ALICE IN UFOLAND

D.W. Pasulka, Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences, St Martin’s Essentials, 2023.

Pasulka, who is a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, regards the belief in UFOs as a ‘nascent religiosity’ and that the perception of the subject is mediated and manipulated by the media and unnamed agents of disinformation.

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STRANGER DANGER

Sean Casteel and Tim R. Swartz (eds.), Mimics: The Others Among Us, Zontar Press, 2023.

Right from the early days of ufology the Contactees told us that the aliens they encountered from Venus, Mars or the Moon looked humanoid and could live amongst us. They did not even need to wear a spacesuit or protective clothing. Since then we know that ‘they’ could not have been physically real aliens and certainly not inhabitants of our closest celestial neighbours. 

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LOSING CONTACT

Alan Steinfeld (editor) Making Contact: Preparing for the New Realities of Extraterrestrial Existence. St Martin’s Essentials, 2021.

It is a useful warning to find this book is "dedicated to brave pioneers such as Budd Hopkins, John Mack, Whitley Strieber, Linda Moulton Howe, and many more..." There are chapters by them and Nick Pope, Grant Cameron and Mary Rodwell, showing this is a mixed bag of the bad and the ugly, that turn up in every mind-boggling and ditch-dull television documentary about UFOs.

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GREY MATTER

Timothy Green Beckley and Sean Casteel (editors) Alien Lives Matter: It’s OK to be Grey. Inner Light/Global Communications, 2021.

This time Tim and Sean collect reports and stories that take a two-pronged attack on the biggest issues in ufology. The major part of the book is dedicated to hostilities between humanity and aliens and underlines the point that throughout history being Grey has not been OK. 

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AREA 51 AND COUNTING

Timothy Green Beckley and Sean Casteel (Eds.) Timothy Green Beckley’s AREA 51: Warning Keep Out! Inner Light/Global Communications, 2019. 

Timothy Green Beckley and Sean Casteel (Eds.) Alien Strongholds on Earth. Inner Light/Global Communications, 2019.

 It is only in the past few years that the US Government has admitted the existence of Area 51, yet it has always been a magnet for those who believe the US Government knows a lot more about UFOs than it is prepared to admit. 

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THERE'S AN AWFUL LOT OF COBBLERS IN BRAZIL

Thiago Luiz Ticchetti, UFO Contacts in Brazil, Flying Disk Press, 2019.

It seems that Brazil is the place to be if you want to contact aliens from outer space. As Thiago Ticchetti the co-editor of Revista UFO magazine and resident of the Brazilian Committee of Ufologists shows, Brazil is a veritable theme park of UFO contacts that have a long history of being seriously weird, outlandish and amazing.
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INSIDE THE BIG TENT

Timothy Green Beckley and Sean Casteel. Alien Strongholds On Earth; Secret UFO Bases Exist All Around Us. Inner Light/Global Communications, 2019.

Alien strongholds, or what John Keel would have called window areas, are believed to exist throughout the world. These areas are where aliens have their secret underground bases that maintain their fleets of flying saucer and where they can conduct their nefarious activities, often in league with mysterious human military units.

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PASSING THROUGH PASCAGOULA

Panagiotakis. The Road to Pascagoula: A Research Trip - 1981. Flying Disk Press, 2018.

With the publication of Pascagoula - The Closest Encounter by Calvin Parker, and a reprint of Charles Hickson’s UFO Contact at Pascagoula, both published by Philip Mantle’s Flying Disk Press, there has been a revival of interest in this abduction incident. Now we get this reprint and translation from the Greek, of Stefanos’ 1981 trip to Pascagoula. 

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THE COUNT AND THE CONTACTEES

Michel Zirger and Maurizio Martinelli.  The Incredible Life of George Hunt Williamson: Mystical Journey: Itinerary of a Privileged UFO Witness. Verdechiaro Edizioni, 2016.

George Hunt Williamson (1926-1986) is one of the more than semi-mysterious characters that Ufology drags up from time to time. In part this is due to the fact that he was a consummate fantasist. The authors of this admiring book take his fantasies at face value but provide just enough evidence to destroy them.
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ANYBODY HERE SEEN KELLY?

Geraldine Sutton Stith. The Kelly Green Men: Alien Legacy Revisited. McClanahan Publishing House. 2015.

