UFO Reports by Timothy Jenkins

"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.

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).