Post by auntym on Sept 9, 2014 11:46:32 GMT -6
www.theufochronicles.com/2014/09/unidentified-ufo-phenomenon-book-review.html
Tuesday, September 09, 2014
UNIDENTIFIED: The UFO Phenomenon | A Book Review
By Peter Robbins The UFO Chronicles
September 2014
Don’t let the modest size of Robert Salas’s new book, Unidentified: The UFO Phenomenon,or its simple, almost generic title fool you. It happens to be one of the best UFO books I’ve read in years. Its two hundred and twenty-two pages take us on a personal journey through Post War History that is not taught in our schools, and in a manner that’s entirely his own. Then again, to the best of my knowledge we’ve never had a UFO author quite like this one, and the uniqueness of his book springs directly from a background rich in relevant experience, and one with a deep appreciation for the lessons of history.
Robert Salas is a mathematician and a graduate of the United States Air Force Academy. Second lieutenant Salas volunteered for assignment as a Missile Launch Officer at Malmstrom Air Force Base near Great Falls, Montana. While stationed there he became a firsthand witness to UFO-interference with nuclear missiles, and in no uncertain terms. This series of events (February 1967) now constitute one of the very the best, and best-documented nuke-UFO incidents in history. Salas left the Air Force with the rank of captain. As an engineer he worked briefly for Martin-Marieta Aerospace and Rockwell International. He is a twenty-two year veteran of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), holds a Masters Degree in Aerospace Engineering from the Air Force Institute of Technology, and a second Masters Degree, this in education, from the University of Washington. His highly regarded first book, Faded Giant(coauthored with James Klotz), is the go-to book for a first-person perspective on the 1967 Malmstrom AFB nuclear-UFO incident and features an appendix of more than ninety pages of declassified documents, letters, cablegrams, memos, diagrams, drawings and photos.
The author’s purpose in writing Unidentified is put forward plain and clear in the introduction: “My objectives for this book are to review the secrecy, the distortion of the truth by governments, about the extraterrestrial life that is visiting our planet and us. It is mostly about us, our perceptions and our fears and how we are learning to accommodate this knowledge. It is also about being true to our ideals as we struggle to define what it means to be human.” And for this reviewer at least, the author succeeds in his goal. In three short pages in the introduction we are whisked through perhaps the best practical, extreme-capsule-history of UFO officialdom, projects and players that led up to the 1952 Washington, D.C. UFO flap. This, the author establishes, resulted in the decision that followed to establish a wide-ranging disinformation program in regard to the reality of UFOs. With this, we begin an account that has been many years in the making. And you embark on it without the aid of a road map; there is no table of contents to tell you where you are going. In most books this would seem to be an embarrassing lapse. Here it seems more a reminder that we do not know where this subject will be taking us in the future.
Chapter one, “A Nation of Secrets,” opens in 1960 with Air Force Academy freshman cadet Salas learning during a classified briefing that American ‘military advisors’ were now on the ground in Vietnam, but only as advisors who would not be involved in the fighting. Salient background on the conflict and the politics surrounding it are briefly reviewed here as we learn that the author volunteered for duty in Vietnam in 1965. He was also offered an assignment as a launch officer at a Minuteman Missile. He ended up accepted the later, a decision his life literally turned on, no matter which decision he’d reached. We then transition into the nature of governmental secrecy, a thread that weaves itself tightly around much of the book’s content. Post War History serves as a bridge here while some necessary discussion is given over to the 1947 Roswell incident and to one of my all-time favorite books on the subject, Witness to Roswellby Tom Carey and Don Schmitt. Some of the more extreme measures in keeping people quiet in the early days of the UFO cover-up are touched upon here, along with some of the nuclear anxiety that had settled over the American people. The author closes “A Nation of Secrets” relating something that happened to him in the Air Force that has a direct bearing on the secret-keeping process.
CONTINUE READING: www.theufochronicles.com/2014/09/unidentified-ufo-phenomenon-book-review.html
Tuesday, September 09, 2014
UNIDENTIFIED: The UFO Phenomenon | A Book Review
By Peter Robbins The UFO Chronicles
September 2014
Don’t let the modest size of Robert Salas’s new book, Unidentified: The UFO Phenomenon,or its simple, almost generic title fool you. It happens to be one of the best UFO books I’ve read in years. Its two hundred and twenty-two pages take us on a personal journey through Post War History that is not taught in our schools, and in a manner that’s entirely his own. Then again, to the best of my knowledge we’ve never had a UFO author quite like this one, and the uniqueness of his book springs directly from a background rich in relevant experience, and one with a deep appreciation for the lessons of history.
Robert Salas is a mathematician and a graduate of the United States Air Force Academy. Second lieutenant Salas volunteered for assignment as a Missile Launch Officer at Malmstrom Air Force Base near Great Falls, Montana. While stationed there he became a firsthand witness to UFO-interference with nuclear missiles, and in no uncertain terms. This series of events (February 1967) now constitute one of the very the best, and best-documented nuke-UFO incidents in history. Salas left the Air Force with the rank of captain. As an engineer he worked briefly for Martin-Marieta Aerospace and Rockwell International. He is a twenty-two year veteran of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), holds a Masters Degree in Aerospace Engineering from the Air Force Institute of Technology, and a second Masters Degree, this in education, from the University of Washington. His highly regarded first book, Faded Giant(coauthored with James Klotz), is the go-to book for a first-person perspective on the 1967 Malmstrom AFB nuclear-UFO incident and features an appendix of more than ninety pages of declassified documents, letters, cablegrams, memos, diagrams, drawings and photos.
The author’s purpose in writing Unidentified is put forward plain and clear in the introduction: “My objectives for this book are to review the secrecy, the distortion of the truth by governments, about the extraterrestrial life that is visiting our planet and us. It is mostly about us, our perceptions and our fears and how we are learning to accommodate this knowledge. It is also about being true to our ideals as we struggle to define what it means to be human.” And for this reviewer at least, the author succeeds in his goal. In three short pages in the introduction we are whisked through perhaps the best practical, extreme-capsule-history of UFO officialdom, projects and players that led up to the 1952 Washington, D.C. UFO flap. This, the author establishes, resulted in the decision that followed to establish a wide-ranging disinformation program in regard to the reality of UFOs. With this, we begin an account that has been many years in the making. And you embark on it without the aid of a road map; there is no table of contents to tell you where you are going. In most books this would seem to be an embarrassing lapse. Here it seems more a reminder that we do not know where this subject will be taking us in the future.
Chapter one, “A Nation of Secrets,” opens in 1960 with Air Force Academy freshman cadet Salas learning during a classified briefing that American ‘military advisors’ were now on the ground in Vietnam, but only as advisors who would not be involved in the fighting. Salient background on the conflict and the politics surrounding it are briefly reviewed here as we learn that the author volunteered for duty in Vietnam in 1965. He was also offered an assignment as a launch officer at a Minuteman Missile. He ended up accepted the later, a decision his life literally turned on, no matter which decision he’d reached. We then transition into the nature of governmental secrecy, a thread that weaves itself tightly around much of the book’s content. Post War History serves as a bridge here while some necessary discussion is given over to the 1947 Roswell incident and to one of my all-time favorite books on the subject, Witness to Roswellby Tom Carey and Don Schmitt. Some of the more extreme measures in keeping people quiet in the early days of the UFO cover-up are touched upon here, along with some of the nuclear anxiety that had settled over the American people. The author closes “A Nation of Secrets” relating something that happened to him in the Air Force that has a direct bearing on the secret-keeping process.
CONTINUE READING: www.theufochronicles.com/2014/09/unidentified-ufo-phenomenon-book-review.html