On June 24th, 1947, a private pilot reported numerous dazzling objects rushing through the sky above Mount Rainier in Washington state. It was the start of the current UFO phenomena, one of the country's most perplexing and persistent mysteries. Within a few weeks, hundreds of sightings of flying saucers were reported to news media. Surprising reports of a UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico further added to the mystery that July. Since then, UFOs have sparked a slew of incredible claims and speculations. This is a sober and honest history of America's first major saucer craze, based on many sources including previously classified government records. The book cuts through decades of mystique and confusion, beginning with the 1947 UFO wave and ending with the launch of Project Blue Book in 1952. Balanced and comprehensive, this history provides background, social context and other tools for reframing perceptions of a controversial subject.

"Saucer Attacks!" captures images of the UFO phenomenon from the golden age of flying saucers, beginning in 1947 with the infamous "Roswell Incident", and taking readers into the prosperous post-war years, when it seemed that the night skies were riddled with inexplicable phenomena. Teeming with 200 images from a variety of sources, "Saucer Attacks!" is a compendium of everything related to a time when the imagination ran wild.

More than half of American adults and more than seventy-five percent of young Americans believe in intelligent extraterrestrial life. This level of belief rivals that of belief in God. American Cosmic examines the mechanisms at work behind the thriving belief system in extraterrestrial life, a system that is changing and even supplanting traditional religions. Over the course of a six-year ethnographic study, D.W. Pasulka interviewed successful and influential scientists, professionals, and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who believe in extraterrestrial intelligence, thereby disproving the common misconception that only fringe members of society believe in UFOs. She argues that widespread belief in aliens is due to a number of factors including their ubiquity in modern media like The X-Files, which can influence memory, and the believability lent to that media by the search for planets that might support life. American Cosmic explores the intriguing question of how people interpret unexplainable experiences, and argues that the media is replacing religion as a cultural authority that offers believers answers about non-human intelligent life.

The Flying Saucers Are Real by Donald Keyhoe, printed in 1950, is one of the first books investigating numerous encounters between the United States Air Force fighters, personnel, and other aircraft and UFOs between 1947 and 1950. The author contended that the Air Force was investigating these cases of close encounters, with a policy of concealing. Keyhoe also said that Earth had been visited by extraterrestrials for two centuries, with the frequency of these visits increasing sharply after the first atomic weapon test in 1945.

The term "flying saucer" first invaded American culture after pilot Kenneth Arnold spotted nine shiny, flat objects whizzing and weaving through the sky in a chain-like formation over Mt. Rainier in Washington. When Arnold told reporters that the objects appeared like saucers skipping on water, they ran with the visual and termed them "flying saucers"-forever changing our skies and vocabulary. Were aliens truly visiting? Or did a foreign power have new technology that could pose a danger to America? Or was it something else entirely? The Air Force began its investigations, though the government always found ways to explain away UFO sightings as anything but otherworldly vehicles. Retired U.S. Marine Corps Major Donald Keyhoe wasn't buying their theories. Convinced that extraterrestrial technology was visiting, he published his first book, Flying Saucers Are Real, in 1950. The book expanded on his True magazine article published in the December 1949 issue. That article is reprinted-as it appeared-at the end of this volume.

In 1878 in Denison, Texas, a man named John Martin looked up into the sky and saw something he could not explain. Americans have been hooked on the possibility of beings from space visiting Earth ever since. A sense of wonder, and reality, are brought to some popular legends of alien encounters and sightings in this volume. The final chapter explores how these legends have become even more popular thanks to movies, television, and literature.