Somewhere in the Skies - Greg Eghigian | After the Flying Saucers Came

Episode Date: June 24, 2024

On episode 361 of SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES, we welcome author and historian, Greg Eghigian. Greg is a Professor of History and Bioethics at Penn State University. We discuss his recently-released book, After the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon. The book tells the story of the world's fascination with UFOs and the prospect that they were the work of visitors from outer space. While accounts of great wonders in the sky date back to antiquity, reports of UFOs took place against the unique backdrop of the Cold War and space age, giving rise to disputed government inquiries, breathtaking news stories, and single-minded sleuths. The book traces how a seemingly isolated incident sparked an international drama involving shady figures, questionable evidence, suspicions of conspiracy, hoaxes, new religions, scandals, unsettling alien encounters, debunkers, celebrities, and so much more. Buy Greg's book at: https://a.co/d/0b2M0J87 Patreon: www.patreon.com/somewhereskies PayPal: [e-mail] Website: www.somewhereintheskies.com Store: http://tee.pub/lic/ULZAy7IY12U YouTube Channel: CLICK HERE Order Ryan’s new book: https://a.co/d/4KNQnM4 Order Ryan’s older book: https://amzn.to/3PmydYC Twitter: @SomewhereSkies Read Ryan’s Articles by CLICKING HERE Opening Theme Song, "Ephemeral Reign" by Per Kiilstofte Copyright © 2024. Ryan Sprague. All rights reserved. Produced by LIONSGATE and part of the eOne Podcast Network. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/somewhere-in-the-skies. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the Somewhere in the Skies podcast, we welcome Greg Egyzian, professor of history and bioethics at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of the new book, After the Flying Saucers Came, a global history of the UFO phenomenon. This is Somewhere in the Skies, with Brian Sprague. Welcome everyone to Somewhere in the Skies and a very, very warm welcoming for one of our first guests that ever came on Somewhere in the Skies, Greg. know if you remember, but I believe you were my third or fourth guest when I first started the show. I did not know that at the time. I was so nervous to talk to you. You and I had maybe just met in Phoenix at a thing. And you agreed to come on the show in the early days. And I can't thank you enough for that. And I can't thank you enough for coming back on the show. So welcome back. I'm really happy

to do it. Yeah. Well, it's good. Yeah. Well, there's a big reason. You're back. You came out with a brand new book. that is really making waves inside and outside of the UFO community. And I want to get the title right here, after the Flying Saucers came, a global history of the UFO phenomenon. So we probably talked about this in our previous interview, but I like to get people caught up on who our guests are and why they are doing this,

why they agreed to come onto a UFO podcast, right? So as a history professor, at a very well-known school. So obvious question first. What got you interested in UFOs? And on the flip side, what made you want to write this book about UFOs? Yeah, right. So, well, I mean, I'm like a lot of people.

I'm sure it's like you and just a lot of us. Very fascinated with the topic when I was growing up. Read just about everything I could get my hands on when I was a kid. and movies, TV, anything related to UFOs and aliens was on my radar. And I liked all of it. I mean, I read, I read, you know, Eric von deniggen, but I'd also read debunkers. I'd watch documentaries. I'd watch movies.

So just about anything. And I was always fascinated with it. But I will say then, you know, as I grew older, I kind of moved in other directions. I got interested in other things. You know, I'm a historian of science and medicine. And so other kinds of things got my interests. And then a while back now, now it's almost, you know, about 10 years ago when I first got

interested in revisiting this stuff. And it was basically triggered by talking with a colleague of mine who was writing some stuff about the resurgence of the occult right after World War II in Europe, which is something I hadn't known about. And I just, I was like asking, I was like, you know, hey, did that fine saucer UFO thing ever take off over there back then? She's like, I have no idea. And she said, you know, you ought to look into it. I'm like, oh, no, no, I don't have time for this. And then I, and then I started to do it. I started just, yeah, in one summer, I was just fiddling around with some digital material and looking at newspapers in Europe and finding out this stuff was popping up.

And I thought, man, that's cool. And then what motivated me to write it was both the kind of fascination with it. I thought, well, that was neat. That was kind of neat to get into. But I'm guessing, like, lots of my colleagues, lots of my fellow historians, right, have written about this stuff. And then I find out none of them had. I mean, one, David Jacobs wrote, you know, his, his,

dissertation that gets published in 1975. But outside of that, professors of history, you know, people who, you know, work in universities and do this stuff, they just weren't writing about this stuff. I thought that was just so weird. I thought, how do you miss something so big? Such a huge social phenomenon that has preoccupied so many people. You got government agencies interested in this stuff. You got conspiracy theories. You got a astronomers and physicists involved. I mean, all these people involved in people, and I just thought it was really, really odd. So, you know, to my mind, what I thought, though, I could do was something maybe a little different, right, than what is typically out there.

