Customer Reviews

Aliens from Space: The Real Story of Unidentified Flying Objects

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With such a wealth of irrefutable UFO evidence, why after 25 years is there still such a strong cover-up? Perhaps this is the core of the book - The US Air Force and CIA have been so determined to keep the truth from the world they will call black - white, as they did with the Condon Report (Donald appears almost bitter about this). It is interesting that this book managed to be published when, as Donald relates, so many similar books failed. A cracking read, a must for everyone. How can the authorities defend themselves?

With such a wealth of irrefutable UFO evidence, why after 25 years is there still such a strong cover-up? Perhaps this is the core of the book - The US Air Force and CIA have been so determined to keep the truth from the world they will call black - white, as they did with the Condon Report (Donald appears almost bitter about this). It is interesting that this book managed to be published when, as Donald relates, so many similar books failed. A cracking read, a must for everyone. How can the authorities defend themselves?

"Aliens from Space" is Major Donald Keyhoe's fifth and final book about the UFO phenomenon and its management by government, military and intelligence services. Published in 1973 (Keyhoe died in 1988), it displays maturity of writing, knowledge of the phenomenon and informed analysis of how the intelligence services, and particularly the CIA, prevented open disclosure of the ET issue by ridicule, denial and media management. Keyhoe by now was seeing the concealment of the ET issue as "Censorship". It's generally the best regarded of all Keyhoe's books, and something of a classic.

Keyhoe's contacts inside the Pentagon gave him access to official details of many encounters between USAF/civilian aircraft and UFOs. He was a proponent of the "extraterrestrial hypothesis" and convinced the covert presence of UFOs infiltrating our airspace was for "surveillance" and may not have an ultimately benign objective. This view was strengthened in 1961, when Betty Hill wrote to him as Director of NICAP about the White-Mountains UFO encounter she and Barney experienced (before any memory-recovery sessions with Dr. Benjamin Simon in Boston and long before the story entered the public domain via Fuller's famous book), so Keyhoe was personally familiar with this case right from the beginning and accepted the abduction account as it emerged.

At 302 pages, "Aliens from Space" is the longest of all Keyhoe's books but still an easy read. It gives a good informed perspective about the state of the whole UFO/ET issue in the early 1970s and is particularly instructive in describing the way the CIA first infiltrated and then destroyed NICAP, and his assessment of "Blue Book" and the Condon project (not yet concluded at the time of publication). Keyhoe knew a lot of big hitters in the government and the military at the time, and his insights are very useful to anyone interested in the subject and the way it has been managed.

The book ends with a short letter from the renowned psychologist C. G. Jung to Keyhoe, expressing gratitude for the couragous and persistent stand taken by Keyhoe against government secrecy on the UFO issue and expressing the view that the policy was "unpsychological and stupid." Keyhoe would be shocked to learn that, more than 20 years after his demise, there has still been no substantial "government disclosure."

"Aliens from Space" had a long print run in hardcover with substantial sales, so it should be easy to find a good copy.

I would highly recommend this title to anyone interested in reading some of the best source material about UFO's from back in the 1950's and 60's when there were many sightings of various kinds that are the starting point for modern interest in UFO's. Mr. Keyhoe was a dogged investigator who had inside information from the Air Force group that wanted to put all the information they had out to the public but were eventually stopped by the secrecy group. Any serious collector should have all of Mr. Keyhoe's books in their library!

I don't doubt that UFO's exist, but this book is a sorry excuse for what the title promises: The real story of unidentified flying objects. It seems to me that the author is jumping to conclusions...