David Burkett is a Cogswell Award-winning cybersecurity researcher who spent a decade building anomaly-detection platforms and conducting large-scale digital forensics investigations at Fortune 100 companies. He published the first white paper on Detection as Code and builds detection signatures that identify nation-state threat actors across petabyte-scale sensor data.
A strict materialist and lifelong skeptic, he did not expect to find anything when he first looked into the UFO question. Four years later, he had conducted dozens of interviews across the national security apparatus: whistleblowers, some who have never gone public, former Deputy Secretaries of Defense, generals, admirals, fighter pilots, congressional staffers, Ivy League academics, and researchers from Tier 1 universities. He was one of the few people to interview Dr. Harald Malmgren, advisor to four presidents from Kennedy to Ford, prior to his passing.
What changed his mind was the weight of the evidence itself: declassified documents that contradicted official narratives, sensor data that couldn’t be explained away, and watching one of his own sources face retaliation for speaking to Congress.
Lies Above applies the same forensic rigor Burkett brings to threat intelligence. Following evidence chains, distinguishing signal from noise, citing every claim, to document how the Pentagon misled Congress and weaponized classification to suppress seventy years of evidence. The book received DOPSR clearance from the Defense Department. The truth was always in the public record. It took someone trained to find needles in haystacks to piece it together.