abductions | Top 10 Book Reviews

Review by: KEN KORCZAK

Physicist BRUCE MACCABEE has been a significant figure in ufology for some 50 years. He holds a Ph.D. earned from American University, Washington D.C. He is often referred to as an “optics physicist” because of his work with optical data processing for the Naval Ordnance Laboratory, later known as the Naval Surface Warfare Center.

He also worked on underwater lasers to generate subsurface sound and made significant contributions on aspects of SDI, Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” space-based defense platform.

For those of us who have been addicted to UFO stuff for decades, Dr. Maccabee is an instantly recognizable face. Starting in the 1970s he began popping up in UFO documentaries on TV and film, usually as an analyst of anomalous photographs and video.

If Bruce Maccabee pronounced an image or video footage “authentic” or “unexplainable by natural means” – well, that really meant something. With his serious scientific credentials, he could not be written off as just another flake.

Dr. Maccabee is also a dogged researcher who has made enormous efforts to obtain all manner of military and government documents relating to UFOs. A major milestone was getting his hands on the secret “flying disc files” of the FBI – yes, there really was an actual FBI “X-Files.”

Dr. Bruce Maccabee

So, in this short book, THE LEGACY OF 1952: YEAR OF THE UFO, Maccabee offers an important perspective on where things stand in UFO research today, and “how we got here,” for better or worse.

He argues that early on, but especially in the year 1952, certain protocols became set in stone in terms of how our military and government would treat the UFO issue and how they would relate what they knew (or did not know) to the taxpaying public they serve.

Those protocols hardened into “tradition,” Maccabee writes, in 1952 and have remained largely unchanged since. The result is wide ranging and enormous. An entire American generation grew up with a government that either denied the “reality” of the UFO phenomenon … or for any case it could not explain, no matter how sensational, the policy was to suggest it could be explained in common terms if more facts were obtained.

What was so special about 1952? Well, that year witnessed a remarkable explosion of UFO sightings. Thousands of reports poured into media outlets, local police and various government agencies. It seems no location in America was spared.

The most significant is known as the “WASHINGTON FLAP” occurring from July 12 through July 29 in the summer of 1952. It was an amazing time! Suddenly, “swarms of UFOs” began appearing over the American capital city. And it wasn’t just sightings. The objects were routinely captured on radar. Jets were scrambled to pursue the objects. Our best-trained fighter pilots observed UFOs with their own eyes. The “saucers” routinely outdistanced the F-94s and other assets that chased them – and when the jets ran low on fuel forcing them to cut off chase and return – the UFOs would sometimes turn around and come right back!

It was impossible for anyone to be in denial of what was happening!

The sightings were making headlines in major papers across the nation. Also unable to ignore the events was President Harry Truman himself. Truman was alarmed enough to call top people in the Air Force to get some answers.

Stop for a minute and think about that. The President of the United States picks up the phone, calls his Top Brass, and orders them to get some answers about UFOs.

President Harry Truman

What would it take today for the President of the United States to pick up the phone and call his top military commanders to focus urgent attention on getting answers about the UFO issue?

And … and … well, I guess that leads me to my take away from this book. It informs me or, I guess, clarifies for me how we came to be in the place we are today in ufology. Ii helps explain the sort of “crazy labyrinth” that is the “UFO question” in which we find ourselves endlessly lost here in 2019.

Reading Maccabee’s book gave me the notion that a certain normalcy or rationality held sway for a few short years after that June day in 1947 when the Kenneth Arnold sighted nine shiny objects flitting over Mount Rainier, kicking off the modern UFO era.

For example, the press was reporting the UFO story largely in a straightforward way. It was “just that facts, ma’me.” If entire fleets of UFOs were observed over Washington D.C., ordinary, mainstream newspapers, such as the Cedar Rapids Gazette in Iowa, would sport the headline:

“SAUCERS SWARM OVER CAPITAL”

Sure, that’s a sensational headline, but it also happened to be simply factual and true. There was no need to hide it, censor it, spin it, mock it or sugar coat it for the reading public – the media just reported to the people what happened – so that citizens could have this information.

