 "Saucer
Attack!"
by Eric & Leif Nesheim
Kitchen Sink Press, 1997
In 1947, the term
"flying saucer" was coined and from that moment on UFO's and little green
men captured America's pop culture imagination. The true height of
UFO mania was in the 1950's where there were hundreds of magazines,
books, movies, and toys devoted to flying saucers. Saucer Attack gathers
up these pop culture elements and presents them as part nostalgia and part
social commentary. America, in that time, had entered the atomic age and
outer space was looked on as the last frontier. Man had evolved into a
technological creature and the future was his for the making. But these
dreams of outer space were tempered by deep-rooted fears of those who were
different. Outsiders, whether those from across the oceans or across the
stars, posed the biggest threat to the American way of life. This book
is worried less on whether or not UFO are real, rather it shows how they
became the phenomenon they did. This book nicely covers all the various
ways American's saw UFO's: as the machines of man's future, as inspiration
toward space exploration, as paranoid displacements of the cold war fears,
as the tools of man's destruction, and as modern man's fear of the unknown.
Some of the images run the gambit of quaint to downright hokey, but there's
no denying how flying saucers sparked the collective consciousness of all
Americans. Nowadays, with the resergence of UFO-maina, this book is an
interesting look back on how the concept of space aliens and flying saucers
has both changed (no more cold war xenophobia) and stayed the same (little
green space men).
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