Books by Pierre Lagrange
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Book chapters by Pierre Lagrange
For decades, social scientists have explained the emergence of flying saucers in 1947 as a by-pro... more For decades, social scientists have explained the emergence of flying saucers in 1947 as a by-product of the cold war context. They claimed that people were influenced by cold war and "saw" Russian flying disks while the rest of the population, scared by the context, believed in the reality of these saucers. In this paper, I show that the explanation in terms of cold war influence does not explain the situation. For several reason. First because people in 1947 were not afraid of saucers, they spent their time making jokes about them. Only 1% of the people interrogated for a Gallup poll on the subjects mentioned the Russians as an explanation. This fact can be clearly understood when we compare the flying disks wave of 1947 and the ghost rockets wave on 1946 in Europe. We see that the reactions to the two events were very different. While Europeans took very seriously the existence of ghost rockets on 1946, the American public didn't take seriously the disks in 1947.
We may therefore think that the cold war explanation works for the ghost rockets and not for the disks, but the situation is a little more complex. This cold war explanation should be discussed for a second reason: sociology and social history cannot use explanation in terms of influence because social actors are not sponges that absorb the context: they define it, they discuss it, they chose among the elements from that context that they will take seriously and that they will reject. Social studies of subjects like UFOs as a lot to learn from the tools developed by social students of science. [note: this paper is a corrected version of a paper previously published in 2012 in the firs hardcover edition of the book in which it is included.]
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This paper describes the history of little green men from its invention as a science fiction ster... more This paper describes the history of little green men from its invention as a science fiction stereotype to its traduction as a media cliché for UFOs in the middle of the 1950s with the Kelly-Hopkinsville, Kentucky, flying saucer landing and "little men" sighting (that were translated into "little green men" by the journalists). It also explores what the history of this stereotype teaches us on the sociology of ufo and of alleged "irrational beliefs".
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This paper serves as an historical and biographical introduction to the annotated translation in ... more This paper serves as an historical and biographical introduction to the annotated translation in French of Gray Barker's book They Knew Too Much about Flying Saucers, first published in 1956. This book is at the origin of the Men in Black story.
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This paper is an historical and biographical introduction to the French annotated edition of John... more This paper is an historical and biographical introduction to the French annotated edition of John Keel's book The Mothman Prophecies originally published in 1975.
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Imagining Outer Space, 2012
For decades, social scientists have explained the emergence of flying saucers in 1947 as a by-pro... more For decades, social scientists have explained the emergence of flying saucers in 1947 as a by-product of the cold war context. They claimed that people were influenced by cold war and "saw" Russian flying disks while the rest of the population, scared by the context, believed in the reality of these saucers. In this paper, I show that the explanation in terms of cold war influence does not explain the situation. For several reason. First because people in 1947 were not afraid of saucers, they spent their time making jokes about them. Only 1% of the people interrogated for a Gallup poll on the subjects mentioned the Russians as an explanation. This fact can be clearly understood when we compare the flying disks wave of 1947 and the ghost rockets wave on 1946 in Europe. We see that the reactions to the two events were very different. While Europeans took very seriously the existence of ghost rockets on 1946, the American public didn't take seriously the disks in 1947.
We may therefore think that the cold war explanation works for the ghost rockets and not for the disks, but the situation is a little more complex. This cold war explanation should be discussed for a second reason: sociology and social history cannot use explanation in terms of influence because social actors are not sponges that absorb the context: they define it, they discuss it, they chose among the elements from that context that they will take seriously and that they will reject. Social studies of subjects like UFOs as a lot to learn from the tools developed by social students of science.
[note: a corrected version of this paper has been published with the softcover version of this book in 2018. This corrected version is available on this web page.]
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This paper describes the evolution of contemporary occultism, esotericism and the paranormal, in ... more This paper describes the evolution of contemporary occultism, esotericism and the paranormal, in particular during the period that followed the second world war. One of the purpose of this text is to show that these subjects are not only connected to contemporary new religious movement but also to scientific culture and scientific controversies. The study of western esotericism will make progress when its students will be able to study those subjects not only from the point of view of the history and sociology of religion but also from the point of view of history and sociology of science.
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in: L'Espace habité, Paris, Observatoire de l'Espace/CNES, p. 25-30.
