cover image Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace

Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace

Jodi Dean. Cornell University Press, $42.5 (256pp) ISBN 978-0-8014-3463-1

If you believe what you read on the Internet, aliens surround us these days--and 65% of the respondents in one poll agreed that the government had hidden a crashed UFO since 1947. But political scientist Dean (The Solidarity of Strangers) is less interested in the credibility of such stories than in their embodiment of a contemporary political culture (networked, televisual, cyber-linked) in which the problem is ""that if the knowledge we need to make a judgment stems from shared experiences, what do we do when experiences are reconstituted so radically that we can't tell if we, or anyone else, actually has them or not?"" Do words like ""truth"" and ""authority"" mean anything when no one agrees how, much less whom, to believe? Writing spry, acerbic prose that only rarely stumbles into jargon, Dean guides her readers soberly through strange terrain in which rationality itself gets upended: in view of radiation experiments on developmentally disabled patients and the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, is it more sensible to credit a government in cahoots with alien beings, or not to? While the book grows somewhat repetitive toward its conclusion, Dean compellingly traces our national loss of faith in formerly attractive notions like outer space and the ""Final Frontier."" The author offers no answers, but no reader will leave this intriguing book without pondering the unavoidable question she raises: ""What happens to our everyday approaches to truth when reality isn't?"" (Apr.)