The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the American Uncanny

by Susan Lepselter

The Resonance of Unseen Things offers an ethnographic meditation on the “uncanny” persistence and cultural freight of conspiracy theory. The project is a reading of conspiracy theory as an index of a certain strain of late 20th-century American despondency and malaise, especially as understood by people experiencing downward social mobility. Written by a cultural anthropologist with a literary background, this deeply interdisciplinary book focuses on the enduring American preoccupation with captivity in a rapidly transforming world. Captivity is a trope that appears in both ordinary and fantastic iterations here, and Susan Lepselter shows how multiple troubled histories—of race, class, gender, and power—become compressed into stories of uncanny memory.

“We really don’t have anything like this in terms of a focused, sympathetic, open-minded ethnographic study of UFO experiencers. . . . The author’s semiotic approach to the paranormal is immensely productive, positive, and, above all, resonant with what actually happens in history.”
—Jeffrey J. Kripal, J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Religion, Rice University

“Lepselter relates a weave of intimate alien sensibilities in out-off-the-way places which are surprisingly, profoundly, close to home. Readers can expect to share her experience of contact with complex logics of feeling, and to do so in a contemporary America they may have thought they understood.”
—Debbora Battaglia, Mount Holyoke College

“An original and beautifully written study of contemporary American cultural poetics. . . . The book convincingly brings into relief the anxieties of those at the margins of American economic and civic life, their perceptions of state power, and the narrative continuities that bond them to histories of violence and expansion in the American West.”
—Deirdre de la Cruz, University of Michigan

Genres: Anthropology, Nonfiction, Psychology, Academic, Paranormal, Philosophy, Theory

192 pages, Paperback

Published March 3, 2016

Reviews

[Sydney · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first book I finished for a grad school class!!!!🤪I liked it a lot and had to use ChatGPT to help me understand the hard parts. I would give it five stars but I don’t want to seem like a total ~nerd~

[sandro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliant work. A bit repetitive, but it has wonderful insights and some great quotes. Writing my final paper on this #lockin

[Ruby · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really took a long time to read this book which is a testament to how brilliant it is. I really pawed over so much of it, highlighting and looking up the references, speaking to people about it to capture my thoughts. So sensitive and well thought out. The interviews read like prose! Invigorating investigation into the uncanny, the liminal, the spaces in-between which can be used to articulate clearly American poetics, wider linking themes of freedom, right-wing politics, pioneer/frontier tales, colonisation, discovery, captivity narratives.

I loved the references to resonance, nostalgia, mimesis and memory ! yes yes yes

[Brookelyn Lambright · Rating 5 out of 5]

“America is still haunted by its own historical crimes and wounds. Ghosts always haunt us with the historical injustices of the past; their uncanny presences hold open social memories that seep into the present and disrupt its attempts at narrative closure… The strange and frightening lead back to what we already know, to what was meant to be completely forgotten.”

This book was an incredible read. I have never thought about how early captivity narratives about Indigenous people connect to conspiracy theories related to aliens and UFOs. Lepselter’s ethnographic work is incredibly illuminating, honest, and empathetic, as she shows that our memories are not just our own — that there is a poetic process to how people recognize various patterns between events and stories.

It also reminds us, at a time that feels so politically divided, that we aren’t all that different from one another. That most of us fear the powers that be, and most of us fear the exploitation of our labor by capitalistic greed. UFO theories are another way of identifying these powers when everything seems too big to name.

This book also reminds us that history lingers. It continues to rupture the present. It exceeds individual experience and becomes a social memory. The wounds of American exploitation still haunt us today, just through different poetic resonances.

It’s a beautifully written book and a wonderful exploration of a world that from the outside looks “weird,” “strange,” and “ungrounded.”

[Dat-Dangk Vemucci · Rating 5 out of 5]

