It is an unfortunate law of ufology that potential audience grows in inverse proportion to credibility and intellectual rigour. Rational explanations for strange phenomena, alas, never sell as well as the X-Files. The principal market for alien investigations has always been those who want to believe rather than to understand. Such people do not much enjoy having their misconceptions debunked. By this token, Bryan Appleyard’s Aliens: Why They Are Here will probably do well. This cultural history of little green men and their anal probes purports to be an “intellectual tour de force” that makes sense of the modern obsession with extraterrestrials. It certainly covers plenty of ground: virtually every celebrated sighting and abduction is here, along with an exhaustive survey of the science fiction. But it is largely devoid of the sceptical analysis without which such an enterprise cannot work. There is little to discomfit its likely readers. Appleyard starts from the premise that whether or not aliens have visited us, they represent a genuine, important cultural phenomenon that begs to be better understood. This is reasonable enough: delusional beliefs have furnished psychologists and philosophers with plenty of useful insights into the human condition. Aliens, both fictional inventions and those that people claim to have encountered, often reiterate similar themes. Human beings are a failed race, selfish, aggressive creatures bent on destroying the unique planet with which they have been blessed. Alien discourse seems to reflect our deepest concerns, and Appleyard is most interesting when musing on what this might reveal.

Our fascination with visitors from other worlds is rooted in malaise about mankind’s place in the Universe, and the meaning of consciousness in a post-religious age. Figures such as the replicants of Blade Runner and Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still might be alien in origin, but the problems they highlight are distinctly human. Where Appleyard sticks to interpreting inventions, he is on solid ground. The trouble is he does not accept that ET is entirely invented. “This book is about fictional creation and real experience and, on the credibility of the latter, it passes no judgment,” he writes. This is a critical weakness that undermines the intellectual foundations of his project.

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