Why Cover Up? Why Governments Conceal Evidence of Extraterrestrial Visitation

The author starts off referring to the Roswell crash of 1947 and the government cover-up, which involved the government leaning on potential witnesses to make it appear that nothing untoward had happened.

He quotes a 1988 mental health survey that revealed that about half those involved in the mental health field believed that mass panic would occur if the government announced that UFOs actually represented some form of alien civilization.

He believes that the financial impact of contact would be much worse than any mental contact. Although he does not directly reference it, assume that aliens might have something like the matter replicators that were seen in the Star Trek series. They are definitely theoretically possible. We know for an absolute fact that matter can be converted into energy. What scientists and politicians don't seem to want to acknowledge is the fact that because the matter/energy conversion is done via an equation, that equations work both ways, so if matter can be changed into energy, then energy can be changed into matter. It must work that way, period.

Now, imaging the replicators were real and you could replicate clothes, food, etc. The need for stores that sold those items would drop considerably. They would never disappear totally, probably, since the replicators might not be able to replicate every single style of clothing, but the need for the stores would decrease. Of course, that would only be after the greatest copyright fight in the history of the earth, since all producers of goods would scream that the replicators were violating their copyrights.

Assuming that the copyright issue would not stop the use of replicators (and it could very well since the ultra-rich would not necessarily stand to profit by replicator use and they would most likely be strongly against their use), then lots of people would be out of jobs. The need for money, except to pay the bill for the energy used, would be lowered.

The thing that most likely would survive just as it has today is the field of the arts. More people might enter that field if they were freed from their everyday jobs. Then, again, the replicator/copyright problem would be there also.

This work is very, very short and does not even begin to examine the question of why the cover-up by the government. One major issue it leaves out is the one that sociologists have found; whenever a technologically advanced civilization encounters a technologically less-advanced one, the one that is least advanced often suffers very major problems if not total collapse.

One rather horrible example is that of wars. Who won World War II? The Allied powers. Why? We had the atomic bomb first. Particularly in the Pacific theater, the U.S. had, let's say half-way through the war or so, the more advanced air force since Japan's ability to produce planes was damaged by our bombing, and their technological changes to their planes were not adequate. (They also lost most of their best pilots in the various battles such as Midway.)

The book also does not go into any detail at all about how the government covers things up. When you read a lot of the UFO literature you find out that the government will lean on people to keep them quiet. They also have the military behind them and can close off areas and take any debris, then deny anything at all happened.

The era of true investigative reporting is dead, so there is no actual pressure from the news media to uncover any conspiracy, plus the government itself has used the concept of a conspiracy to make fun of those who believe there is one.

Another question that should have been asked in the book is why haven't the aliens, if they exist, revealed themselves?

The author says that there has been reverse-engineering of crashed alien craft yet, when you examine the history of scientific advances, there really isn't anything that has come about that represents a true quantum leap of knowledge; science builds on previous science, technology builds on previous technology, and that seems to remain true. Any actual reverse-engineering would have resulted in inventions that would have been incredibly far advanced compared to what would be produced under normal scientific progress, and this is something we have not seen.

Thus, the book is very limited in its scope, leaving out many questions that should have been asked, and not really delving that much into the one it does ask.