Don’t cut me, bro! Star of television’s ‘Roswell’ in shock autopsy prank.

Need to Know: UFOs, the Military and Intelligence
By Timothy Good
Published by Pan Books, 2007

Timothy Good keeps phoning home with evidence that the world’s governments are covering up the alien invasion, but somehow our line is always ‘busy’. My review for The Nation, published on November 18.

Timothy Good is, among ufologists, one of the most respected chroniclers of visits from space, but one does get the impression that he enjoys baiting the sceptics. Among the snippets of book reviews on his own website are these words from the Spectator in the UK: “I do not know how many trees were cut down to produce this 590-page diatribe, but I wish they had been left standing. ‘Above Top Secret’ is an evil book … Mr Good’s ideas are those of a maniac.”

Of Good’s “Alien Liaison”, the Daily Telegraph complained of “shrill yappings” and decided “only mentally subnormal people could believe in it”. The Ottawa Citizen liked a previous title, but tellingly called it “a story worthy of Franz Kafka”.

Then there is the matter of the book at hand here, Tim Good’s latest, “Need to Know”, which is touted as a compilation of previously secret military documents that offer “irrefutable” evidence of contact between humans and extraterrestrials.

There are three main problems, one to do with the word “compilation” – it really is just a sheaf of documents for readers to sift through. Good apparently thinks we’ll have no trouble jumping to his conclusion. Another problem is that this is pretty much the same book by Tim Good that I read a couple of decades ago. The title is different and there is indeed plenty of new stuff in it, but it amounts to the same thing.

The British government declassified many reports and reviews about UFOs in recent years, but that’s only mentioned passingly here in a pointlessly amiable foreword by a pal of Good’s who’s with the Royal Aeronautical Society.

The third problem, it’s almost needless to point out, is that this is not “irrefutable” evidence at all. “A case that is impossible to dismiss,” the cover blurb says. Nonsense. “A compelling expose.” I must have missed that while I laboured through the whole thing hoping in vain for something to get my teeth into.

Several morsels did pique my interest; none was very filling.

* His Royal Highness Crown Prince Maha Vajiralongkorn, the book says – and I’m not aware that this is common knowledge – was the beneficiary of a UFO encounter. Thai Airways made available for his use a 737-488 it had bought from Aer Lingus, Ireland’s national carrier.

About a year earlier, in January 2004, the jet was approaching Dublin airport, followed by a British Midland Airbus, and the Airbus crew swore they saw a triangular UFO with strobe lights launch vertically from a field. It began circling the Aer Lingus 737, causing the passenger craft to glow purple and, according to the 737’s own crew, lose power. The UFO took a position directly in front of the 737, and the air-traffic control tower, which had the UFO on radar, gave the pilot a course to avoid collision, at which point the UFO disappeared at high speed, leaving the jet shuddering in turbulence. When the 737 landed, considerable damage was found on the wings. This was repaired and Aer Lingus continued using the craft for some months before selling it to Thailand.

No authorities have acknowledged the incident. Good got the goods from a pair of Irish UFO researchers who heard the story from a pair of pilots.

* Thailand pops up again in the book, in a 1974 letter published in Flying Saucer Review, a British magazine. A signals sergeant of that nationality who was stationed with the Royal Thai Air Force in Mukdahan (for some unexplained reason) reported that he’d heard about the Americans simultaneously losing several F-111s and an F4 one day during the Vietnam conflict for no evident reason.

Yes. But anyway …

* “Need to Know” is dedicated to Gordon Cooper, the last of America’s Mercury 7 astronauts into space. Cooper went to his grave in 2004 convinced that he’d seen several extraterrestrial craft buzz a German air base back in the ’50s and that Washington was covering up the truth about UFOs.

But he laughed about another episode that Good plays up, when military authorities in California confiscated the cameras from his surveillance plane. Good is unswayed in his belief that “Gordo” had inadvertently photographed aliens. Cooper found out years after the incident that he’d been shooting footage of the top-secret Area 51 test range. Maybe he got a peek at the stealth jets. (Cooper fumed at length over other ufologists’ insistence that he’d seen a “a greenish object with a red tail” fly past his Mercury 9 capsule in 1963.)

* Then there was the surgeon in Brazil who was pulled to one side by the military in 1996 to fix the busted leg of an alien who’d crashed. As the operating theatre filled with a greenish mist, the doctor said, the creature “downloaded” a tremendous amount of information into his brain, mostly spiritual stuff about how humans are wasting their potential and missing the point of life.

What is the point of life? Well, I’m not going to tell you – that would be hearsay!

Buy the book for fun. Extra bonus for plane-spotters: There are dozens of photos in this UFO book, almost all of them of planes and jets “of the type” that someone or other was flying when they saw a UFO.

@ @ @

This bit was excluded from the review as published in The Nation for reasons of space (bad pun intended).

Timothy Good still seems to think it’s okay to cite the revelations of George Adamski, who produced photos of ships from other planets, on which he rode with the “Space Brothers” (and a space babe in golden coveralls) to the far side of the moon, where he saw cities, trees and snow-capped mountains. People basically stopped listening to Adamski when he announced that he was off to attend a conference on Saturn and then, the following year, asked Pope John XXIII on the extraterrestrials’ behalf to change his mind about refusing to communicate with them.

Admittedly, this time around Good mentions Adamski only twice, and in passing, on one occasion in the context of people who have “special access”, such as Adamski (he claims) and President Kennedy, who asked to see the, you know, the alien bodies from Roswell. The Air Force, Good’s source told him, duly flew the famous cadavers to Florida, where JFK had a gander at them at a medical facility.

Good also says President Bush II was once quizzed about the extraterrestrials. “Ask Cheney,” Dubya replied. (As if Cheney would admit to anything.)

There is a film, available on YouTube, that one real bully of a UFO-conspiracy theorist made in which he accosts various astronauts and demands that they swear on the Bible they know nothing about alien contact. Poor old Neil Armstrong is among those besieged by this nutcase, and he does a better job than some of restraining himself.

I’m not including Tim Good in the ranks of the most fevered “researchers”, the ones who ought to be locked up, but too often the ufologists get fixated on curiosities that turn out to be quite explicable — or else utter hoaxes, such as the infamous “Pepper Transcript”, which purported to be a conversation between mission control and Armstrong and Aldrin on the moon (just the two of them, please note). It’s still replicated all over the Web as “irrefutable evidence”:

What was it, what the hell was it? That’s all I want to know.
These [garbled] babies were huge, sir, they were enormous.
What the hell’s going on? What’s the matter with you guys?
They’re here, under the surface.
What’s there?
Roger, we’re here, all three of us, but we’ve found some visitors … Yeah, they’ve been here for quite a while judging by the installations … I’m telling you, there are other spacecraft out there. They’re lined up in ranks on the far side of the crater edge.
What’s this uproar about UFOs?
They’re set up down there, they’re on the moon, watching us.

Would you buy a used vacuum cleaner from George Adamski?