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During one of my recent excursions to Barnes and Noble, I found a book I first heard about when it was in hardback. It’s now out in trade – less expensive – and wow, it’s a winner. UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials go on the Record by Leslie Kean  is exactly what the title promises.

I usually do my reading on the treadmill at the gym. But the past day or so, I’ve had a cold and have settled on the couch in our family room with this book and I can’t stop reading it. Kean is an investigative journalist  who first published something on UFOs in 2000, in the Boston Globe.  Her article was based on a report now known as the COMETA Report, a study by  former “high ranking French officials documenting the existence of unidentified flying objects and exploring their potential on national security.”

In the introduction, Kean talks about her reluctance to become involved in this area because journalists – and the mainstream media – tend to ridicule it.  But after reading the COMETA Report, she was hooked.

Anyone who knows anything about the UFO field will recognize the big stories in these pages: the wave of sightings over Belgium in the early 1990s, the Phoenix lights in 1997, the Hudson River Valley sightings, the O’Hare Airport sighting in 2006, the incident at Rendlesham Forest, UFOs in Brazil, France… But what makes this book unique is that Kean not only compiles this information in a suspenseful way, but has included chapters written by pilots, military personnel, and other government officials who experienced these sightings.

During the Phoenix lights flap on March 13, 1997, hundreds – maybe thousands – of ordinary Americans saw “a massive craft, a solid object, not merely lights; and it often appeared to be very low in the sky, blocking out the stars behind it.” The 9-11 calls poured in. People were panicked. But it wasn’t until USA Today ran a story on the Phoenix Lights that the national media really spotlighted the incident.

So on June 19, Arizona’s Republican governor, Fife Symington, held a press conference and promised to reveal the source behind the Phoenix lights. His very tall chief of staff, handcuffed and wearing an alien costume, was escorted to the podium. The governor joked, “this just goes to show that you guys are entirely too serious.”

And so, the Phoenix lights flap faded into oblivion until a decade later, when this same governor, now out of office, admitted that he had seen the craft. He referred to it as a “craft  of unknown origin.” He heard about it first on TV, then “jumped into his car…and drove to a park near Squaw Park outside if Phoenix. “It was dramatic. And I couldn’t have been flares because it was too symmetrical. It had a geometric outline, a constant shape.”

Symington is now an outspoken advocate for disclosure.

There are so many compelling first-hand testimonies in this book that it reads like the best sort of suspense novel. You get a real sense that people on the front lines – air traffic controllers, for instance . They simply don’t know what to do, how to react,  when they get a report from a pilot that they’re being followed by an unknown craft.  One of the most intriguing chapters is on the incursion at O’Hare Airport on November 7, 2006, when mechanics, pilots, and managers “looked up from their ground positions at the terminal and saw the strange object hovering just under a cloud bank, which began at 1,900 feet above the ground…Based on the collection of eyewitness testimony, the UFO is estimated to have ranged in size from about 22 to 88 feet in diameter, and was suspended at approximately 1,500 feet above Gate C17 at the United terminal.”

Now, really, you would think that the government, the FAA, Homeland Security, someone somewhere, would have a comment about this incident. But the FAA tried to ignore the safety implications. One FAA person wrote the whole thing off as “weather phenomenon.”  You know, that goes into the same category as Japanese lanterns and weather balloons.

As Kean points out, why not be forthright about what these phenomena are? Why not have an agency or commission that actually investigates and reports? In an era when everyone has a cell phone with camera and video capacity, when  You Tube brings you the latest on events on the other side of the world, when information travels at the speed of light,  it’s becoming increasingly more difficult to buy into the “official” explanation.

As Kean concludes: “”…there is too much at  stake to continue stonewalling… the phenomenon itself has placed us in a precarious situation that we have not chosen, and that we can do nothing about. We must strive to learn what we can, for its in our deepest nature and best interest to do so- to simply want to find out.”

As she points out, we don’t need the release of just more documents from the government. We need experts who study these sightings, who attempt to understand what these crafts are, where they come from, what they want. And we need these experts – and the government – be be honest and forthright with the pubic about their findings.

Kean has done all of us a service. Whether you’re a skeptic or a believer or somewhere in between, you come away from this book with questions about the nature of reality, about your own belief system, and about the silliness and trivia your government is feeding you. That alone is worth the price of the book.