Phantoms in the Night or ETs? highlights Lorraine McAdam’s significant UFOlogy career, praised by NEIL NIXON for its honest and straightforward storytelling
Phantoms In The Night or ETs? Review
To give this work its full title, it’s Phantoms in the Night or ETs? My lifelong experience of contact with the paranormal. It’s worth quoting the full title at the start of the review to make the point you’re dealing here – essentially – with an autobiography in which two themes consistently fight each other for first place.
Lorraine McAdam is now – according to her publisher’s website, “an artist, writer and poet”.
For substantial parts of the life-story she tells she is either a nurse, or an English teacher. The two themes fighting for prominence throughout this story are her own battle to overcome significant difficulties, challenges on a scale that would have defined other lives in a negative way, and her life-long quest to understand experiences of paranormal encounters.
The bulk of these encounters fall into classic (as in well established) patterns, which at least allows Lorraine to contextualise her own account by frequently recommending her readers to check out books, or online sources confirming other people have experienced the same things.
From the point of British ufology, it’s also an engaging and frequently surprising story. Engaging because the whole tale is told with clarity and a very candid sense of sharing the experiences; frequent strange encounters with very odd examples of humanity, possibly aliens, and classic abduction/missing time scenarios.
Many of the details of locations are left deliberately opaque, though the author herself has featured in her local press, in Cumbria.
Locations in that county are named in the story’s later episodes and her press coverage places one vivid scene specifically on and around a stretch of the M6 near Carlisle.
The worst moments of Lorraine’s lengthy battle to make sense of the phenomena are told with sincerity, up to and including an admission of suicidal feelings and the anti-depressants prescribed for her, but there’s also a sense of overcoming and she is honest in admitting a central point of her decision to publish is about reaching out to others encountering the same things.
In terms of UFO history there are genuine mysteries here, if only in the predominance of comparisons to some phenomena more commonly associated with ufology’s history than its present.
The consistent encounters Lorraine McAdam experiences with humanoid aliens – commonly known as the “Nordics” – are more evocative of reports from the 1960s than the recent past when grey aliens more commonly feature in abduction reports.
And – in a very vivid and evocative incident – she finds spontaneous markings on her phone case that make sense to her when compared to the strange Venusian writing presented in George Adamski’s contribution to the 1953 work Flying Saucers Have Landed. A standout moment in the story, for me, if only because she finds relevance in a story widely debunked and seldom celebrated today.
Photographs of the author’s drawings and the phone case marks appear, so readers can make their own judgements.
Those already well read on UFO lore in general will recognise the basic “why me?” style questions that consistently drive the story forward, and some of the routes of investigation Lorraine McAdam has taken in her attempts to make sense of something that found her when she wasn’t looking for it. At one point she openly asks, “Am I descended from ETs?” whilst discussing a once popular train of ufological thinking taking in blood groups and the possibility of souls reincarnating.
Not a particularly lengthy read and written with an in-the-moment sense of the key events, Phantoms in the Night or ETs? is a dramatic insight into paranormal experiences, with no sense that the author’s own journey is concluded.
So, it’s asking fundamental – what/why? – questions throughout and engaging the reader in trying to work out the answers.
Phantoms in the Night or ETs by Lorraine McAdam is published by 6th Books and is available from Amazon
You can buy Neil Nixon books at Amazon, including Why Mystery Matters