Superstorms, Aliens and the Bomb (Whitley Strieber)

Over the past few months, the number of UFO events in Iran has reached a completely unprecedented level. There have been a few UFO flaps as intense: the Scandinavian "Ghost Rocket" incidents in 1946, the great American UFO wave from the July 1947 Roswell Incident to the July, 1952 Washington overflights, the Belgian events of 1989-1990 are other equally intense flaps.

UFOs began to appear in numbers after the end of World War II, when atomic weapons came into use. It is possible that the danger of nulear war in Iran has attracted them to that area, as well.

Strieber muses that the "visitors" are attempting to preserve the human species so that we may eventually be deemed fit to join the interstellar "club" -- a scenario that neatly precludes the possibility of open contact (a la the infamous "White House lawn" quip). In other words, emerging into the spotlight would destabilize human society and make us less valuable. If true, then Strieber's aliens can hardly be termed altruistic. (Strieber's speculation that the visitors might choose to take sides in the event of a global nuclear war -- for reasons that have nothing to do with political ideology -- also rings strangely plausible.)