The Lure of the Edge: Scientific Passions, Religious Beliefs, and the Pursuit of UFOs (review)

I was in grade school when the first "flying saucer" reports came in. My friends and I were fascinated by the topic, had endless and fruitless discussions about UFOs and attended all the bad 1950s movies about alien attacks upon the earth. In the early 1960s I was an undergraduate majoring in physics and mathematics (yet minoring, in my spare time, in the humanities and arts), but no longer a believer in the pseudoscientific and paranormal. About that time, I read the book When Prophecy Fails (1956), by L. Festinger, H.W. Riecken and S. Schachter. Although written as a tedious sociological study, it was nevertheless a captivating read about a cult formed around a woman who contacted aliens and was waiting for them to visit earth. Although the study was about the gullible tendency of people to believe outlandish things, I also saw in it a glimmer of optimism about human behavior; true, numerous people joined the cult over several months, yet as negative evidence mounted (namely, the aliens did not appear on their appointed nights!), members left the group one by one, leaving in the end only a few of the original true believers. When there is a lack of confirmation, some people can un-believe things they may want to believe.

The Lure of the Edge is Brenda Denzler's attempt at a thorough review of the community of UFO believers. I was interested to see that the first work she mentions in the introduction is When Prophecy Fails, which she regards as perpetrating a narrow view of UFO believers. She makes a case that in fact this community is not composed entirely of socially marginalized people with pseudoscientific beliefs who are prone to cult behavior. With a Ph.D. in religious studies, Denzler is also interested in the relationship of UFOlogy to traditional religious belief. Her focus is limited to the United States, where, according to a poll she quotes, 48% of the population believe that UFOs are real.

Flying saucer reports began in 1947 and thereafter came in several waves. One such wave was during 1965-1967, which I clearly recall. I was a graduate student in Cleveland, Ohio, and one night two friends returned from a date quite agitated, fearful and yet awed, proclaiming that a light hovering in the sky followed them for an extended period of time along a dark stretch of country road. Subsequently they reported this UFO to Project Blue Book, a government agency set up in 1952 to study the possible validity of such sightings; it was closed late in 1969, and thereafter UFOlogy was relegated to the UFO community. Scientists dismissed most of the mid-1960s sightings as due to the seepage of methane gas

("swamp gas" in the vernacular), which was probably the official judgment of the "close encounter" of my friends.

Over the more than four decades of reported UFO activity, reports changed, from the earlier sightings of strange lights and flying objects to claims of their landing to reports of aliens coming and going and, finally, to stories of physical abductions, complete with medical experiments performed on the abductees. Concomitant with this was the sub-theme that the United States government was covering up evidence about aliens; the most celebrated case is the purported incident of a crashed saucer in 1947 at the Air Base in Roswell, New Mexico, where the Army actually recovered the bodies of aliens. I know that American TV and movies are saturated with such conspiracy themes, but is UFOlogy confined only to U.S. soil, the way "creation science" seems to be?

As reports evolved, the UFO community was forced to respond. Initially they, along with the scientists, believed that only empirical evidence would do. Indeed, many were scientists themselves. When abductions became the norm, some resisted accepting these stories. Then a large...