On Leslie Kean's "UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record": We Are Not Alone, and the Visitors Have Some Awesome Toys

So I’m a sucker for UFO stories, though I remain a fairly strong skeptic. For instance, the more I’ve learned about the much-vaunted Roswell Incident the more I lean toward it being a rather complicated story of interstellar hooey. I’ve watched the many UFO programs on TV over the years, and most of them are so bad they’re good—funny, that is—but now and then you see one that seems hard to dismiss. Particularly the stories that issue from the experiences of military figures and airline pilots, backed up by air traffic controller transcripts and multiple witnesses.
Enter Exhibit A, Leslie Kean’s new nonfiction book, UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record, which is fascinating, eye-opening, and also somewhat hokey, sometimes tedious.  Actual witnesses (as opposed to Kean, who tends to rant a bit) tell the best stories. For instance, the former governor of Arizona, Fife Symington, during the famous 1997 Phoenix Lights mysterious event goes on record to admit he lied, that he actually saw the craft! Which was huge, silent, and not just a matter of dubious ‘lights.’ I’ve seen a documentary that “proved” the Phoenix Lights were military flares, which appears to be, in its own way, a cover story. Symington, the ex-governor (Republican, no less), saw them with his security corps, as in a group of several people, and like most of these witnesses, admits he had no idea what to do. He actually staged a silly press conference, complete with Halloween-costume-aliens, as a kind of cover up. But he admits the U.S. government was of no great help, and did not want to investigate the matter. Kean insists that various documents presented via the Freedom of Information Act imply that our government does have a “super secret” UFO investigation team (Muldar & Scully, most likely), but it’s hard to find any actual data to back that up.
The flaws of Kean’s UFOs: She proselytizes too much, harps on the same thing over and over again (our government’s reluctance or policy of denying UFO reports), and generally her prose is rather flat-footed. THAT DOES NOT, HOWEVER, ruin the book. Several witnesses recount stories that are fascinating simply from the technology involved: The Rendelsham Forest incident in the 1980s, with multiple witnesses who actually touched a UFO, the Japanese Air cargo flight over Alaska, where the UFOs were tracked and recorded on radar, and, most recently, the appearance of a UFO over Chicago’s O’Hare airport in 2007 are convincing, and amazing. If these are aliens, they have some kickass toys. Spacecraft that can hover, go from standing still to several thousand miles an hour in an instant, even seem to move many miles in a second . . . .
Kean makes a big deal about claiming We don’t know they’re extraterrestrials, which is true, but also obvious, and disingenuous, because that’s what we think. The Belgian ‘wave’ of UFOs in the 1980s is another highlight of the book. If you’re the least bit interested in the subject, you’ll dig this book.
Weird note: I read this book on my Kindle, which made it seem like The Future Is Now.