An Australian radio podcast featuring Bridget Brown, author of They Know Us Better Than We Know Ourselves: The History and Politics of Alien Abduction.
Stories of alien abduction, that is, close encounters of the fourth kind, have been around since the 40s.
Bridget Brown has cast her anthropologist’s eye over these accounts and says that the sorts of stories abductees tell have intriguing parallels with political events and social changes that define the 20th century – things like the cold war, the biological revolution and ecological destruction.
They tell a story not just of individual experience but of the collective psyche and are a reflection of our fear about war and scientific progress.
