A slapdash volume mixing some essays on flying saucers with short stories. Lester del Rey laments SF fandom's adoption of flying saucers, deeming them both too dull for fiction and too ridiculous for fact, while Ivan T. Sanderson cheerfully disregards everything from del Rey's piece to spin a yarn introducing us to "The Nonterrestrial" with his usual freewheeling style. One John Nicholson provides a useful look at the split in reported humanoid saucer occupants between handsome Nordic types and creepy Little Green Men.
Despite the heady lineup of authors the fiction entries are a mixed bag. The strongest story by far is Judith Merril's Exile From Space, followed by Theodore Sturgeon's A Saucer of Loneliness. Both of these manage to overcome del Rey's objections to flying saucer fiction with some stirring emotional content. Fritz Leiber and Robert Bloch deliver cutesy trifles that feel beneath them.
Lancer Books, 1968
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