The new millennium is hitting the ground running, judging by the rumble of printing presses overseas. In our next issue we hope to be able to bring you a review of Contributing Editor Manuel Carballal's landmark book on Spain's intelligence agency, the CESID, and its role in a number of cover-ups, capers and covert activity, some of it having to do with UFOs. We heard on the grapevine that Contributing Editor Lucy Guzmán and her husband Orlando Plá are working on a book that is to be released later this year. Stay tuned for details.

Proof that contacteeism is alive and well south of the border can be found in Martha Rosenthal's Hermanos de las Estrellas...¿Donde Están? (Caracas:Editorial Texto, 2001. 205 pages. ISBN-980-07-6960-9) which we can perhaps translate as "Wherefore Art Thou, Space Brothers?" without causing Shakespearean scholars too much distress. Although contacteeism is a spent force in the United States, it occupies a privileged position in South America, where the usually blond, benign non-humans are believed to be on a mission to give mankind a boost up the evolutionary ladder (where have I heard that metaphor before? Hmmm...). The book contains transcripts of dialogues (telepathic or through automated writing) with entities such as Amir and Ashtar -- the latter a fixture of contacteeism around the world -- and quotes from experiences. Dr. Rosenthal sums up her beliefs as follows: "The contactee experience can be an extraordinary experience from the standpoint of growth, or else can lead the percipient to believe that he or she has been "chosen". A significant number of the latter imbue the experience with a certain religious element. In this way, they have demarcated contacteeism with promises of salvation based on the erroneous possibility of a millennial apocalypse, from which Messianic messages tend to arise."

Hermanos de las Estrellas...¿Donde Están? is a thoughtful, well-written venture into the contactee gestalt. INEXPLICATA gives it  * * * 

Ordering information: contact <martha@eldish.net>

Although long since out of print, Ignacio Cabria García's Entre Ufologos, Creyentes y Contactados (Santander: Cuadernos de Ufología,1993. 295 pages, ISBN 84-604-7077-6) is a summa of Spain's contentious ufological history since the 1950s. Described by the author as "a social history of UFOs in Spain, the book is a marvelous blend of cultural and societal forces which shaped belief in the phenomenon (movies, television programs, books etc.) and the colorful personalities who were there at the beginning. The reader can find similes between Fernando Sesma and Jim Moseley, Eduardo Buelta and Grey Barker -- apparently similar personality types were attracted to ufology at the time on both sides of the Atlantic.

Cabria peppers his book with photographs, charts and maps as he discusses the ebb and flow of belief in aliens and extraterrestrial spaceships, the rise of the skeptical movement, and the three distinct generations of Spanish UFO researchers. At 295 pages, Entre Ufologos, Creyentes y Contactados is a world-class treatment of regional ufology which deserves to be alongside any similar compilation from the U.S. or the U.K.

INEXPLICATA unhesitatingly gives it an unheard-of  *  * *  * *

Ordering Information: Cuadernos de Ufologia, Rualasal 22, 39001 Santander, España