And that's what I was kind of after, was to write a book that adopts a very, maybe a very different approach than your typical UFO book that's out there. Right. Yeah, the lens in which this book was written is very unique. Like I, you know, I do want to ask a few specific questions about the book, but I loved how you started with what's going on today, sort of, which I think is, you know, the true sign of a good historian. They start with present day and how the past eventually influences what's going on today. There's a reason we have history to learn from it. Like you even say in the book. And this phenomenon. has been going on for so, so long. And it's evolved throughout time, whether socially or, let's be honest, religiously, economically, everything, everything. That's why I love UFOs. And your book really represented a lot of that. So I guess, you know, that unique perspective you have as a historian, How did that influence the research process? Again, we'll go deep into some of the chapters. But what was that process like? It's not a simple Google search for what are UFOs. What went into the research?

No, no, right, right. So one of the things I knew when I started to get into this, I had to make some choices, right? How was I going to approach this? And as you well know, first, choice you have to face when you get into this is where do I stand on the issue, right? And you, as you well know, the UFO world tends to be dominated by the fight between this stuff is real and this stuff is bunk, right? It's, it's, I believe and I know versus I'm going to debunk this stuff and get rid of it, right? Right. That stuff. I thought to myself, that actually, is not a helpful way to approach this. And so one of the choices I make very clearly from the very get-go is I don't try to adjudicate

that. I don't play referee. I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't, the book is not designed to sort of help defend people who say UFOs are from other worlds and civilizations who are here visiting us or or from other dimensions, but it's also not a book that aims at debunking people or ridiculing people, neither one. The good historian, I, from whenever we study any phenomenon, is what we're interested in doing is just what you talked about, which is figuring out how our present day got the way it got, right? And we get there through choices that people make, choices people don't

make the actions of certain institutions or the lack of action on their part, you know, things like that. So what you do is you, as a historian, you try to figure out how did certain things come about and what other paths might have been taken, right, along the way. And to do that, no, you can't just simply look it up on social media and you've got to do some really oftentimes seemingly boring digging and that digging involves going to archives and and and looking at at things that aren't published personal papers i mean uh and the other thing i realized i needed to do was for this project is i needed to talk to veteran euphologists i needed their advice

I needed their wisdom and their understanding of the history. And I will say one of the things that I did not know going in that proved to be really helpful is I learned, as you probably have this experience yourself, right, that people who do UFO research are collectors. They collect stuff. Yes, you can tell by my background. Yeah, you collect things. Nobody, I mean, uphologists do not throw anything out. They have got, and if you've talked to the veterans, the people have been around for decades, right? They'll show you, right?

Their reams of files and stuff, that was unexpected, and that was a real boon for me. So I got access and the help of lots of people who've been in the field a long time, access to files and documents and records that a lot of people don't maybe get to see. or don't have the time to look at. And so that was a lot of the research I did, was trying to dig into the stuff that doesn't really tend to get publicized, right, to find out how we got to where we've gotten over the years. Yeah, it was so refreshing.

I mean, again, for someone who's been in this research community for decades now at this point, to see names I've never heard, to find cases I've never heard of, to see how much media is actually out there on this topic. That isn't at the forefront. That isn't the New York Times. That isn't, you know, CNN or these well-known books that have been published throughout the years. It was so refreshing, Greg. So I have to thank you first and foremost for that.

I'm imagining you, like, you know, in these archives, just picking through old file cabinets and there's cobwebs and you know, you've got the light over your head, swigging, like very Dan Brown. I love it. Musty, musty smells. I remember going into places that are with no windows in them and boxes where I'm, you know, pushing the spiders and spider webs away and looking at stuff that I'm like, wow, I can't believe I'm getting a chance to, like, look at the personal papers of, say,

someone like Gordon Creighton, one of these really important, really critically important figure who was a writer and also editor of the famous Flying Saucer Review that played such a big role in, say, the 1960s and 1970s. Just things like that are very cool experiences, but, you know, bookies, I'm a nerdy historian. And we thank you for that. Well, I mean, as a historian, you know, you set up the book in such a great way for people who may be familiar with some of this, but those who may not. And you sort of chronicle

the birth, I would say, of this topic. And you start with things like the foo, the foo fighters, the airships even earlier. And kind of work your way through the decades of what the phenomenon is

