Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Steven Spielberg's stunning film about flying saucers and man's first contact with alien entities, was first shown in November 1977. Within a week it had begun to smash box-office records across America. The most influential science fiction film before Close Encounters was undoubtedly Stanley Kubrick's 2001, A Space Odyssey which was released in 1968. 
Willy Smith writes:
Most people know what reincarnation is. That is, most people would say that the statement that we live a succession of lives in different bodies is either true or false. For it to be true or false it must be meaningful. But will this apparent meaningfulness stand up to attempts to analyse it? Apparent memories of past lives are usually obtained by means of the procedure known as hypnotic regression.
In 1979 James Oberg won the New Scientist/ Cutty Sark Whisky prize for the best research on UFOs with an essay entitled The Failure of the 'Science' of Ufology. He argued that ufology "refuses to play by the rules of scientific thought". Here I want to present the view that the main problem in ufology is not a failure to follow certain logical and methodological procedures of the kind outlined by philosophers of science, but the fact that it has a social basis in popular culture, rather than the elite culture of science.
The unknown produces an irresistible call which few people escape; it gives rise to a mixture of glamour and fear that – beyond its psychological origins – acts as an ‘escape valve’ from reality. The anxieties and dramas of everyday life vanish when one involves oneself with something beyond ‘everyday reality’: the search for mystery allows one to escape completely to a new dimension where one moves in the role of protagonist.
I first met the London Underground Platform Maniac when travelling on the Circle Line between Blackfriars and Embankment on 25 February 1985. Not in person, happily, but as a story told by the middle-aged lady opposite me to her friend. I wasn’t meant to be included in this audience of one, of course, but something about her hushed tone advised me to make sure that I was, even if only as an eavesdropper. So my ears flapped long and hard enough to pick up the following …