72 books like American Cosmic

I love Carl Jung’s ability to see into the nature of consciousness and make the connection between the experience of being a being on Earth and the true nature of our being. He is one of the first scientists to describe the near-death experience and to see it as another trick of the dualistic world.

Jung explains how, during his heart attack, he died and was transported above the earth to a doorway guarded by a cosmically dangerous spike. Jung’s observations as a scientist and doctor about what makes us tick are a foundation for people realizing their true nature through people like David Bingham today.

I love this book because gay teen Henry keeps getting abducted by aliens. He’s trying to have a normal life as a high school student in Florida, but people think he’s a flake because he keeps going missing when the aliens take him.

The aliens give him a button to push if he wants to save the world from getting destroyed. Henry’s classmates f*ck around with him so much I wanted him to find something to give him hope not to destroy the world. His new boyfriend seems to be helping, but during a visit, Henry is taken by aliens and goes missing for a while, messing up his new romance.

It’s hard enough to be a gay teen, but to be a gay teen who is abducted by aliens on a weekly basis is something that I love about this book.

Many books on this subject have dated, this title, first published in 1969 remains a classic and highly influential.

It argues that twentieth-century claims of UFO sightings and meetings with aliens fit a wider pattern taking in folklore and our history of strange encounters of all kinds.

A hugely influential book that has influenced a library’s worth of other writing but still an ideal beginners guide to anyone seeking to understand where the strangest modern-day claims might fit into the bizarre stories humans have been telling each other throughout history.

I love how smart this book is, even as it takes us to very dark and depressing places and forces the characters to contemplate life over huge spans of time.

At first, it’s just a book about two guys on a spaceship, running a routine mission to a nearby planet. But the ship or someone is deceiving them. They find out they aren’t on a simple mission, they find out they’re probably the last two people left in the world, they fall in love and then they are killed by the ship (but that’s not the end of their lives).

I love that this book is about a new take on a generation ship–where the inhabitants are indented, never to return home. This is somewhat like The Dark Beyond the Stars, where the characters are intentionally kept in the dark by the people who designed the mission. I really… show more.

Over the thirty-odd years since its publication, Strieber’s haunting story of his own encounters with strange creatures—perhaps from outer space, perhaps from another layer of reality, perhaps from his own mind—has become the most popular and profound first-person account of alien encounters in modern American culture. 

This is in part due to Strieber’s prose, both fevered and fiercely precise. He was a successful horror novelist before producing this book, and whether one believes he is simply continuing his trade here or not, his story is compelling, terrifying, philosophical, and deeply disorienting.

Vallee is perhaps the most respected researcher in the UFO community.

Holder of a PhD and a successful computer scientist, he began writing about UFOs while in graduate school, and has produced a string of books that have transformed conversations about UFOs among believers. He is perhaps the most influential opponent of the so-called “extraterrestrial hypothesis,” the common assumption that UFOs are spacecraft that have made the trip across the stars.

Rather, in this groundbreaking book Vallee draws comparisons between contemporary stories of UFOs and the reams of accounts of encounters with small otherworldly beings, glowing lights, and strange bendings in time and space that have permeated human folklore and religion for centuries.

Perhaps, Vallee suggests, UFOs are simply the most contemporary manifestation of a much stranger and older phenomenon than simply little green men from another planet.

UFOs? Really? That’s not normally something I would want to read. But Lepselter embedded herself in a New Mexico community of people who believe they were abducted by aliens and makes it feel, well, real.

Do You think Nothing happened to those people? Lepselter shows how they know you’re skeptical, but they’re also traumatized and need that community of people who get it. Is the Truth out there? Did she become a believer? The ending is a stunner.

Bullard, a scholar of literature and folklore, has exhaustively catalogued more UFO encounters than a casual reader might imagine have ever occurred.

The book delves into dozens of cases, from well-known stories like the supposed UFO crash at Roswell to popularly overlooked events like the Chicago sightings of 2006.

He then distills this myriad of stories down to their mythic bones, trying to understand how the strange raw material of a sighting—somebody seeing an odd light in the sky—is translated again and again through the narratives of film and television, popular culture and academic analysis, and how the UFO becomes a myth: a story that means something to people in our time, and perhaps tells us something about ourselves too. 

This is hefty, recent, authoritative, and well written (the author’s CV includes a Pulitzer Prize nomination).

Over a lengthy historic account, he spins the twin stories of the search by scientists for extraterrestrial life and the – usually – amateur search by ufologists for evidence to support their claims that aliens are already visiting us. Garrett Graff explores the contradictions.

He is clear and concise on the strength and weakness each side’s efforts, and insightful in those moments when both sides have briefly collaborated. For a beginner to the subject who wants the shortest route to becoming truly knowledgeable, this is the perfect primer.

Making sense of the varied claims of UFOs and aliens isn’t easy, it gets much harder if you dig into history and discover reports that don’t match the things reported today. This book brings clarity.

The biography of J Allen Hynek, arguably the most significant and influential ufologist who ever lived traces his journey from becoming involved in the field as a government-appointed sceptic brought into to explain away eye-witness accounts through his personal realisation that he was dealing with some phenomena he couldn’t dismiss or understand, to his later life as a tireless investigator into the truly strange and a campaigner for more serious investigation.

A unique life, and a great read partly because Hynek emerges as very human and likable.