My new book is going to have a space ship in it.

Oh? That’s not enough for you? You want more? Kidding.

But yes, it will involve the exploration of a downed spaceship. One that’s crashed onto our planet and has been forgotten about for decades. I wanted to tie it into real-world UFO studies/history and thought it would be cool to have a UFO conspiracist (is it still a conspiracy if it’s real? Advocate maybe?) character to help explain all of that to unfamiliar readers. This character can rattle off case studies and sightings. That kind of thing.

One big problem, though. Aside from the Roswell crash, I didn’t know any of the other major ones. So I started researching.

First off, I found this amazing resource here, aptly titled Best UFO Resources. It’s been a godsend of information all painstakingly catalogued and organized.

I just got through UFOs: What to Do an internal document published by the RAND corporation and the Rockefeller-sponsored UFO Briefing Document – The best available evidence and I gotta tell you, this is fascinating stuff!

Growing up, we’ve always been interested in UFOs and the paranormal in my house so this was very much going home again for me. What I didn’t realize was just how much information was really out there.

Some of these cases are really well documented and the sightings were seen by many, many people. So whatever it was, something happened. It’s incredible to read about how the agendas of the organizations specifically created to investigate this stuff ended up changing over the years. Take project Blue Book for instance. That was the Air Force’s designated UFO research group but it eventually turned into a smear campaign against the very thing it was supposed to be investigating. That’s probably a book in itself.

Anyway, as I’m working on my own world building for the book I’m going to write, I’m struck with a few weird inconsistencies.

So even with the mountain of reports and anecdotal evidence I’m reading, I still can’t help but think of the Fermi paradox. If the math says there should be other intelligent life out there, where are they?

Then we get into the sightings reported in this UFO research. If extraterrestrials have been visiting Earth for some time to study us why are the ships so different? There’s some frequent shapes in the sightings but saucers, orbs, cylinders, and triangles all strike me as very different craft. So are these the same species with different kinds of tech?

I mean a B-52 Bomber doesn’t look like a helicopter but there’s still SOME design consistency.

So what’s up with the different ships? Are they all different races? In which case, that means that multiple races are all interested in Earth of some reason either A. independently of each other or B. as part of some larger conglomeration. But if that was the case, why so many? Wouldn’t one report back be enough to satisfy that coalition group?

Maybe I’m answering my own question here. If different races keep visiting us as evidenced by the different designs of their craft, then that means they aren’t working together BUT they’re all interested in something about our planet.

I wonder what that is.

These are the kinds of questions I need to figure out for my new book if I’m going to make any headway with it.