I discovered this book's existence recently while doing a random amazon search, and I put it on my Christmas list. After receiving it on Christmas, I finished this book by Jonathan Gray in two days. It is largely an easy read, the majority of it being a list of out-of-place objects and places like ancient cities in South America and evidence of ancient space travel.
The book, on the one hand, is interesting and has lots of tidbits not for the faint of heart. I knew about some stuff like ancient space travel and ancient nuclear warfare, but I did not know about the possibility of ancient man being on the moon and Mars, the Black Knight satellite, and widespread supposed underground tunnels and cities. I also found his explanation of monoliths to be very interesting and also in support of the electric universe theory (the theory that the universe is held together by electricity and it explains pretty much everything from meteors, how stars run, and even phenomena like storms on Jupiter and Saturn. holoscience.com is a good place to look, if you are interested, though granted I don't believe in everything the guys are promoting with their theory, but I digress). Pretty much the evidence Gray puts forth argues that ancient man was not hairy and stupid but rather that he was highly advanced, even more so than we are today.
However, I do have some problems with Gray's book. For one thing, he has very few sources. I have yet to check out some of them, but I do take issue with him using Zechariah Sitchin as a source (if you want to be taken seriously, please do not use the writings of a man who believes we were genetically modified by aliens). The lack of sources makes it hard to determine where exactly he got the information and thus makes it questionable at times. I didn't like his theory of how the Ice Age began; here I will say that sadly I think Creationists, though I am in their camp, do not do much research in scientific fields and just like uniformitarians refuse to change their mind or look elsewhere for real explanations. I also thought his interpretation of Scripture was extremely weak. I don't know what translation he used, but some of the words he claimed supported his theories did not make sense at all or just seemed far-fetched; I also do not agree with his view on the Levitical dietary laws being implemented only for health reasons or in his premillenial views that come out a few times in the book. There were a few places where he wrote about events like the night the Flood happened and an ancient nuclear attack that were meant to be dramatic, but I thought they were silly and stupid; it would have been better if he had left them out. At a few points, the book became a bit boring and repetitive, and I think he would have done better not to repeat the same thing a few times. Finally, I think the book should have been edited much better. There were often huge spaces between words, sometimes words were combined like "SumariaBulgaria", on occasion it looked like he forgot to add something under a subtitle, and just in general the formatting and editing was poorly done and pretty noticeable.
Despite these issues, the book was an interesting read and definitely made me think and put things together in certain places, especially because I enjoy learning about things like these when they're not written by a psycho or a questionable source.
I give it three out of five stars.
