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Published in FATE, August 2005

Alien Log by Robert Farrell. R. E. Farrellbooks, LLC, 2003. 262 pp.

      I rarely read fiction.  Life's too short, and I prefer to spend my limited reading time learning more about various subjects.  I would not have read Alien Log except that I met the author, Dr. Robert Farrell, in July 2004 in Roswell, where we were both involved in author talks and book signings for the International UFO Museum and Research Center.   

      Dr. Farrell struck me as a very intelligent, kind, considerate man, intent on educating the public about UFOs and alien visitations.  He convinced me that although the story line and characters of Alien Log are fictitious, the information contained within is based on facts.

       I found his statement to be true.  Almost all of the major topics are included—UFO crashes, alien abductions, camouflaged military bases, government secrecy and cover-ups, crop circles, time travel, hybrids, Sumerian civilizations and propulsion theories.  Having researched such topics for 14 years, I could easily have gotten bored reading about them.  However, Farrell's book is so intriguing that once I started reading it, I didn't want to put it down.

       He hooks the reader from the very beginning.  A general who is dying of cancer gives a strange device to the President, but Farrell doesn't let the reader in on what it is.  The President orders Colonel Pete Mitchell to find out.  Mitchell, a 46-year-old Air Force officer, has a master's degree in aeronautical engineering.  He is attached to the Pentagon and has his mind set on becoming a general soon.  He recruits only two people to assist him on his Above-Top-Secret mission: Wendy Ahearn, a 27-year-old linguistics professor who has studied the Sumerian civilization, and Corey Newton, a gravity researcher in his early thirties who has a doctorate in astrophysics and writes UFO articles in his spare time.

       Farrell is skilled at using details to humanize his characters.  Mitchell, for example, says to Wendy after a long flight, "If you would like to use the restroom, there's one inside the terminal here."  And the reader learns early on that Wendy is a vegetarian, but Mitchell is a meat-and-potatoes man.

       The book's major weakness is that it is saturated with spelling, punctuation and grammatical errors.  Too, if I didn't know better, I would have thought that a different person wrote parts of the book.  Still, I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the topics it contains, but particularly to neophytes in the field of ufology.

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