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Nathaniel Rich
Ufologists, Unite!

Belief in UFOs sits uneasily between science and theology.

Oliver Whang
The Next Mass Extinction?

As avian influenza spreads to the farthest reaches of the planet, scientists have expressed both urgency and fatalism.

In the Path of Totality
Dispatches from the 2024 total solar eclipse

Andrew Katzenstein, in Texas
Riders in the Sky

“In an effort to reduce backups, other signs offered travel advice that also sounded like a prayer for a longer totality:

ECLIPSE
ARRIVE EARLY
ECLIPSE
STAY LATE”

Willa Glickman, in New York
Inner Totality

“She explained that eclipses involve the astrological bodies Rahu and Ketu, who symbolize shock and delusion, respectively…. She planned to resist these influences by fasting and reciting mantras, but suggested that other, less spiritual observers could surround themselves with loved ones, and ‘at the very least not get bogged down by pettiness or any type of inconsequential things.’”

Daniel Drake, in Vermont
Look the Omen in the Face

“Maybe feeling some responsibility to the semiregular alignment of the spheres, as if the cosmic order would collapse if we failed to witness it, is a lunacy peculiar to adults, who spend our days fending off entropy and chaos. The kids, for their part, seemed to take for granted that everything was happening as it was supposed to. Why shouldn’t the moon pass precisely in front of the sun?”

Lucy Jakub, in Maine
Big Time Sensuality

“As early as 100 BC, the Greeks were able to calculate the exeligmos with an intricate piece of bronze clockwork, the oldest known analog computer. But the Greeks also thought the sun was like a chariot wheel.”

Free from the Archives

In the Review’s January 26, 1978, issue, two months after the release of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Martin Gardner gazed skyward and then back earthward in order to assess “the extent to which ufology has become a pop religion.”

Martin Gardner
The Third Coming

“Millions of Americans, disenchanted with science and politics, are longing for apocalypse—for a mystical explosion that will instantly solve the world’s problems and start a new age of love.”

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