Burns through the normal limits of modern sociological writing to pursue an infinitely more compelling kind of ethnographic poetics, refusing to do our analysis for us, each sentence so carefully curated and refined to convey a sense of the numinous running through everyday life; The dream of manifest destiny echoes in homoeopathic dilutions through the consciousness of modern disenfranchised Americans as they struggle to comprehend the invisible yet all-encompassing force of American state power, a power so pervasive as to colour everything, even the natural world, in an almost supernatural omnipresence, a force which has accrued as much superstitious reverence as the medicine men once did. The inarticulable malaise of a history which cannot be repaired; Native American tribes made to vanish as if they never existed at all, their children abducted by the invading alien force. A century later Betty and Barney Hill, a married white woman and black man in the 1960s, are passing 'Indian Head' when a UFO stops them. They are abducted and can never fully bring to conscious recall what happened beyond the straining lights, the unreadable faces of the technologically advanced, surgeon-like aliens and the cloying sense that something happened, something profoundly wrong which resists articulation because it has vanished from memory, made to disappear.
"You can't fix history," says one of Lepselter's informants - in fact, you can barely comprehend it most of the time, even when it's everywhere, in the mural of a native American painted on the stucco wall of a desert peep house, in the plastic keychains of little green men and Indian arrowheads sold to tourists outside Area 51.

[ekrobin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lepselter constructs a fascinating study on UFOs and belief, trauma and healing, suspicion and calculation, utopia and dystopia, and political turmoil. I found the approach to this complex and controversial subject to be incredibly thought-provoking!

[elle · Rating 5 out of 5]

LOVE THIS, trauma makes the brain do crazy things and generational trauma is no exception. the connection between alien abductions and colonialism can’t be unseen once you read this

[Amal Omer · Rating 4 out of 5]

super interesting!! the sociology behind conspiracies but specifically around UFOs… talk about the government and stories from believers with experiences … not what i thought it might be!

[Bill Weaver · Rating 3 out of 5]

