She weaves history and pop culture with political theory, weighing tabloid and TV treatment of against the Lacanian psychoanalytic theory of Slavoj Zizek (where the unconscious is viewed as having deep structures that create meaning through certain patterns of repetition and exchange). The structure of Dean.s thought lends welcome clarity to a subject that.s heavily demonized in popular culture. Because ufology is scoffed at, ufology is a political subject. At the same time, the alien question confounds the criteria for judgments of the reasonable; consensus reality, Dean argues, has been replaced with virtual reality; democracy must be rethought; truth is up for grabs.