versus the perception of it. I guess you would say the movements that cropped up from this ambiguous phenomenon that was occurring all over the world. So yeah, I love to ask you, Chapter 3, actually. This is one of my favorites. And I'm going to refer to my notes here. Spaceships, Conspiracies, and the Birth of the UFO Detective. Love the title as a UFO, quote unquote, detective. This one really resumated me. So could you tell us a little about this time period. Here you have it from 1948 to 1953. So what was this birth of sort of the UFO researcher versus, I guess, kind of the birth of the phenomenon itself? Right. Yeah,

because, yeah, you're right. Because the sightings, I think, have always been pretty much grassroots. I mean, nobody has orchestrated the sightings. The sightings come from the ground up, from actual witnesses, seeing things, and sometimes reporting them to authorities or to other people. What seemed to me critical to first of all recognize is though you had to go from that phenomenon to then a group of people who start to say,

hey, to look into this. I mean, the military, of course, was the first to do so. You know, in the United States, it was the Air Force or, say, the UK was the Ministry of Defense. They start to look into this stuff pretty early on, right? Soon after the famous Kenneth Arnold's citing in June of 1947. But what happens is people out there, civilians, regular folks who are interested in the topic, start saying, you know, I don't think, first of all, I don't think they're coming clean with us.

And secondly, if they are, they're not very good at their job. So we need to get involved. And so what you get is the beginnings of a group of people who start to say, maybe I can do this for myself. And how am I going to do this? I'm going to get information by digging into this through newspapers, right? Because newspaper coverage is all over this topic. And so they start collecting newspaper articles on it.

And one of the coolest things I remember finding out about was a phenomenon I did not know existed. This is way before, right, the world we have now with search functions where you can Google something. Way before that, right, were things called news clipping services. And what you would do is you would subscribe to one of these news clipping services and you would give them what we would call search terms, right? Flying saucer, UFO, whatever. And for a fee, what they would do is then intermittently clip out articles from newspapers all over the world and send them to you with the date on them, right?

And then you could keep track of this. And so when you look at the files of people back in the 50s and 60s and how they were keeping track of all of these sightings all over the place, particularly before there were any big UFO organizations to do it, that's how they were doing it. And so this first wave of investigators are really doing this, no budget, they're doing on their free time, and they're looking into this stuff, trying to look for patterns, and then they start sharing information with one another. And very soon what happens by the middle part of the 1950s, you have the beginnings of the first. UFO organizations, some of which basically see themselves as functioning as kind of investigative bodies.

And that's the origin of some of those early organizations like Afro and Nycap, right, the predecessors of things like MuFON. Coverage varies by plan. View contracts and exclusions at endurance warranty.com. If you're driving a car truck with an expired warranty and suddenly lost your transmission or needed a full engine repair, would it leave you stranded? I'm Danica Patrick. Choose the company I trust.

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And you also have, at the head of a lot of these organizations, former military or pilots, which I found fascinating, that those who were encountering these things in our skies militarily were the ones to eventually kind of start these UFO detective organizations, and they took it very seriously. But what I love about the book, too, Greg, is that you then have this, almost this movement that pushes back against the seriousness,

I think that a lot of the early stuff had. And that was the contactee movement, where people were now claiming that these, you know, these flying saucers from Venus were coming and, and bringing people on their ships, bringing them to Venus, showing them around, bringing them back to Earth, stuff like that. So what was it like kind of researching, you know, the very early beginnings of a serious UFO research, I guess, movement versus now this sensational, these sensational claims popping up of, I guess, the contacting movement, as it were. Yeah, yeah, right. The contact, these were a very different group of people, right? Because, as you say, the kind of nuts and bolts investigators and detectives of, say, the 1950s were really doing just sticking pretty much to that, right?

They were interested in these objects trying to get maybe photographs or film or any forensic evidence you could gain from them. The contactees come forward, they're a group of a lot of them, most of them are the most well-known ones or Americans who come forward, as you say, say, I actually met the terrestrials. And almost all of them tended to say they come from within our solar system. Most of them look like us. And they are communicating to us that they have a message, right? And that message is a message of they're here to try to help us, to save us. It's a message of salvation. And these contactees come out of that experience, they say, seeing themselves as,

I guess you'd have to say they're kind of see themselves as prophets, right? They're going to proselytize the message of the aliens, who are now sort of framed as our space brothers, our space sisters, to create this kind of cosmic communion. So, you know, I know they, you know, of course, today the contactees are widely kind of dismissed. I think people either view them as extremely naive or misguided at best. I think a lot of people often view them more cynically as con artists. But I think when you view them historically and you don't sort of get into that sort of issue,

what you have to see is they play this really important part in expressing what many people at the time and still today see as an important aspect of the UFO phenomenon, namely that it has some sort of metaphysical importance, that this is something that is of spiritual or religious significance. And the contactees leaned into that. They got right in in front of that and said this represents something that has a significance that extends far beyond science, right? This is something that is life-altering, life-changing, not just personally, but for the human species. And so in a way, I think we need to view the way in which they help sort of influence that narrative over time. Right.

