Kirk signs!It is a ritual in the publishing industry that in May booksellers and publishers gather in a great hall such as the Javits Center in New York, the L.A. Staples Center, or the Washington D.C. Convention Center to meet, celebrate, and order books for the coming year. The Book Expo is mostly serious dealmaking, bargaining over numbers and discounts and terms of shipping, meeting and greeting the authors of the coming season's hoped-for bestsellers, and enjoying circus of promotion that plays out on the exhibitor floor.

There are all kinds of book promoters in various costumes handing out caps and t-shirts, posters and book bags, and lots and lots of sample copies. For independent booksellers from small towns around the country, it's a chance to meet the publishers and authors face to face.

For the buyers at the huge chains, and there are fewer and fewer of them, it's one-stop shopping for an entire catalog of titles for a year. For agents and studio scouts, it's a bargain basement of literary and theatrical rights.

And for authors who manage to get in, it's a carnival. I was there this year on behalf of my publisher Tor/Forge, part of Macmillan, to sign copies of Worker in the Light with George Noory and to promote our new book coming out next year, Journey to the Light.

As serendipity would have it, right across the aisle from me a long line began to form at the St. Martin's Press table. St. Martin’s is one of the sister publishing units inside Macmillan. "Who's going to be there?"

A buzz began to swirl around the signing table until someone looked at the schedule and said "Shatner." Bill Shatner is magic in the publishing industry. From his first Star Trek memoir to his books about technology and his fiction and his incarnations in various TV shows from the 1950s Twilight Zone to today's Boston Legal, Shatner draws a crowd.

And so he did today, a crowd that wound its way through the Staples Center and out to the street. He came, he signed, he was dutifully worshipped by the line of genuflecting Star Trek fans who had the great fortune to be wearing BEA admittance badges.

"You know," Shatner's publisher told me. "At his first appearance he sold more books then Jimmy Carter. He broke the record of most books sold at a first appearance." Good. Now I know George and I have a record to shoot for.

But the conversation at the Book Expo was also about the goings on in Denver where Jeff Peckman was pitching his idea for a City of Denver Space Initiative and showing a video of an alien peeking through Stan Romanek's window from an upcoming documentary.

This wasn't new footage. In fact it had been floating around since 2003, but that didn't stop the crowd from talking about it. Nobody understood much about it, but it had been covered on Larry King, so that was good enough for folks.

Hey, it kept the ET issue alive and well and in the news, and I was happy about that. Whether it was a real alien peeking in that window, who knew?

But it certainly looked intriguing at first glance. I had to say that if it were really real, a true ET that Stan had videotaped, chances were that the video would have been scooped up years ago by those who keep these secrets and that Stan Romanek himself would have long since been turned into soup for the J-Rod, sucked through an ET straw in some chamber on one of the lower levels of Dulce.

We will certainly hear more about this video in the future. For the time being, however, the video and the Denver Space Initiative is creating its own little circle of excitement, regardless of whether it's hype to sell a documentary, a Steve Greer moment, or a real heretofore undiscovered treasure.

It has taken ET and dragged him out into the public to create more excitement. For the UFO Hunters, we move out on Sunday to Tinley Park to find out what really happened on the night that Ozzy Osbourne brought down the house.

Wish us luck.

(Written by Bill; posted by Nancy)