Little green men! Brilliant spheres of light in the sky! Roswell! The X-Files.! Alien abduction! A UFO conference at--the Massachusetts Institute of Technology??!!

And now Cornell University Press, that bastion of respectable academic publishing whose books of high seriousness have salvaged, salved and saved more than a few academic careers over the years, has entered the UFO waters with a big splash in the iridescent pond by publishing Jodi Dean's Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace.

So far the book has been spanked by a cover story in The New York Review of Books ("UFOs Land At Cornell!") and stroked by The Village Voice (Dean suggests, the Voice says, that "truth, any truth, is finally beyond our collective grasp, that it is out there and always will be"). And Publisher's Weekly asks how many academic books "can boast of play in both Arcturus, an online alien merchandise catalog, and The New York Review of Books? How many university authors have agreed to sign at Tower Records, as Dean has done?"

Dean is an assistant professor of political science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, whose first book, Solidarity of Strangers: Feminism After Identity Politics, was published by the University of California Press.

Underneath the moon dust, Dean has written a serious and readable book about cultural studies, a book that Cornell University Press calls "a provocative analysis of public culture and popular concern," an examination of "how serious UFO-logists and their pop-culture counterparts tap into fears, phobias and conspiracy theories with a deep past and a vivid present in American society. Aliens, the author shows, are cultural icons, in which the new conditions of democratic politics at the millennium can be seen."

But Frederick Crews, a Freud scholar, writing in The New York Review of Books in late June, called the book a "fiasco" both "intellectual as well as political" that seems to support the notion "that 'knowledge' is not a legitimate goal of striving but merely a shibboleth for enforcing the dominance of a class, race or gender."

"Dean cites a Times/Roper poll that says 80 percent of respondents believe the U.S. government is covering up knowledge of aliens," said Alison Shonkwiler, the editor who acquired Aliens in America for Cornell University Press. "Why do so many of us not trust scientific evidence? One has to think about information in a whole new way. Dean is bold. We knew this would be a controversial book. We're delighted by the visceral reaction in the mainstream press. Dean is pushing some hot buttons."

"Some of my critics have been furious that I don't come down solidly against the abductees," said Dean, "and angry that I don't dismiss them as crazy, deceived or themselves deceiving. These critics miss my larger point, that the range of political action these days has been limited to judging those who might have different ideas. I want to combat this reduction of political space by pursuing options other than judging, options such as listening, respecting, interpreting and connecting. If we listen to folks with so-called crazy ideas, we may well discover that somewhere they have some important insights into politics today."

"What we get by publishing a controversial trade book of this kind," said John Ackerman, director of Cornell University Press, "is, we hope, a healthy income, but something more intangible: the kind of publicity, excitement and sell-through that helps to build and sustain our credibility as a publisher capable of competing successfully in the trade. This in turn helps other titles, especially those we've selected and edited in the hope that they'll reach a relatively broad readership."

Beyond the intangibles, Ackerman said, Aliens is that "rarity among books from the academy -- timely, provocative and fun."

Dean's book "treats, from another angle of vision, what Thomas Pynchon mapped in his Vineland: the more paranoid recesses of American culture, and speaks effectively to the issue of the reliability of beliefs in relation to the functioning of democracy," said Michael Shapiro of the University of Hawaii.

Cornell University Press, founded in 1869, publishes some 160 titles a year -- which makes it one of the oldest, largest and most prestigious university presses in the country. The press publishes general and specialized non-fiction in a wide variety of fields, and it is especially strong in the areas of classics, history, labor, biological science and medieval studies.

The lessons learned from publishing Aliens hint perhaps at a few of the directions university presses may have to take in the future.

"In order to survive financially," said Andrea Clardy, the Cornell University Press' special projects manger, "university presses need to find ways to be flexible in their acquisitions and dynamic in their marketing. This book has been enormously fun to promote. That delight has warmed our connections with lots of media people and served as a reminder that our cooperative relationship with the authors can be joyful."