And, you know, like you said, many researchers shy away from things like the contact D movement or the more new age or metaphysical iteration of that nowadays. And I always remind people like, no matter what, you can't ignore that. That is now a part of the UFO history. Again, whether you like it or not. So I did find that fascinating. Two other chapters I kind of just want to tackle with you, Greg, if that's okay. I want to rewind because there's a chapter, I believe it was chapter four, a global phenomenon. Now, we always look at this from very Western eyes, but look, I was just traveling overseas.

I was in Japan, actually, and I had the incredible opportunity to speak to some Japanese UFO researchers about the cases that have happened over there and how their culture kind of embraces the topic. versus I now live in Scotland where I, you know, I've investigated several Scottish historical UFO cases. And you cover this a lot in the book, which I really enjoyed, again, very refreshing to not hear the same cases. Roswell and, you know, Chicago O'Hare, what have you. So can you give us kind of an idea of the global perspective and how you decided to tackle that in the book? Yeah, that was in some ways the hardest part, right, because of that. And it was very clear to me that if I was going to do this right, I was going to have to appreciate that. It's not just that sightings have historically happened all over the world.

It's that there are people and institutions that have been located in other parts of the world that have played really pivotal roles in how UFOs have. been understood, how they've been reported, how they've been analyzed. Militaries. You have militaries and defense ministries in so many countries in South America, in Europe, right, who have been very much involved over the decades at one point or another looking into this matter. You have organizations as well in countries, you name it, Scandinavia, Spain, Italy, Uruguay, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, South Africa. You have to sort of see all of that as playing a very critical role. And the reason why is really multiple.

For one thing, right, I think for a lot of people, particularly in the 50s, in the late 50s and early 60s, one of the things that some of the, I think, forward-thinking eophologists were saying is if we are going to make an argument that these things are looking like they are extraterrestrial in origin, it's going to be pretty odd to make the argument they're only visiting the United States. That's going to be a very hard argument to make, right? And so you get people like Coral Lorenzen at APRO who says, I'm going to get investigators all over the world. We're going to get their cases in here. We're going to get those. We're going to find English speakers who can translate things or we're going to translate them ourselves. Flying saucer review is going to do the same thing. So that's part of one of the things they do.

And then the second thing, of course, is that these different groups and organizations are going to exchange information. So you're going to be, you know, you're going to be able to have then the beginnings of, I mean, takes probably the best. example, probably most people can think of off the top of their head is Jacques Valet. Jacques Valet has made a career out of looking at historical cases across multiple countries and regions of the world, right? That stuff becomes possible because you have organizations and eophologists out there, not only who are doing the work and the heavy lifting, what they're

doing and they do starting really all the way back to about around 19. is they start sharing information with each other, sharing cases, sometimes collaborating with one another on cases to investigate and then analyze the material. So the global, that international dimension you mentioned, yeah, yeah, that I've started to recognize very clearly needed to be in this book. Absolutely. And I think you stress the challenges too. I mean, back then, you would probably have to wait weeks to hear from someone from across the world about a UFO case whereas now I'm just like hey Miguel in Mexico City what happened yesterday and I get the answer within seconds it's crazy yeah yeah yeah all right my favorite chapter Greg I have to say was a chapter eight called intruders um I'm a very big espionage sort of person

and I in that infiltrates its way into uphology throughout the decades and um You highlight one of the most controversial times when it comes to disinformation and sort of intelligence officials or people working on these shadowy UFO disinformation campaigns, which have been basically documented as being real. I mean, sending people spooks, as it were, to UFO conventions or the Russians coming over and coming to our UFO. things too. That fascinates me so much. The ambiguity of this phenomenon lends itself so well, I think, to spying, to advanced technologies in other nations. I'm throwing a lot at you with what I'm saying right here. I guess what my question is, what do you make of all of that? You cover the famous Rick Doty and Paul Benowitz affair. Disinformation. within this topic is huge. So how did you decide to cover that? Yeah, right. I mean, and you have to talk