The same goes for the military and government. Early on, a fantastic UFO sighting was not immediately inserted into a meat grinder of denial, disinformation, propaganda or captured into a classified super-double-top-cosmic-secret-for-your-eyes-only-report. Rather, it was confronted directly as a problem for government experts to look at directly as they strove to come up with straightforward answers.

But after 1952 – and because of critical policy decisions made by top government officials in that amazing time – we were all kicked down the proverbial rabbit hole we remain lost in today. That’s mostly what Dr. Maccabee is suggesting in this book.

On the other hand, this is all a much more complex issue. There’s a lot more at play here. For example, the UFO phenomenon has evolved in texture and scope to an astonishing degree since 1952.

Just nine years after 1952, guess what happened? In 1961 a certain couple from Vermont reported they were abducted aboard a UFO by alien beings. They were subjected to medical tests – Barney Hill reported what is arguably the first ever report of an anal probe. His wife, Betty, had a long needled pushed into her belly. Barney was also forced to give a sperm sample.

And then things really got weird.

I have three words for you: “Praying Mantis Alien.” Or how about three more: “20 And Back.” See where I’m going here?

Oh for the days when swarms of flying saucers were blackening the skies over Washington! What simple times!

So, on the one hand, Dr. Maccabee’s book provided for me an excellent sense of sociological clarity and perspective on how the UFO issue developed from the 1950s to present time in terms of government, military, media and public dynamics.

On the other hand, this perspective “stays in its lane,” so to speak, as it represents a narrow slice of the overall phenomenon as it roils and boils today. That’s by no means a knock on Dr. Maccabee’s well-presented book. It provides a compelling narrative which adds to the realization that the UFO phenomenon is not only real, but that the conventional explanations supplied by the skeptics are demonstrably flawed.

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PLEASE CHECK OUT MY REVIEWS OF OTHER UFO BOOKS, LINKED BELOW:

BLACK SWAN GHOSTS by Simeon Hein PhD

SYMBIOSIS by Nancy Tremaine

PASCAGOULA: THE CLOSEST ENCOUNTER by Calvin Parker

INCIDENT AT DEVIL’S DEN by Terry Lovelace

MANAGING MAGIC by Grant Cameron

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Ken Korczak is a former newspaper reporter, government information officer, served as an advocate for homeless people as a VISTA Volunteer, and taught journalism at the University of North Dakota for five years. He is the author of: BIRD BRAIN GENIUS

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Review by: KEN KORCZAK

This is a bizarre book that is so terrible, I can’t decide if it’s “so bad it’s funny” or “so bad it’s sad.” I opt for the second.

It’s sad because a travesty such as this publication can set back the legitimate study of the UFO phenomenon by decades. It’s a bonanza for hard-core, closed-minded skeptics, always eager to find the latest example of “UFO-Fringe-Nut” material to heap scorn upon.

What’s even worse is that this book is written by a bona fide aerospace industry insider – BILL TOMPKINS – a man who worked at the top his field in rocket science as a designer and engineer for decades. Tompkins worked on some of the most sensitive military defense and space program projects and had the highest security clearances. This makes him a man genuinely in a position to “know” and be a bomb-shell whistle blower.

The book’s editor, DR. ROBERT WOOD, has an equally impressive resume. He holds a Ph.D. in physics from Cornell University and was a top scientist for McDonald Douglas for 43 years.

But instead of delivering the ultimate UFO smoking gun, Dr. Wood and Tompkins give us this muddy mish mash of egregiously poorly written, edited and childishly sexist garbage that should never have seen the publishing light of day.

There are many claims that are clearly delusional and easy to prove as false – the most obvious of which is that Tompkins claims to have consulted personally with DR. JACQUES VALLEE, astronomer, computer scientist and arguable the world’s leading theorist on UFO phenomenon.

