UFO conspiracy theories

1956 advertisement, formatted similar to a newspaper article, for the book They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers which promoted a conspiracy theory that government agents were silencing UFO witnesses.

UFO conspiracy theories are a subset of conspiracy theories which argue that various governments and politicians globally, in particular the United States government, are suppressing evidence that unidentified flying objects are controlled by a non-human intelligence or built using alien technology. Such conspiracy theories usually argue that Earth governments are in communication or cooperation with extraterrestrial visitors despite public disclaimers, and further that some of these theories claim that the governments are explicitly allowing alien abduction.

Individuals who have suggested that UFO evidence is being suppressed include Stanford University immunologist Garry Nolan, United States Senator Barry Goldwater, British Admiral Lord Hill-Norton (former NATO head and chief of the British Defence Staff), American Vice Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter (first CIA director), Israeli brigadier general Haim Eshed (former director of space programs for the Israel Ministry of Defense), astronauts Gordon Cooper and Edgar Mitchell, and former Canadian Defence Minister Paul Hellyer. Beyond their testimonies and reports they have presented no evidence to substantiate their statements and claims. According to the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry little or no evidence exists to support them despite significant research on the subject by non-governmental scientific agencies.

Scholars of religion have identified some new religious movements among the proponents of UFO conspiracy theories, most notably Heaven's Gate, the Nation of Islam, and Scientology.

Overview

Flying saucer conspiracy theories first began in the pages of pulp science-fiction, where they drew upon inspiration from the "lost continent" myths of Atlantis and Lemuria. In 1947, during 'the first summer of the cold war', private pilot Kenneth Arnold reported witnessing supersonic 'flying discs'; historians would later chronicle at least 800 "copycat" reports in subsequent weeks, while other sources estimate the reports may have numbered in the thousands. Press speculated that the flying disc were top secret secret American or Soviet technology.

By December 1949, author Donald Keyhoe promoted the idea that the Air Force was withholding knowledge of interplanetary spaceships, culminating in his 1955 work The Flying Saucer Conspiracy. The following year, the book They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers introduced the concept of the Men in Black.

In the 1970s, a supposed cover up was termed a "Cosmic Watergate". By the late 1970, UFO conspiracy theories became a mainstay of popular culture, while new theories linked UFOs to alien abductions and cattle mutilations. In 1980, the book The Roswell Incident introduced the story of a UFO crash to a mass audience.

Mainstream views

While unusual sightings have been reported in the sky throughout history, UFOs became culturally prominent after World War II, escalating during the Space Age. Studies and investigations into UFO reports conducted by governments (such as Project Blue Book in the United States and Project Condign in the United Kingdom), as well as by organisations and individuals have occurred over the years without confirmation of the fantastical claims of small but vocal groups of ufologists who favour unconventional or pseudoscientific hypotheses, often claiming that UFOs are evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence, technologically advanced cryptids, demons, interdimensional contact or future time travelers. After decades of promotion of such ideas by believers and in popular media, the kind of evidence required to solidly support such claims has not been forthcoming. Scientists and skeptic organizations such as the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry have provided prosaic explanations for UFOs, namely that they are caused by natural phenomena, human technology, delusions, and hoaxes. Beliefs surrounding UFOs have inspired parts of new religions even as social scientists have identified the ongoing interest and storytelling surrounding UFOs as a modern example of folklore and mythology understandable with psychosocial explanations.

Chronology of UFO conspiracy theories

Raymond Palmer and Amazing Stories

Editor Raymond Palmer has been called "the man who invented flying saucers". For years prior to the 1947 flying disc craze, Palmer had published reports of strange craft in his pulp sci-fi magazine Amazing Stories. During the 1947 flying disc craze, Palmer hired original saucer witness Kenneth Arnold to investigate a flying disc report near Maury Island, Washington. By October 1947, Palmer's magazine featured claims that the truth behind the discs was being covered up. Palmer would continue to promote UFO conspiracy theories for the rest of his life, eventually linking them to the JFK assassination and Watergate.

Richard Shaver, Fred Crisman and The Shaver Mystery

The novella "I Remember Lemuria" was the cover story in the March 1945 Amazing Stories

Shaver reported having received a warning about the dangers of atomic pollution from an ancient race of subterranean beings. In March 1945, Palmer's magazine published Shaver's allegedly-received manifesto "A Warning to Future Humanity", adapted by Palmer into a fictionalized story titled "I Remember Lemuria".

