THE KEY TO KEYHOE

Linda Powell.  Against the Odds. Major Donald E. Keyhoe and his Battle to End UFO Secrecy, Anomalist Books, 2023.

To those of us who just think of Donald Keyhoe as the author of some of the earliest and most important UFO books, and as a director of NICAP, this biography gives us an excellent insight into his early career and how he came to be involved with this subject.

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FROM THE FILING CABINET

Pentagon UFO Files. On iTunes, Amazon Prime, Google Play & Microsoft

The press release for this documentary feature states: ‘For decades, secrets have been kept from us. Kept from us by the powers that be. After years of silence and secrecy the US government has finally revealed evidence of extraterrestrial life which could shatter our very perception of mankind’s place in the universe.

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SPOOKS AND SAUCERS

Jack Brewer. Wayward Sons. NICAP and the IC. Independently published. 2021.

Using information from the websites of intelligence agencies, material gained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) records, Brewer pieces together the formation, structure, management and eventual decline of the world’s largest UFO group. At its height under Donald Keyhoe it had 14,000 members.

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DEEP DOWN IT'S SHALLOW

Kevin D. Randle. UFOs and the Deep State, a History of the Military and Government’s War Against the Truth. New Page Books, 2021.

Kevin Randle’s blog A Different Perspective often provides a sensible and sober appraisal of the UFO scene, and this book in a similar vein is a very good guide to the involvement of the U.S. military and secret agencies with ufology. I should warn readers that he begins with Roswell and trundles along neatly through the various studies and projects that the U.S. ran and winds up at Rendlesham Forest. 

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LOST IN AN ESCHER PAINTING

Adam Gorightly. Saucers Spooks and Kooks, UFO Disinformation in the Age of Aquarius. Daily Grail Publishing, 2021.

Adam Gorightly takes us on a fascinating exploration of the car crash that underlies and undermines ufology in the USA. He begins with the research of Stanton Friedman into Major Jesse Marcel’s testimony about the recovery of alien wreckage at Roswell. This led to the publication of Incident at Roswell in 1980, co-authored with William “Bill’ Moore, that initiated our obsession from crashed saucers.

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THE RULES OF THE GAME

John Greenewald Jr. Secrets From The Black Vault. Rowman and Littlefield. 2020.

This is a sequel to last year's Inside the Black Vault book from the same author and it is in essence more of the same. So, if you liked that one then you will undoubtedly be happy with the second helping on a broader scope. As before it is a retelling of stories accumulated over several decades by the author of a popular US website 'The Black Vault'.

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THERE'S AN AWFUL LOT OF COBBLERS IN BRAZIL

Thiago Luiz Ticchetti, UFO Contacts in Brazil, Flying Disk Press, 2019.

It seems that Brazil is the place to be if you want to contact aliens from outer space. As Thiago Ticchetti the co-editor of Revista UFO magazine and resident of the Brazilian Committee of Ufologists shows, Brazil is a veritable theme park of UFO contacts that have a long history of being seriously weird, outlandish and amazing.
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UFOLOGY MEETS KREMLINOLOGY

Nick Redfern, Flying Saucers from the Kremlin. Lisa Hagen Books 2019.

With a title like this, you could be forgiven for thinking this was a book about UFO sightings from Russia and the former Soviet Union, following Ion Hobana's and Julien Weberbergh's 1972 UFO's from behind the Iron Curtain. But the book isn't about that. Subtitled 'UFOs, Russian Meddling, Soviet Spies and Cold War Secrets', the book is an attempt to show that the Russians have been manipulating the UFO phenomenon and its witnesses since the days of the Contactees right up to the present.

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SEARCHING THE PAPERWORK

John Greenewald Jr. Inside The Black Vault; The Government's UFO Secrets Revealed. Rowman and Littlefield, 2019.

First the good news. By today's standards this is both an inexpensive book and an easy one to read – telling the stories in short digestible chunks. The author runs popular US website 'The Black Vault' based on government files. It is also true that it does what it sets out to do – describe some well known UFO cases (mostly American for obvious reasons) in a way free of 'unverifiable' information'.
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DIARY OF A SOMEBODY

Jacques Vallee. Forbidden Science 4, The Spring Hill Chronicles. The Journals of Jacques Vallee 1990 – 1999. Anomalist Books. 2019.