I admit I didn’t like this book all that much, but one thing made it worthwhile and that’s the ending. I won’t spoil it for you. I will say if you are into UFOs and to the left politically then you might enjoy this book. If you even lean right a little (as I do) this is a bit tiresome in places. Still again I must admit she nailed the landing. Regarding UFOs, my theory is that people see what they want to see, and that includes academics who may view this subject through the lens of anthropology and ‘American studies’. She can’t help but mention ‘slavery’ and ‘colonialism’ over and over again. I find her analysis of the folklore highly suspect in that regard, even if it holds up as ‘ethnography’. I’m only a beginner it’s true, an amateur folklorist at best, but still my current working theory is that a more thorough study of the related folklore (including ‘the night hag’ and earlier tales of ‘visitation’) might prove some of her connections to be invented or perhaps overhyped. I take this as a sign of the continuing feud, or so I’ve read, between folklorists and anthropologists. Thus, to my mind some of her claims and connections, though perhaps ‘poetic’, remain unsupported by the data. I would even go so far as to say there is something paternalistic about how she describes the people here at times, the way she italicizes certain phrases as if a nod and a wink to the reader ‘oh I know how this sounds but just bear with me’. Academics too fear being lumped together with “the tabloids”. (p 9) She gets at Luhmann’s ‘unity of the paradox’ describing militia handbooks next to Noam Chomsky. (p. 10) However she does not seriously discuss how easily “uncanny storytellers” can be understood as within a tradition of folklore. (also p. 10) So is there traditional (oral) folklore about ‘genocide’? Or is ‘genocide’ a modern invention? (The term is bandied about a lot these days in regards to certain international conflicts so one might begin to question its usage, at least outside of the International Criminal Court.) The author rather casually suggests that UFO and abduction narratives are tied to ‘genocide’. She doesn’t care to comment so directly on stories of white children murdered by native abductors. This certainly appears to have occurred based on data she presents. Could it be that the story of the United States is more complicated than ‘slavery’, ‘colonization’ and ‘genocide’? To read this book you wouldn’t think so. Perhaps it is because she’s an anthropologist and not a historian. Finally by the middle of the book we get the idea that she understands a bit about this complexity, but only the barest hint: “The federal government—ambiguously mythologized in the nineteenth century West as omnipotent in genocidal campaigns and invisible in daily anarchies of a ‘Wild West’—still retains that magic duality here.” (p. 101) That is the extent of complexity that she cares to mention, aside from a few snide comments about ‘freedom’. I confess that my own biases intrude here. I have no problem with bias so long as it is acknowledged. Yes, moments of beauty punctuate her academic editorializing, where we catch a glimpse of ‘drifters’ floating through life… the beatnik in me cannot help but think of Kerouac… ‘drifters’ vs ‘homesteaders’ I imagine. (p. 10) Later ‘savages’ vs the ‘civilized’ occurs to me. Nomads (‘barbarians’) versus the wall-builders too. Kerouac was truly a poet and found a beauty in the meandering decay (life) of America. Kerouac also was none too fond of communists and other left-wing ideologues. (Will I ever publish a book?! Or am I only drifting… through my notes … notebooks become tumbleweeds passing through the ghost town of my mind… I’m a nomadic scholar without any real credentials in my chosen area of research. I’m a ‘folk’ scholar, haha. So take my critique with a grain of forgiveness. I almost adopt her style for a moment it seems.) She gets Area 51 right as “an enormous open secret” aka “Dreamland . . . a dream of the Cold War come to life in the desert”. (p. 11) She uses ‘uncanny/ordinary’ like I use ‘esoteric/mundane’. “The inextricability of the uncanny and the ordinary expressed a particular blend of desire and nostalgia—a mix of otherworldly displacement and the deep specificity of a heavily entextualized, lived-in place in the American West. The ways these discourses came together suggested other kinds of anxiety about colonization and the earth, secrecy and theft, nature and loss, and the vulnerable boundaries of the human body. These were themes—about strange, amorphous power and the vulnerability of unsuspecting subjects—I’d also heard in the UFO groups . . .” (p. 11) This is a tale of “ghosts”, (p. 16) “a space that slides between ‘memory’ and ‘dream’, subverting the discrete borders of the real.” ( p. 17) America is ‘haunted’ she is saying. This is mostly folklore but she won’t say it. The Unmarked Space too I see here from systems theory. All communication creates a space unmarked or ‘excluded’ by necessity, saying in effect ‘we are talking about this’ (‘and not that’). This is sociology: “the stories here are the real objects.” (p. 17) She admits that “the object of [her] study does not emerge in a single, unified place.” (p. 17) Or space, but this is true for all communication. Here be monsters, she tells us in effect—“the sinister, the traumatic, and the disintegrated”. (p. 17) She uses the term “screen memory” but doesn’t explain it at first. (p. 25) Or she expects us to just understand? Only later does she briefly mention what it means. I patiently waited for her to mention folklore (oral tradition) here when she describes ‘repetition’ but she does not. It seems the way these stories are told with repetition of key phrases and words epitomizes folk tradition, but she never touches folklore studies, as I’ve said. Marginal economic circumstances, ‘sex work’, and ‘addiction’ unite some of these folk and somehow she blames the American ideal of ‘freedom’ for this. Such an academic sensibility, blaming ‘the system’ and its ideals for individual woes. Isn’t that the real conspiracy theory here? Leftists and academics will never admit that they can easily succumb to such prophecies of doom. Yet academics can argue this idea of ‘the system’ as scapegoat over and over without anyone calling them on it. That people have no ability to make decisions to change their lives or improve them is the tragic narrative here, and a master narrative of left wing academics the world over. But I’m sorry, ‘the master narrative of freedom’ is clearly the true culprit, lurking unseen, just offstage. (pp. 32-34) It seems at times this book presents a variation on the ‘what’s wrong with Kansas?’ trope, i.e. if only the folk could see it is the system that is oppressing them and not aliens then we might get somewhere. Certainly she does not specifically attack her subjects, but this line of reasoning is implied throughout. Certainly she is sweet to her subjects and treats them with respect, perhaps too much respect in places, especially when discussing the Long Island native and MUFON raconteur who ineptly tried to poison local officials with radium and ended up in the madhouse. I had to google it but after reading the details it appears to be a tragic tale. A reasonably successful middle class professional destroys himself with this business about UFOs and is found incompetent to stand trial. If every story of middle class distress is connected to ‘slavery’ and ‘colonization’ should there be a lot more UFO believers out there turned middle class disaster stories? Many might admit to belief but do they all go so far down the rabbit hole as to destroy their own reasonably comfortable existence? This seems more about mental illness than ‘captivity’ narratives is what I’m saying, at least the bit about Long Island. Though perhaps the most extreme example, I found that her analysis overall strains against the material, and it seems to me only by glossing over certain details can she confine her analysis to the narrative she has decided upon. Thus she has crossed over the subsystem boundary of science and shares the same sensibilities (and techniques) as conspiracy theory and UFOs, which in most cases depend upon a lack of data to remain within the realm of possibility in the former case or ‘unidentified’ in the latter. In particular her ‘poetic license’ allows her to make objectively false claims such as that “UFO researchers” have found “empirical evidence”. The examples she gives are perhaps claimed at times by overeager ufologists but in fact no “dried rings of grass . . . scraps of metal [or] mysterious scars” have been accepted by the scientific community as ‘empirical evidence’ of otherworldly visitors. (see p. 118) Don’t get me wrong I do admire her field work. Working as a waitress and living in a trailer out West to ‘go native’ as they say is legitimate anthropological work, but I often found myself wondering what other details she glosses over to make the material fit her analysis. The method she uses to tell her tale becomes somewhat syrupy and overly sweet in its application. And, as I am arguing, her vague narrative obscures the real value of her work when she somehow manages to turn a crazy UFO-related assassination plot on Long Island into a story about ‘slavery’ and ‘colonization’. (p. 43) Naturally this is about ‘dissociation’. (p. 37) Trauma is ‘marked off’ from ordinary existence. (p. 40) Perhaps this is why I’m reading all these UFO book (unconsciously despite my claims of sociological and folkloristic ‘research’)—am I really just hungry for these stories about trauma? I don’t want to be a part of this victimology but certainly I have my own (psychological) trauma. The poet vs the listener is perhaps a good point. Plato she mentions—and she too sides with poetry over Plato, as do I. Yet where does ‘poetry’ end and ‘science’ begin? She accuses MUFON members of engaging in “a kind of heightened scientistic style” but is her own ‘academic’ style also merely “mimetic of scientific discourse”? (p. 121) She wants to visit the “vernacular” realm, or as I would say the world of ‘folklore’, but I suppose my point is how well does this message actually translate when carried back to the ‘official’ realm aka the “unanimously agreed-upon real” of science? (p. 63) Ultimately, and this is where we seriously part ways, she veers into hardcore conspiracy territory when she suggests that the twin towers fell due to the “operations of power” rather than merely the mad schemes of terrorists. (p. 157) No matter my own research into the paradox of terrorism, the ever-evolving dance between terror and the state, I must admit finally to being disgusted by this book. Still as I said she nails the ending or the ‘landing’ if we want to use the metaphor of UFOs or (communicative) gymnastics. I don’t want to spoil it but what does she expect? There is a lot of money invested in keeping this UFO disinformation psyop rolling.

