As a reporter and editor, Toplikar had received many calls over the years from concerned citizens who had seen something and felt it was their duty to tell someone about it.
However, the culture in the news business during the last 25 to 30 years was to be extremely skeptical of all UFO sightings and to report only what came from official sources or what could be confirmed by the reporter himself. Unfortunately, despite having an open mind about the subject himself, he found law enforcement officials to be almost universally skeptical and dismissive about what people reported.
He also found Air Force officials, including several at Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas, to be very tight-lipped about almost all subjects, citing the need for national security. During one particular interview, he saw a map on a wall of Nevada, and asked the subject to show him where Area 51 was on the map. Despite Area 51 being part of popular culture for decades, the officer would not even acknowledge such an area existed — that’s how security-minded they were.
In early 2015, Toplikar became interested in Project Blue Book documents that were now available online.
He spent several months schooling himself on the early years of Project Blue Book and reading about the investigations of early UFO researchers into some of the classic cases, such as the alleged crashes at Roswell and Aztec in New Mexico.
His first book covers 10 of the Project Blue Book cases related to Kansas, including two that are tied to Roswell and Aztec.
Since that book’s publication, Toplikar has visited several UFO sites, including Roswell, N.M., and Rendlesham Forest in England.
His second book on UFOs recounts 10 cases from Missouri during the early years of the Air Force’s formerly classified files from Project Blue Book — and how many of the unsolved cases were left hanging without follow-ups. Failure to solve those cold cases seemed to show either incompetency on the part of the military, the use of UFOs to provide disinformation and cover for the U.S.’s own classified craft — or that the military knows what they are and have been keeping the truth bottled up for decades.