We have just reprinted Patrick Huyghe’s Swamp Gas Times: My Two Decades on the UFO Beat. It’s the same as the original Paraview Press version but with a new cover. What we didn’t have then that we have now is Colin Bennett’s sparkling review of the book that eventually appeared online at Phenomena Magazine, which, sadly, is no longer being published. Take it away, Colin: “H.G. Wells once wrote An Experiment in Autobiography, and this title is a good description of Swamp Gas Times by Patrick Huyghe. There are very few books about UFOs that put the phenomenon in a setting of the character and atmosphere of a workaday journalistic world…[Huyghe’s] vision raises the sheer thrill of our dawning realization that we are indeed living within domains of high strangeness…What makes this remarkable book special is that it relates all these matters to American journalism as it evolved over two decades. Both journalism and the UFO inhabit unstable worlds; magazines, newspapers and staff are shown as being in an almost constant state of change. Editors, private financiers, policies, all can change within a matter of months… Thus his UFO reporting is against a professional background of varying levels of ever-changing technology, the whims of rich proprietors, and a rapidly changing print and media culture, changing again in turn as regards content and style, taste, fashion, and evolving social history. We see in Swamp Gas Times the UFO as a live cryptozoological animal, grazing on information flow as it moves through many different dimensions and interpretations of media, opinion, and changing forms of fashionable taste and expression… These stories are of a world full of hairline cracks and fissures, a world constantly crumbling at the edges of the discursive investigational eye like an M.C. Escher drawing of possible impossibilities… In the face of such things, [Huyghe] manages to combine a vigorous analytic logic with a brave ability to face the utterly absurd elements in many of the experiences he describes… Here is great insight, as well as the irresistible thrill of UFOlogy…”