Includes bibliographical references (pages [447]-498) and index.

Prologue : War of the worlds -- Pt. 1. The saucer age -- Flying saucers -- The foo fighters -- The rocket age -- Project Sign -- The classics -- Project Grudge -- Captain Ruppelt arrives -- The mysterious death of Captain Mantell -- The Washington merry-go-round -- The Robertson panel -- Saucer-mania -- Frost's flying saucer -- The contactees -- The men in black -- Sputnik -- Briefing Capitol Hill -- Pt. 2. The space age -- Fermi's paradox -- Project Ozma -- Phantom signal -- The Drake equation -- The search expands -- The Socorro incident -- Exploring Mars -- Swamp gas -- The UFO gap -- The Condon report -- The Byurakan conference -- The Arecibo message -- Close encounters of the third kind -- The Dick Cavett duel -- The Tehran incident -- The wow signal -- Situation red -- Exploring the cosmos -- The alone theory -- Voodoo warrior -- MJ-12 -- Crop circles -- The Belgian wave -- Interrupted journey -- Sex with aliens -- Roswell revisited -- "Who killed JFK?" -- The Mars rock -- The Phoenix lights -- Pt. 3. The interstellar age -- Cometa -- Skinwalker Ranch -- StarChips -- The Tic Tac incident -- Life science -- Breakthrough listen -- Epilogue : The truth is out there.

Are we alone in the universe? From the post-war Project Blue Book to the Pentagon's modern-day Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, Graff presents the first serious narrative history of humanity's hunt for alien life--including the military and CIA's secret, decades-long quest to study UFOs. He traces the real-life history of the U.S. government's hunt for "unidentified aerial phenomena" here on Earth, as well as the story of the small group of forward-thinking scientists who launched the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) far from Earth. Drawing on original archival research, declassified documents, and interviews with senior intelligence and military officials, Graff's book traces the long history of our quest to understand one of the most profound and popular questions of all time: whether or not aliens exist. -- adapted from jacket