Fans pick 85 books like The Resonance of Unseen Things

I read this book while working on my own because Horwitz is a master of weaving a story with many characters about a complicated piece of the past. He provides ample detail about the lengths to which reenactors will go for their performances—and some of the methods are outright gross.

But I love that even when Horwitz is grappling with ways that modern interpretations can obscure the actual past, he never resorts to mockery when talking about his subjects. He might disagree with their perspective about the Civil War, but he listens and reports what they tell him. I recommend this for anyone trying to understand how the Civil War still plays such a prominent role in our world nearly two centuries later. 

I haven’t recovered yet from the way Hartman recovers the lives of young Black women through historical photographs. The images were made to rob these women of their individuality, make them fit “types,” letting them say Nothing about themselves.

But Hartman writes like she’s talking to them, and they’re wonderful. She messes with categories used by authorities who thought they “knew” these women by their transgressions. I was utterly transfixed by how she imagined these women’s lives and loves in the ordinary stairways and back alleys they called home.

The photos are gorgeous. You could talk about them for days and still have more to think about—like how when it comes to women being framed for doing something wrong, maybe Nothing has changed.

Smith offers an up-close-and-personal tour of how the history of slavery has been preserved in various corners of the Earth. From Monticello Plantation in Virginia to the House of Slaves in Gorée Island (Senegal), I was taken on an eye-opening, albeit sometimes cringeworthy, journey through modern-day perceptions of a haunted past.

For me, this retelling of history is most fascinating. It forces the reader to reckon with the idea that truth isn’t just in the eye of the beholder but in the mouth of the teller. How can we find truth in history if it is being told in so many ways? I weirdly enjoyed wrestling with it as I ventured through the places Smith visited as if his storytelling was escorting me.

Incredible. Like a great Russian novel, this book asks its readers for effort, time, and patience, but it all pays off one thousand times over. It is a story about how quiet lives come up against the sky-high pile of debris known as history, the beauty of art, and kindness amidst the wreckages and catastrophes of human politics.

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.

This is the real-life account of a professor who gets caught up in “The Phenomena,” a term used to describe the appearance and interaction with extraterrestrial activity and encounters.

Diana Pasulka is a professor of religious studies who is researching the similarities between encounters with angels and demons, which are very similar in description to encounters with aliens and UFOs. Professor Pasulka is blindfolded and driven by a NASA scientist to a desert in New Mexico, where she is shown a secret  “UFO crash site.”  She doesn’t believe any of it. She says the ground is covered for miles by deteriorating aluminum cans that the government placed there over fifty years ago to obscure the UFO crash site and hide it. Later, her friend, Dr. Gary Nolan, a Stanford University scientist, verifies the objects from the crash site are not from this “universe.” 

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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. 

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.

My book came out around the same time as several others on conspiracy theory from humanities scholars. I could spend all five of my book recommendations on their works—and I’m thinking especially here of books by Clare Birchall, Peter Knight, Timothy Melley, and more recently Michael Butter—but several of the authors are included in this recent collection that also features scholars from throughout Europe. The Routledge Handbook situates conspiracy theories within the political and cultural contexts from which they emerge throughout the world, and it includes in a single volume works from a broad range of disciplines that reveal the diversity and scope of the contemporary academic study of conspiracy theory.