 The Rainbow Conspiracy (1994)
Billed as "The Greatest Cover-Up of Our Time!" this book promises to "change everything you've ever thought about UFOs!"
A disjointed compendium of UFO contacts throughout the 20th century, The Rainbow Conspiracy didn't surprise or scare or interest me at all, and the only change in my UFO thinking was a shift from "mild disinclination" to "defiant apathy."
From introduction to addendum, Rainbow Conspiracy presents series of loosely-connected paragraphs that pretend to reveal a wide-ranging government cover-up of thousands of UFO encounters.
But the reporting is so shoddy, the writing so bland, the organization so loose, the encounters so questionable, it's easy to understand why UFO "experts" are considered crackpots, and very few serious people take UFOs seriously at all.
Most of the book is just an extended list of second-hand encounters, often with no names or dates mentioned, and no citations to verify how the authors came across such incendiarily humdrum accounts. The authors briefly claim that they've researched UFOs for decades, but never distinguish their own direct interviews and meetings from newspaper reports, purloined documents, and other UFO books.
Thus, these incidents come across as unverifiable tabloid reportage. For instance, "Mary was driving down Rural Road 32 when she saw a bright light hover thirty feet above the road, then zip off into the night sky at speeds approaching 1,000 miles per hour."
I made that one up, but it pretty much sums up all the stories presented in Rainbow Conspiracy: beeeeeyoring! What's the point in mentioning a street name if there's no town and state? And how would someone like Mary know what speed the light was going, or how high off the road it hovered? Man, this book annoyed me!
There's not even any juicy alien sex-abuse stories to spice things up. The authors make only passing reference to the pumping of semen and removal of ova, and only to justify the inane theory of aliens taking millennia to construct human/alien hybrids.
I'm with Sagan on that one: any civilization advanced enough to whip through space-time would not need a cup of swirling jizzum to screw with the human genome. And yes, that's exactly how Sagan said it.
If the Raelleans can build a human clone with a single eyelash, why do the goddamn space-aliens have to resort to handjobs and finger-fucking to get results … and by the rings of Uranus, why has it taken like 6,000 years with no visible results?
Where's the neck-gills and telepathic levitation? Where's the mindgasms and hypnotravelling?
It doesn't help that the majority of ink is devoted to "classic" UFO cases that have been reported to death, such as the Roswell Crash and the infamous Estrada-Wilcox abduction. You can't stake a claim on shocking top-secret revelations based on events that were made into a CBS movie of the week.
Worse, they don't ever clearly explain what the "Rainbow Conspiracy" is.
Instead of tying all these stories together into one bogus premise, they confuse the issue by simply listing all UFO theories, and abruptly end the book without advocating any of them.
So technically, there is no Rainbow Conspiracy.
There's only me, rolling my eyes and saying things like, "Oh pshaw!" and "Now really!" and thinking, "I gotta show this to Gleepzorg, he's gonna laugh his antennae off."
Review by Crimedog |