Greg Eghigian’s After the Flying Saucers Came is a rigorous and readable historical examination of the UFO phenomenon and its cultural significance from the 1940s to the present. Although different in its aims and approach, it fits well with other recent publications on the history of the human search for and fascination with alien life, such as Rebecca Charbonneau’s Mixed Signals: Alien Communication across the Iron Curtain (2024). Both books draw attention to the Cold War period and its impacts on science and culture more generally. Both are international in their approaches to their topics. But whereas Charbonneau mainly focuses on the somewhat esoteric world of professional radio astronomers, Eghigian assembles a motley crew of people from a multitude of backgrounds and examines the changing cultural contexts in which they shaped a variety of approaches to the UFO question.

Eghigian’s approach is chronological. It begins with an exploration of pre-UFO ideas about alien life, from science fiction to the science and philosophy of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth. But the book’s main line of inquiry begins with the first official sighting of a UFO in 1947 by pilot Kenneth Arnold. As Eghigian shows, the history that unfolds from that moment proceeds ‘as a serial drama’ (p. 8). Countless new UFO sightings, encounters and abductions, as well as new revelations about older cases, became new episodes in an ongoing saga, the meaning of which continues to evolve and transform. Eghigian’s history of the UFO phenomenon is human-centred. It is people who have experienced and described UFO encounters, and people who have built communities or research programmes to study and/or debunk the phenomenon. Using archival sources and interviews, Eghigian presents very detailed portraits of the individuals and collectives who have devoted themselves to the UFO mystery.

Eghigian does not reduce people’s responses to external social or political forces, but he does provide insightful analysis of the historically specific reactions and interpretations of people in different times and places, and relates these to the larger contexts, anxieties and crises these people were navigating. The human response to the UFO phenomenon is an inseparable part of the phenomenon itself, and this response is ‘shaped invariably by the times and places in which these took place’ (p. 7). As Eghigian shows, all of the necessary ingredients of the UFO phenomenon were in place for decades prior to the 1947 encounter, but earlier moments – such as Orson Welles’s 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast – did not have the lasting effect that Arnold’s sighting did. What was missing? In Eghigian’s analysis, the answer is context.

The Cold War sits front and centre for a good chunk of this book, as one might expect, as expert and lay communities around the world navigated the promises and potential problems of the new technoscientific landscape. Eghigian does an expert job of exploring, on the one hand, the scientists who took up the challenge of the UFO on behalf of their military patrons, the camps that developed within these ranks of the debunkers versus those who felt that UFOs were a legitimate field of study, and those outside these expert circles who developed their own approaches to UFO encounters and abductions. As Eghigian sums up in his conclusion, the UFO phenomenon took on ‘some of the most pressing existential questions of the times’; it ‘tapped into an array of Cold War-era values, movements, innovations, and sensitivities: space exploration; science fiction; new aeronautic, intelligence, and biomedical technologies; nuclear war and the emergence of superpowers; secularization; globalization of mass media; liberation movements; self-help; the psychotherapy boom’ (p. 316). These Cold War themes are so prominent and well addressed in this book, I would not hesitate to include it in a syllabus on Cold War science and technology.