[em · Rating 4 out of 5]

read this for class, lowkey skimmed it ngl, but it was really interesting and I really enjoyed how Lepselter writes.

“The rain on the window recycled from a time we can’t remember, and our memories are not simply our own.”

[Mardi Reardon-Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

anthropology at it’s very best - beyond the spinozan ideal not to laugh at or judge but to understand, Susan goes beyond understanding & shows us how to hold stories with tenderness, care & generosity

[Melanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would rank it equally as Alien Ocean - boundary-breaking ethnographic creative writing and an example of ground-up presentation of data. I have to commend not just Susan but all her editors, writing critics, students, and people who have offered inputs prior to the final product. The book exemplifies the simplicity and clarity of thought that masks the arduous process of data analysis and writing. I can only imagine the stages that she went through and now I am curious about that process and her drafts. Unlike formulaic academic writing, this one takes a lot of writing talent.

I highly recommend this book because it is such a pleasure to read. Her use of poetic style of writing is engaging and makes a rather complex topic appear easy. She introduced me to the term aphophenia or our predisposition to connect things that are seemingly distantly related. Moreover, she emphasized the quality or tone registers of meaning. This is why uncanny resonance is key here. Resonance and repetition of events are what makes the reality of Hillview community real.

I was quite disappointed that this isn't a UFO book per se but rather how to talk and write about a complex process such as alienation, disconnected stories, seemingly random conversation. This is a difficult task of analysis. She shows that it is in the writing process itself that we can represent our subjects. I appreciate that instead of quotation marks that seem to set off the speaker, she uses italics to capture the tone and emphasis of words of her informants. You can almost hear them in your head! High marks for this. I do wish this practice was more common to keep the flow. John remarked that this is one weakness of the book: if this exemplifies George Marcus' writing culture, then it only emphasizes writing talent and privileges Native English speakers. I do agree but I still would want to see examples in the genre and the possibilities that are almost too rare in anthropology. I want to see the lesser-known writers and topics, the marginal and not the big names in the field who happen to be predominantly men. Perhaps it would emphasize talent rather than the more democratic rote of the academic technical report which anyone can do. However, people need to see what can be possible even if so few of us can become great writers.

