Sundays from 4:00-5:30pm beginning February 22nd for 6 weeks
$25 fee includes a copy of Taken and course packet of supplementary materials.

This lab will be led by Ben Roylance.

This will be a discussion and reading group focusing on the texts produced by the ufological (and related) culture(s) beginning in the second half of the 20th century and continuing to present day. This will be a survey, a brief and concentrated introduction to the literature of ETs, UFOs, Abduction, and Contact. No previous knowledge of the subject is required, though a willingness to come to the territory with as few preconceptions as possible may be helpful. Skepticism will be useful only up to a point. We will read one full text (Karla Turner’s Taken) and a course packet containing selections from harder-to-find (but still essential) books.

I will bring to the discussions everything I have read and understood of this great, and sadly ignored, literature. I will do as little lecturing as is possible (this will be difficult!), as I hope others will have (must have) their own reactions to the information. I will be a guide and a librarian. I hope for an open-ended and open-minded environment in which anyone's thoughts on the subject, or any of the many related subjects (poetry, psychology, the occult, literature, technology, science, pop culture), can be included and heard. Because some material may be triggering, I will include warnings on the syllabus and before the beginning of each meeting via email.

I hope that this brief course will have profound results for its students. The literature I intend to share has already changed my life in more ways than can be noticed.

Course Text:

Taken by Dr. Karla Turner: A recently reprinted edition of a classic study of women abductees. Less personal than her earlier Into The Fringe, but not exactly or strictly journalistic either (Turner was herself an abductee/contactee), Taken is a work of ufological investigation which stands the tests of both time and scrutiny. The tone of the book ranges from New Age optimism to doomy apocalypticism.

Content Warning: Genetic experimentation, often involving sexual assault, kidnapping and bodily invasion, is detailed. While the text is important and influential, no one should have to feel surprised or invaded by the studies and discoveries presented therein.

(Photocopied Course Packet TBD)

Ben Roylance spends most time in two separate valleys on the east coast of the United States of America. He is working on a long piece about the poetry of Clark Coolidge and the alien abduction/UFO experience.

Refund Policy

Please note that all education fees include a non-refundable enrollment deposit of 10% of the total fee that will be deducted from your refund if you sign up for, then drop, a workshop (before it begins). For LABS, there is non-refundable deposit of 10% of the total fee plus cost of materials. 

So, for example, if you sign up for Creative Writing and pay a $200 class fee, only to realize you were selected as a contestant in newest season of The Bachelor and shouldn’t have signed up after all, Flying Object will refund you $175 of your tuition payment.

Once the class begins, the class fee is non-refundable.