Although Steven Spielberg wasn’t the first to conceive of spacefaring aliens as dwarfish, spindly and gray, it was his megahit movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which stamped the image onto popular consciousness. He took the movie’s title from a classification by a UFO investigator who defined close encounter of the third kind as a face-to-face meeting with aliens. The success of Spielberg’s film familiarized the term far beyond the circles of flying saucer buffs.
The relationship between popular culture and the unexplained fascinates John Michael Greer. One of the themes of Greer’s book, The UFO Phenomenon: Fact, Fantasy and Disinformation (published by Llewellyn), is the way pop culture shaped public discourse on unidentified flying objects—and how that speculation in turn shaped movies, television and literature. Much of the lore of UFOs, including flying saucers and alien abductions, was anticipated in the pulp fiction of the 1930s and in some cases deliberately fanned by sci-fi authors in the ‘40s.
And yet the question of UFOs isn’t answered simply by calling it the mass delusion of science-fiction fans. Experience is read through society’s lens and interpreted from the contents of the observer's mind. Greer isn’t the first to show that encounters with UFOs precede the famous post-World War II sightings in a lineage dating to the dawn of history. Many accounts by ancient chroniclers of wonders in the sky are strikingly similar to the 20th century legends of UFOs. But in a modern age girded by faith in technology, angels, demons and demigods gave away to extraterrestrials. The phenomenon has many consistencies over the centuries. It’s the explanations that change.
Mirroring many of the theories proffered by UFO buffs, movies and television often conveyed ideas from the fringe into the mainstream. In the earliest UFO movies from 1949 and 1950 flying saucers were piloted by earthly villains, taking off on the theory that they were the product of secret weapons programs. The Day theEarth Stood Still (1951) put forth the concept that benign aliens were prepared to intervene to prevent the Earth from destroying itself in nuclear war. The majority of ‘50s sci-fi flicks were less hopeful, painting extraterrestrials as monsters. The good spaceman/bad spaceman dialogue continued over the decades with Ridley Scott’s Alien on one hand and Spielberg’s cuddly E.T. on the other. “The X-Files” dramatized the widespread feeling that the government is lying as a cosmic conspiracy.
Greer will satisfy neither credulous UFOlogists nor rock-headed skeptics. But far more interesting than any more polemic, The UFO Phenomenon is a rigorously argued essay touching on epistemology, logic, Jungian archetypes, occultism, pop culture and the politics of deception.
