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After the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon
Roswell, 1947. Washington, DC, 1952. Quarouble, 1954. New Hampshire, 1961. Pascagoula, 1973. Petrozavodsk, 1977. Copley Woods, 1983. Explore how sightings of UFOs and aliens seized the world's attention and discover what the fascination with flying saucers and extraterrestrial visitors says about our changing views on science, technology, and the paranormal.
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 spacecrafts built and piloted by extraterrestrials. The age of the unidentified flying object, the UFO, had arrived.
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 defense 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.
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 spacecrafts built and piloted by extraterrestrials. The age of the unidentified flying object, the UFO, had arrived.
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 defense 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.
400 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
October 14, 2024
Rating: 3* of five
The Publisher Says: Roswell, 1947. Washington, DC, 1952. Quarouble, 1954. New Hampshire, 1961. Pascagoula, 1973. Petrozavodsk, 1977. Copley Woods, 1983. Explore how sightings of UFOs and aliens seized the world's attention and discover what the fascination with flying saucers and extraterrestrial visitors says about our changing views on science, technology, and the paranormal.
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 spacecrafts built and piloted by extraterrestrials. The age of the unidentified flying object, the UFO, had arrived.
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 defense 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.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: I didn't abandon this read, exactly; I went stochastic instead. I hopped around, absorbing the stories I so look down on being carefully and fairly examined as though they might be reality.
The author's intent is not to weigh in on that subject but to examine the global phenomenon of UFOlogy in a sociopolitical context. He is successful. He is even-handed. Scrupulous in reporting not editorializing.
I'm not: I've seen a UFO with a companion (hi Donna!) and, as fascinating as it was, it was well within reality's confines. It was really, really interesting as witness my very clear memory of it rising fifty years later. It wasn't aliens. I've got zero tolerance for this quasi-religious bunch of nutters.
Oxford University Press asks $15.99 for a Kindlebook. I'd check it out of the library myownself; but if your looney old bestie from the gym's fallen into the cult, it could help for you to see some of the likely reasons why.
The Publisher Says: Roswell, 1947. Washington, DC, 1952. Quarouble, 1954. New Hampshire, 1961. Pascagoula, 1973. Petrozavodsk, 1977. Copley Woods, 1983. Explore how sightings of UFOs and aliens seized the world's attention and discover what the fascination with flying saucers and extraterrestrial visitors says about our changing views on science, technology, and the paranormal.
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 spacecrafts built and piloted by extraterrestrials. The age of the unidentified flying object, the UFO, had arrived.
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 defense 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.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: I didn't abandon this read, exactly; I went stochastic instead. I hopped around, absorbing the stories I so look down on being carefully and fairly examined as though they might be reality.
The author's intent is not to weigh in on that subject but to examine the global phenomenon of UFOlogy in a sociopolitical context. He is successful. He is even-handed. Scrupulous in reporting not editorializing.
I'm not: I've seen a UFO with a companion (hi Donna!) and, as fascinating as it was, it was well within reality's confines. It was really, really interesting as witness my very clear memory of it rising fifty years later. It wasn't aliens. I've got zero tolerance for this quasi-religious bunch of nutters.
Oxford University Press asks $15.99 for a Kindlebook. I'd check it out of the library myownself; but if your looney old bestie from the gym's fallen into the cult, it could help for you to see some of the likely reasons why.
July 2, 2024
Just finished:
"After The Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon"
By: Greg Eghigian
New York: Oxford University Press, 2024.
A cultural history of the UFO phenomenon. The author doesn't weigh in on whether he believes the stories of the people who encountered UFOs but argues that it is a historical event nonetheless because it is a part of human history; an event that couldn't have happened without the Cold War.
Sightings of fast flying objects really took off in 1947 in the United States and Sweden but ultimately went global. Sightings were an on again off again affair. When sightings occurred, there was also a debunker response. The topic of ancient aliens as well as whether UFOs sightings were beings from a higher plain of existence haunting human.
