Three days before he was supposed to meet with a leading UFO researcher, New York Times bestselling author Steve Alten claims he saw something whirling in the sky above Wellington.
When he examined the odd lights more closely, he says he saw about a dozen saucer-shaped objects with amber lights on the bottoms flying from south to north along State Road 7. They were going in staggered pairs moving “whisper quiet” about 1,000 feet in the air.
Alten is convinced he saw a series of UFOs that night in 2013 and has been researching it ever since, culminating in a recently released fiction book called “Undisclosed.” His research on aliens and UFOs has cemented his the idea that extraterrestrials exist.
“Seeing these things for myself takes the belief to a different level because now there is no question about it,” he said at his home in Stonehaven Estates, across the street from Wellington.
Alten is known for a series of books centered around the fictitious survival of the megalodon, a giant prehistoric shark, inspiring a movie in the works called Meg. He calls his latest novel “faction” instead of “fiction” because it’s based on what he believes are facts. The cover has flying saucers above a farm with the tagline “we’ve been lied to…”
Allen describes what he saw that night:
“There were eight to 12 of them flying in staggered pairs, approaching from the south less than a thousand feet above State Road 7. They were far too silent and smooth to be helicopters and they were definitely not planes. As they came closer and passed almost directly overhead we could see the outline of a… well, their saucer-shaped vessels. By this time I had parked the car (my wife) and I just stood and watched them, the two of us incredulous as they moved north through a cloudless night sky… until, pair by pair, they simply faded into the ether.”
Alten met with Steven Green, a former medical doctor and current “UFOlogist,” who has been working to bring to light what he thinks is a government conspiracy to coverup UFOs and extraterrestrial visits. Alten helped Greer with a recent book called “Unacknowledged” that claims to expose the secrets about aliens.
Alten said he thinks more than a dozen UFOs crashed or landed starting with one of the more famous incidents in Roswell, N.M., 1947. After decades of speculation, the U.S. military claims the incident was a nuclear test surveillance balloon that crashed on a ranch near the town. Many, however, remain skeptical of that report.
Alten said he believes government officials and the fossil fuel industry are covering up details.
“The truth is out there, but first it’s going to really piss you off,” he said.
There have been hundreds of “UFO sightings” over the years including a famous image of a “flying saucer” over the 2012 London Olympic games, which turned out to be a Goodyear blimp.
More recently, allegations that NASA cut a live video feed when UFOs appeared, causing the organization to release a statement saying it wasn’t true.
“It’s very common for things like the moon, space debris, reflection from station windows, the spacecraft structure itself or light from Earth to appear as artifacts in photos and videos from the orbiting laboratory,” the statement reads.
Alten is still unflinching in his beliefs, but he is moving onto other projects.
The popular author has lived in the Wellington area for more than 15 years. He wrote his first book Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror in 1997, which is set in an alternate world where a giant prehistoric shark, the megalodon, survives. A science fiction horror film called Meg, based on his novel, will be released by Warner Bros. in 2018.
His books start with an idea followed by character development, months to years of research and then finally writing. He has written more than a dozen books, including eight from the Meg series.
“Writing is like a muscle,” he said. “The more you use it, the better you get.”
