UFOs and Ufology: The First 50 Years

by Paul Devereux, Peter Brookesmith

Explores fifty years of fascination with UFOs, discussing unexplained phenomena ranging from crop circles to alien abductions

Genres: Nonfiction

192 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1998

Reviews

[Isidore · Rating 2 out of 5]

The authors cite abductee Whitley Strieber's observation that ufologists are "probably the cruellest, nastiest and craziest people" he knew. The present book may not fully exemplify his claim, but it doesn't exactly refute it, either.

Innocent readers and saucer novices probably have no idea that there are feuds within the UFO community which rival the one between Trotskyites and Stalinists for vehemence, if not violence. Nor are they likely to be prepared for the fact that there are very few books on the subject which are not saturated with bias in favour of one particular, exclusive interpretation of the phenomenon.

Devereux et al have written a generally entertaining and interesting introduction to the subject, notable for a caustic wit which is uncommon among writers in the field. However, they're not exactly up front about their own very pronounced biases. Devereux is a specialist in "earth mysteries", and the book strongly promotes the idea that all UFO events are explicable in terms of "earth lights" and the "psychosocial hypothesis". The trouble is, there is plenty of controversy about the former, and the latter is a hodge-podge of conflicting theories whose only common element is a skepticism regarding the extraterrestrial origins of UFOnauts. It doesn't help matters that the authors have additional biases in favour of certain psychosocialists, and are quick to denounce those with whom they are not in sympathy (poor John Keel receives the book's lowest blow, with his sinister but hugely enjoyable speculations dismissed as a byproduct of his diabetes!).

So, the book's lack of objectivity is one problem. Another is its smug tone, as if the exponents of rival points of view are shamefully lacking in perceptivity and mental skills with which the authors are replete. The danger in striking this attitude is that it makes the reader less indulgent toward the authors' own errors and sloppy thinking. For instance, one could forgive them for firmly stating that there are seven stars visible to the naked eye in the Pleiades star cluster, had they not, a page or two earlier, sneered at Billy Meier's "lack of astronomical exactitude". And while they chide many ufologists for not understanding how science works, the validity of Carl Jung's "archetypes" and the "collective unconscious" is taken for granted, even though their existence has never in any sense been scientifically demonstrated. The authors similarly embrace Stanislav Graf's birth-canal trauma theories, and even more dubious stuff, pretty much invalidating their claim to be hard-nosed scientific types; all too often they are distinguishable from the objects of their derision only insofar as they happen to harbour a different set of pseudoscientific beliefs and assumptions.

I confess I skimmed some sections, such as the part on Roswell (a subject without interest to me), and I bailed altogether after hitting an overview of "conspiracy theories", which begins absurdly by likening the thinking of modern-day ufologists to that of medieval peasants. The prevalence of conspiracist thinking today has far more to do with living in a world where deception of the public is commonplace than it does with a scientifically undefined psychological syndrome allegedly afflicting "emotionally inarticulate" members of society from time immemorial.

It's unfortunate that the good things in this book, such as the excellent chapter on crop circles, are compromised by these problems. If you're looking for an introduction to the subject, I liked John Michael Greer's The UFO Phenomenon, which is open-minded, intelligent, and without rancour.

[Paul Darcy · Rating 3 out of 5]

By Paul Devereux and Peter Brookesmith, published in 1997.

Alien abductions, crafts from other worlds and/or dimensions, implants, underground bases, coverups, misinformation, tall blond men and little gray ones. Sound exciting? Sure does, but are they fantasies dreamt up in our subconscious minds or reality knocking on our wooden heads?

Take a peek into the world of UFOs spanning 1947 through 1997 with your hosts: Paul Devereux and Peter Brookesmith. And they, like I, don’t really believe despite the hordes of people “out there” who do.

So what do you get for your money in this book? Well, far as I can tell a pretty decent, though not always objective, view of the UFO mythologies through the years. This encompasses fringe groups, TV and movie and radio, and some certifiable nutjobs. The phenomena is pretty well defined now in our culture and we all know exactly what to expect.

But Peter and Paul take a different approach and try to justify their beliefs of what is really going on. How do they do this? With a lot of poking fun at the traditional “aliens from another dimension/galaxy/world” general belief system in place and introducing their takes on hallucinogenic inner-mind explanations and electromagnetic earth lights phenomena. . .

Sound a far fetched? To me it does, but we do know more about hallucinogens and electro-stimulus to the cerebral cortex than gray aliens and crashes saucers. There may be something to it - the authors think there is - or maybe they are following a wild goose as well.

Overall a good read and appears to be thoroughly researched and documented - but aren’t all people trying to make a case fulfilling those expectations. And no, I don’t have the inclination or time to track down the validity of any of the claims. I read this type of thing as mind stimulus for writing stories and novels.

