Blum, Howard. Out There. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990. 300 pages.

It wasn't that long ago that anyone who claimed to have seen a "flying saucer" was dismissed as loony or at least unreliable. But with increasing reports of UFO sightings and related phenomena, this is rapidly changing. This book shows that government officials -- particularly the U.S. military and science advisors with security clearances above Top Secret -- have formed various study groups over the years while denying their ongoing interest in the phenomenon. However, cracks in the official edifice have appeared. Since even mass-market U.S. television documentaries are now taking UFOs seriously, we can expect to hear much more on this in coming years.

Howard Blum is a former New York Times investigative journalist with a book on Nazi-hunting and another on U.S. spy John Walker to his credit. He starts out this book as a skeptic, using his contacts in U.S. intelligence and plenty of shoe leather to try and get a handle on this UFO thing. One section deals with the debate over the authenticity of the MJ-12 documents -- a classified report of the 1948 recovery of a crashed UFO and four bodies. UFO enthusiasts Bill Moore and Stanton Friedman defend the documents, Phil Klass tries to debunk them, and even the FBI's counterintelligence team gets stonewalled by the official secrecy. Blum comes away from this book feeling that the government has something to hide.
ISBN 0-671-66260-0

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