For example, the May 1946 issue, for example, featured an allegedly-true eyewitness account of strange objects in the skies by Dirk Wylie.

In June 1946, Amazing Stories published a pseudonymous letter by Crisman in which he claimed to have battled "mysterious and evil" underground creatures to free himself from a cave in what is now northern Pakistan during World War II. The letter was quoted in the September 1946 issue of Harper's Magazine as an example of a crackpot letter.

In May 1947, Amazing Stories published a second Crisman letter, this time identifying him by name. In this letter, Crisman claimed to have traveled to Alaska with his friend Dick, who was killed there.

Kenneth Arnold and the 1947 flying disc craze

Main articles: Roswell incident and Twin Falls saucer hoax

Army officials pose with balloon debris from Roswell.

On July 8, 1947, Roswell Army Air Field issued a press release stating that they had recovered a "flying disc". The Army quickly retracted the statement and clarified that the crashed object was a conventional weather balloon. The Roswell incident did not surface again until the late 1970s, when it was incorporated into conspiracy literature.

The Roswell balloon was far from the only misidentified "disc". One potential disc, recovered from the yard of a priest in Grafton, Wisconsin, was identified as an ordinary circular saw-blade. More elaborate hoax saucers were found in Shreveport, Louisiana; in Black River Falls, Wisconsin; and in Clear water, Florida. On July 9, press reported the recovery of a thirty-inch disc from a Hollywood back yard; the hoaxer was never identified.

On July 11, press reported the recovery of a 30-inch disc from the yard of a Twin Falls, Idaho home. On July 12, it was reported nationally that the Twin Falls disc was a hoax. Photos of the object were publicly released. The object was described as containing radio tubes, electric coils, and wires underneath a Plexiglas dome. Press reported that four teenagers had confessed to creating the disc.

Fred Crisman, Kenneth Arnold, and the Maury Island hoax

Main article: Maury Island incident

Artist impression of the Maury Island UFO incident

Raymond Palmer contacted original saucer witness Kenneth Arnold and requested he travel to Tacoma to investigate a story of two harbor patrolmen in Tacoma who reportedly possessed fragments of a "flying saucer". On July 28, Palmer wired $200 to Arnold to fund the investigation.

Arnold met Fred Crisman, who told a story of a flying saucer which spewed debris. Arnold relayed the details of the case to Lieutenant Frank Brown, the military's flying disc investigator, who had previously interviewed Arnold about his sighting. Brown and an aide flew to Tacoma, where they met with Crisman, who gave them a cereal box containing alleged flying disc debris. Returning to base in California, the pair were killed when their plane crashed near Kelso, Washington. The following day, press accounts revealed that a "mysterious telephone informant with uncannily accurate information" had contacted the United Press of Tacoma. The caller claimed that the crashed B-25 had been loaded with flying disc fragments; the caller further claimed that flying saucer witnesses Kenneth Arnold and E.J. Smith had been "in secret conference" at Tacoma's Hotel Winthrop. General Ned Schramm of the fourth air force publicly acknowledged that the deceased pilots were intelligence officers who had traveled to Tacoma to meet with original saucer witness Kenneth Arnold.

By August 3, press reported a detailed narrative about the events: original saucer witness Kenneth Arnold had travelled to Tacoma to investigate claims by Fred Crisman and Harold Dahl, who reported recovering debris dropped by a flying saucer at Maury Island. Flight 105 pilot E.J. Smith joined the investigation, which received "lava rocks" from Crisman who claimed they were "flying disc debris". Army Air Force investigators were contacted, and two investigators flew to Tacoma where they took possession of the debris and departed in their B-25 to return to Hamilton Field.

Aftermath

"The truth of what the strange disc ships really are will never be disclosed to the common people. We just don't count to the people who do know about such things."

Richard Shaver (Amazing Stories, October 1947)

In the October 1947 issue of Amazing Stories, editor Raymond Palmer argued the flying disc flap was proof of Richard Sharpe Shaver's claims. That same issue carried a letter from Shaver in which he argued the truth behind the discs would remain a secret.

