Essential reading on UFOs

The UFO subject is huge, there is a lot of good stuff, but also a lot of nonsense out there, as well as deliberate disinformation. If you are new to the subject and have very little time (~20hrs) to devote to it, a few essential items you want to read/view (you need fast Internet to watch the videos online) are:

1. Out Of The Blue: The definitive investigation of the UFO phenomenon (watch online GoogleVideo or YouTube) video documentary (2003), 1hr30min 353MB (GoogleVideo). (best "general background" UFO documentary I've seen sofar). Interviews with former astronauts (Gordon Cooper and Dr Edgar Mitchell), military pilots, radar operators, scientists. UFO initiatives by former US presidents Carter, Ford and Clinton etc. Briefly covers classic UFO incidents in US, Russia, Britain, France, Iran etc and studies like the French COMETA Report. (purchase the 2007 Update directly)
2. Prof. James E. McDonald's presentation about the UFO issue, before the Committee on Science and Astronautics of US Congress July-1968 (alternate source) The hypotheses of UFOs issue. Why don't pilots see UFOs? Why are UFOs only seen by lone individuals? Why no multiple-witness sightings? Why don't astronomers ever see UFOs? Why aren't UFOs ever tracked by radar? Why aren't there numerous photos of UFOs if they really exist? Shouldn't they produce physical effects? etc debunking popular UFO myths with examples from personally investigated cases. A bit more technical, his paper at the Canadian Aeronautics and Space Institute Astronautics Symposium, Montreal, Canada, 12-Mar-1968.
3. The Disclosure Project Witness Testimony (2001) Googlevideo (2hrs), part 1 of 2 (59min 230MB) and part 2 of 2 (1hr 240MB). Two hours long video distillation from 400hrs of raw video footage of dozens of retired USA intelligence, government and military persons testimonies on the subject of UFO and US government coverup. Quick text summary (.html) of such testimonies given in 1999-2000.

   CNN reporting on Disclosure Project's National Press Club Conference 9-May-2001:
   