Human reports of extra terrestrials went from a blissful experience to one of fear and terror. Aliens in the stories were seen as godlike creatures to scientists trying to probe or extract data from human beings.
Certainly this isn't everyone's cup of tea, but it was different.
"After The Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon"
By: Greg Eghigian
New York: Oxford University Press, 2024.
A cultural history of the UFO phenomenon. The author doesn't weigh in on whether he believes the stories of the people who encountered UFOs but argues that it is a historical event nonetheless because it is a part of human history; an event that couldn't have happened without the Cold War.
Sightings of fast flying objects really took off in 1947 in the United States and Sweden but ultimately went global. Sightings were an on again off again affair. When sightings occurred, there was also a debunker response. The topic of ancient aliens as well as whether UFOs sightings were beings from a higher plain of existence haunting human.
Human reports of extra terrestrials went from a blissful experience to one of fear and terror. Aliens in the stories were seen as godlike creatures to scientists trying to probe or extract data from human beings.
Certainly this isn't everyone's cup of tea, but it was different.
Read
September 17, 2024Greg Eghigian’s examination of the ‘UFO phenomenon’ makes a solid start in doing so. He calls his book a ‘global history’ because UFOs appeared over Sweden before they appeared to Arnold, resembling the German V2 rockets that had lately menaced Europe. And they proliferated elsewhere: the first (recorded) abduction took place in Brazil, while the most creative study of them took place in France and Japan. Nonetheless, the initial ‘flap’ in sightings reflected America’s postwar spike in civil and military aviation. Edwardian Britons had succumbed to ‘airshipitis’ and seen mystery balloons, but postwar Americans got used to scanning the skies. Radar and flight instruments produced many a numinous glitch. UFOs swarmed around military installations, such as the air base at Roswell, New Mexico, where a downed craft was supposedly hidden in the summer of 1947. Official investigations by the authorities designed to reassure the public merely aroused allegations of cover-ups.
The initiative passed to the ufologists. Eghigian’s careful bestiary of them draws a distinction between dreamers and grifters – pulp writers who baldly claimed to have met military whistleblowers or even to have chatted with aliens themselves – and scientists who maintained a healthy scepticism about what weird data points meant. It is a shaky distinction, because even ‘respected’ ufologists were odd fish. David Jacobs, a historian who worked with female ‘contactees’, asked one to hand over her unwashed underwear and to wear a chastity belt; John Mack of Harvard Medical School was censured by its Dean for his flaky research.
Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...
Michael Ledger-Lomas is a historian of religion. He is currently writing a book about Edwardians and gods.
The initiative passed to the ufologists. Eghigian’s careful bestiary of them draws a distinction between dreamers and grifters – pulp writers who baldly claimed to have met military whistleblowers or even to have chatted with aliens themselves – and scientists who maintained a healthy scepticism about what weird data points meant. It is a shaky distinction, because even ‘respected’ ufologists were odd fish. David Jacobs, a historian who worked with female ‘contactees’, asked one to hand over her unwashed underwear and to wear a chastity belt; John Mack of Harvard Medical School was censured by its Dean for his flaky research.
Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...
Michael Ledger-Lomas is a historian of religion. He is currently writing a book about Edwardians and gods.
June 3, 2024
A useless book. A book that is so gently patronizing about its subject matter that it renders itself totally inessential. This reads like a UFO history book written by a minor charactor on "Lucky Hank."
July 6, 2025
It grew on me, but like a 3.6? At first, his studiously nonjudgmental perspective made me a little nuts, but Eghigian digs into the ways in which UFO stories take contextual clues from their time period later on clearly enough to highlight the point that the tropes of contact tales derive in large part from broader fears--the centrality of ripoffs of The Day the Earth Stood Still in the 50s, for instance, in which benevolent aliens warn unheeding earthlings of the dangers of nuclear war, or more recently the medicalization of contact stories in which aliens are evil doctors, experimenting at will on hapless human subjects. I found the internationalization of the phenomenon, though clearly spurred at the start by American fears and panics, to be especially interesting, with some possible cultural differences in how UFOs and their inhabitants tend to be perceived--it sounds like the US phenomenon of invasive science-y aliens that dominated the US in the 80s and 90s felt very much like a curiosity to other countries' UFO believers, and there's a philosophical angle to, say, French UFology, particularly later on, that seems alien, so to speak, to the American branch.
