Need to Know

About the Author

By the time Timothy Good published this book, nearly two decades after Above Top Secret first made him, in The Observer's phrase, "Britain's leading UFO researcher," he was no longer a violinist doing UFO research on the side — his full biography, including the London Symphony Orchestra years and the Above Top Secret origin story, is covered at length in this site's own Above Top Secret entry (ER-004). What's specific to this later book is the bibliography that had accumulated in between: Alien Liaison (1991), Beyond Top Secret (1996, an explicit revision and expansion of Above Top Secret), Alien Base (1998), and Unearthly Disclosure (2000, serialized in the Daily Mail) — and the standing that run of books had, by 2006, earned him within the field: a 1998 invitation to lecture at the Pentagon's Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Office and a 2002 lecture at French Air Force headquarters, both cited by his literary agency as evidence of institutional access few UFO authors of any era could claim.

Historical Context & Origins

This book arrived into a field whose landscape had shifted considerably since 1987. The Majestic 12 documents Good had helped introduce to the public in Above Top Secret were, by 2006, widely regarded as fabricated following the FBI's own November 1988 investigation; the U.S. Air Force had twice tried to close the book on Roswell with its 1994 and 1997 reports; and Good's own intervening titles — particularly Alien Base and Unearthly Disclosure — had drifted toward more speculative contact and liaison-program material than the source-driven approach that built his original reputation. Need to Know was explicitly positioned as a course correction back toward that earlier, document-anchored style, applied to material gathered across the six years since his previous book.

The specific sub-genre this book leans into most heavily — military and intelligence reports of unidentified craft over nuclear-weapons installations — was itself gaining a dedicated following in exactly this period. Robert Hastings, who had been compiling missile-site witness testimony since the 1970s, would publish his own single-subject volume, UFOs and Nukes, in July 2008 and stage a National Press Club event on the subject in September 2010. Good's book, arriving in between the underground researcher circuit's growing focus on this material and Hastings's later, more publicized formalization of it, functions as an early general-readership survey of a case file — nuclear-site intrusions specifically — that would soon become its own specialized literature.

Its publishing context also marked a step down from Above Top Secret's original run: where that book had appeared from William Morrow, a major New York trade house, this one was issued in the U.S. by Pegasus Books, a smaller press distributed through Consortium, reflecting UFO literature's more marginalized position in mainstream publishing by the mid-2000s even as cable documentary series on the same subject proliferated on the History Channel and elsewhere.

Core Arguments & Key Concepts

The book's central structure is a chronological survey of official military and intelligence encounters with the subject, opening with wartime "foo fighter" reports and Mussolini-era Italian air force interest in the 1930s, moving through the 1946 Scandinavian "ghost rocket" wave and the 1947 Roswell debris recovery, and continuing forward into the 2000s. Reviewers who examined the book at length noted its heavy reliance on footnoting and on reproduced photocopies or scanned government documents appended to individual chapters — the same documentary apparatus that gave Above Top Secret its original credibility, redeployed here across a far longer timeline.

Where Above Top Secret was organized primarily around land-based sightings and a single explosive documentary claim (Majestic 12), this book gives comparatively more space to naval and undersea material: reports from naval personnel of unidentified submarine objects (USOs), and accounts of unknown craft hovering at low altitude above aircraft carriers and destroyers, treated as part of the same pattern of officially witnessed but unacknowledged incursions.

Nuclear-weapons installations form the book's most sustained single thread, and the one with the clearest connection to this site's own case files: chapters devoted to reports of unidentified objects over American and international missile fields and airfields, including the 1967 Malmstrom AFB Echo and Oscar Flight shutdowns and reports connected to F.E. Warren Air Force Base, framed as part of a governmental pattern of monitoring and containing incidents at exactly the installations where an intrusion would carry the highest possible stakes.

The book's most speculative and most heavily criticized material concerns direct presidential contact: the book repeats claims that President Eisenhower met with extraterrestrial visitors at Edwards Air Force Base, California, in February 1954; that President Kennedy was shown the bodies of non-human occupants at a Florida Air Force medical facility; and that President Nixon arranged for entertainer Jackie Gleason to view alien remains in 1973. Good presents these accounts with the same footnoted, document-supported apparatus used throughout the rest of the book, a juxtaposition that later critics single out as the point where the book's evidentiary standards visibly slip.

The book also updates its case for the present moment with recent pilot testimony, including an account of a triangular craft that reportedly buzzed two commercial airliners approaching Dublin Airport closely enough to damage one aircraft — presented as evidence that the pattern the book traces back to the 1930s was, as of the mid-2000s, still actively unfolding rather than a closed historical question.

Key Cases & Evidence Discussed

The book's treatment of nuclear-installation intrusions draws this site's own Malmstrom AFB Missile Shutdowns entry (Case File #092, March 1967) directly into its narrative, situating the Echo and Oscar Flight shutdowns within a broader pattern of military reports at missile complexes worldwide rather than treating Malmstrom as an isolated American anomaly.