Most sociologists and social historians explain that flying saucers are a popular belief. This pa... more Most sociologists and social historians explain that flying saucers are a popular belief. This paper wants to show that flying saucers are not a popular belief but that they served (in this paper, back in 1947, but of course also during other periods of time) as an opportunity for science spoke persons, journalists and other actors, to construct saucers as a popular belief, which means that they actively constructed the subject as a marginal, psychological, rejected, belief. The category "popular belief" doesn't come out from the blue yonder, it is a collectively constructed category that helps to describe, and also to marginalise, some phenomena.
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in: Claudie Voisenat (ed.), Imaginaires archéologiques, Paris, Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 2008, p. 233-264.
This paper describes controversies on the existence of the lost continent of Atlantis described b... more This paper describes controversies on the existence of the lost continent of Atlantis described by Plato that occurred in France in the beginning of the twentieth century and that involved Atlantean researchers like Paul Le Cour or Roger Devigne. This paper shows that the point is not to decide whether Atlantean research/beliefs belong to the study of esotericism or science but to describe how the actors of these controversies reconstruct their own definition of what science and esotericism (or occultism) are.
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in: James Lewis (ed.), UFOs and Popular Culture: An Encyclopedia of Contemporary Myth, Santa Barbara: ABC Clio, p. 272-275.
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in: James Lewis (ed.), UFOs and Popular Culture: An Encyclopedia of Contemporary Myth, Santa Barbara: ABC Clio, p. 31-36.
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in: Bruno Latour et Petre Weibel (ed.), Making Things Public, MIT Press, 2005, p. 90-97., 2005
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in: Nicolas Witkowski (dir.), L'Etat des sciences et des techniques, Paris, La Découverte/FPH, 1991, p. 112-114., 1991
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in: John Spencer & Hilary Evans (eds.), Phenomenon: From Flying Saucers to UFOs - Forty Years of Facts and Research. London: Futura Publications/New York: McDonald, 1988, p. 26-45., 1988
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Unpublished papers by Pierre Lagrange
Unpublished Paper (document de travail, Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation), 1986
In 1985, I started an investigation to try to reconstruct what really happened to Kenneth Arnold,... more In 1985, I started an investigation to try to reconstruct what really happened to Kenneth Arnold, the very first “flying saucer” witness in 1947 (what he saw, how his story became so famous, etc). Most of the books and articles that discussed this story included mistakes, rumors, and contradictions (example: many authors wrote that journalists were waiting for Arnold when he landed at Pendleton, Oregon, after his historical sighting, a detail that I found to be wrong). I searched and collected the original sources and wrote (in 1986) this paper that was discussed at a seminar of the Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation in Paris. An edited version of this paper was published in a book directed by Hilary Evans and John Spencer. In 1987 and 1988, I went to Oregon, Idaho and other places to meet the people who had participated in that historical event. Then I published other papers (in Communications and in Terrain, two French journals in social anthropology, in 1990, both in French). My problem was to understand how flying saucers were "constructed" (I use the word construction as in Bruno Latour's construction of scientific facts).
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Papers in peer-reviewed journals by Pierre Lagrange
Socio, 2019
A partir de la celebre scene de Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (Jules Verne, 1869-1871), dans l... more A partir de la celebre scene de Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (Jules Verne, 1869-1871), dans laquelle un calmar geant surgit face a la baie vitree du Nautilus, au moment meme ou les heros sont en train de debattre de son existence, cet article propose de s’interroger sur une contradiction du discours sur les images en science. Le roman populaire et la vulgarisation scientifique ne cessent de construire des images de scientifiques qui regardent la realite directement, comme les heros de Jules Verne, images qui illustrent un double discours sur les sciences et sur les cultures populaires : alors que les scientifiques regardent la nature en face parce qu’ils auraient su s’affranchir des « ombres de la caverne », et de l’influence des images precisement, les non-scientifiques prendraient un grand risque a faire de meme car ils sont susceptibles d’etre influences par ces images de roman populaire et d’imaginer toutes sortes de choses qui n’existent pas. Cet article essaie de montrer que ces images gagnent a etre etudiees autrement en n’oubliant pas une partie du temps qu’il s’agit precisement d’images et en construisant une analyse symetrique qui traite les images scientifiques et ces images « populaires » dans les memes termes. Cela permet de sortir de l’opposition entre pensee scientifique et croyance populaire pour decrire comment les images deploient a la fois le savoir scientifique et un discours public sur les sciences.
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Socio, 2019
Presentation de Bertrand Meheust Bertrand Meheust est docteur en sociologie, auteur d’une these s... more Presentation de Bertrand Meheust Bertrand Meheust est docteur en sociologie, auteur d’une these sur l’histoire des debats autour du magnetisme animal (Meheust, 1999), prolongation d’un DEA de philosophie consacre au mesmerisme a l’universite de Dijon en 1981. Il est aussi l’auteur de deux ouvrages qui proposent de rapprocher les experiences suscitees par des observations d’ovnis avec la science-fiction populaire et le folklore fantastique. Bertrand Meheust est l’un des rares chercheurs qui s’...
