Reddit mentions of Intelligent Life in the Universe

This is reddit, so start with Carl Sagan!

• UFOs: A Scientific Debate details a scientific panel at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1969. You get papers from the major scientific players: Donald Menzel, J. Allen Hynek, Carl Sagan, Thornton Page and James Mcdonald's furious, classic Science in Default. There are less famous commentators who discuss photographs and film, as well as the psychological aspect. You get differing viewpoints, and a variety of scientific perspectives. I personally feel James Mcdonald demonstrates that he was by far the most serious scientist looking at UFOs. When you compare the data content in Mcdonald's testimony to Sagan's, the difference is simply staggering. And yet the book contains Donald Menzel's completely contrary commentary, which in fact directly attacks Mcdonald. You rarely get this level of discourse or active critical analysis in UFO books. But you must read the Durant Report of the CIA's 1953 Robertson Panel and remember that Sagan's co-author Thornton Page sat on the Robertson Panel himself. Read the Educational Program section closely and coments about public debunking.
  
  
• Intelligent Life in the Universe has a great deal of information about basic astronomy, as well as a decent discussion of the possibility of ancient contact. Plus it's full of beautiful pictures. Sagan discusses at length the origin myths of ancient Summeria and how, when taken at face value, they could be evidence that civilzation was basically dropped off in mesopotamia by ET visitors or "gods". It's a truly fascinating book because I. S. Shklovskii wrote the original, which Sagan then translated into English. Sagan couldn't resist adding his own commentary, which appears in brackets and is frequently extensive. So you can see where they differ. Sagan dismisses UFOs via a very amusing though not scientifically persuasive anecdote about a trial for a "UFO contactee" con man that Sagan involved with. The book will ultimately teach you much more about astronomy and history than it will about UFOs, which is not at all a bad thing.
  
  If you do read both of these books, I imagine you'll have a pretty good idea what you want to read about next.
  
  You can also read my post at /r/UAP about Carl Sagan for more discussion and context.
  
  EDIT
  
  May as well throw out one more scientific source becuase it is more recent:
  
  
• Peter Sturrock's The UFO Enigma: a New Review of the Physical Evidence details the process and conclusions of a Laurance Rockefeller-funded 1997 scientific panel overviewing the state of UFO studies. It contains a brief history of UFOs and a discussion of then-current research with presentations about Project Hessdalen and GEIPAN. There are conclusions and recommendations, written in committee by a group of scientists. This does include a recommended reading section you may find valuable. Finally there are five case studies: detailed analysis of two photohraphs, a discussion of luminosity reports, an overview of physical traces, the Trans-en-Provence case, and the Mansfield Ohio case. This is a slightly less exciting book than UFOs: A Scientific Debate, but that is because it is less inclined toward rhetoric and more toward scientific analysis.

There are a small number of people interested in UFOs etc, who are not kooks and who have serious credentials.

Most notably, Carl Sagan co-wrote a book in the late 1960s that may have accidentally kickstarted the ancient-alien-contact theory. He backed away from those claims in later years, but he did take the idea of aliens coming to earth seriously and handled the concept far more cautiously and provisionally than did most subsequent. https://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Life-Universe-I-Shklovskii/dp/189280302X

Peter Sturrock is another example, a major-league astrophysicist who back in the 1940s did important work on development of radar systems in the UK. Alongside his mainstream work, he's occasionally written on UFOs. https://web.stanford.edu/group/Sturrock/Peter/

Could be a hollowed out asteroid like Carl Sagan was saying with Phobos, when he claimed it was an artificial satellite. Thats before he got famous though. It was his first book.

http://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Life-Universe-I-Shklovskii/dp/189280302X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1323133726&sr=8-1

Then he realized that he can't make those claims in public, and later on in life, essentially denigrated anything with UFOs/ET.

Personally, my theory is that UFOs aren't physical craft. They're intelligent entities unto itself. In essence, the UFO itself is alive, a living, intelligent entity.