Rating: 
Summary: An encyclopedic synthesis of UFO lore in fiction format
Review: What was most interesting to me about Phase Two was its integration of detail, speculation, and ethnographic fact. UFO lore is now so systematized, wide-reaching, and detailed that it rivals the sacred stories of ancient cultures. Littleton's grasp of the nuances of this information puts his novel on the level of classic contemporary mythology. He effectively creates larger-than-life characters, and we get a very thought-provoking way to think about what's out there in the UFO research and rumor community.In a way, it doesn't matter if you believe or don't believe. In fact, after reading the book several weeks ago, I find that I am still thinking about it. For a while I thought about the characters and how both humans and aliens were being duped and set-up. This was familiar to me, a moral drama that I've lived many times. But after a while I began to see how deeply--at some level--I had accepted the story as if it were real, and it didn't matter if it were or were not. It was a little like my reactions to my religion. I "feel," and I accept the feeling, but I can't say that I "believe" any particular text. I have a much expanded understanding of dimensionality after reading Phase Two. The book is an easy and engaging read--but it is much deeper than it appears. Littleton is an internationally acknowledged anthropologist, and he does not write about that which he does not know firsthand--whether that be traditional Japanese Zen ritual (he was a Fulbright scholar) or quantum physics, speculations about gravity, and non-locality (professions and topics cultivated by his close friends). His command of data and detail makes for a story that puts pieces of UFOlogy into places in the mind that are easy to retrieve and easy to snap together. Now that he is an Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Occidental College, Scott Littleton is even more fearless than he was throughout all his years mentoring students and advising us, when we studied "primitives," that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" (Arthur C. Clarke).
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