I hate to admit it, but I have no choice. I've started to look forward to the weekly one-hour shows of the History Channel series, "Project Blue Book." My initial response to the debut episode two weeks ago was that it was trash: awful as history, mediocre as drama. I still think it's trash, … [Read more...]
“Project Blue Book,” “The History Journal,” and the New York Times
For about fifteen seconds, it did look like a real newspaper when my friend Jake Horwitz handed it to me over lunch. HUNDREDS WITNESS MYSTERIOUS UFOS, the headline proclaimed in enormous type, and beneath it a photo of an arc of white lights embedded in a luminous green ring, against the background … [Read more...]
“The Close Encounters Man” – Mark O’Connell on J. Allen Hynek
Mark O'Connell, The Close Encounters Man: How One Man Made the World Believe in UFOs. HarperCollins, 2017. A human life can be read as the totality of its enigmas. The questions to be asked, naturally, will differ from person to person. For J. Allen Hynek (1910-1986), the brilliant … [Read more...]
“UFO 96” – The UFO World of 50 Years Ago
If I wanted to do this properly, I suppose I'd issue an annotated edition. Something along the lines of Martin Gardner's The Annotated Alice. "No joke is funny unless you see the point of it," Gardner wrote in his introduction to The Annotated Alice, "and sometimes a point has to be explained. … [Read more...]
“Outtakes of a UFO Investigator” – UFO Abductions Become Part of Us
There are some "banner years" in UFO history. 1966 was one of them. It was a threshold year, leading from the classic UFOlogy of the 1950s and early 1960s to something new, which has left its mark on our culture to this day. March, 1966: a rash of UFO sightings in Dexter and Hillsdale, … [Read more...]
