Some common themes here, more or less unintentional...

Pam Oliver. Raids on Australia: 1942 and Japan's Plans for Australia. North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2010. The title is a bit misleading. Oliver examines Japanese activities in Australia, commercial, government, and individual, in the decades before 1942, as well as Australian government and popular suspicions of Japanese espionage and hostile intentions. Not a believer in the 'he's coming south' myth, I'm glad to see, though surprisingly she doesn't seem to cite Peter Stanley on this.

Michael Swords and Robert Powell, with Clas Svahn, Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos, Bill Chalker, Barry Greenwood, Richard Thieme, Jan Aldrich, and Steve Purcell. UFOs and Government: A Historical Enquiry. San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2012. Not your usual UFO book by any means. In fact it's not about UFOs as such, but rather the way governments have responded to UFOs: a perfectly legitimate line of historical inquiry! The focus is inevitably on the United States and from 1947 on. But there are also chapters on Australia, Spain and France. Of most interest to me are the ones on the foo fighters of the Second World War and even more so, on the ghost flyers of 1932-4 and the ghost rockets of 1946. It's very hard to get sober, reliable accounts of these episodes so I'm very glad to have this book.

H. F. B. Wheeler and A. M. Broadley. Napoleon and the Invasion of England: The Story of the Great Terror. Stroud: Nonsuch, 2007 [1908]. Covers both French plans and British fears. I'm sure it's been overtaken by more recent scholarship but it uses a lot of primary sources, which extends the shelf life. Moreover I'm intrigued by the fact that it was first published in the middle of another invasion scare, this time with the Kaiser as the bogey; the introduction even refers to the contemporary debate about whether the proposed Channel Tunnel would (literally) undermine Britain's security.

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