Same old same old

The Unidentified Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters and Our Obsession with the Unexplained Colin Dickey Viking 2021 Pb, 320pp, £18, ISBN 9780525557586 In The Unidentified, Colin Dickey presents a compulsively readable yet deeply problematic overview of cryptozoology, ufology, conspiracy and pseudoscience. Dickey’s overworn central conceit is that interest in fringe beliefs is the result of a rejection of scientific rationalism and the “disenchantment” of the world, an attempt to regain the wonderment of a premodern and therefore irrational era. Dickey relies upon the flawed view that science and enchantment cannot coexist or are at cross-purposes, and that the advent of Enlightenment rationalism represents an all-encompassing division between the irrational and the rational. It is the same false dichotomy that Damon Knight ascribes to Charles Fort: one is either a scientific true…