Her approach to analysis is also unique. She opted to touch lightly on several topics like class or power (her subtitle is a misnomer) but she focused her interpretation by examining the Native American violent subjugation and the captivity genre that has reverberated throughout American life. I found this fresh. Typically these accounts would be analysed as religious in nature, possession, as is common for non-Western accounts; or interpreted medically such as culture-bound illness (UFO seems to be very American) or in the realm of individual or social trauma or mental illness. This is what sets apart her work. Unfortunately, there is no explanation and clearly she does not set out to have a definitive explanation. This is the weakness of the book. It is not an explanatory book in that sense but one that exercises how memory is continuity and not necessarily truth making.

This is excellent for people who want to see how cultural relativism works in anthropology. She makes no judgment about these people and is preoccupied with how to present their logic of the uncanny and how seemingly unconnected events and things are connected and make sense to people. Martijn Konings wrote about this similarly in his work on the emotional logics of capitalism (read Erin's review here https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/...). Truly this book talks about a fringe topic but actually can be slotted to a multitude of classes on different topics such as class, race, medical anthropology, money, creative writing, and further analysed. This is what Susan set out to do, for us to do further thinking. While a book's usefulness as class reading is not a good measure of its worth as John says, I still think that this work can withstand the decades - only if more people in the institution read and recommend it.

[K · Rating 5 out of 5]

beautiful and fantastic. one of my favorites in 2024. the way she wrote🥹wow!
“Story itself is theory.” Will think abt it forever

[Sher · Rating 5 out of 5]

v interesting! I will think of this book often
read this for my cultural anthropology class

favorite quotes

“The narrative underlying the boarding school policy is a three-part story of removal, conversion, and return. It is, in essence, a policy informed by a naturalized instatement of a genre with deep American roots; it is a captivity narrative.”

“who lived here, before the pioneers came? Who knew this land long before the Rosewell military base opened and closed, taking jobs with it, before the UFo museum brought more jobs back again? Were they Apache, Navajo, Zuni? None of our UFo tourists brochures told us that....At one point we drove out to the desert to find the famous Roswell UFO crash site. Walking off the dirt road into the hills, we were high-spirited until for some reason the air seemed to shift. The atmosphere became uneasy. Things seemed suddenly weighted with a kind of half meaning. I felt the sense of an evaporated history, the disturbing absence created by one world conquering another.”

“The white fear of alien abduction is nothing compared to the abductions of history.”

“America is still haunted by its own historical crimes and wounds. Ghosts always haunt us with the historical injustices of the past; thier uncanny presences hold open social memories that seep into the present and disrupt its attempts at narrative closure. The uncanny denaturalizes the familiar, until the strange and the frightening lead back to what we already know, to what was meant to be completely forgotten.”

[Molly Boyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lepselter has captured exactly what Ethnographic writing ought to be. In this book, she calls into question the epistemic authorities inherent to contentions with the uncanny. From the rhetoric of our colonial beginnings to the pop-culture phenomena of the 90s, the inexplicable aspects of the American experience are not answered outright by Lepselter, but examined thoroughly with fierce ontological commitment to her subjects and their situation within various domains of doubt. Because of this, her reader's ability to re-examine evidential claims and the weight which they carry in our socio-cultural present is entirely reimagined, and they become able to ask questions like: "Does it really matter whether a phenomenon is real or imagined if it has a tangible impact?".

Although I don't personally agree with all of the connections which Lepselter makes in her work, at the end I found myself convinced that it didn't matter. The method of the book still rings true, and whether you are a firm believer in the occult, or strictly invested in the scientific verifiability of the mainstream, we all have our own resonances with the uncanny which cannot be written off through ethnographic practices. I am convinced that this book should be read by all students of anthropology, and anyone who finds themselves struggling to contend with the unknowable.

[Alyanna Denise · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Resonance of Unseen Things documents and analyzes the culture underpinning UFO communities in different rural areas in the United States. On its most superficial level, this book is indeed about UFO communities. But really, it’s a book about how systemic violence, historical trauma, and abuse come to form their strong beliefs. It’s such an empathetic take on a group of people whose beliefs and ways of life are frequently dismissed and even made fun of by larger society.

And here’s one of the things I love about anthropology; it makes the familiar strange, and the strange familiar. Strangely, I saw my own communities reflected back at me through these UFO communities. UFOlogists yearn for a greater force behind it all, mistrust the government, and don’t take societal rules for granted. I’m certain that some of us also share the same sentiments to some extent.

