Unnatural Phenomena: A Guide to the Bizarre Wonders of North America

Clark and ABC-CLIO have rendered a priceless service to Fortean readers and researchers alike with this collection of 645 entries spanning the years from 1729 to 1935. The vast majority are verbatim quotations of newspaper stories commonly cited only in footnotes by other authors (or with excerpts taken out of context, frequently misquoted). Every library should own a copy of this book, and no serious researcher or would-be writer on Fortean subjects will begrudge its cost.

North America has seen some of the strangest natural phenomena in the world: some accounts yet to be proven and possibly fantasy; others well researched, documented science. UNNATURAL PHENOMENA: A GUIDE TO THE BIZARRE WONDERS OF NORTH AMERICA is a compendium of the former of these eyewitness accounts, gathering findings and events from the last 200 years that keep defying rational explanations, from strange lights and sky battles to sea monsters and huge flying starfish ghosts. Each documented sighting includes a description and a dated source reference. This could've been reviewed under 'New Age' but many a science student will find it fascinating, and not to be missed.

This is a wonderful reference book full of material that will inform much future research. Such books are made for libraries, most often, and have high prices due to the time it takes to comply them, their length, the amount of time to edit and produce them, and more. A criticism of the price from someone that borrowed one from a friend seems immature to the extreme and should be removed from consideration as a valid critique. Buy it if you have the money. But please, don't whine if you don't.

Unnatural Phenomena: A Guide To The Bizarre Wonders Of North America by Jerome Clark is a 369-page survey of recorded and reported "anomalous occurrences" that range from the humorous to the fantastic to the frightening. Each incident is drawn from the past two hundred year history of America are drawn from every section of the country and range from confirmed reports of a phantom farmer plowing his field at night, to a bronze-green monster covered in heart-shaped scales, to sky quakes, to a clash of two enormous red-clad armies in the sky above Green Vale, Illinois in 1870, to a 150-foot-long sea monster that was seen in Black Fish Bay, Washington in 1893. These are hundreds of other peculiar happenings make Unnatural Phenomena a veritable treasure trove for those interested in the occult, the metaphysical, the inexplicable, the strange, and the bizarre in American history.