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Gulyas, Aaron John. Extraterrestrials and the American Zeitgeist: Alien Contact Tales Since the 1950s. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2013. 250 pp. Paper. ISBN 978-0-786471-16-4. $40.00
In Extraterrestrials and the American Zeitgeist, Aaron Gulyas explores the phenomenon of alien contact narratives-stories about and from people who claim to have been visited in some way by extraterrestrial life-and the relationship stich stories have to the American politics of their time. They represent what he calls a "fringe movement within a fringe movement" that has been easy to ignore, and he argues that they have been underrepresented in the scholarly literature (225). Moreover, the early contact, narratives differ considerably from later manifestations in pop culture: antagonistic, insect-like aliens, or the more stereotypical "grays" with large eyes and tapered, oversized heads. This element of the popular imagination bypasses the very human-like, benevolent visitors in the earlier tales, most of whom had some sort of message for humanity (3). It is these messages that Gulyas is particularly interested in. He argues that the contactees often present political and religious views that lie outside the mainstream, and use the contact narrative to couch these observations (5).
The book, which is based on Gulyas's MA thesis, is divided into eight chapters. The first, "Meet the Saucer People," is a helpful overview of the main themes of the book. Gulyas justifies the timeline of his study-the 50s to the present-not just in terms of the appearance of space aliens as such, but also by pointing to the Cold War context of the space race in a period of intense and profound sociopolitical change (6). He argues that contact tales consistently and directly reflect concerns of the time, especially beginning in the 1950s, a period that quashed political dissent (7). "Since 1945," he writes, "millions of people around the world have written books, published magazines, and taken to the streets, agitating for change and progress, and urging humanity to think and act differently. That contactees have done so via stories of extraterrestrial visits and personal experiences traveling in flying saucers is extraordinary and worthy of investigation in its. own right" (8). This latter observation is key to Gulyas's project. His interest lies...