IN ADVANCE OF THE LANDING folk concepts of outer space

Looks at the folklore surrounding UFOs from ancient times to the present.

As you are about to see, Douglas Curran is not only a photographer but also a reporter, and an extremely gifted one. I am tempted to suggest that he also qualifies as an anthropologist, but I think I will leave it at "reporter." To be a reporter of Douglas Curran's caliber is a lofty enough achievement. He has discovered an exotic world, and for eight years he has traveled remote terrains throughout the United States and Canada exploring it. This book is the culmination of a quest that, by terrestrial standards, is as extraordinary as that of the people he brings to life in the pages that follow.

I ran into such people many times when I was working on The Right Stuff, a book about the astronauts, but I never got to know them the way Douglas Curran has. They gravitated to Cape Canaveral, Houston, California, to wherever NASA prepared to probe the heavens. They were not interested in NASA's space race with the Soviets. Nor were they interested in lunar geology, solar energy stations, or the psychology of the astronauts, which happened to be the subject that interested me. They looked upon astronauts not as extraordinary adventurers but as agents who might unwittingly help discover the path to a universe far more cosmic than any that astronauts or the engineers who dispatched them had ever dreamed of.

They were interested in UFOs - flying saucers - to be sure. But to leave it at that is to consign them to the oatbin of history reserved for those who succumb, in the words of the title of Charles Mackay's famous book, to "extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds." As you will sense immediately from Douglas Curran's own words and pictures, these people are in fact part of a religion. And that religion is, at bottom, not terribly different from most other new religions of the past two millennia. Most of them, the successful ones as well as those that have vanished, have been based on the belief that there exists Another Order, invisible to the great mass of humanity. It is this Other Order, and not merely the physical order of the physicists, astronomers, and economists, that determines the fate of man and creates the music of the spheres. The revelation of this Other Order has typically come from the sky. The flaming archangel of Ahura Mazda descends from above to speak to Zoroaster... The heavens open and light shines upon Saul on the road to Damascus and a voice booms down: "Saul, Saul, why persecuteth thou me?" ... By the logic of these precedents, what could be more natural than to assume that today Another Order would be at least as technologically advanced as man here on Earth and a good bit more inspired and ingenious in its heavenly revelations?

But it is not the visions of Douglas Curran's people that make them so compelling. It is the very tangible fabric of their lives, and anyone looking at his pictures will feel it immediately.

It is in this wholly mundane sphere that you are likely to be struck by Douglas Curran's ability as a reporter and as an artist. We never see the Other Order that his subjects search for. Instead, we see something considerably more moving: their struggle to rise above the plain facts of their lives here on earth. In most cases those facts are very plain indeed, and they engage our attention more poignantly than anything in the heavens above.

Douglas Curran's own long quest has been to record these earthly scenes. In his relentless focus on the look and feel of the here and now he deserves a place alongside Lewis Hine, Arnold Genthe, William McFarlane Notman, August Sander, and perhaps even Henry Mayhew, who pushed the reporting of unknown souls to the edge of brilliance in London Labour and the London Poor.

Tom Wolfe