Author: John Michael Greer
Publisher: Llewellyn Publications, 2009
Price: £16.50 (paperback)
Isbn: 9780738713199

Greer has written several books about natural magic and the occult. His writing skill shows in The UFO Phenomenon – his style is crisp, clear and concise.

The book is split into three parts. The first covers the incredibly complex history of the UFO phenomenon; the middle section examines theories about what UFOs are; and the final part offers a solution to the mystery.

It is almost impossible to sum up the 60-odd-year modern history of ufology in a mere 70 pages. Greer, to his credit, does an excellent job of this. As might be expected, there are some omiss­ions. Greer comments on the widespread popularity of New Age and occult books in the late 1960s and early 1970s – Carlos Castaneda, Eric von Däniken, Charles Berlitz etc – but surprisingly fails to mention the paperback reprints of Fort’s four books, the influential writings of John Michell, or the 20 books by T Lobsang Rampa, the Tibetan mystic who was really a British plumber who once claimed to have seen giant alien bodies.

In fact, this section of the book appears to have been almost entirely researched by reading and drawing from the usual suspects (Keyhoe, Hynek, Vallee etc) and extensively from Watch The Skies (1994) by Curtis Peebles.

It is evident that little effort was made to dig any further. Very few magazine articles are referenced. There is not a single reference to Flying Saucer Review magazine – I doubt Greer has ever even read a copy. He only lists two books by prolific author Jenny Randles in the biblio­graphy, and they are over 20 years old (UFO Reality from 1983 and Sky Crash from 1984). There are no quotes from interviews with authors, eyewitnesses or field researchers.

I was disappointed to find that the middle section on UFO theories summarily dismissed the extraterrestrial, time travel, and aerial animal theories. These, along with every type of hypo­thesis there is, get short shift. Yet again, Greer does not dig deep enough into the available source material – Hilary Evans’s import­ant works Visions, Apparitions, Alien Visitors (1984) and Gods, Spirits, Cosmic Guardians (1987) immediately spring to mind.

Greer also drops the ball when he makes statements like “millions of people carry cell phones equipped with digital cameras everywhere they go. If UFOs are material craft cruising through Earth’s skies, a signific­ant number of them should be showing up on webcams and having their pictures snapped by startled witnesses around the world.” (p158) Inexplicably, Greer has failed to notice the seemingly endless stream of poor quality UFO photos snapped by cell phone cameras over the last couple of years. A quick Google search produces numerous examples.

In the final section – “Solving the Mystery” – Greer really goes off the rails and loses any remaining shred of credibility.

He contends that the majority of UFO reports are misidentific­ations of secret military test aircraft.

The main prop for this idea is a couple of reports about the CIA’s role in UFO investigation and secret U-2 spy plane miss­ions. According to one study quoted by Greer, “over half of all UFO reports from the late 1950s through the 1960s” were caused by U-2 flights. Greer throws into the mix secret reconnaissance balloon tests (allegedly the cause of the initial 1947 UFO sighting wave), claims about modern ‘black projects’ secret aircraft plus deliberate government hoaxing and misdirection to promote the idea of UFOs being aliens in spaceships. And voilà! The UFO mystery is solved!

But dig a little deeper and the whole shaky house of cards so delicately constructed by Greer collapses. It is extremely unlikely that U-2 flights accounted for more than a tiny fraction of UFO sightings compared to misinter­pretations of conventional aircraft and balloons or bright planets and stars.

Even taking the claim at face value, all it does is swap one set of explanations for another as Project Blue Book staff (the US Air Force UFO investigat­ion project) are supposed to have ‘explained’ U-2s mistaken for UFOs as Venus, balloons, etc. Thus the total number of unexplained UFO sightings is not reduced by a single report!

Very few of 1947’s UFO reports would have been due to secret balloon tests. The vast majority were ordinary weather balloons, planes, stars, and planets. The remaining unexplained cases are highly unusual and could not have been balloons. Greer also has failed to explain any of the tens of thousands of UFO reports outside the USA and the many thousands prior to 1947.

To explain sightings in the last couple of decades, he puts great weight on hypothetical secret advanced aircraft such as the TR-3 Black Manta and the SR-91 Aurora. Currently, there is no hard evidence for their existence – only a great deal of speculation.

Greer states the US government is deliberately hoaxing UFOs to deflect attention away from sightings of their secret aircraft. The intention is to promote the extraterrestrial hypothesis as a form of smokescreen.

What little evidence Greer presents is shot full of holes. He alleges the civilian UFO investi­gation group NICAP had been infiltrated by the CIA to promote the ET smokescreen hypothesis.

This is contradicted by the historical fact that NICAP resisted accepting any UFO report when an entity was also seen. If they were pushing the ET theory, why would the organis­ation have rejected these reports as hoaxes?

Towards the end of his book, Greer jumps on one of his favourite hobby horses.

He cites the possibility of our fossil fuels running out as evidence for the impossibility of any ET civilisation lasting long enough to develop advanced space travel.

There are many obvious solut­ions to the problem – alternative energy sources (wave, tidal, wind, solar power), nuclear-powered spaceships, mining resources in space (from the Moon, asteroids, and other planets) etc – but, like so much else, Greer fails to consider them.

Perhaps if he took off his blinkers and did some original interviews and research, he might come up with a solution to the UFO mystery that stands up to scrutiny.

But don’t hold your breath.