using the theme of the great waterways to show the development of central Canada.

Toronto has hosts of ghosts that go as far back as the War of 1812…and others as recent as the Nineties. From the spirit of the Keeper of the Gibraltar Point Lighthouse to the four spectres that haunt the stairwells and corridors of Queen’s Park, our most conspicuously ghostly presences and sites are all revealed in Haunted Toronto.Sixty-six haunts and paranormal locales are captured in dramatic detail. Arranged like a guidebook for walking or driving tours, this richly illustrated book is the perfect companion for spectre-seeking urban adventurers. Whether or not you spot a ghost or two in Toronto, you’ll encounter the fascinating, sometimes morbid lore of the city’s past, and you’re guaranteed never again to look at its historic sites in quite the same way.

This book pays tribute to 14 women who donated millions of dollars to causes close to their hearts. Iris Nowell is the author of five books. Writing her 1996 book, Women Who Give Away Millions, has given her a solid foundation of philanthropy, the not-for-profit sector, and the wealthy. She has also written a memoir of Canadian artist Harold Town, and a biography of artist, filmmaker, and impassioned feminist, Joyce Wieland.

Canada has given the world the real Winnie the Pooh, the phrase "Beatlemania," and the man who invented the Academy Awards. If it weren’t for Canada, we might not have the pie-in-the-face gag, basketball, time zones, or the dotted white line on the middle of highways.And anyone who still thinks Canada is dull obviously doesn’t know about the Canadian who was the longest serving prisoner on Alcatraz, or the night that members of Parliament threw books and toy balloons at each other during a wild debate in the House of Commons. The Great Canadian Trivia Book explores the noteworthy and the notorious, the factual and the phenomenal, the obscure and outlandish sides of the Great White North.

Our Genetic Destiny is a fascinating account of the origin, evolution, and organization of our genes. At the heart of life, genes tell our cells what to do, when to grow, and what to become. They are passed on faithfully from one generation to the next, from parent to child, a seemingly comfortable constant across millennia. In the past few years, however, genes have been found to be imponderably complex, more subtle and intricate than we ever imagined. They amplify and duplicate themselves; they leap from one chromosome to another; they reshuffle to create new images of themselves. Far from being predictably stable, following a preset schedule, genes are surprisingly versatile. Biologists are now able to retrace the steps to the origin of life when the first cell appeared some 3.8 billion years ago. Ever since, the descendants of that original ancestor have become increasingly diverse. This upward trend, punctuated by bursts of innovations, is underpinned by the genes, which are organized into elaborate networks. Understanding the nature of this genetic architecture is a long quest of biologists, who seek to find the unifying principle that governs life. As the outlines of this come into sharp focus, we are granted unparalleled insights into our genetic past, present, and future. The new knowledge about genes has important practical implications. As we understand in greater detail how living cells work, the causes of some crippling and dreaded diseases are being unraveled. This information is already being used to craft new drugs to deal with a wide range of illnesses, sush as blood disorders like thalassaemia and heaemophilia, cystic fibrosis, muscular dystriophy, cardeovascular diseases, cancer, and AIDS. Our Genetic Destiny provides a stimulating description of what may well be science’s greatest and most challenging field.

It has been called Canada’s most haunted province.While such a claim is impossible to prove, British Columbia does abound with tales of the supernatural. Ghost Stories of British Columbia is a comprehensive collection of these tales, drawing from the province’s history, its archives, and its people.There are ghosts from the distant past, and ghosts from the present day. Legends that are familiar to many, and accounts that, to date, have only been heard by a few. Shady apparitions from the coastline, the interior, and the isolated north. And each story is a true account of someone’s experience with a ghost.In Burnaby, a young child is repeatedly urged by two spectral visitors to follow them back "to the other side."The dedicated publisher of the Surrey Leader returns to check on the new issue - weeks after his death.The image of a screaming young woman haunts a grove of bushes in Beacon Hill Park - years before a woman matching the image is murdered there.Barkerville - a town designed to bring the history of the gold rush to life - truly hosts the "spirit" of the past.Victoria honours its British past - with two of its own haunted castles.In Creston - an eccentric stonemason’s spirit occupies the unusual home he once planned to be buried in.They are the mysteries, the unexplained, the eerie, and amazing stories meant to be told by campfire or candlelight.They are the true ghost stories of British Columbia, and they wait for you in these pages.

A bartender who discovers magic on a winter night, a pair of losers taking a baking class, and a middle-aged woman who goes on a wild limo ride with the ghost of John Diefenbaker. These are a few of the amazing array of characters who live in, or near, Sharon MacFarlane’s fictional village of Palliser, a community struggling to survive in an age of rural depopulation.Whether its a terrifying drive on a frozen river ("Ice Road") or a cancelled trip ("We Didn’t Go to Len’s This Summer"), each of the stories in Driving off the Map takes us, with a character, on a journey toward epiphany.MacFarlane understands these people, and she tells their secrets with humour and compassion. Her prose is as unadorned, yet as teeming with hidden life and beauty, as the prairie she evokes.

