Tom Clancy's view on UFOs

Dear readers

Best selling US author Tom Clancy (with Grant Blackwood) has a 2010 novel out titled "Dead or Alive" (published by Michael Joseph. New York. ISBN 978-0-718-15741-8.) It's the usual action packed spy and military novel we have come to expect from Clancy.

However, a section of page 756 came as a surprise to me, when I read it the other day. Clancy and Blackwood describe a truck driver, working for the US Government who undergoes a special training program. "Mostly they drilled him on emergency procedures: what to do of someone tried to high jack the load; what to do if he got into an accident; what to do if a UFO came down and beamed him out of the cab..."

Well, I know it's only a very small line in a fictional story, but it led me to wonder what Clancy's views were on the UFO phenomenon? Clancy has previously spoken of the very knowledgeable military personnel who he knows through his research for his novels.

I then recalled that Clancy had written a "commentary" for John B Alexander's 2011 book "UFOs:myths, conspiracies and realities," (published by Thomas Dunne books. New York. ISBN 978-0-312-64834-3.)

In the commentary (p. xix)Clancy opens with "Like most Americans, I've been reading about UFOs since I saw my first flying saucer movie back in 1954 or so."

Referring to Alexander's book "This book is, I think, maybe the first-ever look into a question that millions of people have, and more to the point, it's a look that asks questions and looks for hard answers...What he says you can take to the bank."

After speaking of the growth of our own technology "We can assume that UFOs, if they exist, have computer power such as we have not yet dreamed about, and what else can they do? Dimensional corridors that by-pass space-time? If so, then they can hop from place to place faster than the speed of light. Or even time travel? What we consider reality would be immensely limiting to the pilots of such craft.
We cannot know, and even if we did know, could we understand? Probably, yes."

Comparing out state of knowledge of UFOs, Clancy concludes "And so it is with the UFO. We do not know how they, if they are real, operate. All we can do is to gather information, draw conclusions from it, then advance a step at a time in the hope of catching up."