We look at this new book by Greg Eghigian. You can see more about After the Flying Saucers Came here.
After the Flying Saucers Came, How UFOs and aliens captivated the world reviewed
This book is an interesting proposition. How to discuss and tackle something that may, or may not even exist. In many ways the author’s final comments perhaps best capture how they wrestled with the ideas discussed and also some of our thoughts as we read this book. In the summary the author makes the valid point that UFOs have been with us for centuries now, in our headspace and imagination. After that, yes absolutely everything is up for play, were they real, were they fakes, were the people who saw them, or even had close, or even closer encounters (yes he has to go there) accurate or deluded?
In many ways we are probably in a slightly impossible proposition with aliens, extraterrestrial life, and if we have been visited. Firstly, for aliens to even been able to reach us, then they surely must be far more intelligent than us, to travel the vast distances to even reach our galaxy, our solar system and then our planet. Which then immediately raises the questions why should they have benign or positive feelings towards us. Perhaps it is better if we are alone in the universe then? Yes this could be lonely, but maybe preferable to being squashed like a bug by something far more powerful and with its own interests and agendas.
Eghigian does a good job of detailing the literature of descriptions and encounters over the last few centuries. In some ways, whether intentionally or not, it quickly illustrates that the human narratives very quickly seem to mirror the preoccupations, concerns and fears of that particular epoch. As decades pass and science demonstrates that there is no life even possible on Venus, and at best we might have microbes on Mars, all of this quickly renders as absurd and impossible encounters with talking Martians or Venusians. Similarly for a period of time the narrative seemed to be about abductions and various body parts being probed by aliens, with a particular penchant for Midwestern farmers at times.
As always the key question is, if there really are aliens and UFOs then show us one, a body, a spaceship. Yes we have Roswell, but, with the recent declassification of government files it seems to have given us a lot of unknowns and no real definitive answers. This book is a good survey and discussion of all of these matters, with a clear identification of the many phonies and crackpots along the way. Does this mean, once those are set to one side, that what is left is genuine alien visits? Well, hm, hard to say and not something that the author is going to leave you with any certainties about.
How UFO sightings and aliens seized the world’s attention.
In the summer of 1947, a private pilot flying over the state of Washington saw what he described as several pie pan-shaped aircraft traveling in formation at remarkably high speed. Within days, journalists began referring to the objects as “flying saucers.” Over the course of that summer, Americans reported seeing them in the skies overhead. News quickly spread, and within a few years, flying saucers were being spotted across the world.
The question on everyone’s mind was, what were they? Some new super weapon in the Cold War? Strange weather patterns? Optical illusions? Or perhaps it was all a case of mass hysteria? Some, however, concluded they could only be one thing: spacecrafts built and piloted by extraterrestrials. The age of the unidentified flying object, the UFO, had arrived.
In After the Flying Saucers Came Greg Eghigian tells the story of the world’s fascination with UFOs and the prospect that they were the work of visitors from outer space. While accounts of great wonders in the sky date back to antiquity, reports of UFOs took place against the unique backdrop of the Cold War and space age, giving rise to disputed government inquiries, breathtaking news stories, and single-minded sleuths.
After the Flying Saucers Came traces how a seemingly isolated incident sparked an international drama involving shady figures, questionable evidence, suspicions of conspiracy, hoaxes, new religions, scandals, unsettling alien encounters, debunkers, and celebrities. It examines how descriptions, theories, and debates about unidentified flying objects and alien abduction changed over time and how they appeared in the United States, Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Russia. And it explores the impact UFOs have had on our understanding of space, science, technology, and ourselves up through the present day.
Replete with stories of the people who have made up the ufology community, the military and defence units that investigate them, the scientists and psychologists who have researched these unexplained encounters, and the many novels, movies, TV shows, and websites that have explored these phenomena, After the Flying Saucers Came speaks to believers and skeptics alike.
Greg Eghigian is a Professor of History and Bioethics at Pennsylvania State University. An expert on the history of the abnormal and the paranormal in the modern world, his research has been supported by NASA and the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. He is the author of The Corrigible and the Incorrigible: Science, Medicine, and the Convict in Twentieth Century Germany and the editor of The Routledge History of Madness and Mental Health, among other works.
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