Amazon, 2022. ISBN: 9798360357186. 368 pp

At first sight this might seem like a curious choice of a book for review in a CFPSS journal. After all, what could a purported study of ‘alien artifacts’, however variously defined, have to do with things like religion, spirituality and transcendence? The answer’s in the subtitle: for belief is at the root of this study, and, by the end, the reader has learned that ‘visitors from the stars’ can come from more than merely physical worlds.

Hence, for example, the author devotes a whole section to what he dubs ‘Aliens as a Religious Experience.’ Here, we find detailed analysis of a wide variety of claimants purporting to have communicated with ‘extraterrestrials’ in many and various ways. Emanuel Swedenborg is afforded detailed coverage; particularly his claimed conversations with ‘spirits’ allegedly from ‘the Moon, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Mercury, Saturn…and places beyond our solar system.’ In fact, asserts Aubeck, according to Swedenborg ‘there were ‘hundreds of thousands’ of planets, all inhabited, including Mercury, whose denizens – ‘The Mercurians’, of course – possess ‘significantly greater knowledge than other spirits, both about what is going on in our own solar system and what is going on in other worlds in space.’

Gosh. Such a claim invites the question: was Swedenborg really communing with Mercurians or was he simply making it all up? It is to Aubeck’s credit that he refrains from going there. It would, after all, be to defeat the object of the study overall: which, as he makes clear early on, is to chart the histories of claims to alien contact in all their various ways and to portray, in turn, how such claims were described within a period beginning in antiquity and extending all the way to 1880. Which, of course, leaves some way to go. But the really good news is that as exhaustive as Alien Artifacts is, it turns out merely to be volume one: with volume two promised as a future study in which the timeline will be extended forward from 1880 to the turn on the century.

Despite being only part of a projected total treatment, Chris Aubeck’s absorbing exploration is remarkably thorough and all-encompassing. Alongside Swedenborg in the section on aliens as a religious experience, for example, the reader is treated to a detailed examination of the alien ‘other’ within a wide variety of religions and related spiritualities including Mormonism, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Seventh-Day Adventist Church and Spiritualism. I learned much along the way: not least that Franz Anton Mesmer never actually ‘mesmerised’ anybody, despite his name being given to Mesmerism; a forerunner of what we know of as hypnotism today. But, then again, Alien Artifacts is full of fascinating facts like this one and I could pretty much have opened it at any point, stuck a pin in, and struck anecdotal gold. ‘The Great Moon Hoax’ – arguably the first recorded piece of printed ‘fake news’ – is here (don’t ask), as is the beautiful tale of Kaguyahime, found in a glowing bamboo stalk, who grew up to be the most beautiful woman in Japan but who was actually from the Moon. As her tale –The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter – climaxes, her family eventually come to Earth for her, arriving in light, riding on clouds and thwarting all attempts to repel them. It reads like something that could have been written yesterday and I had to do a double take when I realised that it was, in fact, composed in the tenth century.

But there’s way more, even than all this, including detailed explorations of alien artifacts allegedly found in meteorites and theories of origins of human life which have variously appealed to planetary debris and chunks of technology launched or broken off from other worlds. I only occasionally found myself questioning the author’s assertions – such as the ‘fact’ that all stories of quarrymen finding toads and other animals being found alive inside hollow rocks have turned out to be merely urban legends – but it would be churlish to dwell on these when the book has so many obvious strengths. It’s not the first time that Aubeck has married aspects of Ufology to cultural studies – he has done so more recently in his fine study of the origins of the ‘saucer’ shape of Flying Saucers, for example, in his book Saucers – but it stands as a prime example of how such research can and should be undertaken.

In the final line of this absorbing work the author concludes that ‘If we have learned anything from our deep dive into alien mythology, it is that certain elements are endlessly recycled, across time, continents and languages.’ This is a valuable observation, abundantly supported by the mass of folklore, speculation, (outdated) science, philosophy, theology, and hoaxes – amongst other things – contained within Alien Artifact’s lavishly illustrated pages. It is also a timely reminder that those of us working within related Fortean fields should be prepared to encounter motifs that recur and return: not least those that we find within testimonies to religious, spiritual and paranormal encounters.

This review first appeared in The Christian Parapsychologist, New Series Vol. 3, No. 4, Spring 2025, pp. 43 – 5