"A PLACE TO LINGER IN STRANGENESS"

Greg Eghigian. After the Flying Saucers Came. A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon. Oxford University Press, 2023.

As I sign off from Magonia, this book seems to have arrived just in time. It is the definitive study of ufology from its exciting birth in the craziness of post WWII euphoria, the dreams of space travel, and the hope of encountering new worlds. 

But also there came the fears of the Cold War and possible nuclear annihilation, which might be avoided by the promise of new societies and new technologies the saucers might bring. And it ends at the turn of the twentieth century, seemingly drained by the necrophilia of the abduction stories, and mummified in an endless Moebius strip of 'disclosure tomorrow' promises.

I say this is a history of ufology rather than a history of UFOs. Although individual cases are referenced they are not investigated and analysed in any depth, but are used as illustrations of the way in which the UFO phenomenon has been studied, promoted and exploited, and the people and movements behind its development.

Eghigian clearly identifies the early years of the saucers with the world in the aftermath of WWII, and the developing Cold War, drawing a clear distinction from pre-1947 historical phenomena such as the airships and earlier aerial visions, which he calls 'paleovisitology.

The early US reports from Arnold and through the 1940s were interpreted almost entirely in terms of secret weapons, either from the US or the Soviet Union. He quotes a Gallup Poll in 1947 which showed that 90% of Americans had heard of flying saucers, but the numbers who thought that they came from space was so small they did not have a separate category. This was against 29% who said they were misinterpretations and the 15% who suggested secret US weapons. The biggest group, at 39%, 'didn't have an answer'. Even as late as 1957 polling seemed to indicate that only about a quarter of Americans though that flying saucers were extraterrestrial.

But the tend was inexorably towards interpreting the saucer reports as evidence of extraterrestrial activity. Eghigian cites a 1952 article in Life magazine, 'Have we Visitors from Space?' as one of the key drivers of the extraterrestrial hypothesis, along with the wave of sightings in the summer of that year, particularly the McMinnville photographic case. At the same time as the US military began collating reports from personnel and the public, the first civilian UFO research groups emerged. Followed almost instantly by the UFO sceptic groups. By the mid-fifties 'ufology' was an established phenomenon in its own right.

He charts the rise of the major UFO groups like APRO and NICAP, describing in often amusing detail the various conflicts and controversies between and within them and the different paths they took. APRO was to a great extent a reporting organisation, with an extensive range of contacts in South America,

This came to the fore in 1957 when APRO's Brazilian contact, Olavo Fontes learned about the now-legendary Villas Boas case. At first Fontes was reluctant to be specific about the case's sexual content, feeling it 'inappropriate' to discuss it with APRO's female organiser Coral Lorenzen. In fact Lorenzen was quite happy to publicise the case, but in the end deferring to Fontes' view that the case – which they nicknamed 'Lover Boy' - was 'too lewd' for a wider audience. The details of the case were not released publicly until 1965, when Gordon Creighton began to translate them for Flying Saucer Review, after having sat on them for two years, hoping for further confirmation.

NICAP, under the direction of Donald Keyhoe concentrated more on pressurising the US government to open a public investigation of the UFO phenomenon, which Keyhoe saw entirely in terms of physical 'nuts and bolts' extraterrestrial machinery. That is until any of those nuts and bolts machines were reported as actually landing, at which point he rather lost interest in them.

Although they had different approaches to UFO research, Keyhoe and Lorenzen initially shared the distaste for the 'contactee' stories that developed parallel to the 'nuts-and-bolts' saucer phenomenon. Although many UFO historians like to see this as a quasi-occult movement that has nothing to do with 'real' UFOs, Eghigian makes it clear that from the very beginning – even pre-Adamski – contactees were an integral part of the developing UFO legend.

In the sixties contracteeism as a movement within the UFO world stagnated, although individuals such as Adamski and George Hunt Williamson still drew a cultist following. But increasingly it was pushed to the margins by accounts of sightings and interactions with figures associated with UFOs which seemed to fit in better with a scientific, 'secular' view of UFOs. These were usually straight reports of 'operators' working on or around a landed saucer, usual making little or no contact or acknowledgment to the witness.

The classic case, which perhaps gave the more conservative researchers the opportunity to take such reports seriously was the Socorro incident of 1964, which attracted investigators from MUFON and NICAP, as well as from the US military. It was a low-key account with a reliable police witness and no suggestion of any contact, physical or mental, with the landed craft's 'occupants'.

A number of such high-profile cases in the US, and the public's reaction to them, provoked the US Air Force to attempt a scientific analysis of the phenomenon, although carefully 'outsourcing' it. This was the Condon Report. Erdighan gives a fuller account of the personalities and politics that shaped the Report that I have previously seen. He charts the rifts between members and factions in the team, while maintaining an objective stance and describing the motivations and methods of all those involved.

