Co-authors: Alex Wright, Caleb Scott, Chris Noble, Jack Warren

Beneath the dark highway overpasses of Brooklyn, within the forbidden rail yards of Queens and along the rooftops and stairwells of Manhattan, U.F.O., a book by the Combustive Motor Corporation, traces the journey of four urban explorers as they attempt to document and decode one of New York City’s most vilified and most elusive graffiti artists.

Using historical and scientific documentation, government records, personal narratives and photographic evidence, U.F.O. connects the contemporary markings of one underground artist, known only by his associated name-tag “UFO”, to a far greater creative tradition, linking his artwork to an expressive history of communication, sublime and supernatural, dating back some 10,000 years. In its obsessive, often frantic, accumulation of theory and fact, belief and evidence, U.F.O. passes through our collective understanding of graffiti into a place where our most common expectations of art and experience collide with the deepest unanswered mysteries of our human history.

Begun as a treatment for a feature film, U.F.O. has become the first major publication for the art collective Combustive Motor Corporation. It has documented UFO’s artwork around New York City for a number of years, and its members describes themselves as having a “second nature” for finding his often hidden symbols.