100 books like Passport to Magonia

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.

Lepselter is a scholar of folklore and anthropology as well as a lyrical and compelling writer.

This book is based on a series of interviews she performed with those who have claimed encounters with UFOs and their occupants. In a series of compassionate, rigorous, and detailed readings of the very words these people have told her, Lepselter unpacks the deep anxieties, blessings, and emotions that run through their tales, and gracefully links them to broader national stories that afflict all of us.

Fear of disempowerment, worry about captivities of many sorts, confusion about the powers that run our world. Lepselter finds them all in stories of UFOs, and in so doing does more than just about any author to explain why these strange craft have haunted us for seventy years.

This is UFO investigation the way a professor of religious studies tackles it.

Diane Pasulka starts off considering why the levels of belief in intelligent extraterrestrial life amongst Americans roughly match the levels of belief in God. She then completes a study to find out why this is, and what – exactly – drives people, including some of the most successful and intelligent Americans she can find, to this belief.

To her credit she finds answers and covers the whole complex topic in a clear and readable book. Some of the most important contributions to understanding the UFO subject have been made by people who started their investigation from outside the UFO community. This is one of the best examples.

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. 

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.

A clear and well-argued account of how the planet became obsessed with stories of alien encounters and what they might mean to us.

An essential read for anyone curious about the subject largely because it considers the whole planet, not just the truly UFO-obsessed United States. It frequently presents the best and most challenging UFO cases with a clarity that gets to the heart of each claim, and never forgets that one thing driving the enduring popularity of the subject is that – whatever the truth behind each claim – we’re dealing with incredible claims that make for great stories.

This was the first 1950s “contactee” book I read while researching my book. And it’s a fun one.

Contactees were a group of people in the fifties and sixties claiming to have been in contact with aliens—usually Venusians. Fry gives his account of stumbling upon a flying saucer in New Mexico in 1950 and flying to New York and back in 30 minutes. He flew alone, guided remotely from an alien far above.

In his conversations with the extraterrestrial being, he learned that they were visiting our planet to warn us about the dangers of the atomic age and the possible destruction of earth. It’s entertaining, and regardless of your beliefs, the alien makes a fair point.

Fuller’s book captures the story of Betty and Barney Hill, who became the first nationally covered case of an alien abduction.

The book tells their tale and shares the hypnosis sessions they underwent to recall the many bizarre details of their experience. Fuller’s interviews with the Hills, along with the documented transcripts, make for a remarkable read. 

This book provides an early history of the modern UFO era by a credible U.S. Military Officer. Read this book or another book you can find by Donald E. Keyhoe.

I recommend Major Donald E. Keyhoe’s book on flying saucers because of the personal passion he has exhibited for the subject, especially for the reality and importance of it. I recall viewing in a video showing how he was on TV telling viewers how important the subject of flying saucers was, while at the same time his TV broadcast was right then and there being censored off the air. Someone like Keyhoe… right in the act of being censored, well, I think, it doesn’t get more emotionally moving than that!

Major Kehoe investigated many of the earliest encounters allegedly between U.S. Air Force pilots and UFOs (so-called “flying saucers”). Keyhoe believed the Air Force was actively investigating these close encounters,… show more.