Author of the book Aliens in America (Cornell, 1999) which describes alien mythologies and the experience of abductees and contactees in contemporary America. Dean relates their experience to a rising sense of disjuncture and helpless confusion tied to the increasing integration of information technologies into society.
The New York Review of Books reviewed Aliens in America with a cover article. The lengthy attack found few faults with Dean’s carefully researched work itself, focusing instead on a paranoid anti-paranoid ranting about losing of a sense of grounded reality if things like alien mythologies were discussed openly and intelligently.