Book thoughts: Passport to Magonia

This is a book with a handful of big ideas: 1. There are considerable similarities between the UFO stories of the 1950s and 1960s (then current, the book was published in 1969) and the stories of fairies / angels and demons / other mythical creatures from before the space age 2. Those similarities are interesting even if you don’t believe that UFOs come from extraterrestrial life 3. Even if these phenomena aren’t real the way the Empire State Building is real, they still impact the world in real ways 4. The (then current) UFO stories are folklore in the making, which makes it interesting in its own way

I’ve never gone deep on aliens / UFOs so I’m not up on the lore, but I think most of the points above are now mainstream?

Beyond this, there were a ton of stories about weird things happening, including a series of stories from 1890s America that just seemed bizarre. The one that will stick with me is the Mystery Airship of 1896 and 1897 where (potentially?) an airship floats around the western and midwestern states, occasionally stopping and having conversations with local farmers. You can choose to believe this or not, but either way it’s a fun wikipedia read.

On the whole, this increased my belief in the supernatural marginally.

2025-09-25