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Hancock, Graham "Supernatural. Meetings with the ancient teachers of mankind". 2005, Century, London. Hbk.x, 710pp. Illus. Notes. Index. ISBN 1-8441-3681-7 £20.00

Now this is a book that I am sure many Forteans will enjoy reading. It has fairies, aliens, UFOs, drugs, ancient history, genetics, more drugs, academic controversies , cosmology, shamen and much more, all wrapped up in Hancock's usual lucid and often well-researched style. Which is not so say that many people will agree with everything that is aid in the book, far from it, but it's an interesting, mind-expanding, informative and challenging trip that hopefully will encourage readers to do their own research into some of the subjects that this book tackles.

I won't spoil the fun of discovery for those who will read this book by revealing too much about the contents. However, I can let you know that Graham has been to the Amazon where he has partaken of various hallucinatory substances with those peoples who have traditionally used them often in a shamanic context, and has seen the same sort of visions as recorded by other users of the substances. (And if you want proof of what some people see under the influence of ayahuasca, the book has four glorious pages of colour reproductions of the visions of Peruvian shaman Pablo Amaringo )

Further Graham has been to both South Africa and Europe where he has studied the prehistoric rock art and noticed the similarities between them and what has been seen in other cultures in other times and places. (and the remaining four pages of colour are taken up by reproductions of Santha Faiia photographs of some of the rock art discussed in the book.) And in studying the subject, he discovers that it has been the site of much academic controversy, which he enjoys immensely. Further (academic) research revealed that some of the elements of the hallucinatory experience have also been shown to reappear in those undertaking DMT and related substance experiences in contemporary western cultures.

Not content though with these elements in his thesis, Graham decides he wants to add fairies and UFO abductees into the mix. Not, in my opinion the wisest of choices, especially as he insists on treating fairy encounter legends and stories as accounts of "real" events and equally treating the stories people tell about "alien abductions" (even under hypnosis) as epistemologically sound. Now there are interesting things to discuss about fairy stories and alien abduction accounts but to treat them as unproblematic seems rather naïve. Although it should be made plain that Graham does not subscribe to any "nuts and bolts" explanations for UFO's or alien abductions.

More worrying Graham, for all his reading (and the 1500 or so references / notes for the book is very impressive), seems to have missed out on the alternative explanations for alien abductee stories, especially those involving sleep paralysis, false memories, cultural priming and simply wishing to please other members of support groups. He also deduces on the basis of the Roper poll done in 1991 (in the USA) that about 2% of the population can spontaneously enter "trance" states. This is highly problematic, not least because the margin of error in the poll was in the order of +/-1.5%, but that there was nothing in the categories that people were asked to respond to that couldn't have alternative explanations. To leap from this extremely contentious survey to the claim, repeated several times in the book, that therefore 2% of all human populations can spontaneously enter trance states seems unwarranted. However that still leaves the deeper point - why do both fairy stories and alien abduction accounts share features across cultures and times, and why do they have similarities with the accounts of hallucinatory visions above.

So how to account for the apparent similarities in all these types of accounts, in particular the visions of hybrid beings. Now some of these Graham agrees must be down to how our brains are hard-wired to produce them, but other aspects, in particular the visions of therianthropes (human - animal hybrids), are perhaps, in some sense "real". At this point the familiar New Age stuff about vibrations and frequencies is invoked, and I can't say I find it any more convincing in his retelling as anywhere else. However, the problem doesn't go away because of this.

Now Graham takes an evolutionary turn, whereby he discusses DNA / RNA and the problem of how they got started, (and as far as I can tell, scientists have yet to come up with an answer to that riddle that satisfies everyone), which raises the possibility that possibility life on earth was seeded (deliberately?) from elsewhere in the Universe. Regarding extra-terrestrial input into the evolution of life on Planet Earth we can say that there has been a constant deposition of organic material from deep space through out the life of the planet in the form of molecules of the basic building blocks of life (fore example amino acids), which appear to spontaneously be produced in space. But there is a long way from that to the idea that somehow our DNA was deliberately created to have some form of encoded message built into it.

OK that's a brief run through of some of the elements in this book. As many people know, Graham Hancock can write lucid, informative and sometimes very droll prose. And this book is no exception. This book, the product of prodigious research, both academic and experiential, will, despite its short-comings, hopefully act as an inspiration to readers to search out the answers to the problems that the author poses. The publishers have done a reasonable job on the book (more colour photographs of Graham's field research would have been appreciated for example) but I do have a couple more gripes. Firstly there is no proper bibliography and secondly the index only covers proper names, so you can't, for example, find the references in the text to DNA and DMT, which in a book of this length is annoying. That said it can be recommended for critically minded readers, but those on low incomes are best advised to get their local library to buy a copy as at twenty notes it's by no means a cheap read.

7/10

Richard Alexander