Bill Fawcett, Editor: Making Contact: A Serious Handbook For Locating And Communicating With Extraterrestrials

"There will be no more important event in our lifetime, perhaps in the history of the human being, than the first contact with an extraterrestrial civilization," editor Bill Fawcett writes in the introduction to Making Contact, and if you accept his premise, it's hard to argue with his claims. Of course, accepting his premise—that alien contact is possible, probable, and indeed imminent ("within our lifetime")—is everything when reading Making Contact. Deciding whether or not to do so will profoundly affect your reading experience. That said, be assured that Fawcett and his numerous impressively credentialed contributors are very, very much in earnest. They believe so firmly in UFOs, and in the inevitability of contact with aliens, that they have assembled an ingenious little procedures-and-protocols manual to walk fellow believers through the historic experience. Fawcett and company have apparently covered every contingency they could think of, from locating possible UFO sites to alien first aid to the assembly of a first-contact readiness kit. It's clearly written and logical, although occasionally hilarious: After instructing the reader to use a loop of string to perform an extensive series of cat's-cradle figures (which, to be fair, is an old anthropologist's trick used in dealing with unfamiliar cultures) for our highly advanced star-faring visitors, the book suggests that we "show [the cat's cradle] to the ET. Note its reaction." Indeed. Still, giving credit where it's due, even a reader who believes UFOlogy to be a pseudoscientific crock can find pleasure in Making Contact by treating it as a sort of thought-experiment or a lengthy bit of groundwork for an unusually well-researched science-fiction novel. Read either in this fashion or as a potentially useful tool of epochal proportions, Making Contact is a uniquely enjoyable book.