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Rating: 
Summary: A great book to read late at night...
Review: Excellent book dealing with aerial hauntings, phantom aircraft, and unusual sightings made by pilots. Very entertaining (the one "ringer" story reported in the previous review notwithstanding). Very disappointed to hear the follow up was never completed. If you enjoy true stories of unusual events, with a emphasis on aircraft and the pilots who flew them, this is the book for you.
Rating:
Summary: A great book to read late at night...
Review: Excellent book dealing with aerial hauntings, phantom aircraft, and unusual sightings made by pilots. Very entertaining (the one "ringer" story reported in the previous review notwithstanding). Very disappointed to hear the follow up was never completed. If you enjoy true stories of unusual events, with a emphasis on aircraft and the pilots who flew them, this is the book for you.
Rating: 
Summary: Twilight Zone In the Sky
Review: It was on a beautiful, balmy Sunday morning in the late spring of '93 when the telephone call came. I was puttering around the house in cut-offs, a t-shirt, and sneakers, swigging Pepsi Cola and listening to the humm of honeybees in the yard and
early Beatles on the golden-oldies radio station. At around elevenish the ringing began and I picked up the receiver hoping fervently that I wasn't going to be verbally assaulted by some chattering telemarketer.
I wasn't. Instead this big, gregarious basso voice came booming over the wire at me. " Hi," it said. "I'd like to speak to Bill Hancock if I might."
"You got him," says I.
"Bill, Martin Caidin here." (Oh, yeah, sure, I think. Some smart aleck is having me on). "Listen, I'm calling to let you know this case you put me onto for the new book is dynamite. Even stranger than you thought it was when you wrote me." (Huh?
Wait a minute. This IS Martin Caidin!!! Holy Frijoles, Batman!!).
And from that point on we were rolling. I never met the man face to face. Only knew him from his books and his reputation as a historian, aviator, and writer (You remember Steve Austin, the "Six Million Dollar Man"? Caidin invented him. Remember an old movie called "Marooned" that did an eerily uncanny job of predicting the trials of Apollo 13, years before that flight was ever made? Caidin again). At the conclusion of "Ghosts of the Air" he made a request for submissions of material for a possible sequel and yours truly sent him a letter regarding a peculiar incident I recalled. He wrote back, I answered, and a fax or two was sent. Now came this call out of the blue and it turns out he was really jacked up over this little incident and was letting me KNOW he was. And thanking me profusely for putting him onto it. My impressions that day were of a man with a mind like a steel trap. A razor sharp intellect and a tremendous enthusiasm for life. This guy was just plain larger than life and it came through loud and clear on the phone.
He was doing the preliminary work on the "Ghosts of the Air" sequel and was excited about it. said it was going to be better than the first one. That got ME excited because I flat out LOVE "Ghosts of the Air" (So why only give it 4 stars?, you ask.
I will explain shortly). Caidin already had the title: "Phantoms On the Flight Deck"...and he loved it. I thought it was neat, too.(Don't bother to look for "Phantoms On the Flight Deck", though, at Amazon, or anywhere else...Marty never finished it. He died before "final assembly" took place).
But "Ghosts of the Air" IS here and it is wonderful. It is chock full of thrills and chills and supernatural events and stranger than strange happenings in the air. The "Out There" events of Caidin's bizarre trip through a milky fog in the Bermuda Triangle on a Catalina PBY flying boat...with all directional and electronics gear gone on the "fritz"...the cases of shot up warplanes bringing home their dead pilots...all these and much, much more. All of this stuff investigated and checked and rechecked for accuracy before it went to the publishers.
Well...ALMOST all of it. And that is the reason for only 4 stars instead of 5. There is one "ringer" in the bunch. I caught it later, along with some others, when it made its way into Fate magazine with a bit more "tweaking" than Marty allowed it. And he caught it, too. And realized he'd been "snookered" with it.Really ticked him off. He'd seen it in the form of a supposed article someone was doing (the Fate writer I assume). Looked like it had a good pedigree. Guy told Marty he could use the "general outline" of the story but couldn't go into specifics with it because this guy had the "rights" to all the particulars of the thing .So That's what Marty did; he went with it in a very general and non-detailed way. It's in "Ghosts". All the stories in the book are true and accurate except this one. It is a crock job built around a fictional "One Step Beyond" type short story from the early sixties. You'll know it. It is the only incident in the book that is vague and lacking in detail. Everywhere else Caidin gives dates, locales, names, aircraft types, the "whole nine yards". This chapter, though ,is dreamy and detail-less.It says a young fellow is up joyriding in the clouds one day and all of a sudden he is in a near disastrous mid-air with some biplane that looks like something out of the 1920s or even World War One. The contact is so close there is even a paint scraping. Then the biplane is lost in the clouds and the young fellow has to do an emergency landing. No trace of the bipe is ever discovered, though, until some time later some kids find an old, old biplane stored in a barn. Looks like its been there "forever".
