Staretz Encounter: A New Age Thriller - Tapa dura

Delving into thelabyrinthine quagmire known as the paranormal, Staretz Encounter is the storyabout news reporter, Rudy Styne, from New York City, and his Eurasiancounterpart, Dr. Imo Bern, a neuroscientist from a secret parapsychology laboratoryin Siberia. The Soviet Union has collapsed, Eurasia is in turmoil. A right-wingextremist, Petar Bonzovalivitch, has come to the fore. Marshalling a cadre ofpsionic soldiers whose brains have been rewired, Bonzovalivitch launches aclandestine operation to topple the West and restore the empire that was onceRussia. His head of psi-ops is black magician Dr. Georgi Boshtov, ex-KGB agentand grand-nephew of Gregori Rasputin. Their target for capture is Egyptiansuperpsychic Abdullah Manu.A controversialcelebrity, Manu's psychic feats have splintered the scientific community. Fromthe point of the view of the media, Manu is passed off as a charlatan, and theparapsychologists who study him, like NYU physics professor Jay Ketchembach,are billed as pseudoscientists.Rudy Styne,reporter for Modern Times, wakes up one morning to a foreboding dream whichcomes true later in the day. Having never had a psychic experience before, thereporter decides to research the topic for an article for the magazine. At thesame time, he also begins to uncover Petar Bonzovalivitch's nefarious plan andalso interview Professor Ketchembach and Abdullah Manu. Eventually, Rudy andhis girlfriend, Chessie Barnsworth, meet up with heartsick scientist, Imo Bern,at an international conference on psychotronics. Bern, who was performing thebrain operations necessary for the creation of the legion of human cyborgs,tries to defect and pass his knowledge to the West as Rudy attempts to persuadean all too skeptical news community that Bonzovalivitch is more than anoutrageous buffoon.As the storyprogresses, Rudy visits psychic researchers and an avatar in search forultimate truths, only to return to New York to find his local guru, ProfessorKetchembach, murdered. Georgi Bosht

Editor ofMetaScience, A New Age Journal on Consciousness, Marc J. Seifer, Ph.D., hastaught courses on psychology and consciousness research at such institutions asProvidence College and the University of Rhode Island for over 25 years. Havingworked with and interviewed a number of the world's greatest living psychicsincluding Dean Kraft, Ingo Swann, Matthew Manning and Uri Geller, Dr. Seifer isalso a science writer. With more than 70 publications in periodicals such asWired, Cerebrum, Hands on Electronics, Parapsychology Review, Journal ofPsychohistory, Lawyer's Weekly and Psychiatric Clinics of North America, Dr.Seifer is an internationally recognized authority on the inventor Nikola Teslaand also as a handwriting expert. Featured in The Economist, Rhode IslandMonthly, Glamour and Cosmopolitan and on TV on the History Channel andAssociated Press Television News for his work in graphology, and in ScientificAmerican, New York Times, Nature, Library Journal and The Washington Post forhis work on Tesla, he has lectured at such institutions as the United Nations,Cambridge University, Oxford University, University of Vancouver, City Collegeof New York, Long Island University, Brandeis University, New York PublicLibrary, Colorado College, Cranbrook Retreat, LucasFilms Industrial Light &Magic and West Point Military Academy, as well as in Boston, Chicago, ColoradoSprings, Denver, Detroit, Providence, New York, Santa Fe, Jerusalem, Haifa andZagreb. His lecture on the topic 'Precognition, Synchronicity and theStructure of Time' was given as a poster session at the 'Towards aScience of Consciousness' symposium which was held in Tuscon in April 1996and at the University of Rhode Island in 2001.?Listings include Who's Who in the World and Who's Who in Science andEngineering, Marquis' editions.His latest workWIZARD: THE LIFE & TIMES OF NIKOLA TESLA (Citadel Press) was boxed andstarred by Publisher's Weekly, featured in a three-page review in ScientificAmerican as 'a serious piec