Wrote Shaver: "The discs can be a space invasion, a secret new army plane — or a scouting trip by an enemy country...OR, they can be Shaver's space ships, taking off and landing regularly on earth for centuries past, and seen today as they have always been — as a mystery. They could be leaving earth with cargos of wonder-mech that to us would mean emancipation from a great many of our worst troubles— and we'll never see those cargos...I predict that nothing more will be seen, and the truth of what the strange disc ships really are will never be disclosed to the common people. We just don't count to the people who do know about such things. It isn't necessary to tell us anything." During the last decades of his life, Shaver devoted himself to "rock books"—stones that he believed had been created by the advanced ancient races and embedded with legible pictures and texts. After Shaver's death in 1975, his editor Raymond Palmer admitted that "Shaver had spent eight years not in the Cavern World, but in a mental institution" being treated for paranoid schizophrenia.

In 1952, Arnold would author Coming of the Saucers, aided by Palmer. It detailed his 1947 investigation of Fred Crisman's claims, alleged he had been eavesdropped on during his investigation, and other strange behavior.

"There is a definite link between flying saucers, The Shaver Mystery, The Kennedy’s assassinations, Watergate and Fred Crisman."

Ray Palmer (1974)

In 1968, Crisman would be subpoenaed by a New Orleans grand jury in the prosecution of a local man for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy—a prosecution that would later be dramatized in the 1991 Oliver Stone film JFK. In the late 1970s, the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations considered the possibility that Crisman may have been one of the "tramps" detained and photographed in the aftermath of the JFK assassination. Later authors like Bill Cooper would allege that Kennedy was assassinated because he intended to disclose the reality of UFOs.

1949

The year 1949 saw fly saucer conspiracy theories move from Palmer's pulp magazine to mainstream media.

Winchell and the Soviets

On April 3, 1949, radio personality Walter Winchell broadcast the claim that it had been definitively established that the flying saucers were guided missiles fired from Russia. In response, the Air Force denied any such conclusion. The Air Force reportedly requested an FBI investigation into Winchell's claims, a request that was denied.

Keyhoe and the Air Force knowledge of UFOs

On December 26, 1949, True magazine published an article by Donald Keyhoe titled "The Flying Saucers Are Real". Keyhoe, a former Major in the US Marines, claimed that elements within the Air Force knew that saucers existed and had concluded they were likely 'inter-planetary'.

The article examined the Mantell UFO incident and quoted an unnamed pilot who opined that the Air Force's explanation "looks like a cover up to me". The Gorman Dogfight and the Chiles-Whitted UFO encounter were also described. The article cited a supposed report from Air Material Command and claimed a "rocket authority at Wright field" had concluded saucers were interplanetary. Concern over a public panic, of the kind that supposedly occurred after the 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast, is cited in the article as a possible motive for the cover up. Citing historic sources, Keyhoe speculated that similar sightings have likely occurred for at least several centuries.

The True article caused a sensation. Though such figures are always difficult to verify, Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, the first head of Project Blue Book, reported that "It is rumored among magazine publishers that Don Keyhoe's article in True was one of the most widely read and widely discussed magazine articles in history." When Keyhoe expanded the article into a book, The Flying Saucers Are Real (1950), it sold over half a million copies in paperback.

In March 1950, the Air Force denied "flying saucers" exist and further denied that they were US technology being covered-up.

Scully and alien bodies

Main article: Aztec, New Mexico UFO hoax

In October and November 1949, journalist Frank Scully published two columns in Variety, claiming that dead extraterrestrial beings were recovered from a flying saucer crash, based on what he said was reported to him by a scientist involved. His 1950 book Behind the Flying Saucers expanded on the theme, adding that there had been two such incidents in Arizona and one in New Mexico, a 1948 incident that involved a saucer that was nearly 100 feet (30 m) in diameter. In January 1950, Time Magazine skeptically repeated stories of crashed saucers with humanoid occupants.

It was later revealed that Scully had been the victim of "two veteran confidence artists". In 1952 and 1956, True magazine published articles by San Francisco Chronicle reporter John Philip Cahn that exposed Newton and "Dr. Gee" (identified as Leo A. GeBauer) as oil con artists who had hoaxed Scully.

Elements of the Aztec crash were later included in the Roswell conspiract theory.

