He speaks to Terry Lovelace, a retired assistant attorney general in Vermont, who claims that, while camping with friends in northern Arkansas in 1977, he saw three bright lights emanating from a black prism as wide as two city blocks. Thanks to hypnosis, Lovelace later recalled what had happened next. He and his friends were “scanned” by a blue laser beam from the flying saucer, which made them sleepy; they were taken aboard the spaceship; and they were painfully probed by around a dozen aliens the size of small children. Then they were returned to their tent.
In the end, Lavelle admits that his mission has been a failure: “I was supposed to be chasing aliens, but all I found were their shadows.” Ludwig Feuerbach, the German philosopher, posited that God is merely the projection of human wishes; aliens, quite possibly, are God’s secular equivalent. But it leads Lavelle to reflect on the will to believe, and our struggles to find meaning in a seemingly meaningless universe. He quotes Avi Loeb, the Harvard professor and alien-hunter, who hopes that discovering extraterrestrial life would amount to “finding a partner” in the cosmos, someone who could “teach us things that we can imitate, that we can aspire to, will give us a meaning to our cosmic existence”.
In the meantime, none of this conclusively proves that there are, or aren’t, aliens hovering outside your window. Perhaps Ziggy Stardust was right: “There’s a starman waiting in the sky / He’d like to come and meet us / But he thinks he’d blow our minds.” It’s possible.
★★★★☆
Chasing Aliens: Faith and Conspiracy in the UFO Heartlands is published by Viking at £20. To order your copy, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Books