The New Age dimension of alien contact hadn’t emerged yet, and neither had the idea of a government conspiracy whose depths made it functionally magical. What you have, instead, is the suppressed hysteria of a generation that had seen the atom split, had lived through the war’s devastation, had seen humanity’s idea of itself transfigured more than once, in a few short years, and in progressively more disturbing ways. By telling the story of the alien cover-up, Keyhoe is registering an early flutter of the needle in what became the slow collapse of democratic faith. But he’s also preserving the
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