The Uninvited

June 1, 1998
Although hardly original in interpretation or in unearthing new material, this chronicle of the UFO phenomenon from its earliest days to the latest theories about alien abductions has the understated authority a reader would expect from the man who, from 1991 to 1994, acted as the official investigator into UFO sightings for the British Ministry of Defense (on the front of the galley jacket he's identified as "the government's UFO expert"). But anyone sitting through Pope's (Open Skies Closed Minds) detailed recountings in hopes of finding extracts from hitherto secret documents or evidence of government conspiracy will be disappointed. The truth, it seems, is still safely "out there." Pope does describe some extraordinary sightings--one of the most fascinating of which involves a William Morrow editor who spied two aliens browsing a copy of Whitley Strieber's Communion in a New York City bookstore. Thankfully lacking the hysteria of so many other books on the genre, Pope's report takes the high road theoretically, adopting the view that UFOs are perhaps either evidence of inter-dimensional travel or an event "so strange that it will always lie beyond human comprehension." Editor, Martin Fletcher; agent, Andrew Lownie.