Extraterrestrials and the American Zeitgeist: Alien Contact Tales Since the 1950s Aaron John Gulyas. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013.

Extraterrestrials and the American Zeitgeist: Alien Contact Tales Since the 1950s Aaron John Gulyas. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013.Aaron John Gulyas's study of "alien contactee" tales from the 1950s through the twenty-first century is, as the author somewhat self-consciously warns the reader in the first introductory paragraph, "not really a book about flying saucers____not really a book about aliens or abductions, or about the alleged UFO crash at Roswell or faces on Mars, or any of the other cultural trappings of the paranormal" (1). Nor does Gulyas focus on the more well-known "alien abduction" narratives that reached their peak in the 1990s. These paranoid stories feature the so-called alien "Greys," insectoid entities that kidnap helpless people and subject them to various painful, seemingly medical procedures before returning them to their everyday lives, often with blanked memories only later recovered (controversially, to be sure) through hypnosis. In many of these stories, the aliens are aided and abetted in their grisly work by the United States government (or shadow elements of it), which at some previous betrayal point in history has granted a quota of sacrificial victims to the "Greys" in exchange for remaining in power. This grim cultural story of alien contact and government conspiracy formed the nucleus of the mainstream popular culture success of the long-running television series The X-Files (1993-2002) and author Whitley Strieber's best-seller Communion (1987). Instead, Gulyas's book focuses on the more neglected "contactee" phenomenon of post-World War II, in which benign, humanoid extraterrestrials interact peacefully with chosen emissaries on Earth to "convey messages on politics and society, ethics and religion, war and peace" (1), usually with the loving intent of redirecting humanity away from the otherwise dire fate awaiting it.The distinction is important, because Gulyas's study, using the standard academic tools of critical analysis, has the unenviable task of navigating a twilight terrain that has already been well colonized by purveyors of fantastic (and to most people unbelievable) tales about encounters with human-like extraterrestrial and/or ultra-dimensional entities to credulous audiences predisposed to accept on faith the welcome news that humanity is not alone and that benevolent "space brothers" (and sisters) are watching over the planet to guide us away from our own self-destruction and, if necessary, to intervene to save at least an elect few (typically the contactees and their small congregations of believers). This terrain is also haunted by the infamous "Men in Black," sinister entities of unknown origin (perhaps government employees, perhaps aliens in human disguise) who often appear in the wake of UFO sightings and/or contactee publicity to threaten or otherwise intimidate witnesses and researchers into silence. The Men in Black usually constitute the "devil" or demonic agents in the contactees' tales of the cosmic duel between good and evil. Gulyas's intent is not to debunk the veracity of these stories, most of which do not rely on factual evidence anyway, so much as it is to spotlight their importance to historians and cultural scholars as "conduits for reforming ideas" (10) about messages such as racial tolerance, the dangers of environmental degradation and nuclear weapons, the need for global harmony, and so forth. While Gulyas performs admirable work in plucking some of these otherwise obscure contactee tales from the historical milieu of the Cold War, post-Cold War, and Age of Terror eras, one cannot help but get the impression that, at times, Gulyas simultaneously overstates the impact of these stories in shaping the flow of cultural history against the macro forces of sociopolitical movements.Gulyas is one of several writers to study the contactee phenomenon and is certainly one of the most academic, as distinguished from the work of paranormal researchers, such as Nick Redfern and John Keel, writing for a more general audience. …