Ufos and the Alien Presence: Six Viewpoints [Paperback]

Michael Lindemann (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Twenty Twenty Group; 1st edition (June 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0963010409
• ISBN-13: 978-0963010407
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.8 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,437,640 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Six viewpoints worth reading, with a good summing-up, June 21, 2010

By 

Archer Books "Archer Books" (Dubai UAE) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Ufos and the Alien Presence: Six Viewpoints (Paperback)

This rather obscure 1991 publication - reprinted several times up to 1998 - is actually very good, and well worth reading. It's a collection of six separate essays on the ET/UFO issue, each by a different author with a different perspective, edited by President of the 2020 Group Michael Lindemann.

The publisher is the "Visitors Investigation Project" of the 2020 Group, launched in 1990 to conduct validated studies on the UFO issue and its relationships to covert weapons development and formulating government policy. Lindemann himself works as a consultant to news media organizations and the business community, with a successful speaking career on a wide range of serious political subjects.

The contributors and titles of their essays are, in this order:

1. Stanton Friedman: The case for UFOs as alien spacecraft and the government UFO cover-up

2. Linda Moulton-Howe: The "Alien Harvest" and beyond

3. Bob Lazar: Alien technology in government hands

4. Budd Hopkins: The case for abductions (including an examination of the Pascagoula case)

5. "Tom": Personal encounters - the perspective of a credible and articulate abductee, with a typical personal story

6. Donald Ware: The larger reality behind UFOs

All six essays are well-written and thoughtful (even Bob Lazar's) and vary between 20 and 65 pages in length. I have never seen any of them in print elsewhere.

Lindemann's excellent introduction and conclusion to this collection of essays sum up the differing perspectives which attempt to explain the complexity of the phenomenon and the reasons why this particular group of contributors were chosen. Each contributor is demonstrably capable and accomplished in a field unrelated to this subject, which gives them great credibility as they have no vested financial interest in involvement in this field and conversely, place their reputations on the line. All are well-adjusted, university educated and with a high IQ; none claims to possess any final truth; all accept the apparent absurdities in their data and willingly accept the risks inherent in speaking out about what they have learned. Commitment to grapple with uncomfortable evidence and to speak publicly is "the difference which makes the difference", to quote Greg Bateson.

All the essays are essentially from the "liberal" viewpoint but not necessarily in agreement, and neither does the editor agree with or endorse everything said by each contributor, but is confident that the contributors chosen have gone further than most in investigating and understanding the issues and getting to an aspect of the truth of what is going on.

He sums up the situation briefly as follows:

* The alien presence is real

* It is substantial

* It is active and purposeful, and engaged in a wide variety of activities

* It is diverse, with more than one type of alien intelligence in evidence - some genuinely extraterrestrial, others Earth-based, and others possibly traversing parallel dimensions to appear among us briefly and then disappear again

* The alien presence is known to elite and secretive groups within the US government as well as elements inside other governments around the world. Public revelation of the alien presence is seen as posing an unacceptable risk to the social order, and the truth has been hidden behind the most aggressive and ingenious cover-up in history

Both the essays themselves and Lindemann's extensive introductory and concluding summaries of the situation are interesting, grounded and well-reasoned. The editing is excellent and the essays are highly literate, completely free of typos and grammatically near-perfect.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars I liked this idea of this book, May 25, 2010

By 

Christopher P. Obert (Massachusetts) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ufos and the Alien Presence: Six Viewpoints (Paperback)

I love the night sky and I love Astronomy so I am always looking up. I have personally seen a few UFO's. Now don't get all excited, remember UFO stands for Unidentified Flying Object not flying saucers. It means that I saw something that I don't know what it was. In addition to Astronomy I love many of the other sciences and I believe that there is life out there in the universe, some of it advanced life; this does not however mean that I positively believe that that life has visited our planet.

Having said that, if there is a possibility of life out there, and there is such a thing as space travel, then I believe that it is possible the alien life could have visited us either now or at some point in our past or maybe in our future. This is why I like to read books on UFO's and the possibility of alien life. Some of the books I found were not worth the paper that they were printed on, while others were very informative.

I liked this idea of this book because it gave the opinion of a few different people. And that sounded like an interesting way to present a book on such a controversial subject. All of the researchers and witnesses in this book were on the side of "yes it's real and they are here."

I think I would have like the book much better if it had a different mix. Maybe some of the contributors could have been scientists that discuss the possibilities of life in the universe and what that life may be like. The book could have also had a few engineers that discussed the concept of space flight and the difficulties involved, they could also review where we are at in our technology and where the aliens' technology would need to be to make solar system hopping possible.

We could have dialog between the believers and the non-believers and see where that takes us. I would also like to have an Air Force representative give their input on the fact that many UFOs are just military vehicles (both know and still secret.) It is not breaking with National Security to say, "Yes from time to time people see our aircraft and mistake them for `other things' but Air Force is not going to give a press release saying `that UFO that everyone saw last night was a test of our new secret plane. Please don't tell anyone about it!'" Just a simple statement like that treating us with respect would be a breath of fresh air. They would not event need to talk about UFOs, they could just talk about how the US has developed new aircraft and tried to keep it secret, a tough thing to do in an open and free society. That's a book that I would like to read... Hint, hint to the author!

Getting back to the real book, and not what it could have been, the book was an interesting read. The ideas and topics were at times wild and strange but I have not done any investigating myself and do not know how much is true and how much is not true. I just have to keep reading more on the subject and hope to put all of the pieces together into some plausible and hopefully factual conclusion. My suggestion is to keep reading!