The author of this book is the child of the second marriage of one of the principle characters in one of ufology’s strangest episodes; the Kelly ‘little green man’ story of August 21, 1955, the basic details of which can be found here. 

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SPEAK AS YOU FIND

Nancy du Tertre. How to Talk to an Alien. New Page Books, 2016

At first glance I got the impression that this book might be a serious study of stories of space aliens on Earth as modern folklore. I was quickly disillusioned when I saw that the foreword was written by "Stanton T. Friedman, Nuclear Physicist and Ufology Investigator".

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THE LIFE OF GEORGE

The Belgian ufologist Marc Hallet, in cooperation with Richard Heiden, has written a book examining the life and works of George Adamski. They have made it freely accessible on the Internet in a number of formats (I found PDF easiest to use), and we are very pleased to be able to make it available via the Magonia blog. Marc introduces the work: 
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GOD'S CHARIOTS

Ted Peters. UFOs: God's Chariots? Spirituality, Ancient Aliens, and Religious Yearnings in the Age of Extraterrestrials. New Page Books, 2014

This is the second edition of this book, the first appearing in 1977. Ted Peters believes in the soundness of his thesis in the first edition, that the UFO phenomenon exposes a widespread cultural tendency to translate traditional religious or spiritual sensibilities into scientific or materialist language and categories.
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TWO UFOLOGICAL CRASHES

Timothy Good. Earth, An Alien Enterprise: The Shocking Truth Behind the Greatest Cover-up in Human History. Pegasus Books, 2013.

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John Hanson and Dawn Holloway. Haunted Skies Volume Nine, 1981 - 1986. Haunted Skies Publishing, 2013.

Give him his due, Timothy Good is able to assemble a vast mound of UFO related folklore, urban legends, “things I learned in the services” stories, rumour, fringe beliefs and the like, much of it stuff that 'sensible' ufologists wouldn’t touch with a bargepole. His books are among the last refuges of the old fashioned contactee stories that were the staple diet of British gutter-roots ufology 50 years ago.
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EXPANDING INTO NOTHING

Thomas James Streicher. Extra-Planetary Experiences: Alien-Human Contact and the Expansion of Consciousness, Bear and Co., 2012

An attitude that is often encountered among writers on ‘alternative’ subjects, particularly those with a New Age bent, is that if they feel that their message is an essentially spiritual one.

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PROPHECY FAILS

Timothy Jenkins. Of Flying Saucers and Social Scientists: A Re-reading of 'When Prophecy Fails'. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

This book is a re-examination of When Prophecy Fails, setting in the background of theosophical and Adventist religion. The study concerns a group set up in Chicago in 1954 by ‘Marion Keech’ (Dorothy Martin, 1900-1992), who relayed messages from Sananda, a space brother who later revealed he was the then current identity of Jesus Christ. 

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POINTS OF CONTACT

Aaron John Gulyas. Extraterrestrials and the American Zeitgeist: Alien Contact Tales Since the 1950s. McFarland, 2013.

For many years now it has been an axiom of ‘Scientific Ufologists’ that the contact experience is something totally removed from the UFO experience. The latter, they believe, is an objective but as yet unexplained phenomenon. 

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CERTIFIABLY SERPO

Len Kasten. Secret Journey to Planet Serpo: A True Story of Interplanetary Travel. Bear and Company, 2013.

If you are one of those lucky souls like me, who had never heard of this nonsense before, here is a brief synopsis. Hitler got power through the support of a secret Japanese cult in contact with the Reptilians, which allowed the Nazis to develop all sorts of secret weapons, that for some obscure reason they chose not to use to win the war.
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THE STRIEBER ENIGMA

Whitley Strieber. Solving the Communion Enigma: What is to Come? Tarcher/Penguin, 2011.

If the book by Maloney was redolent of the 1960s, and that by Torres and Uriate was about a case from the 1960s (reviewed HERE), the latest contribution by ufology’s answer to Carlos Casteneda is redolent of the 1990s. In fact it looks very much as though it is some manuscript or WPS script from that time, taken down, tarted up a bit with some more recent references and sent in to the publisher. 

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KEEPING IN CONTACT

Nick Redfern. Contactees: a History of Human-Alien Interaction. New Page Books, 2010. 

Nick Redfern takes us on a reprise of the world of the contactees. The people, mainly in the early days of ufology, who claimed to have had contact with nice long-haired, blond Ayrian Venusians who told us to be nice and stop making atom bombs and having wars. 

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