Above Top Secret: The Worldwide UFO Cover-up Timothy Good

Veteran ufologist Good doesn't mince words in this hefty international expose of hush-hush government involvement in UFO research: not only are UFOs real spacecraft, he asserts, but the USA may even have saucers & aliens secretly on ice. Moreover, he presents a warehouse of documentation--much of it anecdotal--to support his case. As a frontline buttress to Good's claims, England's former Chief of Defense Staff, Lord Hill-Norton, offers a spirited foreword crying "cover-up" on the part of world governments. Good's dossier persuasively backs up this charge with a rundown--beefed up by info obtained via the Freedom of Information Act--on a horde of UFO encounters, government responses, & both open & clandestine state investigations into UFOs. First England, then assorted lands including China & the USSR, then the US come under his scrutiny; altho many of the encounters--e.g., the alleged recovery of alien bodies from crashed craft in Socorro, NM, in 1947 and in Aztec, NM, in 1948--are familiar, the sheer quantity of UFO sightings recounted here astounds. Particularly intriguing is Good's discussion of astronauts' reports--ranging from Mercury astronaut Donald Slayton's statement of spotting something that "looked like a saucer, a disk" while testing a P-51 jet fighter to a credulity-stretching report that has ham-radio buffs picking up Apollo 11 calling Mission Control during the 1969 lunar landing & saying, "I'm telling you there are other spacecraft out there...they're on the moon watching us." More weighty, however, is Good's dogged tracking of the CIA & NSA's monitoring & suppression of UFO research--suppression mirrored in other countries (e.g., in Brazil via a Sao Paulo State directive forbidding media "to divulge UFO reports without the prior censorship of the Brazilian Air Force"). There's no smoking gun here, but enough circumstantial evidence to convince that governments have, & are, withholding important data about UFOs. Good's encyclopedic approach blurs the eyes even as it overwhelms skepticism; not a grand read, then, but certainly a noteworthy contribution to the field.--Kirkus