RIGHT THEN, WRONG NOW

Kevin D. Randle. The Government UFO Files: The Conspiracy of Cover Up. Visible Ink, 2014.

This book is a look at the official US government investigations into UFO reports from the days of the foo fighters onwards. The trouble with this is that these investigations largely finished with the closure of Project Blue Book in 1969. The result is that what this book offers is more essentially time warp ufology, rehashing familiar cases from 40, 50 or 60 years ago based on those US government files.
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Much of this would have been interesting 50 or even 40 years ago and by the standards of those times this would have been a decent enough book, but time has moved on. I assume that this endless obsession with “olde time” ufology is an implicit admission that most of the stuff produced in the last thirty years has been absolute rubbish. The only material from the 21st century deals with the Chicago O'Hare airport case of 2006, and even that looks as though it has been put in as an afterthought.

Randle is more sensible than most American ufologists, but is still obsessed with the ETH, and does not seem to grasp how totally naïve the notion is of ETs visiting us in rather more sophisticated space shuttles. 

There is the obligatory reference to Roswell, in which the same old tales are hinted at in general terms, masking how many of the so-called witnesses turned out to be at best misremembering events of more than half a century ago or are plain old attention seeking fantasists.

Randle deplores the fact that the US military no longer investigates UFO report, nor is concerned about their supposed threat to national security. The most obvious explanation of this state of affairs is that the US military is morally certain that UFO reports are not generated by exotic machines and therefore pose no threat to national security and thus has decided not to waste taxpayers’ money investigating them. If this is the case, then it is a total nail in the Roswell coffin. Proof itself that there are no saucers in the Pentagon pantry.

Back in 1980 Randle wrote in his position statement in Ronald Storey’s Encyclopedia of UFOs: “I don’t believe that UFOs are extraterrestrial spaceships … I don’t find enough evidence” He was right then and wrong now. 

• Peter Rogerson.