4. UFO Briefing Document - The best available evidence by Don Berliner (1995). Financed by Laurance Rockefeller, roughly 1,000 copies of this 168-page document were delivered in 1995 to President Clinton, U.S. Congress, Heads of State and other potentially influencial people around the world (also available as mass paperback edition from Amazon)
5. French COMETA Report "UFOs and Defense: What should we prepare for?" (1999) originally 90pages, translated into English without the images Part 1 (.pdf 750KB) and Part 2 (.pdf 2MB). A study by top French military officers and scientists/engineers. The report is prefaced by General Bernard Norlain of the Air Force, former Director of IHEDN, and it begins with a preamble by Andre Lebeau, former President of the National Center for Space Studies (Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales), or CNES, the French equivalent of NASA. It is well known that France created an official organization for the study of UFOs under CNES, first called GEPAN in 1977 and later SEPRA in 1988 -see From GEPAN to SEPRA: Official UFO studies in France (.PDF 105K)-. In Mar-2007, at www.cnes-geipan.fr, CNES published parts of the French UFO sighting database with more than 100,000 pages of witness testimony, photographs, film footage and audiotapes of officially investigated cases, collected since 1954.
6. The 1955 book "The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects" (full text e-book, ISBN: 096653123X) by Edward J. Ruppelt (bio - head of the United States Air Force's Project Blue Book between 1951-1953 and later research engineer at Northrop Aircraft Company). Until you have read at least the last 2 chapters (Ch.16: The Hierarchy Ponders, Ch.17: What Are UFO's?), stop talking about UFOs.
7. Paul R. Hill's (bio - aeronautical engineer and Chief Scientist-Manager at NASA's Langley Research Center who privately acted as an informal citizens' clearinghouse of UFO-related data for over 2 decades) excellent book "Unconventional Flying Objects: A Scientific Analysis" (written in the 1970s, published 1995) explains many things about the probable science/physics behind UFOs. If you only buy ONE book about UFOs, this should be it. Extracts: Table of UFO shapes (drawing) - chapters on UFO illumination, color, brightness, performance. It attempts to explain the apparently reactionless propulsion, lack of sonic boom, lack of overheating at high velocities, high accelerations, lack of stress under high acceleration, etc. His book is not pseudo-science. The speculation that he does make is minimal, but required, to conform to the observations. Book reviews by Dr.Hal Puthoff and H.Ellis Ensle. Amazon src
8. Hypothesing that UFOs are ET vehicles, the next obvious question is "If extraterrestrials have already come to Earth, why don't they make themselves known?" (i.e. the famous "UFOs Land on White House lawn" scenario). Jim Deardorff (professor emeritus of atmospheric sciences at Oregon State University) offered the "leaky embargo" hypothesis in 1997, which argues that the aliens in charge are more ethical than we and wish to let us gradually know of their existence and presence, while providing "deniability" to those who can't yet handle that fact. A gradual acclimation will avoid threatening the governmental, financial, cultural and religious foundations on which we depend.
   In contrast to the "benevolent alien" approach, other researchers, particularly those studying the "alien abductions" phenomenon such as Dr. David M Jacobs (history professor), describe a rather disturbing situation where we humans are "victims of a widespread program of physiological exploitation, with breeding and hybridization programs".
9. Symposium on UFOs (1968) Hearings before the Committee on Science and Astronautics of US Congress 29-Jul-1968, with all the "heavy-weight" scientists (Hynek, McDonald, Carl Sagan, Menzel etc) of that time expressing their views. Artist drawn chart of UFO shapes submitted. This happened before the cover-up "Condon Report" conclusions were used to discontinue "official" UFO sighting reports (i.e Blue Book) and block further examination of the subject of UFOs for the next 35yr until today.
10. Stanton T. Friedman's (nuclear physicist turned into UFO researcher / lecturer / ETH evangelist for the past 30+yr) paper The Case for the Extraterrestrial Origin of Flying Saucers (.PDF 57KB) (1995), his statement before the Committee on Science and Astronautics of US Congress July-1968.
11. From a "conspiratorial" viewpoint, read the (disputed authenticity, leaked anonymously in 1985 and 1994; some demonstrably fake, others probably authentic) Majestic-12 docs 1948-1959. For those who don't know the background, it's claimed that in the aftermath of the crash of an extraterrestrial craft in Jul-1947, near Roswell in New Mexico USA, a small group known as Majestic-12 (or MJ-12) was set up to study the craft and the alien bodies. The investigation team includes Stanton Friedman and Robert M. Wood, Ph.D. (BS in Aeronautical Engineering from Colorado and a Ph.D. in physics from Cornell, a 43-year career at McDonnell Douglas managing research and development projects and over thirty years of investigation into UFOs) who began reconstructing the (MAJIC) Special Operations Manual SOM1-01 in 1995. (more details in the docs page)
12. A lot of what appears about UFOs on "big" media is misinformation. On the subject of media (TV, newspapers etc) coverage of the UFO subject, a good perspective is offered in journalist's Terry Hansen's The Missing Times: News Media Complicity in the UFO Cover-up and Dolan's Getting Inside Your Head: Media, Mind Control, and Marginalization of UFOs. Furthermore, astrophysicist R.Haisch's Review of "SEEING IS BELIEVING: THE TRUTH ABOUT UFOs" by Peter Jennings, ABC-TV, 24-Feb-2005 by R.Haisch (.pdf 84KB) explains how, in the desire to appear "balanced", substantive witness reports are often countered by unsubstantiated pronouncements of "experts" who sound authoritative but do not necessarily know a great deal about the subject.
13. If you enjoy shifting through "raw data" and scientific analysis you can read: USAF's Project Blue Book - Special Report 14 (1955) (PDF 9.6MB) a quantitative cross-analysis of 3201 UFO sightings recorded between 1947 and 1953 performed by Battelle Memorial Institute under contract to USAF. Skipping over the initial misleading one-page summary and reading the actual data, reveals that 21.5% of the cases were "unknowns" (i.e. inexplicable, despite good data), that these unknowns shared no similarities with the identified cases (so that one could presume they were misidentifications of mundane objects) and that the better the quality (more and better qualified witnesses) the more probable for a case to classify as unknown! Also note General Bollender's 1969 memo that "reports of UFOs which could affect national security are not part of the Blue Book system" and Hynek felt "used and abused" when even after having consulted for USAF for so many years, "all the hardcore UFO cases, with pilot-UFO close encounters so close they could read writing on them, were going upstairs". And all Hynek was left with were reports of nocturnal lights.
    It was speculated for years that there was a secret UFO investigation that wasn't part of Blue Book. Now it's fact. In 1953 US Air Force issued Regulation 200-2, which instructed Air Force officers not to discuss UFO reports that were unsolved, and to classify the reports at restricted level. By December 1953, the Joint Chiefs of Staff issued a Navy-Air Force publication 146 (JANAP 146) which made the unauthorized release of UFO reports a crime under the Espionage Act, punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a $10,000 fine. Thereafter, UFO sighting reports would be investigated by the 4602 AISS. When they completed their investigation, the results were forwarded to ATIC at Wright-Patterson and BlueBook didn't receive those reports. So after 1953, US Air Force's Project Blue Book, ostensibly engaged in studying UFO reports, was in fact a public relations scheme whose main purpose was to convince the public that UFOs were all misidentifications of conventional objects. Finally, the "Condon Report" in 1969 was the excuse to close down BlueBook.

There have also been many notable persons -usually in advanced years, after retirement- to have publicly stated that UFO evidence is being suppressed. These have included Senator Barry Goldwater (US Senator and Republican candidate for President in 1964, US Air Force Brig.General, who was denied access the "Blue Room" at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base -where UFO/ET info is allegedly stored-), Admiral Lord Hill-Norton (former NATO head and chief of the British Defence Staff), Brigadier-General Arthur Exon (former commanding officer of Wright-Patterson AFB), Vice-Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter (first CIA director), astronauts Gordon Cooper and Dr.Edgar Mitchell, US General Curtis E. LeMay (head of the Strategic Air Command in the 1960's), former Canadian Defence Minister Paul Hellyer, the authors of the 1999 French COMETA Report (top French Generals and scientists), the 2001 Disclosure Project top-secret military/intelligence/government witnesses testifying on the subject of UFO/ET and many others.

To quote Dr. James MacDonald, past head of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the University of Arizona, "If you are not interested or concerned about the UFO matter, you are simply uninformed." General Arthur Exon stated: "Everyone from the White House on down knew that what we had found was not of this world within 24 hours of our finding it". On 25-Sep-2005, in a startling speech at the University of Toronto that caught the attention of mainstream newspapers and magazines, Paul Hellyer, Canada's Defence Minister from 1963-67, publicly stated: "UFOs, are as real as the airplanes that fly over your head." "We are in the curious situation today that our best modern physics and astrophysics theories predict that we should be experiencing extraterrestrial visitation, yet any possible evidence of such lurking in the UFO phenomenon is scoffed at within our scientific community," contends astrophysicist Dr.Haisch. "You simply cannot dismiss the possibility that some of these UFO sightings are actually sightings from some object created by an advanced civilization, a civilization far out in space, a civilization perhaps millions of years ahead of us in technology. You simply cannot discount that possibility." Physicist Dr. Michio Kaku (NYU Professor and one of the String Theory originators).

Source http://www.hyper.net