“The Second Ship” by Richard Phillips – Welcome to Earth

Regardless of whether or not you believe in UFOs and extraterrestrial beings, you have to admit that pondering the question is quite interesting, especially considering the promptly covered and classified possible encounters we have had with them or their technology.

In the Rho Agenda Trilogy written by Richard Phillips, the story begins in the book titled The Second Ship, where for sixty years a UFO which crashed mysteriously has been kept secret behind the walls of an underground laboratory.

However, just as the government got ready to tell the public the entire truth about it, three teenagers have to misfortune (or is it the fortune?) of running into a second ship which was just outside the military’s reach.

Having come into contact with the technology, the teenagers suddenly find themselves thrust in a whole new world of violence, mayhem, lies, deceit, treachery and power-mongering… but more importantly, they come to learn the truth which lurks behind the Rho Project.

This is pretty much the beginning of a very long rollercoaster spanning across three books, setting up the characters, events, background, and so on and so forth.

However, this doesn't mean the book is riddled with long descriptive paragraphs or that nothing interesting happens in it; on the contrary, much of the book, as you can guess, revolves not only around alien technology, but more importantly, how we humans react to and deal with it.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always been curious as to what we would do if we were given the opportunity to wield a technology far beyond our understanding.

All in all, I found the first book in the Rho Agenda trilogy to have been excellent for what it set out to do; it is the first act of the story, and it does a marvelous job at introducing everything to us. This isn't just some other crashed Roswell UFO story, even though it may seem like it from a brief description.

From a technical perspective I don’t have any reproaches towards Mr. Phillips: the text is relatively simple without hampering itself in the process, the descriptions are easy to imagine, every character acts as their personality and tendencies dictate they would… nothing is out of place.

I’d definitely recommend this book to pretty much anyone who has a thing for UFO stories.

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Richard Phillips Richard Phillips an American merchant mariner, and much more recently, an author, who famously served as the captain of the MV Maersk Alabama which was hijacked by Somali pirates back in 2009. He wrote a couple of books detailing his experiences overseas, titled A Captain's Duty and My Story, by the REAL Captain Phillips. His story was also turned into a silver screen adaptation where he was portrayed by Tom Hanks.