Whatever the reason for the phenomena, it does exist and is a part of our culture for better or worse. Get used to it, and look to the skies - you just never know what may be up there, besides stars planets and vacuum or course.

So, if you are interested in UFOs and UFOLOGY, pick this up from the library like I did and give it a go. You may not find the answers you seek, but you may get a chuckle or two out of it.

[Bill Weaver · Rating 3 out of 5]

“First, one can’t help but feel that there is a contradiction, or at the very least a paradox, in the concept of the crashed saucer.” (p. 134). As Niklas Luhmann the German sociologist sees it, paradox is the ‘holy shrine’ of modern society. I admit these boys are scientific, but this isn’t my favorite UFO book. There is a lot here to like though, some adequate debunking of some ufological ‘holy cows’. If your ‘holy cow’ is the ever elusive UFO ‘disclosure’, be prepared to either hate this book or to have a few of your comfortable illusions on the subject thrown into doubt. Still the ‘earth lights’ floated by the authors as a plausible and scientific explanation for UFOs is just boring and no fun. This is of course one of the biggest problems with science, it’s tendency to disenchant! ‘Tectonic Strain Theory’ (TST) as it is officially called will not satisfy true believers or even those looking for a little entertainment via well-spun folk tales. Earthquakes and magnetic fault lines spitting out balls of colored light cannot explain abductions though right? The authors do a fair job of presenting ‘suggestibility’ as a reasonable explanation for hypnotically reconstructed abduction events, but even if these colored lights spat out from the earth are to blame, “[a]ltered mind states can be also occasioned by artificial energy fields.” (p. 177) Could “electrical hypersensitivity” explain the Travis Walton experience? (p. 177) It seems impossible to arrange for a complete catalogue of all such occurrences that would satisfy either the true believers or the more scientifically inclined ufologists. Indeed that is my chief complaint about this extremely well-written and well-researched book - namely that the authors do seem to avoid any unexplained sightings or events that might throw their primary conclusion (‘Tectonic Strain Theory’ or TST) into question. This is John Keel’s chief complaint against the extraterrestrial hypothesis (‘ETH’) - that it selects only data which fits the theory and avoids the rest. Again since this book is a bit out of date some of that may be due to more recent developments. Could the UAPs of more recent Defense Dept. provenance be explained with this theory for example? I’m not so sure, and I can think of a few contact type events described by Keel and others that (may still be hoaxes but if not) would seem to defy the TST theory. The authors make a big deal out of “things-seen-in-the-sky” but what about examples of things-seen-on-the-ground? Can they confidently say that all of these ‘ground sightings’ or contacts are “misperception, hoax, mirage, psychosocial aberration or whatever”? (p. 179) Not being a geologist and/or a physicist, TST is difficult to refute. Still, my broader question for the authors would be as to why there aren’t even more such events ascribed to ‘electrical hypersensitivity’ given the level of background electromagnetic radiation we are all subject to whilst living in our modern ‘technoculture’? The obvious sociological insight is that no two observers seem to observe the UFO phenomenon in the same way - a lesson in modern society with which most systems theorists would agree. I would say that the ‘differentiation’ of modern society resembles too the trauma or ‘dissociation’ of individuals who find themselves as aliens on the outside of this complex social machine. From this point it is easy to observe that “like most fringe subjects, ufology feeds a desperate spiritual hunger and need for release from mundanity felt by vast numbers of people within modern Westernized societies.” (p. 9) This book offers much by way of description of this ongoing modern spiritual dilemma. “[W]e have traded the soft flicker of firelight for the more mechanical glow of the . . . screen”, whether television, cinema, laptop or cell phone. (p. 37) Within ufology, these boundaries (distinctions even) between fact and fiction blur. “Most of us live in a limbo world of manipulated information.” (p. 39) The sociological truth remains that “all . . . researchers really have to go on are UFO reports, not UFOs themselves.” (emphasis in original, p. 46) Ufology adds to this complexity (or noise?) with its difficulty of objective scientific distinction between hoaxes and naturally produced ‘unidentified’ phenomena as evidenced by attempts to scientifically test crop circles, as “nobody knows where or when crop formations occur, only when they are noticed.” (p. 73) We must perhaps admit that the “nature of . . . [certain ufological] claims is intrinsically insusceptible to what would pass in either the courtroom or the laboratory as proof or disproof.” (p. 81) It may thus come as no surprise that “[s]cientists have largely ignored UFOs . . . and so have governments.” (p. 119) Yet in a modern differentiated society could such scientific and political subsystems even hope to communicate any solution to the spiritual (religious) dilemma at the core of what may be “more complex than simple folklore”, and in fact “modern-day social narratives” which display the “augmented . . . dynamics of folklore narrative in . . . a high-speed technoculture”? (p. 95)