about it because it is such an integral part of the history of UFOs is disinformation, misinformation, spreading information, spreading disinformation, and especially in a topic where everybody involved is in at least who's acting in good faith, it has to be Not everybody has historically been acting in good faith, but anybody who is acting in good faith, you're trying to get to the truth. You're trying to find out what's genuine and real. That, of course, creates a situation which everything gets cloudied. And I realize that one has to talk about that cloudiness and the fact that there are ways in which this happens both deliberately, as you're talking, about in the case of Rick Doty and the famous Paul Benowitz case, or the fact that we know that

the CIA admitted as much in the mid-90s that back in the 50s and 60s they would oftentimes, yeah, maybe lean into a story about UFOs in order to keep certain technology secret, right? So we know that that has gone on, but we also know that it is a world, the UFO world, the communities, right, that have existed, are worlds that in which rumors run rampant. Certainly anybody interested in, say, intelligence or counterintelligence certainly knows this and knows that you can wind people up. But it's also that it's the kind of thing that misinformation spreads so easily. And social media today has only made that more problematic. It's made it even worse because all it takes is for one little thing to get out there.

And it just travels in an instant and becomes seen as a fact before anybody has done really, really the deep, deep digging or maybe even less deep digging that's necessary in order to find out whether something is true or not. So all of this, of course, therefore, I think has contributed to the presence in the field of conspiracy. theory. I'll tell you something, Ryan, I would say probably the number one question I get from fellow academics who ask me or when they hear about my book and my project and want to talk about it with the number one question I get from them is they want to know what role does conspiracy theory play in the UFO world. And, you know, I think you have to say that all the historical evidence shows you that almost from the get-go, there was some, there was conspiracy theory current that was in there, right, right from the very get-go. All of the stuff you're describing,

right, that we're looking, that you're talking about only feeds that, you know. It's pretty hard to walk away. If you, as, you know, if you're running the FBI, when you've admitted the FBI was fine on UFO organizations as far back as the 1950s. It's pretty hard to walk away from that, right? And to say, but on the other hand, we're not messing around with people. So, you know, all of those things contribute to this broad sense that, again, is another kind of ethos that's dominated the UFO world, which is distrust, distrust. And who can I trust? Who is being, who is being straight with me? I mean, and you've, you've been around this enough today. No, for every time you hear somebody say that person is really trustworthy, you'll talk to the next person and say, oh, are you kidding?

I never trust that person. Yeah. Right. And that's the world you live in. And it's really, it makes it tough to navigate these choppy waters, doesn't it? Absolutely. I sometimes feel like I'm in a reality show where you have these alliances and then, you know, you find out they've been going behind your back all along. But no, Greg, I think you're right.

You know, you have, like you mentioned, the FBI messing with people or the Roswell cover-up, as it were. Like this, when the government isn't being completely transparent or honest with the public about a topic like UFOs, that is going to birth conspiracy theory. Within those gaps of distrust and ambiguity and not knowing what UFOs are or aren't and thinking the government does know what they are, that is where conspiracy. theory pops up, especially in today's world when we can't trust anything that the government is telling us, quote, a quote, you know, I'm... Right, right. You know, there's many examples of that. But I think that kind of leads us up to modern day euphology.

And again, you do such a good way of kind of bookending the book. And I have to say, we've covered not even like a tiny sliver of what you actually have in the book. But today's Uphology, where you have groups coming out now that want to work with the government to uncover the answers to all of this. You now have the Pentagon with their own official UFO project again after they said that they hadn't been looking into this for many, many years. So, yeah, can you kind of bring us up to speed on what's going on in today's world and why you decided to include that in the book? Yeah, I think we, again, that was necessary to do because I needed to get this up to where we are now, but also, as you said at the beginning, I also wanted to begin in many ways with what's going on to sort of get us orient ourselves. And also, by the way, to be clear, I try to write this book for a lot of people who are outsiders to the UFO world. You know, people like you and me and your listeners, they know a lot of the ins and outs of this stuff.

it is really, really hard for a lot of people who might be interested in the topic who don't know the ins and outs. It's really hard for them know where to enter into it. And so I was trying to write something that would allow them to sort of orient themselves pretty quickly. Yeah, I would say, you know, from looking at this long history and seeing where we are today, It seems to me you've got three threads working in uphology today. And they don't all, frankly, map on to one another very well. I think it's an open question how harmoniously they can all coexist.

So the first group, of course, is intelligence investigations. So as you point out, we've got now Arrow working here in the United States, right, in doing its investigations. You know, it's following in the long history of projects like Project Sign, a Project Grudge and Project Blue Book and things like that. And they are doing some things, I'd say, that strike me at least historically different than what came before. I think there's a little more frankness on their part, a little more of a willingness to admit things they don't know. The other thing I think that's been really quite remarkable, I thought was remarkable even as far back as 2019 and 20, was that these investigators were coming forward and saying, people are seeing real things, right? These are real sightings.

