Episode 81: Close Encounters of the Third Kind/A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon with Greg Eghigian

Historians At The Movies

This week Greg Eghigian drops in to talk about Steven Spielberg's first extraterrestrial film and his new book charting the global history of UFO sightings. We get into the histories behind the sightings, how the Cold War affected how we think about space aliens, and whether or not one should put gravy on Devil's Tower.
About our guest:
Greg is a professor of history and bioethics at Penn State University. A historian of both the human sciences and modern Europe, he is particularly interested in how societies grapple with the questions and problems associated with modernity through the vehicles of science, technology, and medicine. His research has largely focused on the nature of power and the relationship between the state, science, and medicine in understanding and managing things such as disability, deviance, criminality, mental illness, and security. He regularly writes articles and present papers on the general history of madness and psychiatry. In recent years, however, his interests have moved into studying the history of supernatural and paranormal phenomena.