We Want to Believe
How Aliens Went Mainstream and Why It Matters
Failed to add items
Sorry, we are unable to add the item because your shopping cart is already at capacity.
Add to basket failed.
Please try again later
Add to wishlist failed.
Please try again later
Remove from wishlist failed.
Please try again later
Adding to library failed
Please try again
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Unlimited access to our all-you-can-listen catalogue of 15K+ audiobooks and podcasts
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.
We Want to Believe
Pre-order Now for £12.59
-
Narrated by:
-
By:
-
Adam Kirsch
About this listen
For most of the twentieth century, reports of unidentified flying objects were treated as cultural error: cranks, hoaxes, late-night radio. Then, abruptly, the posture changed. The Pentagon released videos it could not explain. Navy pilots testified under oath about encounters that defied known technology. Intelligence agencies acknowledged that something unfamiliar appears to move through the skies.
In We Want to Believe, Adam Kirsch, one of our most searching literary critics, traces the intellectual history behind this reversal. Moving from Cold War skeptics such as physicists Edward Condon and Carl Sagan—who helped define the boundaries of legitimate inquiry—to figures like Air Force officer Edward Ruppelt and astronomer J. Allen Hynek, who encountered anomalies from within official institutions, Kirsch follows how UAPs migrated from dismissed error to unresolved problem. Tracing how figures such as Pentagon official Luis Elizondo and astrophysicist Avi Loeb have reopened the question under radically different conditions, Kirsch draws on declassified documents, military encounters, and a wide literature of belief and skepticism to examine UAPs not as fantasies or threats, but as a mystery closer to home: why some questions endure, and what it means for modern societies when certainty fails and curiosity persists.
No reviews yet