Greg Eghigian

Early life and background

Greg Eghigian is a historian of science, medicine, and society whose career took an unexpected late turn into ufology. He earned a BA in psychology from Bard College in 1983 — having originally set out toward a career in psychiatry before redirecting toward history — followed by an MA (1985) and PhD (1993) in history from the University of Chicago. After a Schmidt Fellowship at Chicago and a teaching stint at the University of Texas at Arlington, he joined the faculty at Pennsylvania State University, where he has now spent roughly two decades and holds the title of Professor of History and Bioethics. From 2007 to 2012 he directed Penn State's Science, Technology & Society Program. For most of his career, Eghigian was known not as a UFO scholar but as a historian of psychiatry, disability, and the modern security state — training that, as he has explained in interviews, gave him a natural entry point into ufology: both fields turn on how societies decide what to do with people and experiences that look irrational, deviant, or otherwise hard to classify (Onward State, 2020).

Career before ufology

Before turning to flying saucers, Eghigian built a substantial body of work on how modern societies classify, institutionalize, and manage people considered "strange," "deviant," or "dangerous." His early monograph Making Security Social: Disability, Insurance, and the Birth of the Social Entitlement State in Germany (University of Michigan Press, 2000) examined the origins of the German welfare state through the lens of disability and insurance policy. He went on to edit From Madness to Mental Health: Psychiatric Disorder and Its Treatment in Western Civilization (Rutgers University Press, 2010), a wide-ranging documentary history drawing on religious texts, clinical case studies, memoirs, hospital records, and legal treatises spanning antiquity to the present. His 2015 book The Corrigible and the Incorrigible: Science, Medicine, and the Convict in Twentieth-Century Germany (Central European University Press) — which won the German Studies Association and DAAD Book Prize for Best Book in History in 2017 — traced how criminologists and psychiatrists tried, and repeatedly failed, to distinguish reformable offenders from supposedly incorrigible ones. He later edited the multi-volume Routledge History of Madness and Mental Health (2017), assembling case studies from Africa, Asia, South America, Europe, and North America into a genuinely global historiography.

The throughline across this work — institutions and experts struggling to categorize phenomena that resist easy classification, and the social consequences of those struggles — gave Eghigian an analytical toolkit that transferred directly to UFOs: another domain where scientists, governments, media, and ordinary witnesses have spent eight decades arguing over what counts as a legitimate object of knowledge.

Turn toward ufology

Eghigian's pivot toward the paranormal became visible in his 2017 peer-reviewed article "Making UFOs make sense: Ufology, science, and the history of their mutual mistrust," published in Public Understanding of Science. The article argued against a common assumption — that the divide between mainstream science and ufology stems from ufologists' ignorance of proper scientific method. Instead, Eghigian showed that the two camps operate with genuinely different research practices, institutional incentives, and standards of evidence, and that their mutual distrust is best explained sociologically rather than as a simple contest between rigor and credulity. The piece signaled the historiographical approach he would spend the next several years expanding into a book-length global study, and it remains one of the most cited academic treatments of why ufology and institutional science talk past one another.

After the Flying Saucers Came

In May 2024, Oxford University Press published Eghigian's After the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon, the product of nearly a decade of archival research, newspaper analysis, government-document review, and interviews with scientists, officials, and believers. Eghigian has been described as the first professional historian to attempt a comprehensive, genuinely worldwide social history of the UFO phenomenon, tracing the subject from Kenneth Arnold's 1947 sighting through the Roswell incident, Cold War military and intelligence responses, the rise of abduction narratives, contactee movements, and up to the Pentagon's post-2017 UAP disclosures. Research for the project was supported in part by NASA and the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, an institutional pairing that itself illustrates how far academic engagement with the topic has traveled since the 1960s, when the Air Force–funded Condon Committee effectively closed the subject to serious scholars for a generation.

