How this novel came to be, and other personal anecdotes
PLEA TO ET: Before I even begin, I’d first like to make a plea to any extraterrestrials reading this. Please reach out to me, I’m begging you. You can contact me at [email protected]. And please, call me Doug. I would love to know what the hell is really going on out there, and I’m willing to offer anything you want in return (although I have to draw the line at any kind of probing, just to be clear).
Also, if you have nanite tech like that depicted in this novel, I volunteer to be a test subject. Finally, if you need someone to save the galaxy using only pluck and an ability to tell a tall tale, I’m your man.
Regardless, if you could contact me I’d be truly grateful. I promise to be a good listener, and I’m really good at keeping secrets.
Besides, who would I tell?
AM I JASON RAMSEY: Some of you might suspect that Jason Ramsey is somewhat patterned after me. Well, that’s clearly absurd. He isn’t. Not in any way.
Okay . . . maybe a little.
I guess he is the author of a number of near-future thrillers that are heavy on science fact. Oh, and he did do graduate work in science before leaving to pursue other avenues. (Jason because he was better at writing than physics, and me because I was sloppy, worked with carcinogens and radiation, and really didn’t like lab work.) And sure, it is true that, like Jason, when I began thinking of what to write after finishing my last novel, I felt burned out, and couldn’t come up with anything. And I’ve also become just the slightest bit obsessed with finding out about what’s going on with UFOs.
Then, too, if I’m going to be honest, like Jason, I don’t think I’m a natural when it comes to writing. The plotting is always brutally difficult for me, and the writing isn’t nearly as effortless as it seems to be for many of my writer friends.
And I do feel as though I use every good idea I’ve ever had in each novel, only to have to come up with a novel-full of additional ideas for the next one.
Finally, like Jason in the novel, I’m well aware of just how lucky I am to be able to do this for a living, and to have people out there (other than my mother) actually willing to read my work.
In fact, now that I think of it, just about all of Jason’s musings on the subject of writing match my own.
But even if he and I do share some similarities, I would never imply that I could be as heroic as he ended up being, or as clever, or as determined, and so on. And when Tessa lists the qualities she loves about him, I’m not suggesting that this is how I view myself, because no one could be that narcissistic (not to mention delusional, which is what I’d be if I believed that any of these superlatives applied to me).
There are additional overlaps between me and Jason, but I won’t detail what is me and what isn’t. But I should clarify one important difference between us. Unlike Jason Ramsey, the woman I love was actually born on this planet—even if it sometimes seems otherwise.
For all of you out there who are not married to me, feel free to interpret this last however you’d like. To my lovely wife—hi Honey!—the correct meaning of this statement is obvious. There are times when it seems to me you were born in outer space, yes, but only because you’re exactly like Tessa Barrett—practically perfect in every way.
Or is that Mary Poppins?
HOW THIS NOVEL CAME TO BE: For all the reasons outlined in the novel, it’s become clear that UFOs are real. I mean, the US military has announced publicly that Navy pilots were seeing UFOs almost every single day between 2014 and 2015. Every single day. And these craft were thumbing their noses at our most advanced jets, as if they had been built in the Stone Ages.
To me, a lifelong fan of Star Trek (which I’m guessing doesn’t come as a huge surprise), this is as cool as it gets. I resisted believing UFOs were real until very recently (reasoning the same way Jason Ramsey did in the novel). But when I read the papers that I’ll link to later in this discussion, discovered the issued Navy patents that Jason spoke about on the podcast, and saw the 60 Minutes report and the like, I was finally fully convinced.
Like Jason, the more real UFOs became to me, the more often I featured aliens and alien technology in my novels. Finally, I threw caution to the wind and decided I had to address this head on. I had to try to write a novel that would review the current state of our UFO understanding, and then try to come up with a fun, wild, and (hopefully) entertaining explanation for what they’re doing here, and why they’ve behaved as they have.
I’m sure that many readers have followed the UFO literature for much longer than I have and have a wealth of knowledge that puts mine to shame. I tried to get my arms around it all, but found this to be impossible, not unless I wanted to give up my entire life for a decade. Just the UFO documentaries and numerous television series on ancient alien astronauts alone would require around-the-clock viewing for a year or more to finish.
It soon became clear that I couldn’t possibly come up with a fictional account that could explain every last piece of the puzzle (since I couldn’t even identify all the pieces in the first place). Even if I could, it would take a novel twenty-thousand pages long to do it.
So, instead, I decided I’d take a stab at explaining just a small subset of the questions surrounding UFOs, extraterrestrials, and UFO lore—ignoring any of it prior to the 1940s.