Ultraterrestrials: A review of How UFOs Conquered the World: The History of a Modern Myth. By David Clarke

DAVID CLARKE HAS WRITTEN AN insightful, informative and thought-provoking book on UFOs and the UFO culture. This is not a debunking book, although it fulfills that function admirably. It describes Clarke's long search for what is really going on with UFO reports and describes the various stages of belief Clarke goes through that he calls the "UFO Syndrome."

As a British reporter, Clarke interviewed many of the major players in the British UFO community. These interviews and his own investigations provide much information that, as far as I know, has never been published before. For readers familiar with American UFO literature this book provides a welcome broadening of horizons--I had no idea that there was a British equivalent of Project Blue Book, for example. The honesty with which Clarke describes his own changing beliefs is most refreshing. He is never harsh or demeaning and treats those who hold even the most bizarre UFO ideas with interest and respect.

Like this reviewer, Clarke's interest in UFOs sprang from reading science fiction stories and seeing science fiction films and TV shows during adolescence. We both read UFO books and joined a UFO group (NICAP in my case) and both came to really believe that UFOs were of extraterrestrial origin--the start of the "UFO Syndrome." In the Introduction Clarke details his captivation with the syndrome. In the ten charters that follow he writes about his pursuit of the "truth" about UFOs. It is a fascinating journey.

The first two chapters cover topics familiar to the skeptical reader. After describing the Arnold sightings and several 1950s "flaps" and the huge interest they generated in the United States from the later 1940s to the 1950s, he notes that "the [UFO] syndrome took hold in no less dramatic fashion" (p. 38) in the United Kingdom. It is here that Clarke also describes the important connection between the UFO syndrome and the fantasy and science fiction pulp magazines of the 1930s through the 1950s. That connection has been discussed at length in Andrew May's excellent Pseudoscience and Science Fiction (Springer, 2017).

Like many, I suspect what most convinced me that UFOs were real was the number of reliable, sane, often professional and well-trained people who reported them. Certainly all of them could not have been fooled. After all, "seeing is believing." The young Clarke also felt this way. In the second chapter, titled "I Know What I Saw," he elaborates on this theme and introduces Ockham's Razor and the work that shows human memory and perception are highly unreliable, especially under conditions where there may not be enough information. This may be old hat to skeptics, but it certainly is not to the public at large. In fact, it was only in graduate school after I learned about the constructive nature of memory and perception that I came to the conclusion that UFOs (and other such phenomena) were products of the inner world of the normal brain rather than actual objects in the outer world. This insight...