Full Review: "UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government's Search for Alien Life Here — and Out There" by Garrett Graff

A book that completely fulfills all my expectations.

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You can tell a lot about a book by its index. Whenever I receive a review copy of a book about a subject that’s in my space, one of the first things I do is turn to the index to see who it mentions. When a mass-market book like this one comes out, promising to reveal all, it darn well better get things right. This one had 518 pages of opportunity, but blew it.

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Garrett Graff is the former editor of POLITICO and the editor-in-chief of The Washingtonian, so you’d think he’d have his journalism chops down pretty well. If this book is a fair example, you would be wrong. Graff merely repeats the same stories that have been front-page news for decades, fully credulously, subjecting none of them to the journalistic scrutiny that others have. Much of the book retells modern folklore that has been thoroughly debunked, and Graff appears to have missed all of that debunking. Graff applies only the usual filter of “what will be popular to readers” rather than “what’s true.”

For me, this new book — so massively promoted by Simon & Schuster — is a depressing reminder that mainstream authors are in the entertainment industry (disclosure, Simon & Schuster’s imprint Adams Media published my latest book Conspiracies Declassified). The book gives the popular perspective: Something mysterious is happening in our skies, the government has more questions than answers, and the idea that aliens are actively visiting the Earth appears to be better and better supported by evidence. This is not a perspective embraced by the science community; it is the one promoted by crackpots and TV networks.

So, back to the index. If Graff gave an accurate representation of the state of the UFO phenomenon today, he would have discussed the work of the investigative journalists who have debunked much of the popular reporting of UFOlogists’ press releases over the past six years:

• Steve Greenstreet - 0 mentions

• Jason Colavito - 0 mentions

• Keith Kloor - 0 mentions

• Me - 0 mentions

• John Greenewald - 0 mentions

• Michael Shermer - 0 mentions

• Mick West - A single mention — in a footnote having little to do with his massive contribution since 2017.

• Robert Sheaffer - 1 mention from 12 years ago

I found the names of exactly zero of the scientists I’d hoped would be included doing cutting edge work in astrophysics and exobiology, except one — Lindy Elkins-Tanton, and Graff got her name wrong.

What about the people who have been driving the Alien Truther narrative, promoting falsehoods that are counter to everything science has been able to learn about the phenomenon?

• Jacques Vallée - 69 mentions

• Robert Bigelow - 51 mentions

• Leslie Kean - 37 mentions

• Avi Loeb - 36 mentions

• Harry Reid - 23 mentions

• George Knapp - 20 mentions

• Colm Kelleher - 16 matches

• Christopher Mellon - 13 mentions

• Stanton Friedman - 13 mentions

• John Podesta - 12 mentions

• Tom DeLonge - 11 mentions

• Lue Elizondo - 9 mentions

And in an Honorable Mention:

• J. Allen Hynek - 241 mentions

(We wouldn’t say Hynek has been “driving the narrative” since he’s been dead for nearly 40 years; but his books are still among the primary ammunition used by those seeking sciencey-sounding support for their alien visitation beliefs.)

This distribution reflects a heavily lopsided bias toward those promoting the alien visitation narrative at the expense of what’s really going on. What’s really going on can be summarized in three basic points:

1. Most astronomers agree there is probably lots of life in the universe.

2. Technological civilizations will probably never be able to visit one another, supported by the total lack of evidence that Earth has ever been visited.

3. Zero UFO reports have ever been found to have an exotic explanation, and zero empirical evidence has ever emerged of extraterrestrial craft or creatures.

Graff does make a lot of point #1 — it’s true, it’s popular, everyone loves to hear it, and it makes readers eager for more (I open my UFO movie with the same point). But #2 and #3 are as lost to him as they are to the producers of Ancient Aliens or Skinwalker Ranch. They’re not the fun part of the story. However they are the part of the story that you have to work harder to uncover.

I found a telling note in the final section of the book’s main text, a brief description of Avi Loeb’s claim to have found possible alien technology on a donor-funded sea hunt hoping to find proof of alien technology. Considering the timeline, it appears that the publisher must have rushed Graff to quickly tack this onto the book, since it’s such a great affirmation of the book’s thesis. If they were able to squeeze this in, why not squeeze in any of the massive criticism that immediately followed Loeb’s claim, from virtually the entire astronomy community? The answer is obvious. Promote the exciting sensational claim; ignore the science that contradicts it. Or, as our name search above indicates: Stuff your book with fringe claims from a small number of crackpots to make it seem like theirs is the prevailing view, and ignore or marginalize the majority who disagree through having done the real work, making them appear to hold the fringe view!

My frustration probably comes through loud and clear in this review, so let it not turn into a hand-wringing “Woe is me” soliloquy where I lament yet again that nobody listens to us, but they shower major bucks and attention on those who sell popular misinformation to the eager masses. That’s par for the course for nearly all science writing. It’s part of the job and most of us have made peace with it. And it’s not all bad, in fact it’s often exhilarating; we get to live in a world where the thrills come not from fictional storytelling, but from the revelations found in real astrophysics and exobiology. As Graff titles his epilogue, “The truth is out there,” and that truth is indeed wildly exciting — it’s just not the same one that Graff hopes you will take away.

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