Other themes: the constant dance between science and belief, and scientists and believers, and scientists who sometimes become believers--the larger pattern here is that, by the 80s and 90s, governments around the world seem to have concluded that UFOs, or whatever other acronym had been chosen (UAP, say), posed no danger, and so shut down their study groups and later declassified most if not all of their files; many of the big saucer groups, which tended to date either to the 50s and nurture some sort of one-world fantasy, or to the 60s and endorse some version of utopian mysticism, ran out of members and juice by the 90s; there's also a weird Nazi corner in which the people accused of silencing truth-telling contactees are, you guessed it, the same people who allegedly control international finance, the weather, etc. I admire his closing notion that the point here is "the extensive work that has gone into building what might be called a UFO world," the cultivation of networks of people and modes of knowing, but I also wanted more sociology--are these groups particularly distinct from other subcultures, in their elevation of certain people as experts, their infighting, the tension between belief in the rules of the game and skepticism (he notes that some scrupulous later figures left the field, noting how much effort seemed devoted to maintaining rather than solving these "mysteries")? That said, there turns out to be quite a bit more sociological work over the years than I'd expected that looks at membership and group dynamics, going all the way back to When Prophecy Fails and even Cantril's The Invasion from Mars, which he points out was already exaggerating the amount and quality of belief in Orson Welles's broadcast. So another component of that "UFO world" is the quantity of outside study it's compelled. In that spirit, so many fun articles and books in the footnotes that one could read, perhaps my favorite being "Unidentified Flying Objects in Classical Antiquity," from The Classical Journal in 2007. Turns out you can get it from NASA, of all places.
Also...this is Oxford University Press, not some scrappy indie, but the proofreading here is at the scrappy-indie level: missing words, the occasional typo, and a last line (the last line!) that reads, as printed, "...UFOs have offered aC place to linger in strangeness." Shameful, unless it's intended as some sort of final reality-disrupting form-is-function move. Probably not, though.
Other themes: the constant dance between science and belief, and scientists and believers, and scientists who sometimes become believers--the larger pattern here is that, by the 80s and 90s, governments around the world seem to have concluded that UFOs, or whatever other acronym had been chosen (UAP, say), posed no danger, and so shut down their study groups and later declassified most if not all of their files; many of the big saucer groups, which tended to date either to the 50s and nurture some sort of one-world fantasy, or to the 60s and endorse some version of utopian mysticism, ran out of members and juice by the 90s; there's also a weird Nazi corner in which the people accused of silencing truth-telling contactees are, you guessed it, the same people who allegedly control international finance, the weather, etc. I admire his closing notion that the point here is "the extensive work that has gone into building what might be called a UFO world," the cultivation of networks of people and modes of knowing, but I also wanted more sociology--are these groups particularly distinct from other subcultures, in their elevation of certain people as experts, their infighting, the tension between belief in the rules of the game and skepticism (he notes that some scrupulous later figures left the field, noting how much effort seemed devoted to maintaining rather than solving these "mysteries")? That said, there turns out to be quite a bit more sociological work over the years than I'd expected that looks at membership and group dynamics, going all the way back to When Prophecy Fails and even Cantril's The Invasion from Mars, which he points out was already exaggerating the amount and quality of belief in Orson Welles's broadcast. So another component of that "UFO world" is the quantity of outside study it's compelled. In that spirit, so many fun articles and books in the footnotes that one could read, perhaps my favorite being "Unidentified Flying Objects in Classical Antiquity," from The Classical Journal in 2007. Turns out you can get it from NASA, of all places.
