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I have only a passing interest in aliens/UFOs, but the one book I read on the topic really piqued my interest. It's called The Uninvited by Nick Pope, who by his own account was tasked with investigating UFO sightings by the UK Ministry of Defense, began the role as a sceptic, but came away from it convinced that there really was something going on.
Per your dichotomy, the book starts off by the Explorer end of the spectrum and becomes increasingly Esoteric as it goes along. The opening chapters describe some of the canonical alien abduction stories which are very much in the Explorer camp (a man meets a spaceman who claims to be from Venus and who explicitly urges him to promote nuclear disarmament; a couple on a long cross-country drive experience several hours of "missing time": regression hypnosis reveals that they were plucked out of their car into a spaceship and surgically experimented upon by "Grey" aliens), followed by chapters in which Pope recounts anonymised interviews he's conducted with members of the British public, whose own accounts are far more bizarre and harder to square with a simple extraterrestrial explanation. Throughout the book, Pope emphasises that accounts of interactions with intelligent, non-human entities (from Biblically accurate angels to leprechauns and djinn) are as old as the human species, and gave me my first exposure to the Bayesian concept of priors shaping experience: if you wake up in the night and see a pale, short, oddly-proportioned figure at the end of your bed, you might think it's an alien, but a religious person might think it's an angel, while a believer in the afterlife might think it's a ghost.
At the end of the book, there are two chapters in which Pope offers a range of hypotheses for what's going on. The first is Explorer: assuming these experiences are the result of aliens visiting us from elsewhere in our own universe, what are their motivations? The second chapter is a collection of hypotheses which don't take aliens as their starting point, ranging from mundane (hallucinations, mass hysteria) to mundane-but-conspiratorial (government-induced mass hypnosis) to Esoteric (the "aliens" are visiting us from another dimension; the aliens are our genetic descendants visiting us from the future). It's cracking stuff.
Interesting, thanks for the recommendation! My first exposure to the Esoteric case for UFOs/UAPs was reading The Mothman Prophecies for the first time but I've never shaken it since. The publicly released videos from the Navy have seemed more Esoteric than Explorer to me as well, though to be fair that might well be because my bias had already been established at that point.
Oh I'd be curious to read that book. I have something of an obsession with the 2002 film of the same name starring Richard Gere. My understanding is that it has very little in common with the source material, but it's incredibly eerie and unnerving all the same.
Given that you're already curious, I'd definitely recommend it. The movie is what got me to read the book as well, and while I'd agree that the source material differs substantially from the movie, one of the things that I was able to better appreciate after reading the book is how well the movie does at both creating the strange atmosphere and conveying how deeply the MC (Keel) falls down the rabbit hole. I'm not a UFO/UAP buff or anything like that but my dad was so I'm familiar enough with the basics, but that book was my first exposure to the Esoteric explanation and I found it to be every bit as unnerving as the movie!
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