This site's own Warren AFB Nuclear Silo Intrusion entry (Case File #119, August 1965) is cited on this site directly in connection with this book, reflecting the same nuclear-site emphasis: the August 1965 Blue Book memorandum documenting objects over F.E. Warren's Quebec Flight launch complex, preserved today largely because Dr. J. Allen Hynek published it in his own 1972 book.

This site's own UFOs & Nuclear Weapons theory page cites this book directly for its early general-readership compilation of governmental directives and classified communications regarding nuclear-installation intrusions — the same territory Robert Hastings would formalize into a dedicated single-subject book the following year.

The book's opening chapters revisit the 1947 Roswell Incident and the broader Cold War-era wave material Good had already covered in Above Top Secret, now folded into this book's longer chronological sweep rather than presented as new research — a continuity with his first book this article's Critical Reception section treats as a genuine point of contention among reviewers.

Critical Reception & Controversies

Kirkus Reviews, assessing the book on its December 2007 release, called it "an obsessively researched look" at what Good presents as ample international evidence of UFO visitation since the 1930s, concluding that "the author certainly knows his stuff, and to his credit is keenly aware of the importance of documentation, however specious some of it may seem" — a review that, much like Kirkus's own earlier assessment of Above Top Secret, credits the research effort while withholding endorsement of the conclusions.

Publishers Weekly, reviewing the book on September 24, 2007, called it "exhaustive and provocative," noting that Good marshals "hundreds of sightings" and declassified government reports in support of dramatic claims including alleged presidential contact with extraterrestrials. The review's central criticism was direct: Good "fails to provide incontrovertible evidence of UFOs, extraterrestrials or a global conspiracy," and "ignores contradictory testimony, exaggerates rumors and circumstantial evidence, and reprises old charges." It concluded that "UFO enthusiasts will appreciate this comprehensive and spirited UFO defense and the hundreds of supporting documents reproduced within" — praise calibrated specifically for an already-sympathetic readership.

Writing for Blogcritics on April 23, 2009, reviewer Glen Boyd was considerably more favorable, calling the book "basically an update on Above Top Secret, and... no less impressive," and crediting Good with having "once again distinguished himself with another classic that lets the facts speak for themselves, and allows the reader to render their own judgment." Boyd's review leaned heavily on the reputation Above Top Secret had already built, treating this book's research standard as a continuation of that earlier credibility rather than assessing it independently.

A more skeptical retrospective assessment, published on the blog Jumbled Thoughts of a Fake Geek Boy in September 2020, took the opposite view of that same continuity. The reviewer described the book as "a broadly chronological history of military and intelligence agency interest in UFOs from Mussolini's Italy up to the present day," but characterized it substantially as a restatement of Good's own earlier work — useful, in the reviewer's assessment, mainly for readers unable to obtain his out-of-print earlier titles, rather than as a genuinely new investigation. The review identified a recurring temporal-bias problem (most accounts tracing back to the 1950s UFO flap, with corroborating testimony often surfacing decades after the fact), noted that Good continued citing the Majestic 12 documents despite their by-then well-established status as fabrications, and concluded that the book ultimately reflects "a need to believe" rather than a rigorous evidentiary standard.

The book's own promotional blurbs, drawn from within the UFO-research press rather than mainstream review outlets, ran in the opposite direction: UFO Digest called it "one of the best books on this subject," and Eye Spy magazine described it as "clearly the best book to have been published on this phenomenon in two decades" — the kind of publisher-selected praise that, as with the jacket blurbs on Above Top Secret two decades earlier, represents the field's own favorable reception rather than independent critical assessment.

Influence & Legacy

Within organized ufology specifically, the book earned Good a platform at MUFON's own symposium circuit, where he presented its central nuclear-installation and military-intelligence material directly to the organization's membership — a modest but genuine continuation of the standing Above Top Secret had established for him within the field two decades earlier.

The book's reach extended well past its original 2006/2007 hardcover printings: it was later issued in a digital audiobook edition, extending its availability into the 2020s podcast-and-audiobook UFO-media ecosystem that Above Top Secret's own original readership could not have anticipated.

Read against Good's full bibliography, this book occupies a specific transitional position: his last full-length volume built primarily around the documentary, footnoted military-and-intelligence-report method that made his name, before his final book, Earth: An Alien Enterprise (2013), moved further into explicitly exotic contact and alleged human-alien "liaison programme" territory. Read that way, Need to Know is less a sequel to Above Top Secret than its last full echo — the final time Good built an entire book around the specific claim that started his career: that the paperwork, if you looked hard enough, was already there.

Within this site's own coverage, the book's persistent citation in connection with Cold War-era nuclear-missile-site incidents — rather than with any of Good's more speculative later claims — reflects where its material has proven most durably useful to later researchers: not the Eisenhower or Jackie Gleason stories, which found little independent traction, but the Malmstrom- and Warren-adjacent military documentation that anticipated Robert Hastings's own more focused nuclear-site research the following year.

The Book

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