I’ve known Mike “The Owl Guy” Clelland for more than a decade, and he is without a doubt one of my favorite people in the modern UFO field. Not only because of his wry middle-eastern sense of humor, his talent as a graphic artist, and his disarming honesty; but also because what he’s passionate about has very little to do with what the mainstream believe the UFO phenomenon is all about.
The people who began to pay attention to UFOs in 2017 —with the release of Kean and Blumenthal’s NYT article— may have a simplistic idea of them as metal spacecraft visiting us from some remote star system; with the powers-that-be studying them quietly to try and not to rouse a mass hysteria, while at the same time attempting to replicate some menial aspects of their ludicrously advanced technology for their own advantage against their adversaries (who may be doing just the same in their own nations).
And while there may be some aspects of this easy-to-digest urban legend that could be true, it constitutes but a tiny sliver of the whole overwhelmingly incomprehensible mystery that represents the UFO enigma; especially in how it manifests to the everyday people who (for better or worse) find themselves entangled with it in their daily lives: a conundrum that involves synchronicities, premonitions, out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, orbs encountered both in dreams and waking life, strange marks found in the body, etc.
Oh, and let’s not forget about the owls! Which with their eerie big eyes and stealthy demeanor seem to perfectly embody the unnerving nature of this phenomenon: always watching from above, when we least expect it.
After Mike began to share his personal experiences with ‘The Other’ in his online blog Hidden Experience he wrote the book The Messengers, in which he tried to make sense —at least as much as anyone can!— to the correlations he was finding between his own life, and that of the hundreds of anonymous confidants who found themselves facing similar confounding situations; aspects of the UFO experience which had been conveniently swept under the rug of UFOlogy for far too long.
Now Mike is venturing forth in yet another exciting adventure with his first fictional novel: The Unseen.
I received an advance copy of Mike’s manuscript, and was immediately struck not only by how engaging the prose is in its deceiving simplicity, but also in how much the story had the look of a shamanic journey of sorts, painted onto a canvas colored with the striking hues of the southwestern American desert. Indeed, if you are a fan of Carlos Castañeda’s books, you will be immediately captured by The Unseen’s chapters —a full review of the book for our readers will come soon.
“The story is fiction, but the emotions are real” is what you read on the first page of Mike’s novel. And herein lies the value of what Mike is attempting to do by venturing into the field of literature, after spending years and years collating stories from listeners and people who stumbled upon his blog in extremely serendipitous manners: trying to make use of the artifice of fiction in order to bring a taste to the reader of what it really is like to live your life behind the shadow of unseen forces.
The Unseen is currently available on Amazon as a paperback and Kindle.