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[Taryn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was eye opening in the way of all good ethnography. The subject is not UFO experiences per se, but the resonance of these stories with other ideas around captivity & power. Although written before the explosion of conspiracy theorizing after Trump’s election loss, it provides deep insights into one aspect of this time - the way people draw on half-heard similarities to identify & construct patterns of meaning.

This book also has the best definition of trope I have read (p. 6). I would have given it 5 stars except for the growing number of typos in the latter part of the book & references in text that did not make it into the reference list.

[N · Rating 3 out of 5]

To quote the meme "It had me in the first half I'm not gonna lie"

[Kylie]

fav enthno ever!!!

[Clara Louden · Rating 4 out of 5]

oh hell yes loved this- only critique would be, please some pictures and more vignettes! so incredible.

[Drew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating ethnographic book on UFO experiencers culture. Loved Lepselter's writing style very breezy and easy to read for an academic book.

I really liked Lepselter's conceptualization of apophenia within these cases which helps me with having something to add to my toolkit of trying to understand conspiracy culture and this trend towards a "post-truth" way of thinking that society today has found itself in.

I thought her use of the 'captivity' narrative as an overlapping trope found within the abductee experince to be a keen insight (this being her linking overlaps of colonial white captive by indigenous people's stories as having similar thematic qualities to the encounter narrative); however, this aspect of the book was also the biggest drawback for me, as I felt she started to become seemingly too reductionistic and over explanatory with this cleverly intuitive idea.

A book definitely worth the read if the subject matter speaks to you.

[Will · Rating 5 out of 5]

“You only see a shadow. That’s the only way you know it’s there, by the shadow on the ground.”

so simple and sensitive in its storytelling, so intricate and artful in its thinking. effective as a travelogue to an extent I've never seen - reading this feels like being on a trip and talking to UFO watchers yourself, every new idea fitting in perfectly, revealing a little more of the hidden pattern. also insightful American ethnography, clearly articulating ideas at which not much other writing I've seen has been able to take more than wide potshots. very very good

[Devon Chodzin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating, bizarre, and something I hadn't thought of.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

A compelling study of the uncanny (made explicit by alien encounters). I particularly like Lepselter’s concept of apophenia and the way that coming up against power induces the uncanny.

[JCSmith · Rating 5 out of 5]

THIS IS THE GOAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Evan Streeby · Rating 3 out of 5]

Our uncanny narratives are a product both of cultural guilt and appropriation of older narratives. They play on one another and create something unique to each epoch.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Susan Lepselter is an anthropology professor, and this book came out of her field research into UFO narratives, and other "uncanny" narratives. Her research focused groups of people who believe to have experienced some sort of alien or otherworldly visitation or abduction, and the way they speak about their experiences. She spent time in Rachel Nevada (near the infamous "Area 51" air force base), in Roswell, and with UFO experience support groups, listening to, and recording the way people talked about UFO's and other mysterious experiences, as well as the impersonal forces of the modern world.

I'm not familiar with the jargon of ethnography or anthropology, so I sometimes found the reading a bit difficult. However, Lepselter's ideas are deeply intriguing. Among other things, she explores the connections with earlier American captivity stories and tropes, as well as the role of what can be broadly called "conspiracy theories" in the folklore of the American West.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

An unusual ethnography that goes well beyond its ostensible subject. Almost like a guidebook to American paranoia.

[Suzanne LaPierre]

I had the pleasure of hearing this author speak at George Mason University yesterday and was intrigued by her synthesis of research and ideas. "Stories are theories about the world" she said. UFO stories, which she speaks of as a type of folklore, are one of many ways people have of trying to find meaning in the world, trying to figure out how things fit together. During her research, she found that people who believe UFO and alien abduction stories have formed tight bonds with one another, sharing their stories and finding kinship with others who believe them. She explains these people as belonging to a sub-culture that is not so foreign or distant from mainstream America. She said: "We judge most harshly the people who live among us but are not us." I believe she meant that while most of us can respect the fact that distant cultures have belief systems that are different from our own, it's much harder for us to accept those with different beliefs who live among us. However, she also stressed that this is not meant to say that upholding facts and truth are not important, but that we can try to have more understanding of others. She also spoke about how "the margin became the center" in recent years in terms of conspiracy theories becoming accepted by a much wider swath of the public. Altogether, she draws from research in folklore, cultural anthropology, psychology, sociology, and literature to shed some light what once may have seemed a niche area of study but now is of interest to many of us who are trying to wrap our heads around the current power of post-truthism in society.