Also...this is Oxford University Press, not some scrappy indie, but the proofreading here is at the scrappy-indie level: missing words, the occasional typo, and a last line (the last line!) that reads, as printed, "...UFOs have offered aC place to linger in strangeness." Shameful, unless it's intended as some sort of final reality-disrupting form-is-function move. Probably not, though.
March 9, 2025
This gives some great context to the cultural and political times in which UFO sightings and believers became prolific.
The hay day of sightings emerged during a time of recent world wars and a threat of nuclear warfare. Considering how history tends to repeat itself, perhaps it’s no surprise that aliens and ufos are making a cultural comeback now. The author seemed to miss this consideration entirely in the conclusion, where he seemed to reveal his bias towards the “phenomenon” being visitors from outer space with this (what seemed to me) obvious omission. He did seem to stay objective but biases always reveal themselves.
During some of the first reported encounters, many of the “aliens” people claimed to communicate with directly came with a message about the serious mortal danger war and nuclear weapons posed to humanity. They came from cultures that were essentially utopian. It’s pretty obvious that this speaks to the longings of people at the time. These warnings from alien encounters could be seen as a coping mechanism for people who feel powerless in the face of very real threats to not just their survival but the survival of all life on earth.
That the author failed to mention Carl Sagan’s “A Demon Haunted World” was a huge miss. In it, Sagan explored a theory of how culture shapes people’s minds to the point where our delusions, hallucinations, nightmares, dreams, and fantasies are all very culturally specific. This explains why people started seeing ufos right around the time humans started flying around in the sky themselves. It also explains the sexism and racism seen in the reports. Externalizing doesn’t work and sometimes the projections end up being a mirror. Props to the author for calling this stuff out.
I’m clearly a skeptic. I believe that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. There is no evidence of life in the universe aside from what’s on our very small and very fragile planet. Space is also big. Very, very, very big. We mere humans can’t comprehend how big our solar system is much less the galaxy, and many people seem to lack the ability to understand the realistic speed of travel that’s actually possible for matter to move and the physics involved with space travel. The resurgence of alien obsessions could also be attributed to our embarrassing and severely underfunded education system.
Another reason people turn to ufos and conspiracy theories is loneliness and wanting to feel special. Aliens are not flying here on vacation, and we are not special enough to put such an enormous amount of time and energy into visiting just to flit around and do weird, cryptic stuff to a handful of people. I’m so sorry.
Most importantly, we’re living through a time that will decide the fate of life on earth as we know it. People are coping however they can - if they realize it or not. Will we cling to our crystals and pseudoscience and destroy ourselves like Sagan warned against? Or will we snap the heck out of it and mature as a species?
I turned to this book for a distraction and ended up contemplating quite a lot. Coping via distraction *almost* achieved. Existential anxiety not abated. *Sigh*
The hay day of sightings emerged during a time of recent world wars and a threat of nuclear warfare. Considering how history tends to repeat itself, perhaps it’s no surprise that aliens and ufos are making a cultural comeback now. The author seemed to miss this consideration entirely in the conclusion, where he seemed to reveal his bias towards the “phenomenon” being visitors from outer space with this (what seemed to me) obvious omission. He did seem to stay objective but biases always reveal themselves.
During some of the first reported encounters, many of the “aliens” people claimed to communicate with directly came with a message about the serious mortal danger war and nuclear weapons posed to humanity. They came from cultures that were essentially utopian. It’s pretty obvious that this speaks to the longings of people at the time. These warnings from alien encounters could be seen as a coping mechanism for people who feel powerless in the face of very real threats to not just their survival but the survival of all life on earth.