People disappear without a trace. Captain Briggs, his crew, and his family vanished from the Canadian built Mary Celeste. Ben Bathurst walked around the horses harnessed to his coach - and was never seen again. People appear without explanation Kaspar Hauser arrived in Nuremberg as inexplicably as if he’d materialised from some unknown dimension. Researchers of the paranormal have investigated cases where thought-forms seem to have acquired quasi-physical properties. Madame Blavatsky claimed to have done it. There were times when Nikola Tesla, the brilliant electrical experimenter, seems to have lived in an alternative reality where mental images of his machines became solid to him. Tesla expert, Oliver Nichelson, put forward a theory connecting Tesla’s awesomely strange apparatus at Wardenclyffe, Long Island, with the Tunguska explosion of 1908. Were similar strange forces responsible for moving the Barbados coffins around in their sealed vault?Where do poltergeists, like the one that haunted Esther Cox in Amherst, Nova Scotia, get their inexplicable energy? When scores of reliable witnesses continue to report their sightings of UFOs, ghosts, crop circles, lake monsters, enormous cat-like beasts, Yeti, and Sasquatch, how can their observations be explained?We live in an immeasurably strange universe, miraculously suspended in space and time: a universe that has room for the mysteries of the ancient British King Arthur, Merlin, and the Holy Grail; the Oak Island Money Pit in Canada; the undeciphered Glozel Alphabet, and the Priest’s Treasure at Rennes-le-Chateau in France; Mermaids and Sea Monsters; the Kingdom of Prester John; the Riddle of the Pictish Stones at Meigle in Scotland; the Vampire of Croglin Grange; Zombies and Wer-beasts; the Devil’s Footprints in Devonshire; the Green Children of Woolpit; Lost Cities and Sunken Islands; Pyramids and Stone Circles; Telepathy, Telekinesis, Teleportation, and Prophecy. The list is endless. The investigations fascinating.The World’s Greatest Unsolved Mysteries invites the reader to accompany Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe on their many intriguing investigations in Canada and worldwide and their years of research into the unexplained.

Q. What does everyone want from a marriage?A. For someone else to be the wife!Exploring the many cultural assumptions exposed by divorce - sex, money, dating, love, home, and health - Splitting Up is both a guide to the new social landscape and a serious search for personal meaning in an age of rapidly shifting cultural values. According to social theorist and lawyer Larry G. Frolick, divorce is neither a legal nor a therapeutic problem - it is a serious cultural issue. No one can perform the old social roles anymore.Drawing on his most interesting cases from twenty years practicing law, and from studies in culture, the author shows how the seventy-per-cent divorce rate is the flip side of mall marriage - that is, a relationship based on consumption, rather than on saving - and how divorce is part of our common destiny, a painful world many of us will one day encounter.This fascinating book takes the reader on an unsettling trip into the strange world of divorce, revealing the new social order and the roles we must play in it to survive - Working-Warrior Mom, Treat Daddy, and the Lost Child - as our society evolves into the next millenium.Splitting Up is a hip handbook for divorce in the twenty-first century, a guide to survival and renewal. The many topics include: The Worst Divorce Story Ever ToldSex Realities: Sex Talk & Real SexDivorce Statistics & the Myth of UndifferenceDepression: Can a Million Therapists Be Wrong?My Ex-Spouse was an Alien!McParenting in an Age of Wire Monkeys: Children Need One ThingThe Lawyers Other Lawyers UseYour Money & Your Sanity & How to Keep Bothand much, much more!

Are you a snob? Then why not learn to do it right? Study this revolutionary work and become a Canadian Snob of Distinction! Victoria Branden has traced the history of Snobbery from its pre-human roots to our own era, in our own country, and has enunciated the definitive Theory of Snobbery. She examines its evolution from its crude beginnings to its present confused state, with detailed study of the most important types of snobbery, distinguishing Goodsnobs from Badsnobs, experts from fumbling amateurs. Snobbery has influenced history at least as much as the invention of the wheel or the printing press, which were probably actually inspired by snob instincts. Always staunchly patriotic, Ms. Branden has given particular attention to Canadian Snobs, who have been until this time gravely neglected in both life and literature, and has provided Canadian Snobmodels by which we can be guided to higher and better levels of Snobbery. She finds a certain lack of professionalism among Canadian Snobs: Snobbery is not acknowledged as an Olympic contender, and has received no recognition in this year’s "black budget." So there is much to be done, urgently! Branden has thoughtfully provided Snobexercises (video later) by which you can develop Snobmuscle. Careful study, with diligent practice and iron self-discipline, will help you to achieve great heights of Snob-expertise, using techniques and materials particularly suited to the Canadian climate and social mores. Other how-to books claim to "make it easy" to succeed. We do not. Achieving Snob-distinction is hard, gruelling, and incessant work — but the rewards are incalculable. Any jerk can be a snob, and usually is. But to be a truly Great Snob, an upper-case Snob, a Snob who will go down in history like Beau Brummell or Oscar Wilde ah, that is attainable only by the few.

