Images of Elsewhere
6 primary works
Book 1
«Jenkins’ meticulously researched essay will change how you think about UFOs. The interesting question is not whether flying saucers are real or fake, but rather, in what sociotechnical world were such sightings plausible? A fascinating exploration of military vigilance, technological innovation and changing standards of evidence in the mid-twentieth century.»
(Matei Candea, Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge)
Flying saucers emerged as objects of concern to an intelligence unit operating within the US Air Force in the early Cold War. This book tracks the progressive identification and conceptualization of the UFO (Unidentified Flying Object) through contemporary documents and traces the fate of the «interplanetary hypothesis». This small-scale history relates to extraordinary developments in the period in both weapons and communications technologies, as powered rocket flight beyond the atmosphere became a possibility and home radar had to be expanded to detect and meet the threat of enemy missiles. In this context, sightings provoked increasing division among investigators as well as growing public interest in flying saucers, and official policy shifted focus from research to management of reactions to these objects. All the features of early UFO sightings have continued into the present with controversies over UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena).
Book 2
«Flying saucers come from outer space – except, as Timothy Jenkins observes in this persuasive and enjoyable volume, they also come from the pages of nineteenth-century occult texts. Jenkins ably traces the connections between Madame Blavatsky’s messages from spirit masters to Richard Shaver’s pulp fiction classic "I Remember Lemuria".»
(Matt Tomlinson, Associate Professor, School of Culture, History and Language, Australian National University)
Flying saucers display characteristic features, transmitted by an important strand of early science fiction, which express religious concerns entangled with new technologies and scientific discoveries. The extraordinary universe discovered by late nineteenth-century advances in the sciences, with its expansion in both space and time, was populated in spiritualist and other thought by intelligent beings attentive to and bound up with the progress of humankind. This book traces the appearance of these interplanetary guardians, active at every level from the atom to the Cosmos, and uses a pulp science fiction story from 1945 to describe how this theosophical worldview was expanded to explain important aspects of contemporary American wartime society, in this fashion preparing the landscape for the coming of the flying saucers.
Book 3
«Jenkins weaves astrobiology, philosophy and theology into a rich tapestry that will be our vade-mecum for extra-terrestrial contact. The stakes are high, poised between being welcomed into the interstellar community and abandoning hope as we peer into abysses of solipsistic nihilism. The labyrinth remains unplumbed, but Jenkins will be our sure guide.»
(Simon Conway Morris, Emeritus Professor of Evolutionary Palaeobiology, University of Cambridge)
«Jenkins’ anthropological gaze reminds us how sanitized intellectual history has become. While the natural sciences claim life in the universe as their sole preserve, understanding the urge to communicate with extra-terrestrials demands we attend to Mesmerism and Spiritualism, the military, and science fiction. Communication between terrestrial traditions turns out as remarkable as extra-terrestrial forms.»
(Andrew Davison, Regius Professor of Divinity, University of Oxford)
Ideas of «communication» and «information» are key to the project of seeking life on other planets. US Air Force encounters with flying saucers after 1945 and the search for signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI), pursued since 1960, both point to the necessity of composing and understanding interplanetary languages to allow meaningful exchange if contact were ever established. These themes are also explored in science fiction stories across the period to the present, responding to the changing understanding of the possibility of communication. This book traces the major questions that structure the search, together with the episodes raising (and dashing) hope of contact, the languages proposed as means of exchange, and some of the novels that explore this history. Taken together, these elements pose the question: can we ever cross the boundary between our and other minds?
Book 4
«Theoretically insightful and descriptively rich, UFO Reports is deeply thoughtful and thought provoking. Jenkins demonstrates how UFO advocates and sceptics alike exist within a shared universe of meaning that is utterly rationalist and yet profoundly occult. As such, chasing UFOs becomes a rival scientific vocation animated by the human imagination.»
(Joe Webster, Professor of the Anthropology of Religion, University of Cambridge)
«A terrific study of knowledge formation. Jenkins interprets the mid-twentieth-century flood of UFO preoccupations in the United States, tracing the streams of Theosophy, pulp fiction, military security, and science that fed it. A book of many surprises and a model for understanding how and why societies create new stories.»
(Rupert Stasch, Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge)
UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects) were originally the subject of military intelligence interest but quickly became transferred to the civilian sphere in the late 1940s. All the later possibilities discovered by investigations were hinted at in the military materials but expanded in new contexts. This book traces the earliest discussions of UFO reports from the civilian perspective through two case studies. The first concerns the detailed claim by a journalist that flying saucers are real, met by denial at each point by an expert with scientific credentials; the second gives the history of the first «contactee», showing the development of the idea of the flying saucer in various regards, reporting close sightings and even repeated meetings with interplanetary visitors. Taken together, this trio of possibilities – claiming the literal truth, or identifying error, or imagining new forms of life – created the frame for later engagements with the problem.
Book 5
«Fascinating, humanist, and beautifully written, Alien Sightings attends to the relationships and lifeworlds in which UFO sightings occur, analysing the intellectual and cultural trends patterning their expression. Through attention to the form, interpretation, and social history of alien encounters, Jenkins reveals the relationship between collective practices and individual experience. Brilliant and compelling.»
(Joanna Cook, Reader in Medical Anthropology, University College London
«In this masterful review of reports of alien encounters, sightings, communications and abductions, Jenkins skilfully and surgically reveals the underlying assumptions of such stories, as well as the lacunae in sociological accounts of them. This essay also inspires further reflection on the social factors behind claims about related psychic and supernatural phenomena.»
(Beth Singler, Assistant Professor in Digital Religion(s), University of Zurich)
For the last seventy years, members of the public have reported seeing piloted craft, thought to come from other planets, in the sky or on land. Their reasons for making such reports often remain obscure and hard to separate from the accounts of investigators of various kinds drawn to these events. More, these witnesses’ reports have varied over that time, moving from distant sightings at the beginning to include Close Encounters and then abductions, and the focus of the report likewise altered, from description of physical objects to a concern with psychological reactions and, later, with the recovery of hidden memories. This book reviews a series of well-known reports by contemporary journalists of these sightings, showing the order and patterns that underlie both the events themselves and their reception.
Book 6
«Both a fascinating historically informed account of flying saucers in military and popular imagination, from their arrival in the 1940s until the present, and a satisfying intellectual account of how categories and objects change simultaneously. Jenkins authoritatively charts the continuities and discontinuities in the post-war American adventure of imagining alien life.»
(Nicholas Adams, Professor of Philosophical Theology, University of Birmingham).
«Far away is close at hand in images of elsewhere.»
(London graffito, late 1970s)
In the modern period, with understandings shaped by new technologies, we are bound to find something like flying saucers, with a range of properties that are both real and imaginary, which can act as relays between human groups, places and times, providing new resources and allowing innovation to happen. This book reviews the different scientific models that have been employed in making sense of sightings, showing the broader schemes in which they have been put to work, and indicating the different possibilities these schemes contain, running from realistic claims about sightings of objects to claims of encounters with interplanetary creatures which are both psychologically and technically far in advance of our times. It offers a comprehensive account of the features, puzzles, anomalies and paradoxes of flying saucer reports.