Ghosts of the Air: True Stories of Aerial Hauntings

Reader Reviews
It was on a beautiful, balmy Sunday morning in the late spring of '93 when the telephone call came. I was puttering around the house in cut-offs, a t-shirt, and sneakers, swigging Pepsi Cola and listening to the humm of honeybees in the yard and early Beatles on the golden-oldies radio station. At around elevenish the ringing began and I picked up the receiver hoping fervently that I wasn't going to be verbally assaulted by some chattering telemarketer. I wasn't. Instead this big, gregarious basso voice came booming over the wire at me. " Hi," it said. "I'd like to speak to Bill Hancock if I might." "You got him," says I. "Bill, Martin Caidin here." (Oh, yeah, sure, I think. Some smart aleck is having me on). "Listen, I'm calling to let you know this case you put me onto for the new book is dynamite. Even stranger than you thought it was when you wrote me." (Huh? Wait a minute. This IS Martin Caidin!!! Holy Frijoles, Batman!!). And from that point on we were rolling. I never met the man face to face. Only knew him from his books and his reputation as a historian, aviator, and writer (You remember Steve Austin, the "Six Million Dollar Man"? Caidin invented him. Remember an old movie called "Marooned" that did an eerily uncanny job of predicting the trials of Apollo 13, years before that flight was ever made? Caidin again). At the conclusion of "Ghosts of the Air" he made a request for submissions of material for a possible sequel and yours truly sent him a letter regarding a peculiar incident I recalled. He wrote back, I answered, and a fax or two was sent. Now came this call out of the blue and it turns out he was really jacked up over this little incident and was letting me KNOW he was. And thanking me profusely for putting him onto it. My impressions that day were of a man with a mind like a steel trap. A razor sharp intellect and a tremendous enthusiasm for life. This guy was just plain larger than life and it came through loud and clear on the phone. He was doing the preliminary work on the "Ghosts of the Air" sequel and was excited about it. said it was going to be better than the first one. That got ME excited because I flat out LOVE "Ghosts of the Air" (So why only give it 4 stars?, you ask. I will explain shortly). Caidin already had the title: "Phantoms On the Flight Deck"...and he loved it. I thought it was neat, too.(Don't bother to look for "Phantoms On the Flight Deck", though, at Amazon, or anywhere else...Marty never finished it. He died before "final assembly" took place). But "Ghosts of the Air" IS here and it is wonderful. It is chock full of thrills and chills and supernatural events and stranger than strange happenings in the air. The "Out There" events of Caidin's bizarre trip through a milky fog in the Bermuda Triangle on a Catalina PBY flying boat...with all directional and electronics gear gone on the "fritz"...the cases of shot up warplanes bringing home their dead pilots...all these and much, much more. All of this stuff investigated and checked and rechecked for accuracy before it went to the publishers. Well...ALMOST all of it. And that is the reason for only 4 stars instead of 5. There is one "ringer" in the bunch. I caught it later, along with some others, when it made its way into Fate magazine with a bit more "tweaking" than Marty allowed it. And he caught it, too. And realized he'd been "snookered" with it.Really ticked him off. He'd seen it in the form of a supposed article someone was doing (the Fate writer I assume). Looked like it had a good pedigree. Guy told Marty he could use the "general outline" of the story but couldn't go into specifics with it because this guy had the "rights" to all the particulars of the thing .So That's what Marty did; he went with it in a very general and non-detailed way. It's in "Ghosts". All the stories in the book are true and accurate except this one. It is a crock job built around a fictional "One Step Beyond" type short story from the early sixties. You'll know it. It is the only incident in the book that is vague and lacking in detail. Everywhere else Caidin gives dates, locales, names, aircraft types, the "whole nine yards". This chapter, though ,is dreamy and detail-less.It says a young fellow is up joyriding in the clouds one day and all of a sudden he is in a near disastrous mid-air with some biplane that looks like something out of the 1920s or even World War One. The contact is so close there is even a paint scraping. Then the biplane is lost in the clouds and the young fellow has to do an emergency landing. No trace of the bipe is ever discovered, though, until some time later some kids find an old, old biplane stored in a barn. Looks like its been there "forever". Has an old flight log in it that records a near-fatal mishap with a strange looking aircraft with only one set of wings...decades and decades ago. And it has a paint scrape on it. This is the "ringer". this is the one story in "Ghosts of the Air" that is pure B.S. Marty discovered it after the fact and was most distressed by it. That's why he was taking extra time and extra effort with the sequel. It was not his plan for "Phantoms" to have ANY "ringers" in IT. So there is the reason for the 4 stars. Apart from that ONE bogus event, everything else in here went down just the way he SAYS it did. So read the B.S. chapter and know it for what it is. Then read all the REST of these accounts and go ahead and let your hair stand on end. The others all MORE than make up ANY deficit that one single little klunker establishes.