Did Rasputin, the mad monk of Tsarist Russia, possess supernatural powers? Who was the mysterious prisoner in the Bastille who has gone down in history as "The Man in the Iron Mask"? Did he possess a priceless secret which Louis XIV desperately wanted to learn? Victorian Britain was terrorized by a weird super-athlete known to the popular press of those days as "Spring-heeled Jack." Was he just an eccentric gymnast, or could he have been an alien? Who or what was the mysterious man known as the Count of St. Germain whose abnormal powers seemed to defy both time and space – and is he still with us today? What strange powers of prophecy did Coinneach Odhar, the famous Brahan Seer, really possess? Was Bérenger Sauniëre, the enigmatic Priest of Rennes-Le-Château, one of the last guardians of a secret older than the Sphinx? Could the sinister Aleister Crowley have been merely a pathetic victim of self-deception and his own inflated ego, or did he really possess magical powers? What amazing secrets did electrical engineer Nikola Tesla control? Gurdjieff – one of the most amazing men of his time – has never been fully understood: what was the true meaning behind his strangely ambivalent messages? Was Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky a genius with strange paranormal powers, or merely a charlatan and a sensation-seeker? Francis Dashwood of Medmenham Abbey, leader of a sect of the wildest debauchees who roared their way across the eighteenth century, was an expert in the Black Arts. All of these strange, mysterious, and intriguing characters – and many others – are described, examined, and analyzed in The World’s Most Mysterious People. This is a collection of remarkable and mysterious people, from all ages and places – including our own. Some the authors have met, others were researched carefully from reliable archives. Some are Canadian, others are from the US, the UK, and all over the world. All are mysterious; all are intriguing; all are worth studying. Can anyone learn to use mysterious powers like theirs? To update what a great thinker once said: "The proper study of people is other human beings." And the more mysterious those human beings are, the more we shall learn from studying them.

Mysteries of Ontario brings together, for the first time, some five hundred accounts of strange events and eerie experiences, each keyed to one of 250 places in the province. It turns out that, far from being a humdrum part of the planet in which to live and work, Ontario is a province that is alive with ghosts and spirits, mysterious disappearances, and peculiar happenings enough to make your hair stand on end, turn your blood cold, and send shivers up and down your spine! John Robert Colombo has been collecting materials for this book since 1967. Even so, more than two years were devoted to researching, writing, copy-editing, and photo editing Mysteries of Ontario. The reader is invited to peruse the great historical mysteries that have moved Canadians in the past from LaSalle’s missing Griffon to the peculiar disappearance of Ambrose Small, from the spiritualistic legacy of the Fox Sisters of Consecon to the appearance in the 1990s of "ghost walks," "haunted hayrides," and "boo barns." This is a book that unites folklore and scholarship, the supernatural and the speculative, culture and mysticism, the occult and the peculiar, the psychical and the cultural, the human and the non-human.

The World’s Most Mysterious Places is a collection of stories about lost lands, weird locations, and strange sites, many of which the authors have investigated in person. Some of the places are actual sites we can visit, others are legendary lands that have long since vanished. All are sure to intrigue and astound the reader.Here you will discover: a bookshop in San Antonio, Texas, that seems to be haunted by the ghosts of the defenders of the Alamo who were cremated on that site; the "crash site" of a flying saucer in Roswell, New Mexico; the Chase Vault, a mysterious tomb in Christ Church, Barbados, where caskets are moved by some unknown force; Oak Island, Nova Scotia, site of the famous Money Pit; the home of the legendary Sasquatch in the Rocky Mountains; Lake Okanagan, home to the aquatic monster Ogopogo; the lost continent of Atlantis; the homes of Noah’s Ark and the Ark of the Covenant; and many other mysterious sites.

We can’t escape them; aliens are everywhere. They sell us soft drinks and star in their own sitcoms. But to the many people who believe they have been abducted aboard strange crafts, aliens are a very serious reality. Stories of these encounters, taken from investigators’ files, have been vividly depicted in television specials and motion pictures.Despite their predominance as a cultural phenomenon, experts offer drastically conflicting opinions: aliens are harmless creatures whose aim is to better understand humans; aliens are angel-like entities here to enhance our spiritual awareness; aliens are conspiring with the government in a plot to enslave humans; and aliens are genetically breeding with humans to create a new race of hybrids.But, what is really going on? Are aliens abducting thousands of unsuspecting people each year? Are they then inserted with tracking devices and monitored? Based on his own investigative files and almost twenty-five years of research, science writer Chris Rutkowski asks hard questions, looking critically, yet compassionately, at the stories of abductees. He is an astronomer, educator and published commentator within the area of study known as "ufology." Rutowski presents case histories of many abductees, showing both their diversity and similarities, and examines how our understanding is shaped by media, by science, and by society itself.