Images of Elsewhere by Timothy Jenkins

"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.

Timothy Jenkins retired from Cambridge University in 2019. He trained at the Oxford Institute of Social Anthropology, with fieldwork in France and Britain. His research interests include moral uses of scientific discoveries and the multiple dimensions of time. He has also published Of Flying Saucers and Social Scientists (2013).