Book Review of: The Aztec UFO Incident

The case, evidence, and elaborate cover-up of one of the most perplexing crashes in history

Price: About $17
 

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Reviewer: Mark Lamendola, author of over 6,000 articles.

I've read many UFO-related books and found most of them to be quite interesting. I have yet to read one that provides a solid case for the existence of UFOs. Great circumstantial evidence, but often great circular reasoning with a generous dose of non-sequitors.

This book was interesting. It did not provide a solid case proving that a flying saucer crashed in the desert (or in any other locale). The authors made many assertions, but simply repeating something does not make it true. So I disagree with their claim that they proved an alien space ship crashed here. They did, however, prove quite a few people were lying about whatever did happen.

They seemed to disprove the commonly cited explanations for this alleged flying saucer crash, but the falsehood of those does not confer validity on their explanation. They also raised questions that would be hard to answer without the flying saucer in the mix; hard, but not necessarily impossible. Or to put it another way, the flying saucer explanation is the easy one. The real answer might be very difficult to determine.

It does seem certain that "the government" (or, more accurately, people holding government jobs--not the same thing though often equated) covered up something. But just as Eric Holder tried to cover up Fast and Furious, a cover-up doesn't prove that space aliens were visiting. No sign of intelligent life in Washington, DC anyhow....

Several problems exist with UFO theory, such as why are there no smartphone pictures of these craft if they are visiting us so much and even abducting people? And how do these large craft avoid being seen? Why would they want to avoid being seen--except by people who are unimportant in society? Why are they (seemingly always) flying around at night instead of during the day? Why have astronomers never spotted them entering our atmosphere, keeping in mind there are millions of amateur astronomers fully capable of doing this? What do they want here? They aren't coming after our resources (e.g., water, gold, whatever) in those tiny ships, so if they aren't talking to us what is the point of their visit?

Of course, these questions don't mean we've never had alien visitors from other planets or dimensions. Nor do they mean we don't have them now. But if space aliens are visiting, you have to wonder about these things. And you have to be more than a tad skeptical when "eye witnesses" claim to have seen them.

This brings up my major observation about this book. The "proof" the authors provided seemed to consist mostly of eye witness accounts or "years after the fact" recollections. It's well-established that human recollections are faulty and that eye witnesses often get things very wrong. From a scientific standpoint, their input isn't valid data. There's a large body of authoritative literature on this issue, so I won't go into it here.

In addition to the personal anecdotes of presumed eye-witnesses, the authors provide a smattering of redacted and/or poorly photocopied official documents. I didn't find that these proved much of anything.

Where the authors did get into some good analysis was in looking at the site itself and artifacts present there. For example, what was that large cement pad for? Perhaps for a crane? It is hard to say what it was for, but its existence doesn't prove it was there for the purpose of removing an alien spacecraft. Where the good analysis came into play is where the authors debunked one "it wasn't a saucer" explanation after another. But again, proving that government employees lie does not prove that a flying saucer crashed.

The value for me in a book like this is how the author (or in this case, authors) use logic and/or evidence to show that some government-issued claim is false. This sort of thing brings hope for the de-zombification of the populace. Expose enough lies, and maybe people will stop being so gullible and so trusting of folks for whom lying is SOP. Maybe they will see how to step through the analysis and start doing that themselves on other issues.

But we can't turn the "Aztec Incident" or other possible UFO crashes into a multiple choice question where answers A through D are disproven government employee claims and E is "It was a flying saucer." No, on that list of answers E needs to be "Something else happened."

I read every work that another UFO writer releases, because even though he provides far more actual evidence than these authors he never leaps to a conclusion that doesn't necessarily follow from the evidence. He just leaves the reader with questions. I find his work fascinating, and enjoyable to read. This book would have been more enjoyable if the authors had been more objective and less determined to see every anomaly as "proof."

Still, it was well-written and it brought up quite a few things that are rather thought-provoking.