David Halperin

David Halperin is a scholar of religion and a writer whose long engagement with UFO belief informs his fiction and nonfiction. Viking released his debut novel, Journal of a UFO Investigator, in 2011. The story is set mainly in the 1960s and follows Danny Shapiro, an isolated teenager who turns flying-saucer lore into an elaborate private world while living with family pain and uncertainty. Halperin drew on his own years as a teenage UFO enthusiast to recreate the period’s letters, books, Men in Black tales, and sense of cosmic possibility. The novel uses that mythology as both imaginative adventure and a language for fear, grief, loneliness, and adolescence. Its literary approach leaves the boundary between Danny’s daily circumstances and his invented alien landscape deliberately unstable. Readers receive a coming-of-age story about the stories a young person builds when ordinary explanations feel insufficient, and about the emotional truths that can remain inside even the strangest beliefs.