AUTHORS WANT A UFO MYSTERY

UFO Authors often have ulterior motives to keep UFOs mysterious.

Authors have the goal of making money.

UFOs sell books. Explanations don't.

While a UFO case is still a mystery, people buy books about it. They also increase their purchases of books on the general subject of UFOs.
As soon as the primary sighting is identified as something ordinary, the UFO sightings die off, because people quit looking for them.
As soon as the UFO sightings die off, the book sales about that sighting die off. General UFO book sales die down to where they were before the sightings occurred.
Once sales drop, authors try to find ways to increase interest again.

The goal of making money affects what authors do.

What UFO authors due to increase book sales:

Authors write books exposing new mysteries that were unknown before, to sell books.
Some authors resort to the trick of launching fire balloons to keep interest alive.
Often an author writes a book that attacks the recent identification of a UFO case as a known object.
An honest author who exposes UFOs as conventional objects finds that his books do not sell as much as the UFO books that promote the mystery.

Authors often deliberately combine unrelated material into the UFO story.

Examples:

Authors tend to combine into the UFO story any reports of unrelated events (e.g. power failures, radio or TV interference, cars not running, etc). Often they do it intentionally to increase the mystery (and the sales)
When an unexplained power failure occurs, some authors tend to combine it with all of the UFO sightings that occur in the area.
Authors also tend to include anything any crackpot says about UFOs as the truth.

Authors often ignore sources of information.

Examples:

They report that one airport said the UFO could not have been a plane. But they fail to understand that:
1. Military air bases don't have any information on commercial and private flights.
2. Commercial airports don't have any information on military and private flights.
3. Private airports know about only those flights that actually use that airport.
4. Many private flights are not known to any airports in the area.
5. Before 9/11/2001, many flights were known to only the pilots who were flying them.
After a rash of UFO sightings in 1965, an author called one aerial advertising company. When they said their planes were not in the air at the time, the author concluded that aerial advertising did not cause the sightings. But he didn't bother to check if other companies offered aerial advertising in the area.

The author sometimes embellishes what the witness reports.

Examples of "facts" the author adds to the case:

The witness cannot know the true size, distance, speed, or altitude of an unknown object seen against the sky more than 30 feet away through visual observation alone. Without other clues to at least one of these values, the human visual system is unable to accurately provide these values. The values obtained are erroneous, distorted by guesses about the identity of the object. But the author reports these perceptions as fact.
The witness offers effects he experienced that he attributes to the UFO. Such effects include effects commonly experienced whenever a human comes across anything strange: heightened awareness, slowing of time, tingling, enhanced hearing, and other effects on the body. But the author reports them as though the UFO must have caused them.
Witnesses offer sounds and smells as though the object produced them. Strange sounds and smells could have many other sources. But the author reports them as coming from the UFO.
They report the reactions of animals to the presence of the UFO. But, while the animals might have been reacting to something else, the author concludes that the UFO caused the reaction.
When a UFO witness who had a Geiger counter reported that it showed a dangerous level of radiation when a UFO hovered half a mile away, the author accepted this report as real, even though no people in the houses closer to the UFO had radiation sickness.

Authors often imply "UFO" when the unusual happens.

Whenever some unusual event happens, some authors say UFOs might have caused it:

During the 1965 Northeast Blackout, two authors said that UFOs might have caused it.
UFOs and aliens were linked by authors to the 1967 fall of the Silver Bridge carrying US-35 between Point Pleasant WV and Gallipolis OH.
Authors linked UFOs to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
Some authors tried to link the deaths of some of our astronauts to UFOs.

Authors sometimes come up with wild theories to explain how UFOs fly or why they do what they do.

Authors have suggested the following "theories" of UFO operation:

One author claimed that a UFO used microwaves to steal power from his car battery, draining it. Something was probably wrong with his car.
Some authors have devised means where rotation of an "inertial element" within the UFO can produce lift. But like perpetual motion machines, the forces always balance out,
Some have proposed propulsion based on "secret" properties of certain chemical elements, such as mercury, gold, and element 115. Others propose tapping a free-energy source they say exists in the universe. Still others say the UFO mines what it needs from space.
Many authors propose antigravity to explain the apparent lack of inertia in the motions of UFOs.
One author says that UFOs are actually plasma discharges from unusual energy concentrations. Another says that the UFOs themselves are actually living beings from space.
A very few authors say that UFOs are not homogeneous, and that there are many different causes for individual UFO sightings.

Authors have proposed the following reasons why space aliens have come to earth:

Many authors believe UFO occupants came to keep us from destroying ourselves. Some others believe that we are a threat to the rest of the universe, and that the aliens will intervene to prevent the threat.
One popular theory is that UFOs are from a planet that is becoming uninhabitable. These beings need a place to live, and earth is all they could find.
Still others believe that UFO aliens planted the human race here, and that the aliens are now observing us. Some of them even believe that the aliens are interbreeding with us.
A few authors believe the UFOs are secret NAZI devices. A few others believe that UFOs are carrying either God's angels or satan's demons.

Many authors have proposed conspiracies where government is hiding the truth about UFOs.

The most common claim is that the government has secret files that tell the truth about UFOs. But since it is impossible to prove that something does not exist, government has no way to refute this claim.
Some claim that government has crashed UFOs and dead aliens hidden in secret underground bases, hangars, and laboratories.
A few authors have claimed that their own education and employment histories were deleted by government action. But some went too far.
One claimed that his name and picture were removed from the yearbooks where he attended college. But it would be impossible for government to find and replace every copy of a yearbook, since government would have no way to know where every copy is. And nobody complained that the signatures they collected in their yearbooks were suddenly missing (as they would be if a yearbook had been surreptitiously replaced).
Some go as far as claiming that UFOs have secret bases on the earth. Some even claim that the US government is working with the aliens on secret projects.