Borderlands : The Ultimate Exploration of the Unknown

Rating:
Summary: Worth The Trip to The Borderlands
Review: Confession time I bought this book at a good price, but before delving into it decided to read a few Amazon reviews. Ooops. I found many reviews to be unesserarily harsh, of course I am speakinmg subjectively, but I think all reviews on here have bit of subjectivity. Let me explain myself though in hopes it will encourage other people to give this book a chance.
Mike Dash researched extensively as on can tell reading this tome of the unknown, and I thought he did an exceptional job presenting case studies of bizarre phenomena, and possible rational explanations for them. Some negative reviews seemed to take Dash's explanations personally as if his intent was to completely debunk all of the unexplained occurances. My interpretation of his introduction, and much of the text itself is that he merely wished to seperate the chaff from the wheat. In other words Dash's book I think is more credible from his playing devil's advocate and explaining to reader how many hoaxes in paranormal activities exist. Like Scully of X-Files his tone can be skeptical but he has open mind of the possibilities and doesn't intend reader's to fall into trap of becoming zealots and thinking everything not immediately explicable by science must have supernatural explanation. In this he succeeds, making this book educational, insightful and most important perhaps entertaining.

Rating:
Summary: Highly recommended
Review: I found this book to be highly entertaining and thought provoking. The author has clearly spent many hours researching and thinking about his subject and this is reflected in the quality of his writing. He has opened my eyes to other possibilities that I had not considered...

Rating:
Summary: Exellent book, written with clarity and dry humour
Review: I was lucky enough to find the hardback edition of this book being sold really cheaply and I`ve never regretted buying it. It deals with the full breadth of the `fringe' phenomena. The book is very well written and by turns, informative, amazing and amusing. Dash walks a tightrope between impartiality and outright scepticism. Particularly amusing is the way he completely demolishes the legend of the Loch Ness monster. There is such a wealth of information here that I seem to get something new out of his book each time I read it. I don't agree all his conclusions, especially the one about UFOs being a product of `fantasy prone' individuals but most of the time he seems to hit the target dead centre. Essential reading for those interested in strange phenomena.

Rating:
Summary: What a Joke!
Review: I'm glad I found this book in the library and didn't buy it! After hearing the good reviews here I was shocked at how poor this book really was. I'm a fan of the paranormal and have studied it for a long time, I am always looking for new views and info whether it be pro or con. But this book is obviously a debunking manuscript. And a poor one at that! It tackles only the weakest of cases, ignores REAL evidence, and brings forth "rational" explanations that are even more far out than the paranormal explanation. The section on crop circles was horrible, dismissing it as a hoax without even LOOKING AT ANY of the fascinating evidence that this is a real occurance. Pass!

Rating:
Summary: A must have !!!
Review: Mike Dash does a excellent job of covering the various mysterious phenomena and weirdness in this world. The book was a easy read and I would recommend it for anyone wanting to get a good introduction to the Paranormal.

Rating:
Summary: A scholarly yet enjoyable study of strange phenomena
Review: Most compendia of strange phenomena are heavy on accounts, but light on theory, and usually try too hard to force the data into extant schools of thought. Mike Dash's book is refreshing in that it looks at such phenomena with a theory in mind, but without declaring that any one theory can explain all such occurrences and experiences. Dash proposes that they may be born of a combination of psychological forces and external event. On the way to testing this hypothesis, Mike Dash examines large array of phenomena from the "borderlands" of ordinary reality and those stranger worlds which may lie all around us or just outside our ken. These phenomena include, among others, UFOs, cryptozoological entities and phantom dogs, rains of fish and frogs, spontaneous human combustion, phone calls from the dead, and ghost ships.

Dash looks at accounts of such phenomena critically, suggesting that the majority of them were hallucinations, hoaxes, and misperceptions, but without assuming that no such event could occur or that all such experiences are false. Indeed, his intent in looking critically at such occurrences is to find those few such accounts that might tell us more about these intrusions from the borderlands. To this end, he examines the psychological source hypothesis, which asserts the possibility that such phenomena might be the result of hallucinations, created by fantasy prone individuals, or born out of altered states of consciousness, or some combination of these three. He cites several psychological studies and theories to support this idea, such as the experience of the hypnagogic state between wakefulness and sleep, the effect of magnetic stimulation of the temporal lobes, and the fact that memory is, at best, a faulty tool. Dash points out the flaws in the use of these theories as explanations for borderland phenomena, but, assuming that internal rather than external forces might be responsible for at least some of the UFOs, lake monsters, and ghosts seen, he points out that such an assumption begs the question: why do these phenomena follow trends and fashions? Why are alien abductions common only in Europe and the United States, and not elsewhere? Why are the ghosts of the dead we see today so different from those of the medieval period?