The book's method is deliberately not that of a ufologist weighing evidence for extraterrestrial visitation, nor that of a debunker cataloguing misperceptions and hoaxes. As Eghigian has put it in interviews promoting the book, "my job is not to prove people correct... but at the same time it isn't to debunk those people" (Onward State). He instead asks historical questions: why did UFO reports spike when and where they did; how did Cold War anxieties about surveillance, secrecy, and nuclear annihilation shape what witnesses saw and how authorities responded; and what do decades of UFO narratives reveal about shifting public trust in science, the military, and government more broadly. In his own framing, "the UFO phenomenon essentially has been asking us to think of ourselves historically: what has been our past, what is going on right now, and what does the future hold?" (Leonard David). He treats contactees, abductees, and investigators as historical actors whose testimony matters as evidence of belief formation and cultural meaning-making, whether or not it constitutes evidence of alien craft. The book's roughly 400 pages move from the 1947–1953 "flying saucer" scare and the early UFO-detective culture that grew up around it, through the scientism and government studies of the 1960s Cold War years, and on to the present, with Eghigian consistently asking readers to weigh past, present, and future together rather than treating any single decade's sightings in isolation.

Eghigian promoted the book widely in 2024, appearing on outlets including Space.com, the Some Other Sphere podcast, Podcast UFO, and The Micah Hanks Program, positioning himself as a rare figure able to speak to both academic historians and the UFO-research community on its own terms.

Reception and criticism

Critical response to After the Flying Saucers Came has been substantial and largely positive, if not uniformly so. Reviewers in outlets ranging from Leonard David's site to the academic journal Science Fiction Studies and Limina: The Journal of UAP Studies have praised Eghigian's command of archival material and what one reviewer called his "engaging prose and fine storytelling" in treating UFOs as a genuine cultural phenomenon worth serious historical study. The book has been widely credited as the first work of its kind and scope by a professional academic historian.

Not every review was uncritical. A History Today assessment, while calling the book "a solid start" toward a genuine historiography of the subject, argued that much of it reads less as an analysis of substantive debates than as a chronicle of "the squabbling of obscure and fissile groups" within ufology, and suggested that Eghigian's conventional historical method may underplay harder questions about the experiential reality reported by witnesses. Readers hoping for a book that treats UFOs as literally extraterrestrial craft, or conversely one that debunks every case, have both found the book resistant to their expectations: Eghigian leans skeptical about the reality of alien visitation itself, but pointedly refuses to frame the phenomenon as mass delusion or hoax, insisting instead that it be studied as a durable and consequential feature of modern culture.

The book's dual audience — professional historians on one side, the UFO-research community on the other — has made it something of a rarity: a university-press monograph reviewed as seriously in Science Fiction Studies and academic UAP-studies journals like Limina as in outlets aimed at general UFO enthusiasts such as Leonard David's site and the Podcast UFO circuit. That dual reception is itself evidence for one of the book's central claims: that ufology and academic history have long talked past each other not because one side is rigorous and the other credulous, but because they have been asking different kinds of questions of the same material.

Significance and legacy

Eghigian's work marks a notable moment in the academic legitimization of UFO studies. For decades after the Condon Report, mainstream historians and scientists largely avoided the topic, ceding the field to enthusiast organizations, self-published researchers, and occasional journalists. By bringing the same source-critical, institutionally grounded methodology he had previously applied to the history of psychiatry and criminology, Eghigian helped demonstrate that UFO belief and government response to it could be studied rigorously without either embracing extraterrestrial claims or dismissing them outright. His framing — that the believer/skeptic divide is itself a historical and sociological fact worth explaining, rather than a dispute to be adjudicated — has influenced how a newer generation of historians and science-studies scholars approach the disclosure era that began with the 2017 New York Times revelations about the Pentagon's AATIP program. Along with historians like David Halperin and journalists covering the same territory, Eghigian represents the small but growing cohort treating ufology as a legitimate object of humanities scholarship, distinct from both government investigation and grassroots ufology itself.

That cohort now has its own institutional scaffolding — the existence of a peer-reviewed outlet like Limina: The Journal of UAP Studies, which reviewed Eghigian's book alongside titles on the philosophy and physics of unidentified phenomena, is itself a sign of how far the academic study of UFOs has come since Eghigian began his research nearly a decade earlier, when there was no comparable venue for this kind of scholarship. Eghigian's earlier work already anticipated this shift in miniature: Making Security Social and The Corrigible and the Incorrigible had shown, in the context of German social and penal history, how expert classification systems shape the fate of people deemed abnormal or risky, and After the Flying Saucers Came extends that same insight to a subject — flying saucers — that professional historians had largely treated as beneath serious study. In doing so, Eghigian has offered later scholars a template for how to write about contested, stigmatized, or ridiculed phenomena without either mocking the people who report them or pretending the historian's job is to settle whether the reports are true.