Starting with its beguiling title, “Journal of a UFO Investigator” by David Halperin (Viking, $25.95) is an enchantment from beginning to end, a coming-of-age story that is also a kind of whodunit and, above all, an eerie adventure tale set in the subculture of flying saucers and space creatures.
Is evolution the merely pointless, meaningless consequence of having world enough and time, or is our current state of consciousness just too embryonic to grasp the telos of the universe?
I am in a cult.
Not one with an Indian twist, nor a homegrown one full of fervid believers waiting for a modern-day Shabtai Tzvi to fly us all to a New Jerusalem. No, my cult is more like that of those UFO suicides in Rancho Santa Fe waiting for the spaceship to take them away to a far better place.
My cult is called Hollywood.
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