Deadly Artifact

Deadly Artifact is the first book in the Classified Skies trilogy.
The story follows a U.S. government meteorologist named Jack Davis, whose life is dismantled by shadowy government agents after he uses scientific instruments to document a massive UFO over Phoenix, Arizona.
Recruited by billionaire Bob Sinclair into an elite research team, Jack joins a multi-disciplinary investigation into anomalous phenomena that leads them all over the world on a mission of discovery.
This eventually leads the team to the site of an alleged 1974 crash in Coyame, Mexico.
There, they unearth a double-edged nightmare: a buried Soviet nuclear warhead and a dormant extraterrestrial pathogen. When a local cartel inadvertently unleashes the virus, the team must perform a desperate moral calculus, authorizing a nuclear detonation on foreign soil to prevent a global biological extinction event.
Though they successfully contain the threat and recover revolutionary alien artifacts, the survivors are left navigating a geopolitical firestorm, under active threat from both government black ops and a vengeful criminal organization.

By age 7, Daniel J. Koch ("Dan") knew he wanted to be a meteorologist. A deadly tornado struck his hometown the year he was born, and that was all anyone could talk about for years afterward. That spurred his interest in the weather at a young age. After high school he earned a degree in meteorology from Northern Illinois University.Dan spent thirty-two years as a government meteorologist, working for the National Weather Service (NWS). His job took him to various duty stations across the United States, from the Midwest to Texas, to the desert southwest, back to Texas again, and finally to the deep South.When he started his career, emergency services forwarded many UFO reports to local NWS offices. Dan was a skeptic and felt that most sightings could be explained as misidentifications.However, on the fateful night of March 13th, 1997, Dan was at work at the Phoenix NWS office and witnessed the now-famous Phoenix Lights incident.The first occurrence that night was the sighting of a large, V-shaped craft moving south over Arizona.The second incident, which more people are aware of, was a series of glowing orbs suspended over the Sierra Estrella mountains, southwest of Phoenix. Dan and a colleague witnessed the first event, and he became interested in UFOs from that point forward.He moved to Arkansas in 2001 and never left. He met his wife and raised a family. When 2025 came around, he retired and pursued other interests.The written word called to him since childhood, though the relentless demands of operational forecasting left little room for writing-until now.These days, Dan dedicates most of his time to crafting fiction, drawn primarily to the pulse-quickening worlds of techno-thrillers, though the vast frontiers of science fiction and the shadowy corners of horror also beckon.