Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace, Jodi Dean, Cornell University Press 1998, ISBN 0 8014 8468 5, 242 pp., £12.50.

Dean analyses the debates surrounding belief in UFOs in the contemporary USA within a political and cultural context, particularly such questions as the widespread tendency to believe in conspiracies. She writes ‘Ufology is political because it is stigmatized. To claim to have seen a UFO, to have been abducted by aliens, or even to believe those who say they have is a political act’ (p. 6). In her discussion of belief in abduction she argues that ‘The notion that abduction provides a cultural expression of the confused passivity accompanying the collapse of the real is not the interpretation offered by abduction researchers, but it doesn’t contradict their claims’ (p. 123).