Have extraterrestrial creatures become a legitimate subject of academic study? A group of anthropologists gathered on this planet Friday at Labyrinth Books to discuss beings with gourd-shaped heads and almond-shaped eyes. For more than a century, anthropologists have examined magic, witchcraft, and shamanism in far-flung cultures. Now these anthropologists have trained their eye on customs and beliefs a lot farther from home.

In the anthology “E.T. Culture: Anthropology in Outerspaces” (Duke University Press), which was the subject of discussion that evening, these scholars have set aside the issue of whether or not aliens exist and examine what role belief in them plays in people’s lives. “This book is about how people find and relate to one another around the idea of extraterrestrial life and UFOs,” the book’s editor, Debbora Battaglia, who teaches anthropology at Mount Holyoke College, said. The scholars who wrote for the book focus on how discussion and images of aliens reflect anxiety about issues such as technology and race.

“Why is the alien everywhere? What work does it do for us?” a Pennsylvania State University professor of rhetoric, Richard Doyle, asked. “Why are we constantly replicating this image of the alien?”

He described the view as he rides his bike across campus. Images of creatures with olivine eyes are found “on backpacks, skateboards, bumper stickers, tattoos. I see little aliens all over the place. They’re ubiquitous now,” he said.

Their proliferation comes precisely at a time when the Earth is becoming covered in a networked system of information. He cited a study from the Berkeley School of Business that shows the information explosion. “If any other inputs in our ecosystem were to suddenly increase in that fashion, we’d be amazed if there weren’t some sort of symptoms,” he said. “My contention is that aliens are one of them.”

Mr. Doyle is interested in how people go about trying to tell stories about experiences that they can’t really explain. There are patterns and consistencies in how they tell these stories, he said.

Susan Lepselter, who received her Ph.D. in anthropology from University of Texas at Austin, spoke about ethnographic research she conducted in Rachel, Nev., a small hamlet outside Area 51, where the U-2 bomber and Stealth bomber were tested.

She originally began studying a UFO abductee support group in Texas, which she described as basically “a storytelling community.” In listening to them, the subject of Area 51 kept coming up as a sign of “covert government alien activity.” So she traveled near there and became a waitress at the Little A’Le’Inn.

The area was primed to become a ghost town after a local mine closed, she said. But then UFO lore started and some enterprising people opened a cafe and inn that attracted tourists.

She said the hamlet had tourists who came out to look for UFOs, as well as locals living out a kind of “fading pioneer narrative.”

The book grew out of a session at the 2002 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association. Ms. Battaglia said the various anthropological approaches to the subject of life in outer space were “methodologically, geopolitically, and even disciplinarily diverse.”

University of Massachusetts-Amherst anthropology professor David Samuels is interested in the expectations that people bring to their communication. For example, he said he has previously explored “what kinds of ideas about language do missionaries have when they decide to translate the Bible into Apache?”

But for this volume, Mr. Samuels wrote about how scientists have imagined what it would be like to communicate with aliens. He once took a course in a language spoken by characters on the show “Star Trek.” Why? As the linguistic anthropologist said, “Because I thought at the very least it would give me stories to tell my undergraduates in my introductory class.”

He spoke of linguist Ferdinand de Saussure examining a medium who claimed to speak Hindi and Martian; Percival Lowell charting the canals for Mars; and more recently Carl Sagan.

On the Voyager probe in the 1970s, Sagan and others included a longplaying record and a stylus. The record included sounds of 55 human languages and one whale language. Music selections included, in addition to classical music greats: Javanese gamelan; Senegalese percussion; Pygmy; New Guinean and Australian aboriginal singing; mariachi music; Chuck Berry; Japanese shakuhachi; Louis Armstrong; Peruvian and Solomon Islands panpipes; a Navajo Nightway chant; Blind Willie Johnson; and Chinese, North Indian, and Georgian performances.

Mr. Samuels recalled the “Saturday Night Live” skit in which the aliens send word to Earth: “Send more Chuck Berry!”

By avoiding the truth of claims of UFO believers, the scholars examine the effects of those beliefs on people. But the anthology might have been improved by including at least one anthropologist who exhibits skepticism. That scholar could ask, as comedian Joan Rivers did: Why do the UFOs land in cornfields? Why doesn’t one land in a quadrangle at M.I.T.?