These aren't computer glitches. people are seeing the things they describe. That's kind of unusual because Project Blue Book people and people like that tended to say, oh, most people just, yeah, no, they're not seeing anything real. So I know a lot of people are really alienated disenchanted with Arrow and the way it works.

But those things, I think, are somewhat new. But Arrow is interested in the intelligence question. Bottom line is the intelligence people are always, always going to be principally interested in, are these things a national security threat? Anything beyond that, really that's beyond their sort of jurisdiction. The second thing you have is, of course, the world of, for a lack of a better term, the commercialization of UFOs, right? It's the entertainment industry, it's social media, it's people who have now made a name for themselves who I guess you'd have to say are kind of UFO celebrities you you are yourself a UFO celebrity at least in my to me you're the biggest

you're the biggest star I know in the field extremely flattering I think but but that's its own world right as you well know that can be that's got its own pushes and pulls right you There's money involved. Money has to, and if things are going to succeed, there's going to have to be a way to monetize those things. But there's a tension, right, between entertainment and doing and digging in ways and saying things that may be not popular. And that's always a threat with the entertainment part of things.

Can you make it entertaining and can you make it serious at the same time? There are people like you who do it. There are people who I don't know that they're nearly as successful at it as you are. That's, I think, one of those kind of challenges. And then the third group are academics. This is probably, to my mind, the newest development and probably the most really unprecedented. And that is people in my line of work, academics from all sorts of backgrounds, have come out of the woodwork. and started, you know, it's not an invisible college anymore.

Right. We're out there. We're saying, do the, let's do the research. Let's do it. You've got foundations. You've got a new journal, academic journal, a new society. You've got people at the University of Wetzburg, the people at Harvard, right, who are connecting, right, seti with UAP research. That is all really new.

And these are folks who are saying, I'm not afraid to talk about this in public and to say, we need funding to do this stuff. Heck, NASA has given its stamp of approval to this. You could not have imagined in a million years that you'd ever hear NASA saying that. So that's a very new development. We'll see where it all goes. Those are the three things that are all happening. it's a question of do these three things can they be can they be married in some way to one another can they can they coexist and not step on each other's feet um that is up for grabs and we're going to

find out over the next say five to ten years right interesting yeah i'm i'm really interested to see where that all goes. I mean, you're right. There's classes and curriculums sprouting up left and right at universities and in classrooms across the world where UFOs are now being taught, you know, whether historically or religiously, stuff like that. So I think you're right. That is the newest kind of iteration of all of this. And I look forward to where that goes. Greg, I have a couple of listener questions if you're willing to reach through those with us. We have two of our Patreon members actually. They get priority to ask our guests questions. And two of them had kind of a similar question for you. So I'm going to group these together. Susan L. and Paul H on Patreon,

how did you move from an interest in mental illness and sort of like psychiatry into an interesting UFOs and what is kind of the psychological impact that you perceive from a lot of these people who've seen UFOs or have experienced these things. Yeah, we'll start with that. Yeah, those are great questions because, yeah, they're quite right. That's what I've spent a lot of my career doing is studying the history of psychiatry and mentally illness and, and things like that. And I will say, when I began working on this project, I in no way believed that that work I had previously done

would have anything to do with this. I didn't get into this thinking that people who saw things or people who talked about encounters with aliens were mentally ill. And all the research that I've read over the years indicates that with very few exceptions, that is the case. The vast, vast, vast majority of people who, in one form or another are witnesses show no evidence of psychiatric illness in any way.

So that's not, that was never the thing I expected. So I never thought it was going to be relevant. Where it came into play then all of a sudden was when I started to look particularly at witnesses and look at the ways in which historically people, both within UFO milieus and communities and people outside it, were trying to understand people who had had experiences and encounters one kind or another. And what I saw already in the late 50s were people saying, you know, we need psychologists or we need psychiatrists. to get in here to help us figure out what to make of these experiences or find better ways

to get information out of people, right? And in many cases, to verify or to find a way to verify or confirm what somebody is saying, the extent to which it is the truth or the extent to which people believe it. Right. And then by the time you look at, say, the 80s and the 90s, when I talk about alien abduction, hypnosis, support groups, psychotherapy, of course, John Mack, as a psychiatrist, all enter into the picture. And so all of a sudden, I started realizing this is an integral part of the history of UFOs and witnesses and encounters. So all of a sudden, that stuff that I was familiar with started to become relevant again,

mostly as a point of information. But the way I got to all this stuff was my interest. I've always been interested in the kind of ideas and people and things and values that societies consider to be weird or abnormal or on the margins or on the fringe. And how it is that we do this and why we do this. and the ways in which we get those things wrong because we're not thinking about them historically. That was the thing that I saw as the connection between my former research on these other things and the kind of research I did here. Interesting. Did you receive any sort of blowback from like people in the mental health sort of research communities or psychiatry, psychology?