1950s

The 1950s saw an increase in both governmental and civilian investigative efforts and reports of public disinformation and suppression of evidence. A few weeks after the Robertson Panel, the Air Force issued Regulation 200–2, ordering air base officers to publicly discuss UFO incidents only if they were judged to have been solved, and to classify all the unsolved cases to keep them out of the public eye. In addition, UFO investigative duties started to be taken on by the newly formed 4602nd Air Intelligence Squadron (AISS) of the Air Defense Command. The 4602nd AISS was tasked with investigating only the most important UFO cases having intelligence or national security implications. These were deliberately siphoned away from Blue Book, leaving Blue Book to deal with the more trivial reports.

Keyhoe and The Flying Saucer Conspiracy

Main article: The Flying Saucer Conspiracy

In 1954, before the first human-launched satellite, Keyhoe told press that non-human satellites had been detected in orbit. In 1955, Donald Keyhoe authored a new book that pointedly accused elements of the United States government of engaging in a conspiracy to cover up knowledge of flying saucers. Keyhoe claims the existence of a "silence group" orchestrating this conspiracy. Historian of Folklore Curtis Peebles argues: "The Flying Saucer Conspiracy marked a shift in Keyhoe's belief system. No longer were flying saucers the central theme; that now belonged to the silence group and its coverup. For the next two decades Keyhoe's beliefs about this would dominate the flying saucer myth."

The book features claims of a possible discovery of an "orbiting space base" or a "moon base", knowledge of which might trigger a public panic. The Flying Saucer Conspiracy also incorporated legends of the Bermuda Triangle disappearances. Keyhoe sensationalized claims, ultimately stemming from optical illusions, of unusual structures on the moon.

Morris Jessup, Carl Allen and the Philadelphia Experiment

Main article: Philadelphia Experiment

In 1955, Morris K. Jessup achieved some notoriety with his book The Case for the UFO, in which he argued that UFOs represented a mysterious subject worthy of further study. Jessup speculated that UFOs were "exploratory craft of 'solid' and 'nebulous' character." Jessup also "linked ancient monuments with prehistoric superscience".

In January 1956, Jessup began receiving a series of letters from "Carlos Miguel Allende", later identified as Carl Meredith Allen. "Allende" warned Jessup not to investigate the levitation of UFOs and spun a tale of a dangerous experiment in which Navy Ship was successfully made invisible, only to inexplicably teleport from Philadelphia to Norfolk, Virginia, before reappearing back in Philadelphia. The ship's crew was supposed to have suffered various side effects, including insanity, intangibility, and being "frozen" in place. By 1975, the Philadelphia Experiment was being promoted by paranormal author Charles Berlitz and in 1984, the legend was adapted into a fictional film.

In 1957, Jessup was invited to the Office of Naval Research where he was shown an annotated copy of his book that was filled with handwritten notes in its margins, written with three different shades of blue ink, appearing to detail a debate among three individuals. They discussed ideas about the propulsion for flying saucers, alien races, and express concern that Jessup was too close to discovering their technology. Jessup noticed the handwriting of the annotations resembled the letters he received from Allen. (Twelve years later, Allen would say that he authored all of the annotations in order "to scare the hell out of Jessup.")

The Jessup book with Allen's scribbled commentaries gained a life of its own when the Varo Manufacturing Corporation of Garland, Texas, who did contract work for ONR, began producing mimeographed copies of the book with Allen's annotations and Allen's letters to Jessup. These copies came to be known as the "Varo edition." This became the heart of many "Philadelphia Experiment" books, documentaries, and movies to come. Over the years various writers and researchers who tried to get more information from Carl Allen found his responses elusive, or could not find him at all.

Edward Ruppelt and The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects

Ruppelt was a captain in the US Air Force who served as director of official investigations into UFOs: Project Grudge and Project Bluebook.

In 1956, Ruppelt authored The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, a book that has been called the "most significant" of its era. The book discussed the Twining memo which initiated UFO investigation and the rejected 1948 "Estimate of the Situation". Ruppelt criticized the Air Force's handling of UFOs investigations. Historian Curtis Peebles concludes that the book "should have ended the speculation about an Air Force cover-up. In fact, Ruppelt's statements were converted into support for the cover-up idea."

Al Chop and The True Story of Flying Saucers

In 1956, a film titled Unidentified Flying Objects: The True Story of Flying Saucers dramatized the events of the early 1950s from the point of view of Air Force press officer Albert M. Chop. Chop had served as the Press Chief for Air Materiel Command in Dayton, Ohio until 1951 when he transferred to the Pentagon to serve as the press spokesman for Project Bluebook. The film incorporates interviews with actual eyewitnesses and historic footage of unidentified objects, concluding with a dramatization of the 1952 UFO flap that featured repeated sightings over Washington D.C.

