If you read a lot of Dean Koontz, you may have noticed that sometimes he will put a preface or an endnote to his books saying that such-and-such piece of technology, used in his story, actually exists or is under development. In other words, the story is made up, but the mind-control or the super-zap-gun or what-have-you are reality-based.
Mr Koontz doesn't say that he is using fiction to shed light on true secrets, as that Con Man Dan Brown does, but that idea of "exposing" something by calling it fiction has been around for a long time. Citizen Kane, anyone?
Similarly, there have been more than a few fictionalized layouts of various writers' take on UFOs or little green guys or cattle mutilations, etc.
Sometimes the story is so cosmic it's silly, as in Walter Ernsting's The Day the Gods Died. Of course, being based on Erich von Daniken's ideas, silly is the name of the game.
Other times, as in Deborah Deutschman's Signals, or John Dalton's The Cattle Mutilators, it's a researcher who delves too deep into Things No Man Is Meant to Know.
Or, as in Richard Steinberg's Nobody's Safe, an innocent schmoe takes one step too far and ends up in a puddle of secrets (kind of like Dean Koontz sometimes after all). Of course, in Nobody's Safe, the "innocent" main character is actually a master thief. But he steals something and witnesses something that eventually lands him in a place where these little guys eat lots of strawberry ice cream. You dig?
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