As an interesting departure from the kind of thing I usually write about-UFOs, for instance, or arcane religious literature-my editor and publisher Tim Beckley suggested a topic I had not spent much time thinking about before: the mysterious disappearances of people, singly and en masse, with no explanation or even a hint as to where they've gone. After I had read Michael X. Barton's fascinating history of the disappearance of New Age scholar Dr. Wallace Halsey that makes up the early part of the book, and I began to research the subject of mysterious vanishings on the Internet and in various books and through interviews I conducted personally with a few experts, I appreciated the logic of what Tim had asked me to do. There is truly a wealth of material out there on these cases of people disappearing under circumstances that to this day have not been understood.

The book touches only briefly on some of the better known cases, like Flight 19, which disappeared in 1945 on a military training flight that began in Chicken Shoals, Florida, and ended somewhere out in the Bermuda Triangle, that mysterious swallower of ships and planes. We chose to focus instead on lesser-known incidents, like the succession of people who vanished without a trace in the Green Mountains of Vermont, or the numerous children who disappeared while visiting the Devil's Gate Park in California. While foul play cannot be ruled out completely in those cases, you will see when you read about them that other explanations, even seemingly paranormal ones, appear to jibe more easily with the facts.

"Gone Forever In The Blink Of An Eye" also revisits some of the disappearances of the rich and famous. While most people generally agree that Jimmy Hoffa, for instance, was rubbed out by his own cohorts in organized crime, there is still an interesting follow-up story in his case. Over the years since Hoffa went missing in 1975, a succession of Mafia hit men have claimed it was they who did the job. Certainly they can't all be telling the truth, but the reader will still enjoy the various scenarios by which the deed may have been done.

And remember Philip Taylor Kramer, the bassist for the late 60s metal band, Iron Butterfly? His story is recounted in detail as well as the numerous tantalizing clues he left behind before disappearing from the Los Angeles airport with some kind of alleged amazing mathematical breakthrough tucked inside his briefcase. Had he really discovered a way to communicate at a rate faster-than-light? Would that lead to kidnapping, or to Kramer's faking his own death to escape potential assassination by greedy business rivals?

At the core of "Gone Forever In The Blink Of An Eye" are three interviews conducted exclusively for the book. I spoke to Troy Taylor (a well-known ghost hunter and writer based in Illinois), Brian Haughton (a British archeologist and collector of strange stories) and Brad Steiger (the world-renowned researcher who has written about paranormal subjects for nearly half a century), all of whom gave generously of their time and filled me in on a great many case histories of mysterious disappearance, providing perspectives on the subject that are genuinely their own.

And one mustn't forget the cases of disappearance en masse, in which entire towns and villages were found abandoned, with the evidence of the missing occupants left smoldering behind them. The famous incidents of the first colonists of Roanoke, Virginia, and the Anasazi, a tribe of Native Americans of the southwestern desert region, are also covered, including some of the more recent educated speculation about what may have happened to them.

The real point of "Gone Forever In The Blink Of An Eye" is not to provide easy answers about the case histories of mysterious disappearance, when the obvious truth is that such answers probably don't exist. But the reader will be entertained nonetheless by the various stories themselves, made all the more beguiling because there is so much about them that simply can't be known. As interviewee Troy Taylor told me, "Everyone loves a mystery."

For more information or to purchase this book, simply click on the title: Gone Forever In The Blink Of An Eye

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