One of the more interesting books to emerge from the flying saucer craze of the mid-twentieth century. Blum devotes a significant portion of it to the Charles Hickson/Calvin Parker incident (1973 - Pascagoula, Mississippi), the single most believable UFO abduction case, and even now this makes for compelling reading. Some of the wackier alleged abductees are here, too, like Antônio Villas Boas (1957 - São Francisco de Sales, Brazil) and Herbert Schirmer (1967 - Ashland, Nebraska); the former, especially, is bound to elicit eye rolls, but eye rolls come with the territory. Like all the books in Bantam's UFO/ancient astronaut line, Beyond Earth includes a section of black-and-white photos. ( )