Secrets Of The Mysterious Valley

With the goal to move to the San Luis Valley in a few years, I decided to pick up this book ( I've never read the authors previous books on the SLV). Prior to ordering the book, I'd read some reviews about the book's terrible editing. At first I figured some of the reviews were an exaggeration. But after reading the book I have to honestly say that I don't believe there was any editing done on the book! I found the content very informative, but man, the misspellings, repeating of words, missing words, mixed up font, and even paragraphs with no spacing between the words, are such a huge disappointment. Did anyone affiliated with the publishing of the book, including David Perkins (the Foreward writer) even bother to read this book??? I'm usually not one to throw out the baby with the bathwater when it comes to books and periodic editing hiccups, but this is pretty disappointing.

How many sufficiently funded groups of people are secretly competing to be a new world government? Chris has attempted to put together all of the information that could prove there are definite locations on earth where the research into how to do this is on going. San Luis valley has been one such place. Follow the trillion dollars missing from the pentagon budget to find other areas being developed for the transition, at least by our military and it's allies, such as underground cities and armed space stations put into orbit by private corporations. Remember what President Eisehower said about being wary of the military industrial complex. Their goals are lofty but someone also has to be at the top of the pyramid of power and many billions of others will do the bidding of those in control of world power. I would like to see a book on the competitors for this power written with appeal to our younger generation of game players who seem to be apathetic to history now taking place. I gave this a 5 star rating for the content not the editing.

After reading Christopher O'Briens first two excellent books, The Mysterious Valley and Enter the Valley, I eagerly awaited his third promised book.Upon recently reading Secrets of the Mysterious Valley, I found it to be a rehash of the same material in his first two books. On one hand this was very disappointing to me, yet on the other it was good to see all the material meshed together, especially since it had been awhile since I read the first two books. There is very little new information here, which the reader will find at some point is partly due to the author's moving from the valley to Sedona in I believe 2001. He still keeps in touch with a group of "watchers" in the valley who report to him.While the content is fascinating, this has to be one of the most poorly edited books I have ever read. We have much repetition within the book itself, run-on sentences, missing words that leave one with the need to interpret the author's meaning, extra words, sentences with words that are run together, too much punctuation, too little punctuation, different typefaces that do not appear to be deliberate, a repeated portion of a chapter, some photos that are not addressed within the chapter where they are placed, word forms used incorrectly, words and names not spelled correctly, and etcetera, etcetara, etcetera, as the King of Siam would say. With that run-on sentence of my own, I will leave other readers to find the rest of the errors.I am not saying don't buy this book, especially if you have not read the first two, but hopefully there will be a new edition available that is properly edited. I think Christopher O'Brien's diligent work and research into the anomolous happenings in the San Luis Valley is laudable and I hope to see another book from him on the strange happenings in the Sedona area.As one final note, the book gives no credit to the artist of the cover design, which I find very intriguing.And as a second final note, there are two websites listed in the book, one of which give updates on the happenings in the San Luis Valley. I find this very helpful as when I read the first two books I could not find any website for Christopher O'Brien.

I found this to be a good book on the paranormal. It has a lot of good stories and contains a lot of good information. My only complaints are that it's not as good as the first book. There are many grammatical errors, the book can be a little preachy at times, the authors views have changed a bit since the first book (don't agree with them), the books format has changed since the first book and it appears a cheaply made book. Also, the editor has a very preachy first 15 pages preface, the photos in it are in black and white and a little fuzzy (making them hard to read), and the content of the stories isn't as good as the first book.It's a lot of complaints about the book, but the information contained within is what makes the book a must read.