Gray Barker and the 'Men in Black'

Main article: Men in black

Gray Barker poses with his book cover art

1956 saw the publication of Gray Barker's They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, the book which publicized the idea of Men in Black who appear to UFO witnesses and warn them to keep quiet. There has been continued speculation that the men in black are government agents who harass and threaten UFO witnesses.

According to the Skeptical Inquirer article "Gray Barker: My Friend, the Myth-Maker", there may have been "a grain of truth" to Barker's writings on the Men in Black, in that government agencies did attempt to discourage public interest in UFOs during the 1950s. However, Barker is thought to have greatly embellished the facts of the situation. In the same Skeptical Inquirer article, Sherwood revealed that, in the late 1960s, he and Barker collaborated on a brief fictional notice alluding to the Men in Black, which was published as fact first in Raymond A. Palmer's Flying Saucers magazine and some of Barker's own publications. In the story, Sherwood (writing as "Dr. Richard H. Pratt") claimed he was ordered to silence by the "blackmen" after learning that UFOs were time-travelling vehicles. Barker later wrote to Sherwood, "Evidently the fans swallowed this one with a gulp."

Keyhoe and 'Enigma of the Skies'

On January 22, 1958, Donald Keyhoe appeared on the CBS tv show Armstrong Circle Theatre in an episode titled "UFO: Enigma of the Skies". During the live broadcast, Keyhoe deviated from the pre-approved script, announcing "now I’m going to reveal something that has never been disclosed before". At this point in the broadcast, Keyhoe's microphone was cut. CBS later explained: "This program had been carefully cleared for security reasons. Therefore, it was the responsibility of this network to insure [sic] performance in accordance with pre-determined security standards. Any indication that there would be a deviation might lead to statements that neither this network nor the individuals on the program were authorized to release."

1960s

Throughout much of the 1960s, atmospheric physicist James E. McDonald suggested—via lectures, articles and letters—that the U.S. Government was mishandling evidence that would support the extraterrestrial hypothesis.

"Swamp Gas" claim met with ridicule

Main article: Michigan "swamp gas" UFO reports

In 1966, amid a wave (or 'flap') of UFO reports throughout southern Michigan, there were two mass sightings reported. The first occurred around marshland near Dexter, while the second mass-sighting took place near the campus arboretum of Hillsdale College, about 50 miles away.

After the reports were attributed to swamp gas by Air Force civilian investigator J. Allen Hynek, the explanation was widely derided. US congressman Gerald Ford called for a formal Congressional investigation into the sightings.

Jacques Vallée and the "Pentacle Memorandum"

In June 1967, researcher Jacques Vallée was tasked with organizing files collected by Project Bluebook investigator J. Allen Hynek Among those files, Vallee found a memo dated 9 January 1953 addressed to an assistant of Edward J. Ruppelt, an Air Force officer assigned to Bluebook. The memo was signed "H.C. Cross", but Vallée elected to refer to the author under the pseudonym "Pentacle".

The memo referred to a previously unknown analysis of several thousand UFO reports, along with calls for agreements about "what can and what cannot be discussed" with the 1953 Roberson Panel. Writing in his 1967 journal, Vallée expressed the opinion that the memo, if it were published, "would cause an even bigger uproar among foreign scientists than among Americans: it would prove the devious nature of the statements made by the Pentagon all these years about the non-existence of UFOs".

2001: A Space Odyssey

In the novel and film 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick, American discovery of a non-human artifact prompts a cover up and disinformation campaign with fatal consequence for astronauts sent to investigate.

1970s

Emenegger documentary and landing at Holloman

Main article: UFOs: Past, Present, and Future

Clark cites a 1973 encounter as perhaps the earliest suggestion that the U.S. government was involved with ETs. That year, Robert Emenegger and Allan Sandler of Los Angeles, California were in contact with officials at Norton Air Force Base in order to make a documentary film. Emenegger and Sandler report that Air Force Officials (including Paul Shartle) suggested incorporating UFO information in the documentary, including as its centerpiece genuine footage of a 1971 UFO landing at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. Furthermore, says Emenegger, he was given a tour of Holloman AFB and was shown where officials conferred with aliens. This was supposedly not the first time the U.S. had met these aliens, as Emenegger reported that his U.S. military sources had "been monitoring signals from an alien group with which they were unfamiliar, and did their ET guests know anything about them? The ETs said no." The documentary was released in 1974 as UFOs: Past, Present, and Future (narrated by Rod Serling) containing only a few seconds of the Holloman UFO footage, the remainder of the landing depicted with illustrations and re-enactments.

