Peter Tompkins was an American journalist, World War II spy, and best-selling author. His best known and most influential books include The Secret Life of Plants, published in 1973, Secrets of the Great Pyramid, reprinted in paperback in 1997, and Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, published in 1976. He is the father of author Ptolemy Tompkins.
Christopher Bird was a writer best known for his books The Secret Life of Plants and The Divining Hand: The 500-Year-Old Mystery of Dowsing.
He served in the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1950s. Fluent in French and Russian, Mr. Bird was an editor of the Gallatin Annual of International Business and a correspondent for Time Magazine in Yugoslavia.