That the author failed to mention Carl Sagan’s “A Demon Haunted World” was a huge miss. In it, Sagan explored a theory of how culture shapes people’s minds to the point where our delusions, hallucinations, nightmares, dreams, and fantasies are all very culturally specific. This explains why people started seeing ufos right around the time humans started flying around in the sky themselves. It also explains the sexism and racism seen in the reports. Externalizing doesn’t work and sometimes the projections end up being a mirror. Props to the author for calling this stuff out.
I’m clearly a skeptic. I believe that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. There is no evidence of life in the universe aside from what’s on our very small and very fragile planet. Space is also big. Very, very, very big. We mere humans can’t comprehend how big our solar system is much less the galaxy, and many people seem to lack the ability to understand the realistic speed of travel that’s actually possible for matter to move and the physics involved with space travel. The resurgence of alien obsessions could also be attributed to our embarrassing and severely underfunded education system.
Another reason people turn to ufos and conspiracy theories is loneliness and wanting to feel special. Aliens are not flying here on vacation, and we are not special enough to put such an enormous amount of time and energy into visiting just to flit around and do weird, cryptic stuff to a handful of people. I’m so sorry.
Most importantly, we’re living through a time that will decide the fate of life on earth as we know it. People are coping however they can - if they realize it or not. Will we cling to our crystals and pseudoscience and destroy ourselves like Sagan warned against? Or will we snap the heck out of it and mature as a species?
I turned to this book for a distraction and ended up contemplating quite a lot. Coping via distraction *almost* achieved. Existential anxiety not abated. *Sigh*
October 16, 2024
It's definitely another good book full of good documentation, sightings and testimonies.
A lot of old stuff, but with a particularity that I haven't seen in books of this kind.
In the middle of the stories, the author often intervenes to relate very personal conversations or events reported in the newspapers of the time, which are very vivid and very curious.
Here's an example:
A lot of old stuff, but with a particularity that I haven't seen in books of this kind.
In the middle of the stories, the author often intervenes to relate very personal conversations or events reported in the newspapers of the time, which are very vivid and very curious.
Here's an example:
[…]At the same time, there were stories of eccentric figures reported to be at work making their own flying machines, but whose sanity seemed in question.
An elderly Kentuckian named Judge Fenley apparently was spending lengthy periods of time in trees to prepare for what he planned to be a trip to the moon.
Pinning his hopes on an airship powered by boilers and a series of cannons, he proclaimed, “I can reach the moon in 10 or 12 days, traveling at the rate of 10,000 miles an hour and allowing for a variation of the course,” reassuring those concerned, “I have become accustomed to being in high places, and I can now stand on any limb that will bear my weight and look down without the least feeling of fear or dizziness.”[…]
August 13, 2024
For those that want an unbiased historical review regarding UFO / UAP phenomenon, this is a book for you. It's fact based on the key points of this phenomenon with anecdotes on those specific topics.
And it is written in a method for anyone to understand. There is a lot of detail but it is explained in a manner for anyone to enjoy.
All topics are covered including a chapter plus regarding abductions. Chapters are also dedicated to special groups and important persons associated with understanding, proving and / or debunking this phenomenon.
For me, this is my type of book - scientific review on the facts - there wasn't any bias associated with the information provided.
The book does what it stated it would - a Global History of the UFO / UAP phenomenon.
And it is written in a method for anyone to understand. There is a lot of detail but it is explained in a manner for anyone to enjoy.
All topics are covered including a chapter plus regarding abductions. Chapters are also dedicated to special groups and important persons associated with understanding, proving and / or debunking this phenomenon.
For me, this is my type of book - scientific review on the facts - there wasn't any bias associated with the information provided.
The book does what it stated it would - a Global History of the UFO / UAP phenomenon.
April 4, 2025
It is impressive that such an interesting topic can be made so dull. This was a slog to finish. It is a litany of UFO researchers/groups, their approaches, cliques and especially their petty squabbles. It never gets deeper into the question of why. Not why do little men from Mars come here, but why have we had reports of strange things in the sky since we drew on cave walls? Do we somehow need this type of thing? Why do we care? The pettiness mentioned above is indicative of a real need to "own" this phenomenon, and an inclination to fight about what it means. I would have rather read a discussion of that need rather than a list of the names of Brazilian UFO researchers in the 70s.
