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Yet she persevered, and her book clearly leaves the taboo against taking UFOs seriously with no leg to stand on. Kean and her distinguished co- -writers call for the establishment of a aorta small U.S. government agency to cooperate with other countries that are already formally investigating, reviewing, and releasing information relevant to UFOs. This new agency would handle release of documents and any future investigations with openness and efficiency. It's an idea worth considering, and it is definitely time for government, scientists, and aviation experts to work together in unraveling the questions about UFOs that have so far remained in the dark. It's time to find out what the truth information really is that's out there. The American people—and people around the world—want to know, and they can handle the truth. UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record represents a pivotal step in that direction, laying the groundwork for a new way forward. Ten years ago, as an investigative reporter working for a California public radio station, I was suddenly confronted with a seemingly impossible reality. A colleague in Paris sent me an extraordinary new study by former high-ranking French officials documenting the existence of unidentified flying objects and exploring their potential impact on national security. Now known as the COMETA Report, this unprecedented white paper marked the first time in any country that a group of this size and stature had declared that UFOs—solid but as yet unexplained objects in the sky—constitute a real phenomenon warranting immediate international attention. I was The distinguished COMETA authors—thirteen retired generals, tists, and space experts working independently of the French scientists, and scientists, and space experts working independently of the French government—had spent three years analyzing military and pilot encounters with UFOs. In the cases they present, all conventional explanations of something natural or man-made had been eliminated by the authors and their associated teams of experts, and yet these objects were observed at close range by pilots, tracked on radar, and officially photographed. They achieved tremendous speeds and accelerations, made sharp, right-angle turns in a flash, and could stop and stand still in midair, seeming to defy the laws of physics. What could this mean? Since some of the military officers on the COMETA panel were serving with the French Institute of Higher Studies for National Defense, a government-financed strategic planning agency, their characterization of UFOs as a phenomenon with possible national security implications assumed a grave importance. In their ninety-page report, written with objectivity, clarity, and logic, the authors explained that about 5 percent of sightings—those for which there is enough solid documentation to eliminate other possibilities—cannot be easily attributed to earthly sources, such as secret military exercises or of the INTRODUCTION