Alien Sightings

«Fascinating, humanist, and beautifully written, Alien Sightings attends to the relationships and lifeworlds in which UFO sightings occur, analysing the intellectual and cultural trends patterning their expression. Through attention to the form, interpretation, and social history of alien encounters, Jenkins reveals the relationship between collective practices and individual experience. Brilliant and compelling.»

(Joanna Cook, Reader in Medical Anthropology, University College London

«In this masterful review of reports of alien encounters, sightings, communications and abductions, Jenkins skilfully and surgically reveals the underlying assumptions of such stories, as well as the lacunae in sociological accounts of them. This essay also inspires further reflection on the social factors behind claims about related psychic and supernatural phenomena.»

(Beth Singler, Assistant Professor in Digital Religion(s), University of Zurich)

For the last seventy years, members of the public have reported seeing piloted craft, thought to come from other planets, in the sky or on land. Their reasons for making such reports often remain obscure and hard to separate from the accounts of investigators of various kinds drawn to these events. More, these witnesses’ reports have varied over that time, moving from distant sightings at the beginning to include Close Encounters and then abductions, and the focus of the report likewise altered, from description of physical objects to a concern with psychological reactions and, later, with the recovery of hidden memories. This book reviews a series of well-known reports by contemporary journalists of these sightings, showing the order and patterns that underlie both the events themselves and their reception.

Timothy Jenkins retired from Cambridge University in 2019. He trained at the Oxford Institute of Social Anthropology, with fieldwork in France and Britain. His research interests include moral uses of scientific discoveries and the multiple dimensions of time. He has also published Of Flying Saucers and Social Scientists (2013).