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Len Kaster's book The Secret History of Extraterrestrials has plenty of chapters, there needs to be -- he is a man with much to say about the truth surrounding aliens and whether they exist. He starts the first chapter with the reason for this book, being his own encounter with aliens he describes as an actual close encounter as he felt nauseous at being in the craft itself. The fact there are a great deal of chapters in this novel means Kaster has a lot of newly discovered information on aliens to back up what might be conceived as bizarre claims by the author.

Kaster begins with the all too familiar story by George Adamski, and his brush with aliens, catching his first sighting of the beings in 1946, and his story was soon to become the beginning of the Venusian sightings in the US. The Venusians were tall, humanoid and slender of body, with blond hair they looked every bit alien and straight out of an SF novel, but to Adamski they were as real as human beings.

In one chapter, a document is unearthed about alien visitations on Earth that had not come to light before the mid-60s. Events mentioned in the document tell of extra terrestrials who successfully resemble humans encountering people from across the world, one in Italy, who spoke perfect Italian and one in Denmark who spoke their language as if it were their own. As the human-looking aliens could pass so well for our kind, it made the military sit up and think more closely:

"It was cases like these, involving ET s that were human look-alikes, that really electrified the military. That meant that aliens could be walking down the corridors of the Pentagon unrecognized."

The document would cause anyone who read it to feel daunted by the possibility of aliens disguised as humans, free roaming, though only if they had a sinister purpose in mind. Most of us would like the thought of meeting people from another world, as it is such a large universe, we would be arrogant to think we are the only ones to occupy it.

Readers will find it isn't long before Kaster gets onto the subject of the Roswell incident, as it has caused so much controversy over the past fifty years. Though the evidence is there many still see Roswell as fake entertainment at best, while others stand by their principles and believe the alien they found to be as real as the footage. The whole incident is open for debate, and will be for some time to come. Kaster gives a decent account of the findings and results of the investigation, and some good reasons for both sides after.

Another more controversial issue over the past few years has been crop circles. Once believed to be messages left by aliens for us earthlings to read into have been the subject of books about them, yet most have been considered laughable, and in many cases the farmers were creating the crop circles themselves just so they could get on TV. The first of these crop circles was found back in England in 2002 in Crabwood. Kaster thought the depiction of the alien and what was believed to be a CD next to it was code left by the aliens for us to decipher:

"The face was enclosed in a precise rectangular frame 250 x 360 feet in dimension. The alien had an angry, scowling expression, as if it were saying, "maybe this will wake you all up!" Thrust out in front of it, clutched in its four-fingered hand, was a circular disc, obviously representing a CD, encoded with a circular progression of "dots" (i.e., bunches of wheat) and spaces radiating out from the center in a spiral pattern. Upon close inspection, it was obvious that all the spaces and dots were of equal size, but there was a smaller space after each group of eight. To anyone with a computer background, it was very evident that the dots represented 1's and the spaces were 0's. In other words, this was binary code."

Many of us will have come to our own conclusion on the crop circles issue. Some will believe that they are encoded messages from another planet there to guide us while others will merely see them as someone's idea of a prank done at the farmer's expense. Kaster, though only talks for the argument, in the belief that aliens are among us, or he would not have gone to such trouble to gather the information he has in this volume.

For the next few chapters, Kaster goes on to mention the influence science fiction movies have had on the public; how technology has moved forward so quickly and why, plus more info on Roswell. There is more, but there isn't enough space for it in this review. Regardless of the readers views on extraterrestrials and their existence whether real or false, this book is a gripping read full of inspiration, plus a special eight-page series of color plates of artwork done by artist, Jim Nichols.

Sandra has yet to see a crop circle in her town, and thinks if she did see one, she might freak, but at lest she would remember this book. When she isn't freaking out, she writes reviews for Love Vampires, Vampire Romance Books, and Quail Bell magazine.