NEED TO KNOW

An obsessively researched look at what British sky-watcher Good (Alien Contact, 1993, etc.) deems ample international evidence of UFO visitations since the 1930s, and the repeated official denials that they ever happened.

“UFOs are as real as the airplanes that fly over your head,” declared former Canadian Minister of Defence Paul Hellyer in 2005. Good methodically lays out similar testimony from pilots, military men in air and sea, civilian observers, surgeons who operated on the extraterrestrials, generals and presidents, accompanying their words (some from sworn affidavits) with meticulous footnotes, photos, drawings and copies of documents. During World War II, small, seemingly remote-controlled flying objects dubbed “foo-fighters” created a nuisance for pilots. In the summer of 1946, a rash of sightings of “ghost rockets” across Scandinavia and other parts of Europe alarmed the U.S. military, which blamed them on the Soviets. Good believes UFO incursions were common in 1940s New Mexico, the site of U.S. atomic testing, and avers that the debris found near Roswell in 1947, quickly identified by the military as fragments from a military balloon, was in fact the remains of a flying-saucer crash. He chronicles alien-disc sightings during the Cold War, suggests that Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy were taken to disc-landing sites and maintains that since the 1940s, aliens have been communicating “with an elite group of U.S. military and scientific intelligence personnel [and] there has been a transfer of technology.” Reagan’s “Star Wars” project was actually motivated by growing concerns about alien hostility, the author adds. The bizarre crash of a cigar-shaped craft near Varginha, Brazil, in January 1996 stranded strange creatures needing medical attention. Good excerpts some chilling material from an interview conducted by a fellow UFOlogist with the Brazilian hospital staff, though it’s rather peculiar that several individuals’ comments are conflated into quotes collectively attributed to “Medical Personnel.”

The author certainly knows his stuff, and to his credit is keenly aware of the importance of documentation, however specious some of it may seem to the unconverted.