Anomalist Book Award Winners for 2002

BEST REFERENCE	Mysterious Creatures: A Guide to Cryptozoology by George M. Eberhart This new reference work leaves me speechless, unable to grasp the proper superlative. Words like incredible, monumental, important are all true, but don't do it justice. Put it this way, if Bernard Heuvelman's On the Track of Unknown Animals put cryptozoology on the map, then George Eberhart's Mysterious Creatures will launch a thousand ships in search of the many and varied wondrous beasts that are said to hide from man. This book--actually two beautiful, illustrated, hardback volumes, which total more than 700 pages--contains the descriptions of 1,085 unknown animals from Abnauaya, the Wild man of West Asia, to Wyvern, the dragon of Wales and England. The information for each entry is helpfully broken down into as many as twelve categories: Etymology, Variant Names, Physical Description, Behavior, Tracks, Habitat, Distribution, Significant Sightings, Present Status, Possible Explanations, and Sources. In addition, Eberhart provides brief descriptions of the forty major cryptid categories these 1,085 unknown fall into. But that's not all. The book also contains thorough geographical and crytipd indexes, introductory articles by Henry Bauer, Jack Rabbit, Loren Coleman and Eberhardt himself, an annotated list of Lake and River Monsters, and more. Every serious cryptozoologist should have this book. Unfortunately, it's an extremely expensive reference work. I would strongly urge the publisher to issue a cheaper paperback volume that all cryptozoologists could afford and use to further our study of the world's mystery creatures.
MOST ORIGINAL	Faith, Madness and Spontaneous Human Combustion by Gerald N. Callahan Gerald Callahan, a professor of immunology at Colorado State University, sees connections between seemingly unrelated things and events. What is a book by an immunologist doing on the Anomalist Awards list, you ask? Basically, it's here for Callahan's daringly original suggestion that our immune system might be responsible for a host of paranormal phenomena, such as déjà vu, spontaneous human combustion, and ghosts. How? You'll have to read this personal and poetic book for the details, but essentially his working hypothesis is that these phenomena may be byproducts of our immune systems' attempts at distinguishing "self" from "not self" in order to keep our bodies from being consumed by the microbial world. Many scientists are more imaginative than we generally give them credit for, but few are daring enough to tackle anomalous subjects. Callahan is one and deserves our attention—and applause for a wonderfully provocative book.
BEST SCIENCE	Investigating the Paranormal by Tony Cornell Some books are infused with authority by their unflinching quest for the truth. This is one of those books. Tony Cornell has been researching hauntings, poltergeists and mediums for 55 years. He knows his stuff. Each of the case studies that make up this highly entertaining book is a detective story in itself, illustrating the techniques, strategies and technologies Cornell employs in his common sense investigations of the paranormal. He's always careful to separate interpretation from experience, even when he's standing right next to two trustworthy witnesses as they witness a ghost in broad daylight. As such, it serves as the perfect textbook (without the dry presentation) for conducting psychical research. Cornell, who is the vice president of the Society for Psychical Research, is neither believer nor debunker, and while he discovers that many of these phenomena have non-paranormal origins, in the end he remains genuinely puzzled over those cases that truly hint at a deeper level of reality.
BEST AUTOBIOGRAPHY	Shockingly Close to the Truth: Confessions of a Grave-Robbing Ufologist by James W. Moseley and Karl T. Pflock You'll either love this book or your hate it. I think it's the literary equivalent of a grade-B sci-fi flick—a thoroughly enjoyable insiders' look at the golden age of UFOlogy. Much of it is not pretty, sometimes it's rather sad, but it's the unvarnished truth. You have to give Moseley a lot of credit for his honesty—even if some of it comes a little late. This book provides some much needed perspective—something newcomers to the field need a good dose of to avoid sounding like dummies. I think that Moseley, who loves to kick up mud in the UFO swamp, actually comes closer to the truth about UFOs than most who take their extraterrestrial craft too seriously. But get this straight: I'm not giving the "Supreme Commander" an award for his contributions to UFOlogy. It's for the book. Got it?
BEST BIOGRAPHY	Politics of the Imagination: The Life, Work and Ideas of Charles Fort by Colin Bennett If Thomas Pynchon had any interest in Charles Fort, this is the kind of book that might result. It's far more than a biography (Damon Knight already did that), but a literary study of Fort the writer, as well as a postmodern rant on the illusory nature of facts and reality in the light of Fort's philosophy. Bennett, like Fort, sees "explanations," especially those provided by science, as a superficial means of understanding. Even more than in his previous book, Looking for Orthon, Bennett does battle with modern skepticism, which he sees as a debilitating contemporary illness. This is a great, big, heady stew of a book full of references to literature, arts, philosophy and more—much, much more. Bennett takes Fort and runs for the goalposts--I don't think anyone else could have done him justice. This book is a monster, a raised fist at the orthodox prison of the mind that is contemporary culture.