"For several years now, I have been studying the history of unidentified flying objects and claims of alien contact since World War II. One of the most puzzling things I have encountered, however, is not a specific sighting of some odd aerial phenomenon, not a photograph of a flying saucer, not a report about being abducted by extraterrestrials. Rather, it is this: why have academic historians all but neglected this subject?
For seven decades, claims of UFOs from outer space and encounters with aliens have inspired amateur research, enthusiast periodicals and organizations, extraterrestrial contact support networks, government investigations, scientific and clinical research, bestselling books, news coverage, television shows, films, and websites across the globe. Surely a cultural phenomenon this large warrants our attention.
Yet, the last and only time a university professor of history published an English-language book on the history of UFOs was in 1975. This was former Temple University professor David Jacobs, and the book was The UFO Controversy in America, published by Indiana University Press. Jacobs, in fact, went on to become a leading proponent of the notion that aliens were in fact kidnapping people in order to colonize earth by breeding human-alien hybrids. While his subsequent involvement with “abductees” has brought him considerable ridicule from his academic peers, his monograph continues to stand alone as a well-researched history of the UFO phenomenon.
The absence of historians from the study of postwar interest in flying saucers and extraterrestrial visitors is even more glaring when you take into consideration that researchers in other fields have taken up the issue since the 1960s. Folklorists, psychologists, sociologists, religious studies scholars, anthropologists, political scientists, neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and journalists have all embarked on any number of research projects designed to understand and explain the perceptions, attitudes, and institutions that have gone into the making of the UFO craze."
Källa, 18 april 2017:
https://emotionsblog.history.qmul.ac.uk/2017/04/ufos-and-the-historians/
