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Foreword Any appraisal of the “flying saucer mystery”’ must be all inclusive and must attempt a study of the apparent hoaxes, as well as an examination of the many events now generally accepted as being totally authentic. The data must be reviewed quantitatively, no matter how arduous the task becomes. There is a natural tendency to concentrate on only those facets which seem most interesting, or which seem to provide the best evidence. The phenomenon of unidentified flying objects is a gigantic iceberg, and the truly important aspects are hidden far beneath the surface. Nearly all of the UFO literature of the past twenty years has leaned toward the trivia, the random sightings which are actually irrelevant to the whole, and to the meaningless side issues of government policy, dissection of personali- ties, and the conflicts which have arisen within the various factions of the UFO cultists. For the past four years I have worked full time, seven days a week, without a vacation, to investigate and research UFO events in total depth, hacking my way systematically through all of the myths and beliefs which surround this fascinating subject. This book is a summation of that effort. The original manuscript was more than 2,000 pages long. It has been boiled down and carefully edited to its present length. In the process, a good deal of documentation and many details have been deleted or heavily condensed. I had hoped to include full acknowledgment of my many sources and of the many people who helped me in this task. But that proved to be impossible. More than 2,000 books were reviewed in the course of this study, i in addition to uncounted thousands of magazines, newsletters, and newspa- pers. Since it is not feasible to list them all, I have included a selected bibliography, listing those works which proved to be the most valid and useful. Very few of these books deal with the subject of flying saucers directly. History, psychiatry, religion, and the occult have proven to be far more important to an understanding of the whole than the many books which simply recount the endless sightings of aerial anomalies. I have tried to apply the standard rules of scholarship wherever possible, going directly to the original sources in most cases instead of relying upon the distilled and often distorted versions of these events