Read it now:
Lies Above: How the Pentagon Misled Congress and Cost America its Skies, the new investigation from cybersecurity professional David A. Burkett, is now available in paperback and hardcover.
Burkett has spent his career spotting deception in data. He grew up religious in the South, found his footing in the skeptic community, and made a living pulling the signal out of the noise. So when 60 Minutes aired the Navy's Tic Tac footage in 2021, he assumed the ordinary explanations would win. Instead he watched careful people defend a conclusion by ignoring the radar returns, the jamming, and the sensor data that didn't fit. The blurry video was never the story. What happened to the rest of the evidence was.
That question pulls the book through seventy years of the record. Burkett tracks the official campaign to ridicule the subject back to a single declassified source, the CIA's 1953 Robertson Panel, and follows the stigma it manufactured all the way to the present, where it still decides what scientists and reporters will say out loud. He sits down with Dr. Harald Malmgren, who advised four presidents, and gathers testimony from intelligence officers, Navy aviators, and the congressional staff who have seen what stays classified.
Three claims that stand on their own. Washington has misled the public about these objects since the 1940s. Military instruments have recorded performance that nothing in the open record can explain. And a classification system sold as protection has become a shield against accountability. Strip the UFOs out entirely, and the secrecy alone is the scandal.
Every claim is sourced, nearly every page carries a QR code that opens the original document, and a companion app keeps those links alive as the originals move or vanish.
Less a UFO book than a field guide to how official deception gets built, and how it gets caught.
Available now: