In a brilliant stroke, Keith Thompson takes a subject usually confined to sensational tabloids and reveals its surprising literary richness, intellectual energy, and symbolic depths. By offering a new, open-ended perspective which avoids the dogmatism of true believers and debunkers alike, Angels and Aliens invites readers to enter a fascinating world with profound implications for our understanding of the human spirit.

It was Carl Jung who first spoke of the UFO phenomenon as “A modern myth in the making,” and Joseph Campbell who insisted that the first function of myths is “opening mind and heart to the utter wonder of all being.” Now Keith Thompson makes it possible for us to share that sense of wonder as he explores the UFO against the timeless backdrop of visionary experience: angelic vision, near-death experiences, shamanic journeys, religious miracles, and folkloric encounters with fairies.

Angels and Aliens offers a compelling interpretive history of the UFO phenomenon, beginning in 1947 when the first reports came in describing nine disc-shaped objects moving in the sky “like a saucer skipping water.” In Thompson’s even-handed telling it is difficult to say which is more outrageous: the stories of temptresses from outer space disembarking for impregnation by sexually self-confidant farmers, or the government’s ham-handed explanations for ambiguous events that nonetheless did take place, having been confirmed by both radar and independent visual sightings.

Thompson argues that the need for clear distinctions in the Western mind obscures the rich sense in which the UFO phenomenon becomes not less real but more so for its mythic, metaphoric, allegorical dimension. No matter whether the reported sightings were caused by literal aliens from another galaxy or summoned from some poorly understood dimension of the human psyche, we may come to fathom the distinctively modern longing to recover lost intimacy with deeper currents of the universe.

Angels and Aliens prepares us for the provocative conclusion that, where mind and matter intersect, what we term reality may in fact be a limited spectrum within a much larger realm of possibilities.

Keith Thompson is an independent scholar and journalist with particular interest in the cultural imagination. The author of The UFO Paradox, his articles have appeared in the New York Times, Esquire, and the San Francisco Chronicle.