Aliens Adored: Rael's UFO Religion

Susan J. Palmer's Aliens Adored, Rael's UFO Religion, published by Rutgers University Press in 2004, is an ethnographic study of the Raelian movement built on more than a decade of Palmer's own fieldwork among its members, attending gatherings and interviewing adherents rather than relying only on the movement's public materials or outside press coverage. Palmer is a sociologist of new religious movements with a substantial body of work on UFO and new age groups specifically. Its strength is that sustained direct access, letting the book describe how members themselves understand and live the movement's teachings rather than only how outsiders characterize them. Its limit is the standard one for embedded ethnography of a living, still small movement, that closeness to informants can shape which practices and voices the study foregrounds, so a claim about the movement's history, financial structure or public controversies is better checked against independent reporting alongside Palmer's account of belief and practice.