By KEN KORCZAK
In 1995, Ron Felber published The Searchers, a book that was a significant departure for him.
That’s because it was a “UFO book.”
Describing himself as “not a ufologist” or UFO buff at all, Felber holds a Ph.D. in arts and letters from Drew University. He completed his undergraduate degree at the prestigious Georgetown University.
Back in the 90s, Felber was a successful businessman. His side hustle at the time was cranking out thrilling detective novels.
Then, one day, he came upon a truly sensational UFO story by serendipity.
On a business trip, one of Felber’s associates told him about an astonishing and intensely bizarre set of experiences that had happened to his best friend.
Intrigued, Felber agreed to talk to the man — and the result was The Searchers, the story of a young California couple who had been accosted by what can only be described as an army of “demonic” alien beings while camping in the Mojave Desert.
I read The Searchers shortly after it came out in 1995 and found it to be among the best I had ever read in the UFO genre — and I had read hundreds by then.
In my initial review, I called it “the most frightening UFO book ever written.”
I fully expected The Searchers to be a big hit on par with Whitely Streiber’s Communion, the groundbreaking story of alien abduction that parked itself on the New York Times bestseller list for weeks and sold millions of copies. However, after selling well for a short time, The Searchers faded into the ether, so to speak. It became just one of thousands of other run-of-the-mill UFO books clogging this competitive market.
Thus, I was delighted to see the book reissued in 2015, this time with a new title: The Mojave Incident.
I was even more delighted to notice that my own name was on the front cover! That’s because the publisher had chosen to place a blurb from my review near the bottom of the cover as a marketing kicker.
This prompted me to take another look. I wanted to see if my original proclamation calling this “the most frightening UFO book ever written” still stood up. I read hundreds more UFO books since reading The Searcher in the 1990s and many of them were pretty damn unnerving.
After a second read, my mind has not changed. Yes, The Mojave Incident remains, in my opinion, “the most frightening UFO book ever written.”
It’s also, by far, among the most well-written books in this category. Felber has some serious academic literary chops, but more importantly, he flat-out engages his reader and draws us in with his marvelous skills as a wordsmith.
Here is what I said about The Mojave Incident in my original review:
This book describes a sizzling night of terror as experienced by an ordinary middle-class California couple, Steve and Dawn Hess.
It was 1989 when the couple decided to head out to the Mojave Desert for a camping trip. Upon arriving and setting up camp in the middle of nowhere, the isolated couple began to see strange globes of light in the sky.
They were unnerved but tried to explain them away in all the common ways. But then, events rapidly escalated to a profoundly frightening degree.
The “lights” moved toward their camp. Steve and Dawn Hess retreat to hide in their camper, only to be accosted by an array of eerie alien beings who surround them, leered menacingly into their camper window, and seemed intensely bent upon not getting at them physically, but also penetrating their minds and probing every aspect of their beings.
The aliens performed devastating psychological invasions of their minds — at times, the couple is surrounded by dozens of bizarre alien manifestations of multiple and mind-blowing variety.
Dawn Hess described it this way:
“They (the aliens) wanted everything we had … everything …our minds, our bodies, even our souls, I think. It was like they drew it out of us with a syringe … every molecule. And it was painful, and I thought we were going to die, or already had died and were being tortured in hell.”
After enduring a night of this hell, Steve and Dawn returned to their normal lives and jobs, but all was not well with them. Nightmares, fears, anxieties, post-traumatic stress — everything that had happened to them had shattered their sense of what it means to be a normal human being.
So, I can’t recommend this book enough. It’s among the best I have encountered over my 50+ years of reading countless UFO books.
To view a video interview with Ron Felber in which he discusses this book with Martin Willis, go here: Martin Willis Live Shows.
MORE NOTE: For more UFO stories and reviews of the best UFO books, please see: KEN-ON-MEDIUM