In 1988, Shartle said that the film in question was genuine, and that he had seen it several times.

In 1976 a televised documentary report UFOs: It Has Begun written by Robert Emenegger was presented by Rod Serling, Burgess Meredith and José Ferrer. Some sequences were recreated based upon the statements of eyewitness observers, together with the findings and conclusions of governmental civil and military investigations. The documentary uses a hypothetical UFO landing at Holloman AFB as a backdrop.

Emenegger's 1973 depiction of a landing at Holloman is widely noted for its "striking" similarities to Steven Spielberg's 1977 depiction of a landing at Devil's Tower in the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In the 2013 documentary Mirage Men, Ufologist Richard Dolan discussed the Emenegger documentary, saying "I have wondered [if] that film, I think as many people have wondered, was an abortive attempt at some kind of 'Disclosure'.

J. Allen Hynek and "Cosmic Watergate"

J. Allen Hynek was an American astronomer who served as scientific advisor to UFO studies undertaken by the U.S. Air Force under three projects: Project Sign (1947–1949), Project Grudge (1949–1951) and Project Blue Book (1952–1969) Hynek had drawn ridicule for his most famous debunking, in which he suggests a mass-sighting over Michigan may have been caused by "swamp gas".

By 1974, the former skeptic was publicly charging that Bluebook was "a Cosmic Watergate". Hynek claimed 20% of Bluebook cases were unexplained. Fellow Ufologist like Stanton Friedman echoed Hynek's "Cosmic Watergate" accusations. In 1976, pulp publisher Ray Palmer argued "there is a definite link between flying saucers, The Shaver Mystery, The Kennedy’s assassinations, Watergate and Fred Crisman."

Hangar 18

"Hangar 18" is a non-existent location that many later conspiracy theories allege housed extraterrestrial craft or bodies recovered from Roswell. The idea of alien corpses from a crashed ship being stored in an Air Force morgue at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base was mentioned in Scully's Behind the Flying Saucers, expanded in the 1966 book Incident at Exeter, and became the basis for a 1968 science-fiction novel The Fortec Conspiracy. Fortec was about a fictional cover-up by the Air Force unit charged with reverse-engineering other nations' technical advancements.

In 1974, science-fiction author and conspiracy theorist Robert Spencer Carr alleged that alien bodies recovered from the Aztec crash were stored in "Hangar 18" at Wright-Patterson. Carr claimed that his sources had witnessed the alien autopsy, another idea later incorporated into the Roswell narrative. The Air Force explained that no "Hangar 18" existed at the base, noting a similarity between Carr's story and the fictional Fortec Conspiracy. The 1980 film Hangar 18, which dramatized Carr's claims, was described as "a modern-day dramatization" of Roswell by the film's director James L. Conway, and as "nascent Roswell mythology" by folklorist Thomas Bullard. Decades later, Carr's son recalled that he had often "mortified my mother and me by spinning preposterous stories in front of strangers... [tales of] befriending a giant alligator in the Florida swamps, and sharing complex philosophical ideas with porpoises in the Gulf of Mexico."

Alternative 3 and a secret space program

Jerome Clark comments that many UFO conspiracy theory tales "can be traced to a mock documentary Alternative 3, broadcast on British television on June 20, 1977 (but intended for April Fools' Day), and subsequently turned into a paperback book." Barlun similarly notes that elements of the film were later incorporated into UFO conspiracy theories.

According to the fictional research presented in the episode, it was claimed that missing scientists were involved in a secret American/Soviet plan in outer space, and further suggested that interplanetary space travel had been possible for much longer than was commonly accepted. The episode featured a fictional Apollo astronaut who claims to have stumbled on a mysterious lunar base during his moonwalk.