Dash answers these questions by putting forth the cultural source hypothesis, which states that perhaps each culture creates a repository of symbols such as monsters, ghosts, UFOs, abductions, and so forth, which provide forms for those experiences from the borderlands. When the internal forces that create such phenomena strike, then, there are available numerous entities to which the phenomena might be ascribed: such an event might appear as a UFO, an abduction, or a Sasquatch, depending on the circumstances and needs of the percipient. In short, as Dash states, "neither the psychological source hypothesis nor the cultural source hypothesis can stand alone, because culture influences psychology and psychology, culture."

Dash states clearly that in no wise has he provided an answer to all such phenomena, but his suggestion that the psychological and cultural source hypotheses provide answers to some of these events is a step in the right direction to providing answers to questions about the origins of these mysteries. The extensive footnotes and the index make this an easy book to use for further research, and it is recommended to any interested in Fortean phenomena and the paranormal, whether the student be a serious investigator or merely looking for an enjoyable read on the topic.

Rating:
Summary: It could be better
Review: The book isn't that bad. Its beginning is terrific, but the half and the end... The author tries to give a logical and skeptical explanation for every event he talks about. And some of his explanations aren't that good. Anyway the book is worth its price.

Rating:
Summary: The cover teaser is somewhat misleading
Review: The cover screams - "[Mike] Dash...dares to record those macabre, inexplicable, and otherwise terrifying events where there is no other explanation *except*-that what people saw...is true!" The reality is far less sensational and more scholarly. Essentially, he argues for a sort of collective cultural source for most of these manifestations by pointing out many of the cultural variations in similar types of manifestations, while suggesting altered states of consciousness (such as hypnogogic states) as an actual vehicle for the manifestations. In just one fascinating example of many, he examines UFO sightings, and compares the shape of the UFO manifestation (saucers, triangles, or "flying cigars") and shows that the geocultural region that the UFO sighting takes place in tends to influence how the UFO's physical characteristics are perceived by the observer, as well as the content and quantity of such sightings. Religious (visions, stigmata), ghostly (ectoplasm, mediums) and beastly (bigfeet, chupacabra) phenomena are given similar treatment.

If a criticism can be drawn, the book has a weakness which stems from Dash's insincere speculation regarding the issue of the "reality" of these borderland visitations. He tapers off at the end and never gives the ideas his ample evidence supports the forceful resolution they need. And I suspect he overachieves a bit in trying to be sensitive to the feelings of the "visited" by using gentle and deliberately mystical prose and constantly second-guessing his own conclusions. The book's ultimate conclusion treads a fine line between attempting to rationally explain (or calmly debunk) these types of phenomena and then subtly suggesting a metaphysical maguffin to explain the manifestation of said phenomena. This is the danger of using of the concepts of a "borderlands dimension" and "visitations" to generalize these experiences. You can see it in a survey of the negative reviews here, which tend to either come from forteans who detest the excessive skepticism, or skeptics who object to some of the ultimate speculation.

Nevertheless the general impression this book leaves is of a wealth of well-researched and finely-presented facts about the bizarre in their cultural context that will find welcoming audiences in cryptozoological, fantastical, or even skeptical camps. Dash's overall qualifications as a highly-informed journalist of the paranormal realm prove to be exceptional and well-documented and his work certainly rivals that of Jerome Clark. Viewing paranormal phenomena through the cultural lens is very helpful and enlightening for anyone assessing (or dismissing) the objective reality of said phenomena.

Rating:
Summary: should have stayed beyond the border
Review: This book is pure pseudoscientific bunk. The publication of this book and others of its ilk is the price we pay for freedom of speech. The truly sad thing is that the real universe is thousands of times more interesting than this nonsense, yet people persist in gobbling it up. If you really want to know about the borderlands of science read Sagen's The Demon Haunted World or Morris's The Edges of Science. I should have read the reviews more carefully; fortunately I bought it used and for a very small price, still it is only good for starting a fireplace fire.

Rating:
Summary: excellent reading
Review: this is an excellent book.It is very evenly distributed subjectively and objectively on subjects that range from ufos to poltergeists to weeping statues and so on.Mr.Dash put in a lot of research effort into this book and it shows.I just finished reading Jerome clark's "unexplained",Colin Wilson's "Beyond the Occcult",and John Keel's "Jadoo" and this book was easily right there with them.