Has an old flight log in it that records a near-fatal mishap with a strange looking aircraft with only one set of wings...decades and decades ago. And it has a paint scrape on it.
This is the "ringer". this is the one story in "Ghosts of the Air" that is pure B.S. Marty discovered it after the fact and was most distressed by it. That's why he was taking extra time and extra effort with the sequel. It was not his plan for "Phantoms" to have ANY "ringers" in IT.
So there is the reason for the 4 stars. Apart from that ONE bogus event, everything else in here went down just the way he SAYS it did. So read the B.S. chapter and know it for what it is. Then read all the REST of these accounts and go ahead and let your hair stand on end. The others all MORE than make up ANY deficit that one single little klunker establishes.
Rating:
Summary: Next time I'm taking the train!
Review: One of the best books available on any kind of haunting...primarily because it is _thoroughly_ documented. Mr Caidin bases his stories on eyewitness accounts and official military records (none of those "I knew a guy whose second cousin knew the guy this happened to....")His 'take' on the Bermuda Triangle is particularly interesting. I had the honor to be acquainted with Mr Caidin; he was intelligent, opinionated, and as skeptical as anyone I've ever met. The fact that _he_ wrote this book makes the stories within all the more convincing!
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating, authoritative tales of aerial hauntings
Review: This is a book that should appeal greatly to those interested in the paranormal as well as those captivated by aviation. The author writes in an engaging, personalized manner, and he bends over backward to defend the stories he relates as well as the integrity of his contributors. He does not try to explain the unexplainable; he merely presents each tale the way it happened, often using the very words of the person involved. Throughout, the author's great love for flying and for the men and women involved in aviation is openly apparent. Caidin's qualifications as a pilot and aviation expert are almost unequalled; he has flown countless aircraft of all sorts in his life, he has written well over a hundred books on aviation, and he is well known in aviation circles. The fact that he himself cites a number of personal examples of impossible things that happened to him while in flight lends great authority to his role as compiler of the truths of others. Some of the stories are truly fascinating: a plane disappears for ten minutes on approach to Miami and everyone on board "loses" ten minutes; military aircraft fly hundreds of miles back to base and actually land with a dead pilot or no crew whatsoever; three flight crews return to base and are debriefed from a mission in which, it is soon discovered, all planes and crew were lost; pilots encounter planes from an entirely different era which then disappear; ghostly apparitions and sounds are encountered on military bases and airfields, etc. Every tale is fascinating; more importantly, each tale is verifed to the extent possible. Caidin tells us that the vast majority of the stories he collected were rejected; only the stories he could research intensively and authoritatively prove as having happened in the ways they were described to him made the final cut. He stands by these unexplainable stories and the brave men and women who had the courage to reveal truths many had never revealed before to another soul. As the author often points out, the events and experiences detailed here could not possibly have happened, yet they did happen.
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating, authoritative tales of aerial hauntings
Review: This is a book that should appeal greatly to those interested in the paranormal as well as those captivated by aviation. The author writes in an engaging, personalized manner, and he bends over backward to defend the stories he relates as well as the integrity of his contributors. He does not try to explain the unexplainable; he merely presents each tale the way it happened, often using the very words of the person involved. Throughout, the author's great love for flying and for the men and women involved in aviation is openly apparent. Caidin's qualifications as a pilot and aviation expert are almost unequalled; he has flown countless aircraft of all sorts in his life, he has written well over a hundred books on aviation, and he is well known in aviation circles. The fact that he himself cites a number of personal examples of impossible things that happened to him while in flight lends great authority to his role as compiler of the truths of others. Some of the stories are truly fascinating: a plane disappears for ten minutes on approach to Miami and everyone on board "loses" ten minutes; military aircraft fly hundreds of miles back to base and actually land with a dead pilot or no crew whatsoever; three flight crews return to base and are debriefed from a mission in which, it is soon discovered, all planes and crew were lost; pilots encounter planes from an entirely different era which then disappear; ghostly apparitions and sounds are encountered on military bases and airfields, etc. Every tale is fascinating; more importantly, each tale is verifed to the extent possible. Caidin tells us that the vast majority of the stories he collected were rejected; only the stories he could research intensively and authoritatively prove as having happened in the ways they were described to him made the final cut. He stands by these unexplainable stories and the brave men and women who had the courage to reveal truths many had never revealed before to another soul. As the author often points out, the events and experiences detailed here could not possibly have happened, yet they did happen.
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