They Are Already Here : UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers

More than fifty years since Roswell, UFOs have been making headlines once again. But the UFO community—those who had been thinking about, seeing, and analyzing supposed flying saucers (or triangles or chevrons)—has been surprisingly skeptical. The people most invested in UFO reality were filled with incredulity and doubt. As Scoles did her own digging, she ventured to dark, conspiracy-filled corners of the internet, to a former paranormal research center in Utah, and to the hallways of the Pentagon.Scoles meets the scrappy upstarts, the field investigators, the rational people, and the unhinged kooks of this sprawling community. How do they interact with each other? How do they interact with “anomalous phenomena”? And how do they (as any group must) reflect the world around them? We will travel along the Extraterrestrial Highway (next to Area 51) and visit the Watchtower, where watching for lights in the sky is more of a spiritual quest than a “gotcha” one. We meet someone who believes they’ve been abducted. Where do these "encounters" stem from? What are the emotional effects on the experiencers? Funny and colorful, and told in a way that doesn’t require one to believe, Scoles brings humanity to an often derided and misunderstood community. After all, the truth is out there..