The Real Story of the Mid-West UFOs

In a period of around three weeks in March and April 1966, large numbers of people in Michigan and Ohio reported encounters with UFOs in several separate incidents. Some of these witnesses were Law Enforcement personnel and their accounts are compelling, even for someone who, like the author, began by being doubtful about the whole subject of UFOs. Why then did the US Air Force not only fail to investigate these sightings adequately, but also attempted to discredit the reputations of witnesses to the extent that some were forced to quit their jobs?

The author began the research for this book as a UFO skeptic who assumed that the idea of people having their lives changed by UFO encounters and of Government agencies attempting to suppress reports of such sightings belonged wholly to the fictional world of the X-Files. However, at least one witness to the 1966 sightings lost his career, his marriage, his children and almost his sanity as a direct result. Research using declassified documents confirms that Government agencies did deliberately attempt to add pressure to UFO witnesses by inducing mockery and ridicule of what they claimed to have seen. Worse still, it has become clear that many of the more outrageous fallacies about UFOs originate not from people wearing tin-foil hats but from Intelligence Agencies of the US Government.

This book is an attempt to dispassionately examine one particular group of UFO sightings and, through this, the wider phenomenon of UFO encounters and the attitude of the US Government. This is a meticulously researched account of a disturbing series of events backed-up by reference to source material which reaches explosive and controversial conclusions.

This is one of the Real Story of... series of books which attempt to take a rational, common-sense, evidence-based approach to looking at some of the most fascinating mysteries of the last one hundred years.