"UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry" is getting rave reviews as the first work of its kind - a scholarly historical study of how the government responded to UFO phenomena from the 1940s on that reads like a great detective story The book itself (which will be available) is impressive - a research team worked 5 years after decades in archives to create a narrative that is fully documented. There are nearly 1000 citations in almost 600 pages - nothing speculative, nothing fanciful. The researchers use the government's own words to show how and why policies were established and executed in light of real national security concerns.
Richard Thieme was fortunate to be included on that research team. He has worked as an author and professional speaker for 20 years and his clients range from the Pentagon, the NSA, the Secret Service, and the FBI to security, intelligence, and hacker cons all over the world. (He will speak at Def Con in August for the eighteenth year). This book, this speech, are labors of love - he has been passionate about the subject for 35 years, ever since a fighter pilot told his clergyman (Richard, at that time, in his first parish in Utah) that "we chase them and can't catch them" when the subject of UFOs came up. That credible testimony has been supported over the years by much, much more.
Neither the book nor Richard in this presentation pretend to know about aliens or origins, cattle mutilations or crop circles. What is known is how seriously the government took numerous credible reports of anomalous vehicles that exhibited technologies beyond our own abilities and responded as best they could to a challenging, confusing, even frightening phenomena. That is the subject of this fascinating talk.
