On the plane, I’d been browsing through a book, a work of sensationalist mid-century journalism that played a role in charting the outlines of the narrative, pre–Close Encounters version. The book was called The Flying Saucers Are Real. Forgotten today outside hard-core UFO circles, but a mainstream bestseller in 1950. Its author, an ex-marine pilot and pulp fiction writer named Donald Keyhoe, had started with a series of articles for True magazine (True: The Man’s Magazine), then expanded them into the book. I’d dug up a PDF online. Keyhoe’s work is a fascinating tour through a bygone
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