“A Splendid Biography”
June 28, 2024
Against the Odds: Major Donald E. Keyhoe and His Battle to End UFO Secrecy by Linda Powell is our first biography and reviewers are over the moon about it. Christine Scott, on UFO Talker, called it “a landmark bio of Donald Keyhoe.” Jeffrey Mishlove of New Thinking Allowed said it’s “…the most well-researched book in the UFO field that I’ve ever seen…a must read book.” Author Leslie Kean called it “an inspiring work.” Nigel Watson, in Magonia, writes “Powell does an expert job of showing us the major characters and factors that constituted that influential period of UFO politics…” But it’s Jerry Clark, who in Fortean Times, best sums up this extraordinary work: “A towering figure in his time… Keyhoe is now the subject of Linda Powell’s solid, deeply researched biography…Against the Odds can be read as an object lesson in the dangers of public identification with a heretical opinion…Powell focuses on the societal, political, and personal side of the disputes that rages, sometimes within ufology itself, over matters both profound and petty. Though I am well versed in the history of the UFO wars, hardly a page of Against the Odds fails to inform me of something I didn’t know…One closes Powell’s splendid biography, which is sympathetic but hardly hagiographic, with the impression of an ordinary man who placed himself in extraordinary circumstances. Decades later, as physicists, journalists, historians, academics, pilots, and politicians—precisely the figures whom Keyhoe attempted with limited success to recruit into the ranks—descend on a subject barreling toward respectability, one wishes he were here to see what he started.”