The Truth is Out There

UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government's Search for Alien Life Here - and Out There is a thoroughly researched and readable account focused on the US government’s handling of UFO reports over an almost 80-year period.

Author Garrett M Graff is, among other things, a Pulitzer Prize Finalist and magazine writer who has written for Wired, Esquire and the New York Times. He is a regular contributor to NPR, and the author of several books. I read one of his previous titles - The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 and reviewed it back in March of 2021 - I found the audiobook of that work to be very moving.

UFO begins with a review of the War of the Worlds radio broadcast in 1938. That broadcast treated the H.G. Wells story of a Mars invasion as a series of “live” news bulletins that inadvertently scared many in its audience into thinking the US was really under invasion by Martians. Even then it seems that an American audience was willing to believe that aliens exist.

The first actual UFO sighting that Graff discusses is the granddaddy of UFO lore - Roswell. From there the book is off and running covering the various periods of UFOs and the US government. Roswell was part of the “Saucer Age” where most of the incidents involved aerial phenomenon in the shapes of saucers, cylinders, etc. Were these phenomenon reflections of the general paranoia of the cold war? The possibility of nuclear war seemed close, and perhaps mass delusion was possible. Where they weather balloons or other high-flying craft not readily recognized by civilians on the ground?

These and many other theories were raised, and Graff covers many of them. Early in the book Graff posits that after all these years UFOs “continue to confound us in part because we know so little of the world around us”, noting that much of our knowledge of “physics, time, space and astronomy have only been discovered in a human lifetime or two.” Graff rarely takes a position himself on any of the theories he covers, preferring instead to be the neutral journalist. He never really tries to “solve” any of the UFO mysteries and incidents that the book covers either. Rather he contents himself with a “just the facts” approach, which can at times be frustrating given some of the material he covers in this book.

The “Saucer Age” was followed by the ”Space Age”. Here Graff includes potential UFO sightings by astronauts, and details the government’s need to “get to the bottom” of the UFO sightings in the now famous “Project Blue Book.”

This was also when alien abduction stories became a thing, and when stories of paranormal activities began to be linked to UFO sightings. The popularity of UFOs led to movies like the above-mentioned Close Encounters of the Third Kind. (The origin of the terminology of different types of encounters with aliens that led to the movies title is also covered in the book.)

The story moves on and veers away from UFOs into the “Interstellar Age”. Here Graff spends a good bit of time documenting the search for intelligent life (SETI) championed by figures like Carl Sagan and led by scientists like Jill Tarter (the real-life SETI scientist who Sagan used as the model for the protagonist in his novel Contact.)

I found the book to be an interesting overview of the history of UFOs, the US government’s involvement in trying to understand that phenomenon, and its funding of the scientific search for extraterrestrial life.

But it does suffer from being the type of history where the storyline seems to be just one thing after another. In other words, there doesn’t seem to be a progression of thought or ideas, only of time, and they are no grand conclusions that Graff draws from all his effort. Even though I enjoyed reading it for the history it ably covers, I was left at the end a bit disappointed in the lack of a coherent arc to the book.

RATING: Three Stars ⭐⭐⭐

RATING COMMENTS: An interesting and readable overview of the UFO phenomenon and the search for intelligent life in the universe, but ultimately it disappointed me. The author maintains a “just the facts” journalistically neutral approach, which can at times frustrate, and the book lacks a coherent arc.

WHERE I GOT MY COPY: I listened to the audiobook version through my subscription to Everand (formerly Scribd).