The Adventures Unlimited Press has a somewhat cavalier attitude to proof reading and editing, which results in a number of quite avoidable typos. Having said that, the book itself grabs the imagination. New Mexico has always been known for its high weirdness, but the San Luis valley, straddling the border between the states of New Mexico and Colorado marks a new high in total weirdness. The book covers the period 1993 to 2006, and documents UFOs, balls of light (colour coded by size, yet!), unmarked helicopters, Bigfoot sightings and, nastiest of all, mutilated animals, mostly cattle. It is to O'Brien's credit that he doesn't instantly blame the little green men (or other ETs), but instead looks at all these occurances in chronological order, thereby allowing the reader to draw their own conclusions. It was pretty obvious to me that there were at least 3 different groups of animal mutilators, one being a local rancher who mounted a campaign against neighbouring ranchers of a different ethnic origin. Another might have been an ET (or maybe some kind of local spirit), whilst the third may have been a govenment or environmental group monitoring pollution (the area is downrange of a number of mines spitting out all kinds of pollutants). He also implies that the lights in the skies and UFOs are probably mostly 'black' projects, as the area is also underneath a designated military flight testing area. All in all, an intriguing read, if not quite what I expected when I bought the book.

The San Luis Valley (SLV) is in the USA. It runs from south central Colorado into northern New Mexico, and has been the setting for numerous cattle mutilations, UFO sightings, and other oddities over the years. Having lived in the area and actively investigated cases there, Christopher O'Brien is well-placed to write about the region's anomalous events. 'Secrets of the Mysterious Valley' is his third book about the area. Military activity may have been the source of many of the UFO sightings in the SLV. O'Brien explains that the 70-square-mile La Veta Military Operations Area is located just east of the SLV, and is used for low-level flight training. And he notes that there has been speculation about the presence of one or more secret bases in the Colorado/New Mexico border area. He relates (p. 285) that an investigator told him about seeing a large door open somewhere in the Rio Grande Canyon. A concrete pad extended out from the opening, and a helicopter flew off from it. The pad then retracted and the doors closed. (O'Brien's quotation from the anonymous source contains an inconsistency - it refers to a 'door' that opened, but 'doors' that closed.) However, if they occurred as described, some of the UFO events reported from the SLV don't seem easy to explain in terms of military activity. A man called Alan, who lived near the mouth of the Rio Grande Canyon, informed O'Brien that throughout the spring of 1994, he and his family had seen "every kind of ship you can imagine" flying around near to where they lived. Some were discs, some were triangles; some were big, and others were small. Some of them gave off red and blue flashes. And Alan's mother had allegedly discovered that the craft would come closer if she called to them mentally. Alan told O'Brien about an incident that had occurred one evening towards the end of May of that year. He was with a friend who didn't believe that Alan and his family had seen these craft. As they sat in the friend's pick-up truck at a remote spot a couple of miles north of the ranch, a strange bank of fog rolled in and surrounded them. They saw a light ahead, and a craft appeared and hovered in front of them, some 200 yards away. Alan called it closer, and it approached them. When it got to about 50 feet away, it "just sat there" (Alan's words, quoted by O'Brien). According to Alan, his friend "kind of freaked out" and fired two shots at the object with a rifle. The UFO went above the truck, somehow lifted it up, and then deposited it in a ditch! Much of the book deals with the animal mutilation phenomenon, although O'Brien prefers the term 'unusual animal deaths' (UADs) to 'mutilations'. In fact, he thinks that many UAD cases, but by no means all, may represent the work of scavengers. There was a wave of cases in the SLV in 1975-78, although there's reason to suspect that human perpetrators were responsible for at least some of them. O'Brien notes, for example, that some of the mutilated cattle had been shot with firearms. But there had been unusual animal deaths in the area before the 1970s. For instance, in September 1967, a three-year-old horse, called 'Lady', was found lying on her left side in a meadow, with all the tissue from her shoulders to the tip of her nose missing, and with the exposed bones glistening, bleached white, as if they had been in the sun for many years. The eyes, tongue, oesophagus, windpipe and brain were missing. There had apparently been UFO sightings in the weeks preceding her death. There have been further unusual animal deaths in the area since the 1970s, and after moving to the valley at the end of the 1980s, O'Brien personally investigated or researched many cases. O'Brien refers to speculation that mutilations have been carried out for purposes of environmental or biological monitoring (e.g. to