After the Flying Saucers - Greg Eghigian ***

This is a UFO book with a difference. Unlike so many others, it wasn’t written by a ufologist or sceptic with a particular axe to grind, but by a professional historian whose personal interest in the subject only goes back a few years. While I’ve read numerous books and articles about ufology over the last 30-plus years, this is the first time I’ve encountered such an in-depth account by an ‘outsider’. This in itself makes the book noteworthy – as does Eghigian’s studiously impartial approach, presenting developments in chronological order with virtually no analysis or commentary of his own. That’s quite a novelty in this field – but also, as I’ll explain at the end, something of a weakness.

The first two-thirds of the book deals with what I think of as the ‘standard history’ of ufology, covering the same basic highlights that you might find in any account of the subject’s evolution and scope prior to the 1970s. From the first major ‘phantom airship’ scares of the late 19th century, through the ‘foo fighter’ sightings of World War Two, all the way to the coining of the term ‘flying saucer’ in 1947, the general belief was that these represented advanced terrestrial technology rather than anything other-worldly. It was only through the writings of Ray Palmer and Donald Keyhoe – respectively, an editor and author of pulp fiction – that the identification of flying saucers with alien spacecraft gradually began to percolate into the public’s mind. Keyhoe was also responsible for another essential facet of UFO belief – the idea that governments know far more about the subject than they ever let on.

Things progressed rapidly during the 1950s and 60s, though not always in a way that modern UFO believers like to recall. There were the embarrassingly naive accounts of George Adamski and similar ‘contactees’ of meetings with the inhabitants of flying saucers – invariably good-looking and benevolent anti-nuclear activists claiming to come from Venus or some other nearby planet. Spinning off from the contactee phenomenon were numerous ‘flying saucer cults’ such as the Aetherius Society, which saw UFO occupants as religious or spiritual entities rather than flesh-and-blood ones. The striking thing here is how the ‘unidentified flying objects’ that  give the UFO phenomenon its name became far less important than the supposed extraterrestrials within them. This trend continued, in a more sinister vein, with Betty and Barney Hill’s ‘alien abduction’ experience in 1961. Only recalled later under hypnosis, this set the pattern for countless similar encounters over subsequent decades.

The final third of the book was, for me, the most interesting part of it. I began reading copiously about UFOs in the early 1990s, when – among serious researchers on this side of the Atlantic, anyway – the whole attitude to the subject underwent a major change. Since the early 1950s, the assumption had always been that UFOs were either alien spacecraft, or else completely uninteresting (i.e. hoaxes, hallucinations or misidentifications). But after a while, that dichotomy becomes unsustainable. The lack of convincing photographs or physical evidence, coupled with the huge variation in the way sightings and encounters are described, means that the ‘extraterrestrial hypothesis’ only holds water if you make drastic assumptions about the capabilities and motives of the aliens, and the complicity and super-competence of terrestrial authorities in covering up the truth. While uncritical believers may be happy with that, it’s much harder to swallow for serious investigators. At the same time, the astonishing persistence of the UFO phenomenon means it would be stupid to dismiss the whole thing as unimportant and uninteresting. It may not have a single, all-encompassing explanation, but in various ways could have a lot tell us about elusive natural phenomena, human psychology, folklore, spirituality and maybe even the paranormal.

This ‘psycho-social’ approach has dominated ufology in Britain and western Europe since the 1990s (among serious followers of the subject, I mean – not the tabloid press and its readers). But while a few researchers on the other side of the Atlantic have followed similar lines, the main developments there have headed off in much wackier directions, towards a preoccupation with hypnotically recollected abduction experiences on the one hand (which Eghigian discusses in fascinating detail) and endless Roswell/Majestic-12/Area 51 style conspiracies on the other (which, to my great relief, he only touches on briefly).

My three-star rating is both a personal one from my own perspective, and what I think is most appropriate for a site focused on popular science books. Of course, Eghigian’s book was never meant to be about science, and perhaps in its proper context as a history book it might warrant a higher rating. Certainly readers who only have a casual acquaintance with the subject, obtained from a present-day perspective, may find a lot that will surprise and fascinate them about its changing face over the last 70-odd years. But for me – and I imagine most fellow scientists – the frustrating thing about the book is the almost complete lack of insight that it offers. I suspect that Eghigian, as a historian, sees this as a plus – that it’s his job to present facts, not to analyse or interpret them. If you’re happy with that, then you might really enjoy this book. If not – if you want the author to develop a logical and coherent argument as he goes along – then I’d point you instead at the most insightful book I’ve ever read about UFOs, which I reviewed on this site when it first came out: David Clarke’s How UFOs Conquered the World. 

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Review by Andrew May - See articles by Brian Clegg or subscribe to a weekly email free here