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Books by Pierre Lagrange
Book chapters by Pierre Lagrange
We may therefore think that the cold war explanation works for the ghost rockets and not for the disks, but the situation is a little more complex. This cold war explanation should be discussed for a second reason: sociology and social history cannot use explanation in terms of influence because social actors are not sponges that absorb the context: they define it, they discuss it, they chose among the elements from that context that they will take seriously and that they will reject. Social studies of subjects like UFOs as a lot to learn from the tools developed by social students of science. [note: this paper is a corrected version of a paper previously published in 2012 in the firs hardcover edition of the book in which it is included.]
We may therefore think that the cold war explanation works for the ghost rockets and not for the disks, but the situation is a little more complex. This cold war explanation should be discussed for a second reason: sociology and social history cannot use explanation in terms of influence because social actors are not sponges that absorb the context: they define it, they discuss it, they chose among the elements from that context that they will take seriously and that they will reject. Social studies of subjects like UFOs as a lot to learn from the tools developed by social students of science.
[note: a corrected version of this paper has been published with the softcover version of this book in 2018. This corrected version is available on this web page.]
Unpublished papers by Pierre Lagrange
Papers in peer-reviewed journals by Pierre Lagrange
We may therefore think that the cold war explanation works for the ghost rockets and not for the disks, but the situation is a little more complex. This cold war explanation should be discussed for a second reason: sociology and social history cannot use explanation in terms of influence because social actors are not sponges that absorb the context: they define it, they discuss it, they chose among the elements from that context that they will take seriously and that they will reject. Social studies of subjects like UFOs as a lot to learn from the tools developed by social students of science. [note: this paper is a corrected version of a paper previously published in 2012 in the firs hardcover edition of the book in which it is included.]
We may therefore think that the cold war explanation works for the ghost rockets and not for the disks, but the situation is a little more complex. This cold war explanation should be discussed for a second reason: sociology and social history cannot use explanation in terms of influence because social actors are not sponges that absorb the context: they define it, they discuss it, they chose among the elements from that context that they will take seriously and that they will reject. Social studies of subjects like UFOs as a lot to learn from the tools developed by social students of science.
[note: a corrected version of this paper has been published with the softcover version of this book in 2018. This corrected version is available on this web page.]
Après avoir rapidement décrit l’usage que les historiens de l’imaginaire font de ces catégories, je décrirai certains travaux qui se sont penchés sur l’histoire des classifications et des méthodes classificatoires (notamment ceux de Keith Thomas) et, en les comparant à d’autres travaux (comme ceux de Jack Goody, d’Elisabeth Eisenstein ou de Natalie Zemon Davis) qui ont porté aussi sur les conséquences des opérations matérielles de classification et de répartition, je proposerai de m’interroger sur la façon dont il convient sans doute de repenser la portée de ces travaux sur l’histoire des classifications en les rapprochant des résultats produits par les science studies. Je proposerai enfin de tester de manière assez radicale cette façon de reconsidérer le partage entre animaux réels et animaux imaginaires en prenant l’exemple des « cryptides », ces créatures classées comme imaginaires pour beaucoup de chercheurs en sciences sociales, mais étudiées par la cryptozoologie. Je prendrai plus particulièrement le cas du fameux yéti et de ses cousins.
French: Pourquoi les études anthropologiques privilégient-elles les croyances lointaines (comme les revenants médiévaux ou le chamanisme amérindien) et ignorent-elles souvent les croyances nées au sein de notre culture scientifique (comme l’astrologie ou l’ufologie), sinon pour les dénoncer ? Cet article montre que le refus d’étudier les croyances proches tient dans un autre refus (ou une incapacité), celui d’étudier les pratiques scientifiques, par crainte de tomber dans le relativisme. Il montre aussi que certains travaux qui ont proposé de prendre des croyances au sérieux l’ont fait au prix d’une critique des sciences responsables de la marginalisation de ces croyances, ce qui revenait à adopter à nouveau un ton critique. Il montre aussi que les travaux qui ont proposé une approche capable d’étudier sciences et croyances dans les mêmes termes ont souvent évité de mettre trop en avant les sciences. La pratique scientifique apparaît donc comme une tâche aveugle, particulièrement pour l’anthropologie française.