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AUTHOR ABOUT THE A former principal investigator on Department of Defense computer network- ing projects, Dr. Jacques Vallee was born in France, where he was trained in astrophysics. He moved to the United States in 1962 and received his Ph.D. in computer science in 1967 from Northwestern University, where he was a close associate of the late Dr. J. Allen Hynek. He now lives in California with his wife and two children. The author of many articles and three books about high technology, Dr. Vallee first became interested in the subject of UFOs when he witnessed the destruction of tracking tapes of unknown objects at a major observatory. His research into the phenomenon has taken him to many places in the United States and to many countries around the world—from France to Scotland, and from Australia to Brazil. His unique approach to this phenomenon was crystal- lized when he served as the real-life model for the character of the French scientist played by Francois Truffaut in Steven Spielberg's film Close Encoun- ters of the Third Kind. In his books, which have been translated into all the major languages of the Western world, Jacques Vallee has clearly stated the personal conclusions he has reached: he believes the phenomenon represents a genuine, unknown technology that is able to manipulate the physical environment and the psychic reality of the witnesses. He argues that this technology is not necessarily extraterrestrial in nature and that the serious analysis of UFO reports could give science important new insights. Revelations completes the three-volume Alien Contact trilogy that began with Dimensions and Confrontations. It is an ironic, skeptical, but thorough survey of the extreme beliefs the UFO phenomenon has created in its wake, from the alleged history of saucer "crashes" and the retrieval of aliens by the U.S. government, to the manipulation of the zealots and their cults by various groups engaged in psychological warfare experiments or simply in the fulfill- ment of their own private fantasies.