How and Why I Wrote “UFOs & The Government Coverup.”
I want to describe my first book, “UFOs & the Government Cover up.”
This book was inspired by one of my more memorable public access TV shows. I had invited two people from the Tampa Bay Skeptics organization to be guests on my program. By that time, 1997, I had already been in the field of UFO research and investigations for like 10 or 15 years. I had been a very active member of the Tampa Bay MUFON organization and I had attended several national symposiums and conferences on UFOs. I’d read innumerable books and I’d done massive amounts of research. I had interviewed and talked with probably 100 experiencers and UFO abductees already in fact. And I had already hosted and produced my own TV show on the subject for a few years by that time.
So when I had these two guys from Tampa Bay Skeptics on my show I sort of took them for granted. I figured I would convince them fairly quickly of the reality of the subject of UFOs.
But these guys were hard nuts to crack.
The show went along fairly well without any major arguments or anything but both of these guys had several years of experience already, having written articles in magazines, and they had been guests on TV shows themselves several times already. So they were real pros, I have to admit.
I also had a friend of mine on the show as a guest. His name was Jeff Wheeler and he’d had a few close-up UFO encounters of his own which he related on the program. But nothing I said or that my guest said seemed to impress these two knuckleheads from Tampa Bay Skeptics.
Despite it all I taped the program on an even keel and tried to be respectful of the guests.
It was sort of a draw I guess you could say, in terms of who won the debate. But at the very end when there was just a minute or two left in the program, one of the skeptics, Dr. Gary Posner, grabbed his briefcase and opened it on his lap and he handed me a couple of papers. I had no idea what this was about. And just as we were closing up the show he told me that they had done some investigations on one of my former guests, Sergeant Robert Dean, and they said they had clear evidence that he was a fraud.
This move caught me by surprise and I didn’t have time to read the papers he handed me. I didn’t know what to say, and for all I knew perhaps they had actually found evidence that indicated Sergeant Dean was not who he had said he was.
I was caught off guard, and it all sort of looked bad because I was now closing out the show and I had no time to read the papers or respond.
It was a dirty trick and it made me look bad.
I want to point out that the day after the show I actually called Sergeant Robert Dean on the telephone and I talk to him in depth and I told him about these skeptics that had been on my show. Sergeant Dean clarified everything 100% and proved that these guys were full of baloney and he backed up all of his resume 100%. In fact I recorded that call and I still have a copy of it.
But this all came after the program had already aired and the damage had been done. A lot of people saw that show and they thought the skeptics had one the day.
Looking back at the entire program, I wasn’t very prepared for these skeptics at all. They made some very poor arguments but I went easy on them, trying to be a nice guy. I should have been a lot tougher and I should have been better prepared. And honestly I should probably never have given them the opportunity to be on my program in the first place.
But the program was a major learning experience for me. I had thought I really knew everything there was to know about the UFO subject and that I could convince anybody if I had enough time. But these two lunk heads wouldn’t believe in UFOs if one landed in their front yard. And they had all kinds of fictitious and phony nonsense to use as comebacks. And to a certain percentage of the viewers, it probably appeared they were right and I was wrong. Most of my audience saw through it all and they knew I was right but to a certain number of the viewers it probably appeared that the skeptics had won.
Well my experience with that show really inspired me. That is when I determined that I would write a lengthy book that would generally prove the truth about UFOs and how the subject had been covered up by our government.
So that is how I began writing my most well-known book, “UFOs & the Government Cover up.”
It took me about two years to write this book and do all of the research. I already had plenty of knowledge but I wanted to document everything solidly. One thing I did was I ordered several old books online that had been written in the 1950s and 60s by some of the real pioneers in UFO research. I bought classic books by Dr. J Allen Hynek, Major Donald Keyhoe, Captain Edward Ruppelt, Dr. David Jacobs, and many others. And I quoted these people verbatim in my book and I included something like 340 end notes with references.
I took a lot of time off of my paying job to focus on researching and writing my book and it was a mammoth undertaking. I also did almost all of the graphics myself, after having learned some things about using Corel Draw and other drawing programs. I even made the cover myself. A UFO experiencer friend and professional artist contributed a few nice illustrations which I was able to include as well.
These were the days before POD (print on demand, online publishing) technology was available. So I actually paid a local printer to print up 3 or 400 copies of this very large, 8 ½ x 11-inch trade paperback book. And it had a full color cover. It was all quite expensive. Even buying a few hundred books at a time it still cost me about $18 per book in printing charges. And I only charged $25 per book to sell it. By the time I packaged the book and took it to the post office to mail it, I made less than $5 off of every book I sold.