It was claimed that scientists had determined that the Earth's surface would be unable to support life for much longer, due to pollution leading to catastrophic climate change. Physicist "Dr Carl Gerstein" (played by Richard Marner) claimed to have proposed in 1957 that there were three alternatives to this problem. The first alternative was the drastic reduction of the human population on Earth. The second alternative was the construction of vast underground shelters to house government officials and a cross section of the population until the climate had stabilized. The third alternative, the so-called "Alternative 3", was to populate Mars via a way station on the Moon. The final moments of the film feature the discovery of animal life on the surface of Mars.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

On December 14, 1977, the Spielberg blockbuster film Close Encounters of the Third Kind premiered and brought UFO conspiracy theories to a global market. The film opens with a United Nations recovery of Flight 19, lost in the Bermuda Triangle some 32 years prior, in Mexico's Sonora desert; Since Keyhoe's 1955 book The Flying Saucer Conspiracy, theorists had linked Flight 19's disappearance to flying saucers. Early in the film, power company lineman Roy Neary is dispatched to investigate nighttime power outages; Loss of power had been associated with UFOs since 1951's The Day The Earth Stood Still and the 1957 Levelland case. After witnessing a series of UFOs, Neary suffers a 'sunburn' -- sunburns has been included in UFO reports since at least the 1957 case of James Stokes. Neary attends an Air Force press conference, where the sightings are dismissed and ridiculed.

Meanwhile, in Mongolia's Gobi desert, UN researchers discover the SS Cotopaxi, lost in the Bermuda Triangle in 1925. In India, UN researchers record a brief musical motif from villagers who claim they heard it from a UFO. A specific recorded audio signature emitted by a UFO, and used to summon them, had previously been featured in the 1956 film Earth vs. the Flying Saucers.

By broadcasting the musical signature, UN researchers receive a reply directing them to Devil's Tower, Wyoming. To clear the 'ranching country' of civilians, authorities consider faking an anthrax outbreak before ultimately deciding to create a cover story of a train derailment leaking nerve gas.

After his encounter, Neary begins obsessively sculpting a peculiar shape, which he later realizes is Devil's Tower. Alien "contactees" receiving telepathic contact, psychic vision, or 'downloads' had been part of UFO conspiracy lore since the 1940s and 1950s, exemplified by Meade Layne and George Adamski. The film's subplot of an "exchange program" of humans visiting aliens would later resurface in conspiracy theory as Project Serpo.

The film culminates with a summoned landing, like the one UFO conspiracy theorists allege had occurred at Holloman. Legendary French filmmaker François Truffaut played a character inspired by French UFO investigator Jacques Vallee, an advisor to the film. Real life debunker-turned-believer J. Allen Hynek made a cameo in the film. In coming years, conspiracy figure John Lear and others would allege that the powerful insiders had "subtly promoted" Close Encounters and other films to 'educate' the public.

1980s

Jesse Marcel and Roswell conspiracy theories

Main article: Roswell Incident

In February 1978, UFO researcher Stanton Friedman interviewed Jesse Marcel, the only person known to have accompanied the Roswell debris from where it was recovered to Fort Worth where reporters saw material that was claimed to be part of the recovered object. Marcel's statements contradicted those he made to the press in 1947.

In November 1979, Marcel's first filmed interview was featured in a documentary titled "UFO's Are Real", co-written by Friedman. The film had a limited release but was later syndicated for broadcasting. On February 28, 1980, sensationalist tabloid the National Enquirer brought large-scale attention to the Marcel story. On September 20, 1980, the TV series In Search of... aired an interview where Marcel described his participation in the 1947 press conference:

"They wanted some comments from me, but I wasn't at liberty to do that. So, all I could do is keep my mouth shut. And General Ramey is the one who discussed – told the newspapers, I mean the newsman, what it was, and to forget about it. It is nothing more than a weather observation balloon. Of course, we both knew differently."

Marcel gave a final interview to HBO's America Undercover which aired in August 1985. In all his statements, Marcel consistently denied the presence of bodies. Between 1978 and the early 1990s, UFO researchers such as Stanton T. Friedman, William Moore, Karl T. Pflock, and the team of Kevin D. Randle and Donald R. Schmitt interviewed several dozen people who claimed to have had a connection with the events at Roswell in 1947.

In the 1990s, the US military published two reports disclosing the true nature of the crashed aircraft: a surveillance balloon from Project Mogul. Nevertheless, the Roswell incident continues to be of interest to the media, and conspiracy theories surrounding the event persist. Roswell has been described as "the world's most famous, most exhaustively investigated and most thoroughly debunked UFO claim".

