Not For Disclosure: UFOs: The World’s Best-Kept Secret by Jonathan Caplan (book review)
This latest book on UAPs has an ex-King’s Consel Jonathan Caplan as a writer which offers some credentials. For me, that isn’t enough in itself. There’s been other high profile writers in the past.
If this book, ‘Not For Disclosure: UFOs: The World’s Best-Kept Secret’, loses on something then its not enough photos, although I suspect that might be copyright and expense issues. There are some, including one of a grounded UAP with a few wooden chairs facing it on page 54. Caplan has, however, interviewed many people who have even UAPS who have military background. The number of times military aircraft from across the world have seen or buzzed by these craft, it’s more amazing that it’s been kept quiet for so long. The number of alien species is marked around 40, which sounds like a UN full, especially if they have their own agendas and bases. Then the numbers varied from 5 to 27. You would think someone would come across some of these, but these extra-terrestrial visitors know how to make people forget so who knows?
A lot of the chapters look at Majestic 12 and historic cases but doesn’t really offer much that I didn’t know already. Some cases look at people who were in the know but discretely executed should they reveal anything. It does raise a few questions. I mean, how did Majestic 12 recruit and replace their own number as they got older and, more importantly, what was it replaced with. Considering the number of downed UAPs and alien bodies, you would have thought news would have gotten out from some countries than keeping it quiet. There’s a lot of misinformation and ridicule working as a distraction. The belief that people would go into a mad frenzy and panic with an alien encounter doesn’t seem to have happened and UFO/UAP encounters just seem to interest the public now.
Like a lot of books of this kind, there is no suggestion of what these beings are doing or after any crashes. If anything, their vehicles can have as many problems as our own. Whether it is security hiding things or not, very few look at modern information or whether there is a match to the historical cases. Caplan does do some observations in the latter chapters of the book but nothing any of us could have come up with and its still a big blank as to what the motives are or what the various security agencies are keeping hidden. Even if they turned around today and showed us any alien bodies they have, I think I would still need to see post-mortems done by expert people to confirm that they aren’t hoaxes.
I think I would like to see books covering more up-to-date events in terms of sightings, encounters and abductions than the older cases that we are familiar with. If nothing is, it’ll at least convince that these events are still going on. If they aren’t being revealed than we know just how much security is keeping from us. Don’t forget, the Nimitz event happened in 2002 which is still a long time ago.
If more up-to-date events are covered by security, then that means there is still things to hide or being investigated. Even so, the original consensus that populations would go into wild panic of the prospect that there are alien bases on Earth then that is clearly wrong. Whether they want to communicate with us is a different matter.
GF Willmetts
August 2026
(pub: Century/Penguin, 2026. 274 page illustrated indexed hardback. Price: (UK). ISBN: 978-1-529-97996-1)
check out website: www.penguin.co.uk/books/477763/not-for-disclosure-by-caplan-jonathan/9781529979961
