The name Harold T. Wilkins may not ring an immediate bell with most readers of paranormal literature these days, and that sad fact is one of the primary reasons we put this book together. We chose the lengthy title in a spirit of playfulness, but we are very serious about bringing one of the great, unsung heroes of the Golden Age of UFOs to the attention of 21st century readers.
The large body of work that is the legacy of Harold T. Wilkins is wonderfully represented here. There are excerpts going back as far as the early 1940s, when Wilkins was writing about pirates and lost treasure with charm and wit and grace. He would later move on to become a pioneer in a subject called "crypto-zoology," which essentially means the study of strange and unexplained forms of animal life, and was a term that did not yet exist when Wilkins began his research. We are pleased to present the complete text of a monograph Wilkins wrote on the subject back in 1947, which includes stories of living dinosaurs and King Kong-like large apes still roaming the hidden jungles of Africa and South America.
The monograph is called "Monsters and Mysteries of America, the Jungles, the Tropics and the Arctic Wastes," in which Wilkins takes a walk on the wilder, darker side of nature, to say the least. The creatures described herein are not cute and cuddly, but are instead the sort of flesh-eating monsters that will conjure nightmares as Wilkins draws the reader into their surreal landscape, one that is often terrifying and sometimes deadly.
Wilkins was also one of the first to tackle the weighty study of the UFO reports that started with a trickle in 1947 and were quickly magnified to the size of a raging river in the early 1950s. Such grab-you-by-the-shoulders titles as "Flying Saucers On The Attack" and "Flying Saucers Uncensored" are little-known classics today, but when reading the excerpts published here, you will be astonished at how Wilkins seems spookily prescient about aspects of the UFO phenomenon in his time that would become mainstays of later research. For example, Wilkins was writing about the Roswell Incident more than 30 years before it became a celebrated cause among UFO researchers, and he may have been the first to refer to the diminutive "grays," calling the three and a half to four feet tall UFO occupants reported in his time "midgets."
Wilkins was not one to embrace all aliens as "Space Brothers," and he often felt that the contactees who said otherwise were sappily trusting in entities who may have intended some form of harm while appearing to be completely and utterly benevolent. But he nonetheless reports objectively on some of the more interesting up close and personal alien encounters of his day, such as the story of the beautiful extraterrestrial woman from "the other side of the moon" who spoke to one male contactee exclusively in rhyming verse.
There are also a few out and out hoaxes that Wilkins discusses, though he still carefully leaves the final conclusions up to the reader. He completely understood that separating truth from fiction was not a simple matter of black and white in the new field of Ufology, and was willing to listen to any story told by a sincere witness, no matter how otherworldly or bizarre.
In any case, anyone interested in all kinds of strange and unexplained phenomena will find a great deal to enjoy in "UFOs Attack Earth." Wilkins' elegant prose style belongs to another time entirely, and one is quicky swept up in the carefully chosen stories he tells, simply because they are so well told. As a cross section of Wilkins' best work, this book will surely leave you hungry for more, as well as provide a wonderful education in the UFO and paranormal culture of that bygone era. Apart from the historic and nostalgic aspects, there is also a wealth of data presented here for the serious student of these subjects, and the glimpse into the earliest period of research into flying saucers alone is more than worth the purchase price.
