This is one of those very smart books that completely sucks you in and manages to be profound, mind-blowing, utterly fascinating and funny and personal—the kind of thing Mary Roach might write if she got obsessed with UFOs and ancient Chinese texts. I already knew these two from their first collaboration Shadow Book of Ji Yun after I read a review of it in Strange Horizons, but even then this book surprised me. They've dug up two millennia of Asian encounters with phenomena that look exactly like what Pentagon officials are reporting today. But then rather than making the same moves you see with books of this type, they discover entirely different ways cultures have made sense of these experiences. There's Chinese immortals emerging from glowing orbs, Taoist UFO theories based on qi energy that make more sense than our nuts-and-bolts spacecraft assumptions, and ancient abduction accounts that map onto modern contactee stories in some pretty disconcerting ways. The authors also explore how Asian immortals, Western fairies, and contemporary alien reports share the same DNA—trickster beings that mess with time, snatch humans, and slip between dimensions like they're changing clothes. They dive into Chinese sexual cultivation traditions that parallel modern contactee experiences and the Jack Parsons Jet Propulsion Laboratory material, Asian takes on ultraterrestrials, and ancient cosmic egg mythology (love their Mork from Ork reference, alongside Pangu and company) showing up in recent whistleblower testimony. This is all pretty fascinating but what I loved best I think is how the authors weave between different disciplines to ultimately show how Eastern philosophies are shedding light on how consciousness and reality entangle in the phenomena. Honestly, if you thought Westerners had this stuff figured out, or owned all the theories, you're in for a ride. I guess for the life of me, after finishing this, I don't know why no one has done a book like this before. Sits very nicely next to Jacques Vallee and Diana Pasulka.