UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government's Search for Alien Life Here―and Out There

UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government's Search for Alien Life Here―and Out There
by Garrett M. Graff
Published in November 2023
544 Pages
Thibault’s Score: 4/5

This book is a history of all of the well documented efforts by the US government to look for extraterrestrial life.

I grew up in Palo Alto, where the omnipresent Stanford University “dish” could be seen from just about anywhere. The “dish” was used by a wide variety of groups - such as the US Air Force to spy on the Soviet Union and astronomers to do research. The story that always intrigued me the most growing up was that the dish was used by a group of scientists called SETI to listen for potential signs of extraterrestrial communication in space.

This book is a history of SETI and how it ties into the many other weird government funded initiatives to search for extra terrestrials. SETI always had a good reputation in the Bay Area - as a credible, mainstream scientific effort supported by reputable universities. To my surprise, this book revealed that SETI was tied at the hip to US government funded investigations into “flying saucers” during the 1950s and 1960s.

This book covers SETI, Project Blue Book, ATIP, and the many other government funded initiatives to look for extraterrestrial life. They range greatly in terms of their scope and credibility. On one hand, some involved astronomers looking for signs of Dyson Spheres. On the other, some involved interviewing alleged alien abductees.

Fascinatingly, nearly all of these projects overlap. The scientists, financiers, donors, and supporting government officials all connect to each other. They all knew each other, and participated in some sort of ecosystem. During the height of the Cold War, the ecosystem even included Soviet scientists.

The book was very entertaining and well written. It has a little bit of a slow start, but considering the overall length of the work, it is acceptable. At first I thought it would be nothing more than ratiocination and pontification; but it quickly moves into serious substance.

The book begins with an explanation of how the US government’s interest in extra terrestrials was piqued shortly after WW2. During WW2, there were accounts of US pilots of strange glowing orbs in the sky. The allies believed it was a German weapon; but upon raiding German archives realized the Germans had seen the same orbs but assumed it was an allied weapon. Then, there was a series of crashes of vehicles or rockets in Scandinavia that were neither Axis nor Soviet in late 1945. The US government began investigating potential extra terrestrial activity by 1946.

The book ends with the major revelations of pilots such as David Fravor and the “gofast” and “gimble” videos. It explains more recent initiatives such as AATIP.

I would recommend this book as a serious introduction to the topic of UFOs.

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