gauge the presence of prion disease in animals that humans eat). However, one might wonder why it would be necessary to engage in unlawful killing of livestock in order to obtain biological samples. If some sort of government agency were involved, wouldn't it be a lot easier for it to buy cattle from ranchers, or to maintain herds of its own? Of course, another suggestion is that aliens have carried out mutilations, in order to obtain biological material. But why would they leave evidence of their depredations scattered about, thereby drawing attention to their activity? O'Brien (pp. 427-428) states that a man called Wayne Holland claims to have been a member of US Army Intelligence and to have been involved in animal mutilations in Indiana and Illinois between 1973 and 1975. "[S]aucer-shaped aerial platforms" were allegedly used, with Holland being responsible for logging data while others removed cattle parts. The aim was ostensibly to discover why other - unexplained - animal deaths were occurring. However, it's not clear to me how mutilating cattle would achieve that objective. It is, of course, possible that members of mutilation teams weren't told the real reason for these procedures. O'Brien states that other members of covert government mutilation teams are beginning to come forward. If so, further information may emerge in due course. There's something grimly theatrical about animal mutilations. But maybe that's intentional. Imagine, for example, that the authorities wanted to conceal the testing of top secret or prototype aircraft in an area. One way might be to encourage the local populace to attribute sightings of unusual aerial craft to extraterrestrial aliens. Conducting animal mutilations thereabouts could be a ruse to reinforce the belief that the UFO sightings were caused by aliens. But that could backfire - by drawing attention to the area. O'Brien considers the possibility that mutilations are perpetrated by members of occult groups. He refers (pp. 413-414) to a 5,000-acre ranch located in New Mexico, just below the Colorado border, and states that it has been the setting for upwards of 50 unexplained cattle death reports since 1993. He observes that in several instances in the early 1990s, occult-based ritual signs were reportedly found in the vicinity of the mutilated animals, although he notes that the discovery of "occult evidence" at sites of cattle mutilations is extremely rare. But later in his book (p. 430), he mentions a claim that a congressional committee had "smoking-gun evidence" linking mutilations with a ritual group that had access to military hardware. Human sacrifice was allegedly preferable to the group, but it targeted livestock (mainly cattle) because so many human sacrifices would eventually come to notice. But it's not clear from this whether the group is supposed to have sacrificed both humans and livestock, or just the latter. The information came to O'Brien third-hand, and he doesn't name his informant or his informant's source. Accordingly, it's hard to know how much credence to give this report. O'Brien (p. 415) notes that the livestock sector is one of the most significant contributors to our global environmental problems, and he refers (p. 426) to the notion that the mutilation phenomenon is somehow being manifested by the "collective unconscious", perhaps as a warning to us. Arguably, though, if we're being given a warning, it's not a very clear one, and it doesn't appear to be very effective! O'Brien contends (p. 431) that there has always been something awesome and powerful happening in the SLV and certain other locations in the western hemisphere. He asks whether the SLV could be a "sacrificial altar", and he suggests that the US government has at least some knowledge of "this predatory 'presence'", and may be engaged in appeasing, emulating, and studying it. Confusingly, though, he goes on to refer to the "power elite, the hidden control structure on our planet" (p. 432) - which sounds like a reference to a secret world government. He speculates that it may have made a bargain with the "ancient presence", and may be conducting ritual blood sacrifice to placate it and/or keep it at bay! In addition to unusual animal deaths and UFOs, O'Brien mentions various other anomalous phenomena. For example, he states (pp. 269-270) that several utility poles in the area sporadically vibrate during periods of UFO sightings, and he relates that a researcher called Gary Hart tape-recorded sounds from a vibrating pole on 30th June 1994. There was apparently no wind that night, and the sound seemed to come from the ground. This happened five miles south of a spot from which two triangular-shaped UFOs had been seen a few nights before. Although the content is interesting, O'Brien's book is marred by misspellings, badly constructed sentences, and printing errors (e.g. words appearing with no spaces between them). Running to well over 400 pages, it deals with serious and intriguing matters, but it lacks an index, which it badly needs. And although it was published quite recently (2007), it says very little about what has, or hasn't, been happening in the SLV since the 1990s. For these reasons, I can't give the book more than three stars, although I'd recommend it to anyone with an interest in anomaly hot spots.