Okun’s story is amazing, yet completely believable. It begins in the 1970s when this CalTech genius arrives at Area 51 to work with the National Security Agency (NSA) and the CIA on the study of a downed spaceship retrieved from Roswell, New Mexico.
But there is much more to the job than Okun realized. Soon, he begins to suspect that a massive government cover-up has successfuly buried all evidence of alien visitation throughout the years–a cover-up in which Okun is now an unwilling participant. His perseverance leads him to the truth behind the studies at Area 51, the government’s fear of an alien invasion and a mysterious encounter in the Mexican desert at a place known as “La Manta de Silencia”: The Silent Zone.
Not a terrible book, much better written and laid out than the novelization of the movie, but it suffers from the obvious problem of being a prequel. We know that not much work was done on the alien space ship and we know that not much really happens to change the world that ID4 starts in. There’s a few good plot threads that held my attention, but this was clearly a test story to see if anyone actually cared about the universe. Luckily it did well enough to warrant a few more books in the series, which I’ll be consuming very quickly I think, as they’re all sequels and have some promise of furthering the story along.
