It isn't possible to create an audio source in mid-air using the method you've described. This is because the two ultrasonic waves would create an audible source if the listener were standing at that spot, but those waves would continue to propagate in the same direction afterwards. You would need, as I point out below, some sort of medium which scattered the waves in all directions to make it seem as if the sound were coming from the point at which you interfered the two waves.
It is possible, however, to make the user percieve the sound as coming from a specific location, but it isn't as easy as the author makes it seem. I can think of two different ways. First of all, as described by @reirab, you can get audio frequencies by interfering two sound waves of high frequency. When they interfere they will generate a beat note which has the frequency of the difference between the two frequencies. I.E. if you send a sound beam with frequency $f_1=200\ \text{kHz}$ and another beam with $f_2=210\ \text{kHz}$, the frequency heard in the region where they combine will be $\Delta f-=f_2-f_1=10\ \text{kHz}$ which is in the audio band of humans.
There is an additional difficulty. You will need the sound to come out in a well-defined, narrow (collimated) beam, and this is not terribly easy to do. A typical speaker emits sound in all directions. There are many techniques for generating such beams, but one is to use a phased array.
How can you use this to make a person perceive the sound as coming from a specific point?
Sending Two Different Volumes to the Two Ears
What does it mean to perceive sound as coming from a specific location? Our ears are just microphones with cones which accept sound mostly from one direction (excepting low frequencies). A large part of the way we determine where the sound came from is just the relative volume in our two ears. So, you could use the interference effect described above with beams which are narrow enough that you can target each ear. By using two separate sets of beams targeting each ear with different volumes, you could make the person perceive the sound as coming from a specific location; at least as well as a 3D movie makes a person perceive images in 3D.
Hitting a Material Which Scattered the Sound Isotropically
The second method is to use the same interference effect, but this time combining the two beams at a point where a material scattered the sound waves in all directions. I'm going to be honest, I'm not sure how realistic such materials are, but lets assume they exist for now. If you did so, the two sound beams would be scattered with equal amplitude in all directions and the person you are trying to fool would percieve the sound as coming from this point. This method has the advantage of truly sounding to the person as if the sound came from that direction in all respects including reflections, phasing, etc.
In summary, the idea is definitely possible (maybe there are more ways than I've given), but it isn't as simple as the passage in the book makes it out to be.
Best Answer
For one ear alone, the sound you hear will be the sum of all sounds at that point. So there's not really such a concept as "out of phase" there... "out of phase" relative to what? If you have two speakers generating two sounds that are identical except for a 180 degree phase offset when they arrive at one ear, the perceived volume at that ear will be zero or close to it.
The story becomes a bit different when you talk about two ears. If your ears hear the same sound but it has a slight phase offset in one ear compared to the other, your brain uses this (plus a few other factors) to judge the direction to the source of the sound. E.g. a sound coming from a single point off to your side is likely to have a slightly different phase at each ear, this is part of the set of info your brain uses to figure out where the sound came from (as well as e.g. frequency filtering from the shape of your ears, amplitude differences, visual information, logical conclusions about what "makes sense" in the current situation, etc.)
So, if you're asking if one ear can distinguish between "sounds of different phase" from a single source that doesn't really make any sense.†
If you're asking if one ear can distinguish between "sounds of different phase" from multiple sources, not really, you're only really aware of the end result.
If you're asking if you can distinguish between "sounds of different phase" across both your ears, yes, you do it all the time, it's one of the things that helps you locate the source of a sound.
For the one ear, case, though, it's a lot easier to identify two sounds whose phase is changing relative to eachother, it's a common, distinctly recognizable audio effect especially with guitars, you probably recognize the sound, e.g. https://youtu.be/pvScdOldfc8?t=154.
† By "doesn't really make any sense", I actually mean: You wouldn't be able to tell unless you knew what the sound was supposed to sound like "normally" as a reference for comparison. There'd be nothing inherently identifiable about such a sound, you'd need a mental reference. If I played two identical waveforms, overlapped but with one shifted slightly, of a sound that was completely unfamiliar to you, you would not be able to identify that as any kind of "phase shifting" - it's just a waveform like any other, but if I did it to a human voice, you'd be able to tell something is odd, because you know what a voice should sound like.