Customer Reviews

Before and After Roswell

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Clary's "Before and After Roswell" is a cultural history of the flying saucer in America, starting with Kenneth Arnold's famous siting in June 1947 and the crash of a Project Mogul radar array about the same time, and continuing all the way through the turn of the Millennium. Clary is plainly not convinced that UFOs are extraterrestrial visitors, so UFOlogists and conspiracy theorists will probably be disappointed by his brisk narrative. For readers of a more skeptical bent, as well as afficianados of American cultural history, Clary's book is an enjoyable read.

Clary's main themes are that flying saucers, whether they exist or not, were traditionally exciting and hopeful and not merely menacing, at least in their original form. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, in the aftermath of the Kennedy Assassination, the Vietnam War, Watergate, and revelations about the CIA's involvement in various bizarre plots, the field was well-prepared for conspiracy theorests. It was then that the myth of a crashed saucer at Rosell took hold. From then on, UFOs were more fully bound up than ever in all sorts of dark conspiracies involving extraterrestrial invaders, an evil shadow government within the government, threatened witnesses, and men in black, all familiar to fans of the X-Files television series and its progeny.

Clary's book is worth a read, but hard to find. It seems to have been self-published by "Get Published, Inc." and I learned about it only because it was listed in Clary's bibliography in Eagles and Empire: The United States, Mexico, and the Struggle for a Continent, which was published by Bantam. I finally tracked down a copy at The Reading Warehouse ([...]), which arranged to have a copy of the book reprinted on order for $[...].

For those interested in exploring the topic further, try UFO Crash at Roswell and The Roswell UFO Crash: What They Don't Want You to Know. For a surprisingly sketpical and highly entertaining book by two well-know UFO researchers, see Shockingly Close to the Truth : Confessions of a Grave-Robbing Ufologist.