When you said you were going to be writing a UFO. from a historical perspective. Just the term UFO when you bring it up, it still can rub a lot of people the wrong way. You get that side eye glance. Any blowback from where you currently teach or colleagues in the past? Yeah, I'm always interested in that.

Yeah, I wondered about that when I started it. You know, every now and again, I would get a little bit of an eyebrow would go up or something and people would size me up. very briefly. But I will say overwhelmingly, the response has been very, very positive. I will tell you what I get a lot of, by contrast, when I would bring this up, is people would go to me, oh, my God, how cool.

Or as I remember, some graduate students coming up to me and saying, I didn't know we could write books about stuff like that. I'm like, yes, you can. Yeah. Absolutely. No, no, I'd say most of my colleagues and people I've encountered have thought this is just so darn neat. I wish I was doing that or something like that. I said, well, listen, there's plenty of room. There's a lot of books to be written. As I say in the book, this is not the definitive history by any stretch. There's no such thing. This is the beginning, I hope, of now people writing histories and looking at different. things and exploring other aspects that, you know, I could never get into. I just didn't have

time to get into. That's what it is. Yeah. You've opened that door and it's really exciting. I want to go to this question, which is interesting, being that it's pretty public that you are a history professor. You work at Penn State. So MJ jumps on YouTube actually wants to know, Are you familiar with former president of Penn State, Dr. Eric Walker, and his connection to the sort of mythical MJ12? And if so, what do you make of that? Did you know that Eric Walker was allegedly a part of MJ12? I had no idea. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I do know that. I will say this. I have, I have, I mean, I must say I'm of the view that. that most people who've done the sort of, I know the veteran eophologists who know the history of these things and all have been pretty good, I think, at showing pretty conclusively that the MJ12 documents don't really add up and that there's too many discrepancies for this stuff to be authentic. That said, I have been wanting to go into the library at the university and look at his papers and stuff to find out what is there that might be a connection of some kind.

I've never gotten around to doing it, mostly because to finish this book, which took much longer than I wanted to. COVID had something to do with that, but really, it was, it was just, it's just so much material. It was hard to do. But I, I realized at some point, I have to not go down rabbit holes. I have to go and say to myself, stick to the chapter you're working on. Finish this one. Finish this. And so every time I thought, I'm just going to go to a library this week and look at the Walker papers and see what's there. I haven't done it. So good question. That's my game plan. Hopefully this coming academic year, what I'm going to do is I'm going to dip my toes and see if there's anything there.

Good luck, good luck. Yeah, that is a rabbit hole to say the least. Last listener question, Greg. Norman on Facebook asks, so basically, you know, art and history are often, you know, melted together. And he wants to know, to what degree does human art in art forms play a role in the history of UFOs? Is that something you tackle in the book at all? Yeah. Yeah, talk about images a lot. And there's a lot. There's a lot. There's a amount of imagery in there. But there's no question. Art plays a role in a number of ways. In one form, art plays a role in that, in that, you know, we certainly know that people have often tried to connect the UFO phenomenon that we associate with, you know, the late 20th century in today with sort of artistic depictions of strange things in the skies centuries ago, right? And I think there is a connection. I don't think it's the same connection that a lot of people want to make. I think it has to do a lot more with those earlier sort of paintings and engravings and things.

Nine times out of ten, what they were about was trying to express something spiritually significant and a message of spiritual importance, oftentimes moral lessons, right, for people. people in their time, and you did that through portrayals of certain objects. Oftentimes, they were religious artifacts. Or they could have been things like comets and meteors, which, you know, we're seeing as also very, very significant as communicating something to people. I see those things as very much also oftentimes types of figures and emblems and symbols that get carried over into the modern age as well. So that I find that where I see the connection is I see it oftentimes in the kind of symbols and symbology that's used, but also in the kind of moral and spiritual significance that people read into things that happen in the skies above us.

At first, I didn't think it was real. I woke up to this blinding light and I was transported to another place. Pluto TV. Then I heard a voice. with me if you want to live. There were thousands of movies and shows, and they were all free. The truth is our scene. It's just so beautiful. On Pluto TV, free streaming of Terminator 2, Fringe Arrow, the 100 N-E-X-Files, may cause excitement, loss of sleep, and sudden belief in extraterrestrials.

