I would like to dedicate this
to anyone out there in the world
that knew there was a whole lot more
to our human story
Toms Acknowledgments:
I would like to thank my wife Jennifer, and my children, Ava and JonasFor their support of my interests in all things weird.
I would also like to thank Peter Levenda for being such a brilliant researcher, an eloquent spokesperson for this important project, and a great friend. Through his words and experience, I was able to summarize this very important topic and eventually get us the ears of the US Government. Additional thanks to AJ Hartley for joining the fun, soaking in the esoteric knowledge, and bringing it all to life in a way for ordinary people to understand.
And last, to all my government advisors
You have already begun to change the world through this project. People are waking up and thinking differently about themselves and the world they live in... all because of you.
Peter's Acknowledgments:
So many individuals have gone on before to research, write, speak and even at times risk their reputations if not their lives where the Phenomenon is concerned. It is inconceivable that more people do not take this enduring mystery more seriously, and it is our hope and intention that with this project more people will come to the conclusion that the missing piece of this puzzle is the missing piece of the human condition.
There is a group of about ten individuals we refer to as the advisors. Most of these gentlemen cannot be identified here due to their standing in their respective agencies and departments. I ask the readers patience with this omission, and state that I can vouch for the fact that they do, indeed, exist and that their contribution to this Project has been substantive and of great importance.
That said, there are some people I have to acknowledge by name, and thank, in this place:
Jacques Valle, whose foreword to this book sets it squarely where it has to be. M. Valle has been at the forefront of the post-World War II UFO Phenomenon for nearly the last fifty years or so. He and Dr. J. Allen Hynek were experts in the Phenomenon at a time when serious and respected researchers were in short supply; in addition, Valle brought to the table his expertise in astronomy and computer science, making his contribution the beginning (and the model) of the multi-disciplinary approach to the problem that is so desperately required and which we are determined to implement as best we can. I am grateful for not only his foreword but for his continuing friendship and advice.
Whitley Strieber, who has been a friend since the 1990s and whose sincerity on the subject of UFOs and the abduction experience has been inspirational. Our voluminous correspondence over the last twenty years has yielded many insights and new avenues of approach to this very complex subject ranging from military and mind-control interpretations to the purely spiritual, and everything in between.
Thanks and acknowledgments must also go to those friends and colleagues with whom I have shared convivial meetings and discussions in the past on this subject, including Jim Marrs, Richard Dolan, Timothy Good and Hal Puthoff. For many in-depth radio and podcast interviews: Jimmy Church, Ian Punnett, the late Georgeanne Hughes, Dr. J. Ilias, Gordon White, Micah Hanks, Joseph Farrell well, the list goes on and on. These are the people who keep this discussion alive, especially at a time when many would like to forget all about it and move on to other subjects.
To Andrew J. Hartley, who is an incomparable raconteur as befits his dual role as best-selling novelist and king of Shakespeare studies (no allusion to Lear, Richard III, or the Scottish king is intended or implied!). Our conversations are usually wide-ranging and not without elements of wry humor and dollops of ironic asides. His fictional interpretation of the names, places and events described in this non-fiction series has provided a coherent narrative that has intrigued and even startled some of this Projects most seasoned advisors, so close it has come to being more than a novel and very nearly an expos.
And, of course, to Tom DeLonge without whom there would be no such project and no such determined assault on the old, established theories of alien contact; and, of course, it has been Toms unequaled access to high-ranking individuals in military, intelligence and corporate circles that has made this Project three-dimensional in scope if not four-dimensional.
Family and friends (and devoted readers) have been patient with me during the last roughly two years of work (so far) on this Project when I have been unavailable due to travel, research, and long hours of pondering the relationships between events, persons, and phenomena and the implications they suggest for a new understanding of the role of humanity in the world and for the extension of human consciousness into realms only dreamed of by scientists and shamans.
To all of these, and to those I cannot mention by name, my thanks and gratitude.
Peter Levenda
Foreword by Jacques Valle
When Tom DeLonge and Peter Levenda asked me to introduce this book, which constitutes a bold re-examination of the meaning and nature of unexplained aerial phenomena, I felt at the same time honored and challenged by the opportunity they offered, because the field has reached a crossroads.
The sightings have been ignored by academics, summarily brushed off by most politicians, censored by churches, classified by the military and ridiculed by the media. Yet the reports continue to come. The experience of the unknown has only deepened, raising unsettling questions about the intrusion of the uncanny in our shiny modern world of convenient machines and superficial entertainment.
First, questions about history. When the mythology about the origins of human cultures is confronted with environmental and biological fact, what truth emerges about the birth of humanity? What forces, what influences impinged upon its development? Were there gods on the earth in those hoary days ( in illo tempore )? Or did we invent them to account for our spiritual need to touch the starsa need born millennia ago, yet more urgent and powerful than ever in our own century?
The second question is about reality itself. It is even more scientifically fundamental and psychologically troubling.
Lets concede to the skeptics, for the sake of argument, that UFOs dont exist, as the experts of SETI and the consensus of Academe keep assuring us. Let us assume that reports of such objects are indeed inconsistent with anthropocentric ideas of physical reality as the sophisticated edifice of modern science understands it.
In a subtle twist of logic that would have delighted the philosophers of the Derrida school, this denial of the testimony compiled from hundreds of thousands of sightings all over the world suddenly enables us to accept them freely: What harm could there be in acknowledging these meaningless stories in the light of day? As the authors of this book argue brilliantly, once we agree that UFOs are impossible, nothing stops us from opening the fileseven the secret ones: Indeed, The UFO can be known only by not asking what it is.
Which logically leads us to realize something else: If UFOs and physical reality are incompatible, maybe the time has come to re-negotiate physical reality. Because, as we all know, these impossible UFOs that dont exist are not going away.