How UFOs Conquered the World: The History of a Modern Myth. By David Clarke. Aurum Press, Ltd., London, 2015. 312 pp. $28.99.
One of the most profound observations ever made about UFOs was that of the late British Fortean author Hilary Evans in his essay “A Twentieth Century Myth”: “No anomalous phenomenon has generated so rich an anomaly-cluster as the flying saucer. Kenneth Arnold’s straightforward, uncomplicated sighting” was gradually embedded in “a sprawling aggregate of associated happenings”—cattle mutilations, crop circles, black helicopters, Men in Black, saucer crashes and saucer bases, contactees, abductees, etc.—“constituting a wonderfully rich and elaborate mythology unmatched in the world’s folklore.”
This is, I’m sure, what Clarke means when he says that UFOs “Conquered the World,” and in this book he sets out to understand why. Clarke explains this using another quote from Evans: “Hilary Evans said that most of us have never known a time when there was no such thing as a UFO. ‘Yet there was such a time,’ he wrote. ‘UFOs are a creation of our time, and when their time came, they were born.’”