No credit cards or alien encounters necessary. Pluto TV, stream now, pay never. Yeah, you know, I always look at things like ancient aliens. I mean, say what you will, about the television show. I guilty have been featured on that show. show many of times. I don't cover, you know, the ancient part of ancient aliens. I also cover the more modern stuff. But you do have to wonder, you know, like the interpretation of a lot of these pieces of art throughout history. And is there any possible connections to men from the skies?

You know, you see these statues with space helmets and spacesuits. But like you mentioned, it's all about what was happening at the time, how they were able to convey what they were trying to express through the art and then how we future humans as it were are interpreting what they were trying to say. So yeah, that's why I love art. You know, there's a million people to look at. And let's face it, you know, this is I think a lesson from history is we in the present day, and this has been, by the way, for every generation in history. But whatever present day you are in, we are not very good at understanding our ancestors. We're often very, and when we suffer from a disease called anachronisms,

we tend to want to see them solely through our own eyes, to think that they must have seen the world the way we see it. And that, of course, really wasn't the case. And that I think is a hard thing to sort of reconstruct and getting at that. right at some way. Yeah, absolutely. Well, that leads into my last question for you, Greg. And it might be one of the most obvious, too. But what do you hope people will take away from your book? And, yeah, what importance do you think your book will eventually play in the history of euphology, as it were? That one I don't know. We'll see what folks make of it, if anything of it. I don't know.

I'm eager to get feedback from people about it. I'd say the big takeaway I hope people get from this is an expression I use a lot. I use it in the book several times. And that is that UFOs don't make history. People make UFOs make history. The basic point of this book is to say that UFOs are a phenomenon that are inherently, part of human history, part of our social fabric. And whatever they are and whatever they mean or maybe don't mean,

whatever take that might be, it involves the work of people at various periods of time making decisions, doing things, right? Taking action, writing about it, speaking about it, making movies about it, arguing about it, proselytizing about it, or trying to shut people up about it, right? All these kinds of things are going on. All that is the work that goes on behind the scenes. And that, to me, is essentially a part, inherently part of the UFO phenomenon.

You can't tease that out. I've got a lot of colleagues who are in the sciences, the natural sciences, who say that, you know, culture, we want to get the cultural associations of U.S. UFOs out, which is why we use the term UAP, and we want to just stick to the science. And I make the argument, you can't do it. It doesn't, you can't take the human being out of it. And I know that's, that's something you and I both agree with, right? Because you also are a big advocate of this idea.

Don't divest this stuff of its human aspect, right? Absolutely. I mean, at the end of every lecture I give, you know, when I travel around and give these lectures on the human approach to the UFO phenomenon, I play a brief clip of you to my audience. And it's basically you stressing, as I agree, that you can't take the human. You can't take the observer of said UFO out of the equation. Maybe you can, if you're dealing with it from a national security standpoint or something like that. But this phenomenon stretches much further than just national security and what the UFO itself is. What does it do to us? How does this affect us

culturally, religiously, economically, like we mentioned before? So yes, I always leave my audience with hope, with what UFOs can mean in your own personal life. And I leave them with that clip that you so graciously provided me with. So yeah, I have to thank you for that. I have to thank you for writing this book. I think it was sorely needed in this field of research. And of course, last question, Greg, where can we find it and where can we find everything you're up to? You can find the book just about anywhere like Amazon or you can go right to Oxford University Press's website to order it there. The audiobook is, I believe, going to be available in about six or seven days if you're if you're a fan of the audio uh version of books it's going to be

available that way it is i should say only available right now in the united states it's going to be released in the uk europe and i believe also elsewhere throughout the world in early september so anybody there is going to have to wait a few months or get a friend to send them a copy uh from elsewhere but anywhere you can buy books you can order it and it's readily available and it's I think actually affordable at a nice 2999. I love it. I love it. Affordable UFO books of all four. I know. They're a rarity sometimes. I know. I know. Well, Greg, like I said, like you came on in the very early days of the show. I feel like we've come full circle. I've been waiting for a book like this for a very long time. So thank you. Thank you for writing it.

Thank you for giving us a very fresh perspective on a lot of this by looking at the past, which I think is most important. And that's how we will eventually find answers. So thank you. Thank you for coming on Summer of the Sky. Thank you. This is a blast, as usual. The Somewhere in the Sky's podcast is part of the Lionsgate Sound Network. Please take a moment to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever possible.

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