September 8, 2024
This book does an excellent job tracing the history of UFO sightings, reports, and the community that was caught up in all that while situating it all in the historic, social, and political context it all was happening in. If you’re looking for a good history book to shed light on this part of history then this is a solid choice. If you’re hoping that this book will shed new light on old cases or prove the existence of aliens you should look elsewhere.
April 11, 2024
This book had so much information and it was fascinating. I went into it expecting the usual accounts of sightings and abductions, but it surprised me with detailed historical events regarding what was happening at the time. It honestly left me questioning everything I thought I knew about UFOs. Highly recommend.
August 24, 2025
This is a rehash of what has been written and reported in several other books and articles. The information is good, and I suppose the fact it’s published by a reputable publisher like Oxford gives it clout. However, I believe there are better books that can be read. Indeed, I highly recommend UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government's Search for Alien Life Here—and Out There by Garrett Graff.
October 4, 2024
An excellently researched book but dry dry reading. Very useful as a reference book-it should definitely be on your shelf if you are doing work in the field of UFOs. Not recommended for entertainment reading, though.
January 6, 2025
Very detailed coverage of many incidents of interest from the 1940s to the 2000s.
The conclusion is the best "extraterrestrials have been here for hundreds of years, inhabiting the Human imagination..."
The conclusion is the best "extraterrestrials have been here for hundreds of years, inhabiting the Human imagination..."
May 18, 2024
More about what UFO’s says about ourselves. Not even little green men are immune from the lens of identity politics herein.
July 4, 2024
Proposes to be a sort of history on UFO’s and as such delivers.
January 25, 2025
Really good — more effectively debunks ufos than most others, simply by elucidating the history of how they present and are constructed and putting that into context.
September 2, 2024
“After the Flying Saucers Came” is a book about the history of UFO’s and the public’s reaction to them, beginning with Kenneth Arnold’s iconic sighting in 1947. The author does not aim to settle the question of whether or not UFOs are extraterrestrial or any other kind of “real” phenomenon. Instead, he focuses on UFOs as cultural history, recounting the varying interpretations of the phenomena that have prevailed from time to time in the last 80 years, from Project Bluebook and the “contactees” of the 1950s through the Pentagon videos and “abductees” of modern times.
Eghigian’s book complements Garrett Graff’s recent “UFO: The Insider Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here—and Out There.” Despite the sensational titles, both books are fairly sober assessments of cultural phenomena. “After The Flying Saucers Came” includes a broader discussion of international UFO culture than Graff’s book, including the interesting observation that flying saucer clubs were viewed with great suspicion in Franco’s Spain because even small gatherings were seen as a threat to the dictatorship.
Readers who are looking for a book that treats UFOs as “real” and extraterrestrial may be disappointed. It’s fair to say that Eghigian leans skeptical, but his book is not an exercise in debunking. For those interested in UFOs as a cultural and historical phenomenon, “After the Flying Saucers Came” is worth reading, especially together with Graff’s “UFO”.
Eghigian’s book complements Garrett Graff’s recent “UFO: The Insider Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here—and Out There.” Despite the sensational titles, both books are fairly sober assessments of cultural phenomena. “After The Flying Saucers Came” includes a broader discussion of international UFO culture than Graff’s book, including the interesting observation that flying saucer clubs were viewed with great suspicion in Franco’s Spain because even small gatherings were seen as a threat to the dictatorship.
Readers who are looking for a book that treats UFOs as “real” and extraterrestrial may be disappointed. It’s fair to say that Eghigian leans skeptical, but his book is not an exercise in debunking. For those interested in UFOs as a cultural and historical phenomenon, “After the Flying Saucers Came” is worth reading, especially together with Graff’s “UFO”.
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