Inevitably, when the final Report was issued in 1969, it seemed something of an anti-climax. Condon himself later described it as “the biggest waste of time I ever had in my life”. Team member Robert Low wrote to a friend “the whole [UFO] thing seems to be dead as a doornail.” But this was soon to change.

I feel one of the greatest values of this book is the author's understanding of the world-wide nature of the UFO research 'community'. Unlike other American academics who have entered  thisfield, he is well acquainted with UFO researchers in Europe and across the world. He quotes one UK writer who was looking forward to the 1970s: “new and unexpected elements will be introduced into, and emerge from, the whole UFO problem rendering it not only more complex but considerably more interesting.” He comments that the writer “proved to be prescient”.

OK, that writer was me, in a piece for Merseyside UFO Bulletin published in 1969. I was surprised and pleased to see numerous other quotations from and references to pieces by myself and my MUFOB/Magonian colleagues John Harney, Roger Sandell and Peter Rogerson. Pleased not just from the satisfaction of seeing our work acknowledged, but as an example of how it demonstrated the depth of the author's research into the UFO literature beyond the canon of the established writers, and beyond the USA.

In the seventies the UFO phenomenon opened up beyond the limited perspectives of the ETH and contactee movements - “fresh voices emerged, bringing variety and a new vitality to the UFO scene”. Eghigian points out that this influx of new ideas was fuelled by young people, and that almost half of the 'ufozines' of the period were being published and edited by people under 20 years of age. As an example he describes the ufological career of Hakon Blömqvist and the growth of the UFO research movement in Sweden and the growth of the AFU (formerly 'Arbetsgruppen för ufologi') now the Archive For the Unexplained', the largest UFO and Fortean library in Europe.

Also new in the seventies was the growing interest from social scientists who found in the UFO phenomenon and its followers an interesting topic for study, analysing both the psychological and social backgrounds of the UFO 'percipients' and in the social organisation of the researchers themselves. Eghigian points out that as early as 1970 Flying Saucer Review editor Charles Bowen readily accepted that ufology should be accepted as an area of parapsychological study.

Vallee's Passport to Magonia and John Keel's Operation Trojan Horse exploded on the UFO scene and stimulated ideas and discussions on the relationship between UFO belief and other forms of supernatural and folkloric ideas. Many of these ideas had been bubbling around in ufology for some time before, often as a variation of the pre-von Daniken 'ancient astronaut' theories. Vallee's ideas were developed much further by French ufologists like Michel Monnerie, Bertrand Méheust and Thierry Pinvidic as they created the basic principles behind 'psychosocial' ufology. This soon became a major influence on ufology in Britain and across Europe, but with one or two exceptions did not have a great influence on ufology in the USA.

What seemed to be a liberating movement in ufology met many obstacles. The ETH 'establishment' was still a strong barrier to new ideas. In the UK it was disparaged by critics as the 'fairies and folklore' tendency. Of course now many would see that as a perfectly accurate description of what was happening, as the search for the stimulus of the UFO phenomenon grew broader and away from the stifling corral of the ETH into a wider area of anomalous experience.

But in the USA another tendency began to emerge, as the research movement became dominated by the abduction phenomena, which in its turn became dominated by researchers like Budd Hopkins, David Jacobs and John Mack. These figures were more activists than researchers, steering the witnesses and the phenomena into their own image, and imposing their own agendas onto the reports which they extracted from their research subjects. The 'abductionists' began a move into a cultist world, leading commentors like Elizabeth Lofus and Roger Sandell to make comparisons with the growing Satanic abuse 'recovered memory' advocates and their links to a massive range of conspiracy theories.

Many of the themes were the same: both involved the 'alien' invasion of the human – usually female – body; the use of women as 'breeders', for alien hybrids or for sacrificial victims, and of course the absence of any actual physical evidence. Eventually the abduction phenomena imploded with its own absurdities, but rather than opening up new horizons, for many researchers it resulted in a retreat to the cosy world of aliens, government secrecy and demands for 'disclosure'.

In his concluding chapter Eghidian surveys the UFO scene in the age of the Internet. He notes the closure of most of the open membership UFO groups, which have either folded totally or transitioned into archive organisations. He suggests that some observers believe that the hype over the abduction reports took “all the oxygen out of the room leaving ufologists with nowhere to go after its celebrity faded”. Or has ufology retreated into “true believers spinning their wheels”. He quotes my comment when I ended publication of the printed Magonia magazine in 2009: “... it has deteriorated into an endless scrutiny of issues that were once considered settled”

But the author ends on a less despairing note, and one which for all my scepticism defines my own viewpoint: “For those who have found themselves unable to look away, UFOs have offered a place to linger in strangeness.”

Eghigian has captured the true essence of ufology in this book, and has delved deeper into it than any other academic researcher who has braved the field. It is a balanced and open-minded historical survey of the UFO phenomenon and the people who have been involved in it. This book is essential for every ufologist's and Fortean's bookshelf.

• John Rimmer