After a month's hiatus POTG returns with a new category: UFO fiction! Here's a cheerfully sleazy offering from author George H. Leonard, who also wrote one of the all-time great works (and titles) of UFO fiction/nonfiction, Somebody Else Is On The Moon, which claimed mysterious megalithic structures were visible in NASA lunar photographs ... This thriller is far more down to earth but still carries our bewildered protagonist on a crash course trek through three decades of UFO hunting, with lots of namedropping and references to the Falcon Lake, Manitoba encounter of 1967, South American UFOs, and Californian Contactees among others.
Leonard is canny enough to work it all into an original configuration rather than simply recycle Bluebook/disclosure conspiracies, though there's plenty of globetrotting and some CIA/KGB skulduggery. It's all competently written and the ending is as satisfying as any of these UFO/mystery novels can be, so many of which fail to stick the landing after spending 200-300 pages crafting their Ufological setting.
A 1981 reprint of the novel changed the title to Alien Quest, to differentiate it from a certain film which had come out in 1979.
3/4
Playboy Press, 1977
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