This is the fourth volume of a mammoth (2000 pages and counting) series released over the past 25 years which form chronological diary entries covering a decade in the life of one of the most important scientists in the field of anomaly research.

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COWBOYS AND ALIENS

Dermot Butler and Carl Nally. Circle of Deceit: A Terrifying Alien Agenda in Ireland and Beyond. Flying Disk Press, 2018.

David Cayton, director of the ‘Animal Pathology Field Unit’ provides the foreword where he describes investigating the mutilation of a pony called Rascal. From the start his efforts were thwarted by the Sussex police who feared that if they released any details it would inspire copycat attacks.
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INTELLIGENCE QUOTIENT

Larry Hancock. Unidentified: the National Intelligence Problem of UFOs. Treatise Publications, 2017.

In this book Larry Hancock, a noted writer on the Kennedy assassination, examines the USAF’s approach to UFOs as a threat to national security, largely concentrating on the period up to 1952. 
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THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

David Booher.  No Return: The Gerry Irwin Story, UFO Abduction or Covert Operation.  Anomalist Books, 2017.

The story of Gerry Irwin is one of the spookiest in ufology, at least as presented as the opening sequence of chapter 4 of Jacques Vallee’s “Passport to Magonia”. Private First Class Gerry Irwin was travelling south-east on Highway 14 out of Cedar City Iowa on 28th February 1959 when he saw what he thought might be a plane in trouble. He left a hurried note and a message by his car and set out on foot to see what he could do.

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I WALK THE LINE

Ben Mezrich.  The 37th Parallel: The Secret Truth Behind America’s UFO Highway. Heinemann, 2016

Sorry to disappoint folks, but if you think you are going to discover the truth about the UFO Highway or any other amazing secrets in this book you will be disappointed. It is not really a story about UFOs at all, rather it is the story of one of the people investigating them.
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GRAPHIC DETAILS

Dwight Jon Zimmerman. Area 51 - The Graphic History of America’s Most Secret Military Installation. Illustrated by Greg Scott. Zenith Press, 2014.

Who has not heard of Area 51? For a secret base, it is a complete failure. Not only is it discussed far and wide by those who feel that aliens are housed underground whilst their circular craft are parked in the hangars above but also coach parties wheel up to peer through the fences until guards arrive and shoo them off.
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FAILING TO EXPLAIN

Robert Salas. Unidentified. The UFO Phenomenon: How World Governments Have Conspired to Conceal Humanity's Biggest Secret. New Page Books, 2014.

Robert Salas can hardly be said to be open to argument on the subject of UFOs, as in his preface to this book he states that there are two things that he knows for certain about the UFO phenomenon. These are that we are being visited by "real objects of unearthly origin", and that alien abductions are also real.
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BABES IN THE WOODS

Nick Pope, with John Burroughs and Jim Penniston. Encounter in Rendlesham Forest: The Inside Story of the World’s Best Documented UFO Story. Thomas Dunne Books, 2014.

Rendlesham just will not lie down it seems, though in this latest presentation the story is largely peeled back to the story of Jim Penniston, with Burroughs playing something of a supporting role.
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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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DISASTER AREA

Thomas J. Carey and Donald R. Schmitt. Inside the Real Area 51. New Page Books, 2013.

Even works of fantasy and science fiction have their own internal logic, so that readers can enjoy the stories by achieving a suspension of disbelief. Very few writers of UFO books seem to bother about being logical or consistent, and Carey and Schmitt are not among them.

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STATE OF DENIAL

Carl Nally and Dermot Butler. States of Denial: The Tuskar Rock Incident and Other Mysteries. Mercier Press, Cork, 2013.

‘Conspiracy theories, by their nature, cannot be conclusively disproven,’ says the skeptic Ben Radford, ‘since any evidence contradicting them can be dismissed or ignored as part of the conspiracy itself.’ Radford was writing in June this year after the seventeenth anniversary of the crash of TWA Flight 800 near New York, in which 230 people died.
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