I just read the 1969 book by Jacques Vallée Passport to Magonia.
WOW.
Vallée is the guy the French scientist in Close Encounters of the Third Kind was based on.
He’s exceptionally intelligent, nuanced, and entertaining. I can’t recommend a book on the UFO subject more highly. It’s probably the best, period. 1969.
The last portion of the book is 400 UFO reports ranging from 1868 to 1968, destroying such ideas as “encounters with aliens with big heads and big eyes were not widely reported until the movie Close Encounters came out.” In fact, these and other strange characters have been part and parcel for as long as the contemporary phenomenon has been reported.
Vallée’s later work includes documentation of “UFO” and occupant encounters going back thousands of years, many of which are strangely familiar to both more recent folklore, and what we now think of as the UFO phenomenon.
We shall see what, if anything, comes of this public UFO report that should be hitting at some point in the next 4 months or so. Apparently still-classified (but somewhat widely-circulated) photos politicians who have been briefed on this (and pushed for the legislation) include a cockpit photo from an F-18 of a large triangular craft emerging from the ocean…