And I had to market the book myself and advertise it. It was an absolutely mammoth project that I was in no way prepared for. Rather than making any money I ended up losing a lot of money in the process.
In fact the marketing and distribution was so unprofitable that I totally lost interest in trying to do any mass sales. It would have bankrupted me!
I did get numerous outstanding reviews on the book and it was commented on by some of the greatest authorities in the field of UFO research. I received blurbs and commentaries from great people like Stanton Friedman, Michael Lindemann, Lloyd Pye, Jim Maars, and several TV and radio personalities.
I also did over 100 appearances as a guest on radio programs around the United States and in a few other countries while promoting my book. And I was a guest on a few local television programs as well, Including Fox News and I was interviewed briefly on CNN.
But like I said, the job of marketing, promoting, and distributing my own book with such a very low profit margin, was far more than I had ever bargained for.
So I made very little money off of that book, and it didn’t even cover my expenses. But overall I received a great deal of recognition for what I done, and the book was considered one of the best that had been done on the topic. I was really the first person to outline some of the things that were covered in my book.
“UFOs & the Government Cover up” includes a concise history of UFO sightings going all the way back for thousands of years into ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome and all the way up until the present day.
The book also explains why there is a cover up of the subject of UFOs and it clearly delineates how and when the coverup began, and why it has been successful.
Probably the entire second half of the book is dedicated to exposing the truth about Project Blue Book, the US Air Force’s official investigation of UFO’s.
I told a lot of this story through the words and experiences of Captain Edward Ruppelt, who had been the first real director of Project Blue Book. Ruppelt was director of Project Blue Book for a little less than two years, but he is the only director that did any real investigations. And his own book and memoirs “The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects,” totally proved the existence of UFOs and the fact that the Air Force actually had massive proof themselves, and that they had been lying about it for many years. Ruppelt explained how, previous to his own tenure, Blue Book was a phony organization that only rubber-stamped UFO reports rather than investigating them. But during his stewardship he and his small team did some amazing investigations, and they documented the truth and the reality of many of these powerful sightings and report.
Likewise, the work of USMC Major Donald Keyhoe was amazing, and he was one of the first courageous champions to help release the truth about UFOs to the American public. This was in the 1950s, far before my time and I’d never really looked at this information before, so it was quite a revelation. I was surprised to see how much solid work had already been done so long ago.
Major Keyhoe made his mark in several books and magazine articles a few years before Captain Ruppelt arrived on the scene,
My book, “UFOs & the Government Cover up,” also went into the reality of the Alien Abductions and their importance, and how this aspect of the phenomenon is perhaps the biggest factor in why the government would not, and could not, release the truth about UFOs.
There is another great chapter in my book comparing UFO abductions to various myths and mystical tales of fairies, elves, dwarfs, and other magical entities of ancient folklore.
There is a 24-page chapter outlining the reality and everything to do with the Roswell UFO crash and its cover up.
Also included is a lengthy chapter on the amazing “Great Airship” of the 1890s, which was in reality just a series of visual reports and sightings of large silent aircraft (UFOs) that were seen by innumerable people throughout the entire United States.
But this had occurred before the introduction of air flight (the 1890s), so people had no idea of what they were actually looking at. This was at the time when dirigibles were just starting to become viable and it was also the time just before the Wright brothers and several other inventors had been working on the first real flight-capable aircraft. So the public was already anticipating that before too long they might actually see some newly invented, real American “airships,” as they referred to them.
And people were now looking at the sky more frequently and they reported many truly unusual sightings which today are much more well understood. But people described them in their own terms the best they could at the time. To make matters worse, there was a lot of fakery by dishonest news publications who were just looking to sensationalize and increase their readership. So a lot of fanciful tales were thrown in with a great many serious and truthful accounts of honestly amazing sightings of silent aircraft that traversed the American skies back then.
And out of these innumerable truthful reports, intermixed with some fictional accounts, the belief that one “Great Airship” had been invented and was being seen has it traversed the skies across America. It was all made widely popular by the bourgeoning American newspaper companies that were now much more prevalent back then.
My book, “UFOs & the Government Coverup,” could really have been split up into four or five different smaller books of their own, but I turned it into one massive encyclopedia of the subject.