OUT THERE: The Government's Secret Quest for Extraterrestrials

by Howard Blum ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 10, 1990

A melodramatic account by former New York Times journalist Blum of his lid-ripping investigation into the secret federal search for UFOs--and their occupants. ""The book's style and structure,"" Blum admits, ""were influenced by the narrative pace of popular science fiction""--and his dramatic hero is none other than star reporter Blum himself, who first sniffed the government's ongoing UFO quest while researching his best-seller on the Walker spy ring, I Pledge Allegiance (1987). Intrigued, Blum shook his web of media and government contacts and found leads that soon brought him to this book's big revelation: the existence--despite myriad official denials--of the UFO Working Group, a tiny, top-secret, federal interagency investigative body headed by one Col. Harold E. Phillips of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Founded in 1987, according to Blum, after a flurry of suppressed UFO sightings, including the tracing on radar of a UFO by the US Space Command Space Surveillance Center, the UFO Working Group, calling on CIA, FBI, and other resources, has come up with--nothing solid. It has, however, dug into many of the major events of UFOlogy, allowing Blum to pad his book with numerous secondary accounts: of the history of federal research into UFOs, and of its various SETI programs; of extensive UFO sightings in Elmwood, Wisc,; of the infamous MJ-12 documents, which purport to document the government's retrieval in 1947 of a crashed disc and alien bodies in Roswell, N.M. While much of this ground has been combed over by others, Blum presents it in relentlessly cliff-hanging fashion, and vividly portrays a hive of probes and cover-ups and a mystery so profound that, as one FBI agent told him, ""Even the government doesn't know what it knows"" about it. Entertaining enough to already have sold to NBC for a miniseries; and, despite the self-promotion and the reblocking of old-hat material, a significant journalistic coup.

Pub Date: Sept. 10, 1990

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1990

Categories: NONFICTION