Tin foil zombie robots, little green men from Mars, advanced civilizations departed from the Pleiades star cluster, pie plates tossed in the air, dull in-need-of-attention personalities, weirdos, nuts, all these have been amalgamated in this funny written material that tries to bring together all the best of what Ufology has contrived in its 120 years of existence.

Don’t get your hopes too high though. I picked up this book while waiting Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker, and believe me it was a long wait. How the hell was i going to fill the article about it, which had to be comprised of at least 1000 words, after reading the fanciful stories concocted by shallow, un-interesting, died-in-the-wool un-skeptics that probably missed all their science classes, stories gathered in this short treatise with the help of Gregory Reece’s rife patience. I am fascinated how could any agnostic-towards-unbeliever regarding Ufology like Reece, at least that is what i sensed his convictions are, analyze and study this hogwash of pseudoscience literature that UFOs and Flying Saucer lovers bring to the table. An almost insuperable dullness took hold of my brain as i reached the text about abductees and contactees. I almost succumbed. But anyhow…

The most interesting part of the book is the first one. I found quite interesting how just plain old hoaxes, miss-interpretations of natural phenomena, or miss-information spread through the local newspapers by bored charlatans, could so insidiously and rapidly evolve into the prime provisioners of the 20th century American culture.

By reading the ‘Nuts and Bolts’ first section of the book, which deals with UFO reports from a objective, “scientific” point of view, you will find that the first reports regarding extraterrestrial crafts happened long before Kenneth Arnold’s supposedly aerial encounter with flying saucers. The story goes that the November, 1896 edition of the Stockton Evening Mail had published the report of the close contact that Colonel H.G. Shaw had had with what he described to be a 150 feet long, 25 feet in diameter, metallic, sharp at both ends grounded spacecraft. Three, very tall, thin extraterrestrial beings came out of the spaceship and tried to kidnap the Colonel. Too bad for them because he fought back making the pathetic space dwellers from Mars return to their UFO and run for their lives in the vastness of the cosmos (see Wallace O. Chariton’s The Great Texas Airship Mystery for more)

Another funny story, which happened some five months latter, was reported in the St. Louis Post Dispatch. W. H. Hopkins reported having encountered a 20 feet long and 8 feet in diameter cigar shaped metallic spacecraft that was driven by 3 large propellers. From it emerged a very sexy nude woman accompanied by a un-clothed bearded man. The witness managed to squeeze from them the information that their home planet was Mars. After this long exchange of knowledge with this must-be-more-advanced extrovert couple, Hopkins saw the two of them return to the ship and run for the stars. Now, that is an interesting story!

Flying bicycles furiously treadled to remain hovering above towns, little aliens capable of reducing their spacecraft to pocket size, and numerous other hoaxes and miss-reported aerial natural phenomena were evenly spread through California, the Midwest, and Texas in what was the wave of sightings between 1986 and 1987. Now, they are lost in time like tears in rain not because someone wanted them to vanish, but because of their swindlerish character. They offer us one of the first examples of how stories and the ideas they contain, the memes, blithely get intermingled with one another, so, after the blending is achieved, a long, widely-agreed-upon fictitious narration regarding the first visits of space invaders emerges to entertain the pseudoscience thirsty minds of a large percent of today’s population.

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