Have probes of extraterrestrial origin conducted surveillance missions in Earth's atmosphere? James McDonald, co-founder of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the University of Arizona, one of the twentieth century's leading atmospheric physicists, presented strong evidence for this hypothesis at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in December 1969. Yet, remarkably, McDonald's important conjecture has all but disappeared from the purview of scientists today. That's likely to soon change, former Science Museum (London) curator Tom Willamson argues in this book. The reason is simple: a large chunk of science supporting McDonald's idea, much of it carried out in the former Soviet Union and later Russia and Ukraine during the 1980s and 1990s, had gone missing. Now, thanks to the wonders of Google Translate, Williamson has been able to put together in this book a provisional, alien-free (and UFOlogy-free) account of that missing science.

Charles Fort's classic recording of unexplained, paranormal events and phenomena offer fascinating insights into bizarre occurrences the author felt had been unjustly damned from formal, scientific study. The title derives from the author's perception that the book's subjects were so stigmatized and excluded from ordinary scientific inquiry that they had become 'damned'. Perhaps permanently forbade for formal study, the oddities and unexplained events in this text were felt worthy of attention by the author, who eventually became an authority on anomalous phenomena. The topics in Fort's thesis include unexplained disappearances of large groups of people, frogs and fish suddenly raining from the sky, the possibility that mythical beasts such as giants exist, UFOs manifest as glowing and sometimes moving lights in the sky, and bizarre weather phenomena. Fort attributes credence to many of these oddities, and argues that science - by dismissing them - has become a religion in itself.