We have just released the ebook edition of one of our biggest and best books, UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry by Michael Swords, Robert Powell, et al. It’s available from Amazon Kindle, Apple iBooks, Barnes & Noble Nook, Kobo, and more.

We have also released the ebook edition of our newest book, More Encounters with Star People: Urban American Indians Tell Their Stories by Ardy Sixkiller Clark.

And available for the first time this month as laminated hardcover editions are Return to Magonia: Investigating UFOs in History by Chris Aubeck and Martin Shough from Amazon or Barnes & Noble; and A Manifestation of Monsters: Examining The (Un)usual Suspects by Karl Shuker, also from Amazon or Barnes & Noble. These hardcover editions will only be available for a limited time, so get yours now.

Our big, very popular, scholarly book, UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry by Michael Swords, Robert Powell, et al., has received the recognition it deserves from Choice, a publication of the Association of College and Research Libraries. The review, authored by R. Fritze of Athens State University, appears in the February 2013 issue. It states, in part: “The bibliography of the UFO phenomenon is vast but often dreary. This straightforward study of the limited topic of government responses to sightings of UFOs…is an exception…Their narrative is firmly based on the available sources. The writing can be dense and sometimes convoluted, reflecting the military sources that form the evidence. A useful resource of the study of a controversial topic.” Summing up the review are these much-appreciated words: “Recommended. All levels/libraries.”

Under the title of “The History We Don’t Know,” Billy Cox of the Herald Tribune has reviewed our new book, UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry by Michael Swords, Robert Powell, et al. Cox notes that Swords, the primary author, “has drilled deep into the vein of primary sources and—along with eight co-authors and contributors—produced an authoritative look at the high-level disarray, inter-agency tensions, and the military’s improvisational attempts at information management even as honest scientists struggled to give them the truth.” While it’s not the first book of its kind, it is in many ways unique. “What separates this accounting from its predecessors are the details harvested from obscure archived material and FOIAs, all of them channeled into a cogent narrative arc that reads like an epic tragedy.” In three additional articles “The Best Minds of My Generation,”  “A Furtive Glimpse of Candor,” and “? + $$ = Science,” Cox goes on to mine the book for episodes that allow him to comment on the current quagmire. In one he notes that Swords “has long been frustrated by history’s gatekeepers, their aversion to rendering the complete story of postwar America as UFOs zig-zagged through the early stages of the Cold War. The Western Michigan University emeritus professor says UFOs and Government’s mission statement is to plug that gap as a reference book.” According to Cox, Swords and company have succeeded:  “UFOs and Government belongs on those history shelves… this book offers a glimpse into the largely forgotten world that put us in the vacuum that cripples us today.” Unlike in this summary, Cox doesn’t wait until the end of his review to let you know what he thinks of the book—in the very first sentence, he calls it “The most important book on the origins of our current policy on The Great Taboo …”

Get ready: UFOs are about to make history. Governments have been concerned about UFO sighting reports since WWII, but historians have never made a concerted attempt to understand their often contradictory responses to the phenomenon. How could something of such potential technological and national security consequence have left no visible trace in the history books? Whether it’s a conspiracy or not, the subject has been marginalized to such an extent that it’s as if the military never acted with alarm on the heels of a UFO sighting, as if the intelligence community never took up the issue behind closed doors, as if government research and development efforts never attempted to duplicate the phenomenon. But they have. So now a collection of veteran UFO historians and researchers have attempted to address this historical oversight with the publication of a new book entitled UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry. The authors have spent more than four years researching thousands of government documents and archives in order to present a work of historical scholarship on the U.S. government’s bungling response to the UFO phenomenon. How and why the U.S. government—and other governments around the world—have dealt with the UFO phenomenon during most of a century is the focus of this historical inquiry. The remarkable story explains much that is new, or at least not commonly known, about the seriousness with which the military and intelligence communities approached the UFO problem internally. It also reveals how the subject became treated as if it were a triviality, and why the United States government deemed it wise to treat it so. Though the book focuses primarily on the U.S. government’s response to the UFO phenomenon—revealing how bureaucracies fight amongst themselves, protect themselves, and in the end fail to serve the public—also included is the treatment of the subject by the governments of Sweden, Australia, France, Spain, and other countries. The book’s international cast of authors was headed by Michael Swords, a retired professor at Western Michigan University with an extensive knowledge of UFO history, and managed by Robert Powell, director of research at the Mutual UFO Network.