The 37th Parallel: The Secret Truth Behind America's UFO Highway by Ben MezrichMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Chuck Zukowski is obsessed with UFO sightings. This is his story.
Despite the pandemic, we flew my sister-in-law and brother-in-law into town for Miles' first birthday. Before they left town, Marc pushed this on me. My in-laws are much more into UFOs than I am but I resolved to give this a read.
I was huge into UFOs as a kid but have gotten increasingly skeptical over the years. As a result, I approached this as a work of fiction but reserved the right to change my mind later.
This reminded me of James Renner's True Crime Addict more than anything else. It was written in an engaging style and felt more like fiction than a factual work.
The 37th Parallel chronicles Chuck Zukowski sojourn into the world of UFOs, starting with cattle mutilations and eventually leading to a dig at one of the Roswell crash sites and beyond.
I'm not going to debate the existence of UFOs here. I'm sure there's life elsewhere but the thing about space is that it's quite big. Anyway, this book can be interpreted in two ways: either it's a very engaging piece of fiction with a shitty ending or an account of one man's wild goose chase.
If you take it as a work of fiction, this is some gripping stuff, although I found the time jumps annoying. If you take it as fact, Chuck's wife should have divorced his ass decades ago. Yeah, I get the pursuit of truth and I understand his obsession at times but was it really worth all the sacrifices along the way?
At the end, I guess I'll say I was very entertained by this and possibly a little convinced Chuck isn't wasting his time. Four out of five little green men.
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Hi Dan, this is Chuck Zukowski.. Yeah I need to smack Ben again for portraying me as a bad husband. (ha ha) My wife Tammy and I have been happily married for over 38 years. I was the one that worked two jobs, my wife never has, but... she's always been there for me. As for the ending, I think Ben's intention was to show the reader what I've always gone through, redacted information. Also, the ending alluded to Robert Bigelow being involved, which was released publicly a year after the book's release. I knew he was working with the government, but thought it was the CIA, turned out to be the Pentagon. The investigation parts of the book are real, but the jumping around and some fluff is for screenplay material. The book was written by an author who sells his books for movies, and the rights for this one was acquired by New Line Cinema before it went public. Well, glad you enjoyed the book, and if you have Amazon Prime Video you can catch my one and only season of Alien Highway from Travel Channel in 2019. On my team was my son Daniel, and Heather Taddy from Paranormal States. Thanks for the 4 stars.
ReplyDeleteOh.. and if anyone has any questions they can visit my site, UFOnut.com or email me at: zukowski@ufonut.com
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