Above Black

TL;DR

Above Black is a foundational text of the UFO whistleblower genre, the kind of account that trades not in sightings but in claimed insider knowledge of secret programs. Dan Sherman says he served in Air Force electronic intelligence and was secretly enrolled in a project called Preserve Destiny, allegedly a program to develop humans as “intuitive communicators” with extraterrestrials, and that his participation was arranged before he was born. It is a compact, first-person memoir whose entire weight rests on the reader trusting one man’s word.

What it claims

Sherman claims his mother was part of an alien-human genetic effort and that he was engineered and later activated for Preserve Destiny, receiving specialized training to send and receive information from non-human intelligences by intuition rather than equipment. He frames his ordinary-looking military record as cover for this covert role, and presents his eventual decision to go public as an act of conscience. The book offers narrative detail but essentially no external documentation of the extraordinary parts.

Why it matters

It matters as a template. Much of the later whistleblower wave, the reverse-engineering claimants, the “I was on the program” testimonies, follows the shape Sherman’s book helped popularize: a credible-sounding service record wrapped around unverifiable secret duties. Studying Above Black is useful less for its content than for understanding the genre’s mechanics and why this style of claim is so persistent and so hard to test.

Does it hold up?

No. The mundane portions, that Sherman served in the Air Force in intelligence, are the kind of thing that can be true; the load-bearing claims, Preserve Destiny, prenatal selection, telepathic contact, have no independent corroboration of any kind. Nothing about the program has surfaced in documents, and the account cannot be distinguished from sincere confabulation or invention. This is the recurring problem with the whole whistleblower category and the reason it sits low on our rubric: a claim you cannot check is not a claim you can credit. Thin is generous.

Read this if

You want to understand the DNA of the modern UFO whistleblower narrative and why “trust me, I was inside” testimony resists verification. Read it beside the AAWSAP account in Skinwalkers at the Pentagon to feel the difference between a documented program and an undocumented one.