Taken from first-person accounts and historical documents, this book chronicles more than 300 examples of alien encounters, conspiracy theories, and the influence of extraterrestrials on human events throughout history. Investigating claims of visits from otherworldly creatures, aliens living among us, abductions of humans to alien spacecraft, and accounts of interstellar cooperation since the UFO crash in Roswell, this discussion of the theories and mysteries surrounding aliens is packed with thought-provoking stories and shocking revelations of alien involvement in the lives of Earthlings.

The two most fascinating questions about extraterrestrial life are where it is found and what it is like. In particular, from our Earth-based vantage point, we are keen to know where the closest life to us is, and how similar it might be to life on our home planet. This book deals with both of these key issues. It considers possible homes for life, with a focus on Earth-like exoplanets. And it examines the possibility that life elsewhere might be similar to life here, due to the existence of parallel environments, which may result in Darwinian selection producing parallel trees of life between one planet and another. Understanding Life in the Universe provides an engaging and myth-busting overview for any reader interested in the existence and nature of extraterrestrial life, and the realistic possibility of discovering credible evidence for it in the near future.

An Air Force major is ordered to approach a brilliant UFO in his Phantom jet over Tehran. He repeatedly attempts to engage and fire on unusual objects heading right toward his aircraft, but his missile control is locked and disabled. Witnessed from the ground, this dogfight becomes the subject of a secret report by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency.
In Belgium, an Air Force colonel investigates a series of widespread sightings of unidentified triangular objects, and he sends F-16s to attempt a closer look. Many hundreds of eyewitnesses, including on-duty police officers, file reports, and a spectacular photograph of an unidentifiable craft is retrieved and analyzed.
Here at home, a retired chief of the FAA's Accidents and Investigations Division reveals the agency's response to a thirty-minute encounter between an aircraft and a gigantic UFO over Alaska, which occurred during his watch and is documented on radar.
Now all three of these distinguished men have written breathtaking, firsthand accounts about these extraordinary incidents. They are joined by Air Force generals and a host of high-level sources--including Fife Symington III, former governor of Arizona, and Nick Pope, former head of the British Defence Ministry's UFO Investigative Unit--who have agreed to write their own detailed, personal stories about UFO encounters and investigations for the first time.
They are coming forward now because of Leslie Kean, an investigative reporter who has spent the last ten years studying the still unexplained UFO phenomenon. Kean reviewed hundreds of government documents, aviation reports, radar data, and case studies with corroborating physical evidence. She carefully examined scientifically analyzed photographs and interviewed dozens of high-level officials and aviation witnesses from around the world. With the support of former White House chief of staff John Podesta, Kean draws on her research to separate fact from fiction and to lift the veil on decades of U.S. government misinformation. Throughout, she presents irrefutable evidence that unknown flying objects--metallic, luminous, and seemingly able to maneuver in ways that defy the laws of physics--actually exist.
No one yet knows what these objects are, even though they affect aviation safety and possibly national security. The phenomenon has been officially acknowledged by numerous foreign governments. For these reasons and many others, Kean concludes that the UFO problem must be more widely recognized and ultimately solved through an unbiased scientific investigation. The material presented throughout this landmark book is sobering, unflinching, and undeniably awe-inspiring, and moves us toward a goal of properly addressing this worldwide mystery.

"From the Hardcover edition."

If only the war had lasted another six months, then Hitler would have won ... because his scientists stood upon the very brink of inventing flying saucers. That, at least, is the myth as it is currently being peddled today, in books, pamphlets and online; and, if it were true, squadrons of Luftwaffe spacecraft would certainly have made mincemeat out of British Spitfires and American B-52s. But, of course, it is a complete fiction. And yet the sinister myth of Nazi UFOs is surprisingly well developed. If you listen to its champions, escaped Nazis and their indoctrinated offspring are simply hiding in secret Antarctic bases, inside the Hollow Earth, somewhere upon another planet, or even within another dimension, just waiting for the right time to strike again - and this time, armed with saucers and in close alliance with Aryans from other star systems, they stand poised to finish what they started. Some even claim that Hitler and his chief henchmen did not really die in 1945, but were borne away in spirit on flying saucers. Such theories seem insane - but do they have a hidden purpose? White supremacists around the globe have adopted Nazi ufology to draw the gullible into the wider orbit of Far-Right ideology; after all, if the standard version of history is so wrong as to fail to acknowledge that Hitler helped invent UFOs, then what else might historians have got wrong about the Third Reich? Might the Nazis actually have been right all along? Could the Holocaust have been a total hoax? Once they have swallowed the first lie, a person might easily swallow several others. The stories in this book are bizarre: Nazi saucer-pilots fighting alongside Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War; alien boot-prints whose soles bear swastikas being found in the wake of UFO-landings; the leader of America's Nazi Silvershirts claiming to be in psychic contact with men from other galaxies; and Allied pilots being buzzed by fiery glowing 'foo fighters' during the Second World War. They may seem harmless at first, but they are not. Is it really the white race's destiny to conquer the icy reaches of space under the banner of the 'Aryan world spirit'? Perhaps not, but the conquest of their victims' inner space, not outer space, in the name of Hitlerism is what these latter-day Goebbels truly desire.