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As the title suggests, this book is about the UFO controversy rather than the UFOs themselves. Professor Jacobs is an historian and has written what will probably come to be regarded as the definitive history of the UFO controversy in America, covering the period from 1947 to 1973. The first chapter discusses the 1897 airship mystery, but on a fairly superficial level. Some articles published in various small-circulation UFO journals have gone into this matter in more detail and greater depth.
The book is mainly concerned with the UFO investigations conducted by the US Air Force, the rise of NICAP, and the political pressure which that organisation brought to bear on the Air Force and , finally the Colorado Project. Professor Jacobs is obviously trying to be impartial in his account, but one gets the impression that he has a leaning towards the believers in the ETH, even though he criticizes Keyhoe' s " loose thinking" in support of that hypothesis. There is little in this book that will be unfamiliar to most ufologists -- the inadequacies ot Blue Book (When Ruppelt left in August 1953, "No replacement came for him and he turned over his command to Airman First Class Max Futch". ), Blue Book's notorious fiddling of UFO statistics and the chaos in the Colorado Project.
Like many writers on UFOs, Jacobs tries to separate the contactees from the ' serious' UFO witnesses and investigators. Although he mentions Arnold’s famous sighting he does not refer to his contactee experiences as described in The Coming of the Saucers. Although he criticises Keyhoe, as we have already noted, he appears to adopt a similar attitude to Arnold, apparently not realising that the contactee syndrome is an integral part of the whole UFO mystery. He mentions Gray Barker’s writing on the MIB, but ignores Al Bender and John Keel, and Vallée's Passport to Magonia. In other words he seems to favour the ‘nuts and bolts' approach to the problem. In the last chapter, where he discusses the 1973 wave in the USA, he is obviously hoping for some really concrete evidence to turn up, so that he can write a sequel wrapping up the whole UFO business once and for all.
- John Harney, from MUFOB New Series 2, March 1976
1 comment:
> he is obviously hoping for some really concrete evidence to turn up
Finding none, he pulled on his rubber boots, went out to the barn, hypnotised some bulls, and shovelled up some evidence himself.
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