Dr. Jacques Vallee, right, with J. Allen Hynek

Tompkins says he meetings with Dr, Vallee took place in the early to mid-1950s – he said that Dr. Vallee:

“… divulged his knowledge concerning the Federation of Planets – a sort of galactic governing force that limited the extraterrestrials of rogue planets from threatening other planets. Basically, Jacques was … in contact with them …”

The only problem? In the early 1950s Jacques Vallee was a teenage boy growing up in France. He was still years away from becoming a Ph.D. scientist. Apologists for Tompkins say, “Okay, maybe he just confused the time frame a bit … he might have met with Dr. Vallee in the late 60s or 70s …”

But we know this is impossible as well since Dr. Jacques Valle himself has publicly stated that he has never met Bill Tompkins, and furthermore, Dr. Vallee calls the comments about him in Tompkins book “absurd,” “false,” and even “injurious.”

In addition to whoppers like this, the book is riddled with small factual errors, such as saying modern humans emerged 30,000 years ago, and in another passage, Tompkins says it was 300,000 years ago. Any idiot can spend two minutes on Google and find out both these dates are wrong and that the first known anatomically modern human is dated to 190,000 years ago.

I could fill another page with similar blunders, but let’s get to some of the other giant absurdities, such as the author’s monumentally, even painfully sexist, sleazy and raunchy accounts of sex-play with what he believed to be alien women.

He tells of how the American aerospace industry was infiltrated with dozens of sizzling hot human-looking female “Nordic” aliens who universally dressed and acted like hookers – and they were seemingly incapable of stopping themselves from “rubbing their bodies” against all those pencil-neck rocket engineers dressed in their short sleeve white shirts, ties, horn-rimmed glasses and pocket-protector pen holders.

Sexy “Nordic” alien women. Were numerous lurid pulp sci-fi covers like this one inspired by the real thing?

Again and again, insanely beautiful young women dressed in “micro-mini skirts,” wearing “translucent plastic 4-inch spiked heels” and “breasts falling out of their tops” come on to Mr. Tompkins and his pals, not only promising the hottest sex they have ever had, but taking the time to “red mark” and correct and update their advanced engineering specs in their spare time.

Tompkins believes these were ETs who were sent by “the good aliens, the “Nordics” – and that these wise beings used these lovely sluts to implant psychic images for advanced space vehicle designs directly into engineer’s heads — before taking them out on the town for wild drinking parties and unstoppable sex.

Yes! It’s all in this book!

The editor, our famous Dr. Wood, makes the claim that his pal Bill Tompkins was propositioned dozens of times by these alien-prostitute-geniuses, but “never once gave in” – and yet, Tompkins includes a special chapter in which an alien hottie takes him off planet in a space ship to a distant “Las Vegas-like planet” where she says that they will spend three months together having sex. She tells him:

“We will climax many times together and you will love every month of it.”

Of course, Tompkins then backs away from this bizarre tail – probably because he knows his wife and children are reading – and says his outer space sex romp may have been just a “mental image” implanted in his mind by the aliens. He just isn’t sure.

Skeptics will quickly dismiss this book as the delusional rambling of an old man afflicted with senile dementia – and then Dr. Robert Wood with his advanced age and 43 years in the aerospace industry must also be senile and delusional – and skeptics will say that these two senile, demented old men decided to get together and write a crazy book, for some reason.

But such skeptics are no better than these two nutty, sadly lecherous old coots.

So what are we to make of this? While skeptics will gleefully heap scorn, certain conspiracy theorists will scream “mind control!” They’ll say top secret government mind-warping techniques implanted the brains of Tompkins and Dr. Wood with fantastic delusions they now believe to be real – all this to seed chaos, throw up smoke screens, to keep the general public pacified, and keep everyone guessing about what “black-ops” and “shadow governments” are really up to.

As for the rest of us – well, why worry about it? This book can be summarily dismissed as a “non-contribution” to ufology. It’s a worthless document, and meaningless.
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