Richard Doty, John Lear, and the "Dark Side" of UFO conspiracy theories

Paul Bennewitz

The late 1970s also saw the beginning of controversy centered on Paul Bennewitz of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Bill Moore, Majestic 12

Main article: Majestic 12

External videos
Bill Moore addresses MUFON, July 1 1989

Majestic 12 was the purported organization behind faked government documents delivered anonymously to multiple ufologists in the 1980s. All individuals who received the fake documents were connected to Bill Moore. After the publication of The Roswell Incident, Richard C. Doty and other individuals presenting themselves as Air Force Intelligence Officers approached Moore. They used the unfulfilled promise of hard evidence of extraterrestrial retrievals to recruit Moore, who kept notes on other ufologists and intentionally spread misinformation within the UFO community. The earliest known reference to "MJ Twelve" comes from a 1981 document used in disinformation targeting Paul Bennewitz. In 1982, Bob Pratt worked with Doty and Moore on The Aquarius Project, an unpublished science fiction manuscript about the purported organization. Moore had initially planned to do a nonfiction book but lacked evidence. During a phone call about the manuscript, Moore explained to Pratt that his goal was to "get as much of the story out with as little fiction as possible." That same year, Moore, Friedman, and Jaime Shandera began work on a KPIX-TV UFO documentary, and Moore shared the original "MJ Twelve" memo mentioning Bennewitz. KPIX-TV contacted the Air Force, who noted many style and formatting errors; Moore admitted that he had typed and stamped the document as a facsimile. On December 11, 1984, Shandera received the first anonymous package containing photographs of Majestic-12 documents just after a phone call from Moore. The anonymously-delivered documents detailed the creation of a likely fictitious Majestic 12 group formed to handle Roswell debris.

At a 1989 Mutual UFO Network conference, Moore confessed that he had intentionally fed fake evidence of extraterrestrials to UFO researchers, including Bennewitz. Doty later said that he gave fabricated information to UFO researchers while working at Kirtland Air Force Base in the 1980s. Roswell conspiracy proponents turned on Moore, but not the broader conspiracy theory.

The Majestic-12 materials have been heavily scrutinized and discredited. The various purported memos existed only as copies of photographs of documents. Carl Sagan criticized the complete lack of provenance of documents "miraculously dropped on a doorstep like something out of a fairy story, perhaps 'The Elves and the Shoemaker'." Researchers noted the idiosyncratic date format not found in government documents from the time they were purported to originate, but widely used in Moore's personal notes. Some signatures appear to be photocopied from other documents. For example, a signature from President Harry Truman is identical to one from an October 1, 1947 letter to Vannevar Bush. The so-called Majestic 12 documents surfaced in 1982, suggesting that there was secret, high-level U.S. government interest in UFOs dating to the 1940s. Upon examination, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) declared the documents to be "completely bogus", and many ufologists consider them to be an elaborate hoax.

The term "Extraterrestrial Biological Entities" (or EBEs) was used in the MJ-12 documents.

Linda Moulton Howe, black helicopters, and cattle mutilations

Linda Moulton Howe is an advocate of conspiracy theories that cattle mutilations are of extraterrestrial origin and speculations that the U.S. government is involved with aliens.

George C. Andrews and Milton William Cooper

In 1986, conspiracy theorist George C. Andrews authored Extra-Terrestrials Among Us, accusing the CIA of the Kennedy assassination. Scholar of extremism Michael Barkun notes that "Andrew's political views are almost indistinguishable from those associated with militias, only his placement of extraterrestrials at the pinnacle of conspiracies identifies him as a ufologist." According to Barkun, "the publication of Extra-Terrestrials Among Us marked the beginning of a feverish period of UFO conspiracism, from 1986 to 1989.

Citing Andrews as a source, in 1991 the UFO conspiracy author Bill Cooper published the influential conspiracy work Behold a Pale Horse which claimed that Kennedy was killed after he "informed Majestic 12 that he intended to reveal the presence of aliens to the American people". Behold a Pale Horse became 'wildly popular' with conspiracy theorists and went on to be one of the most-read books in the US prison system. According to Michael Barkun, the theories of Andrews and Cooper helped create "a conspiracist form of UFO speculation, which Jerome Clark refers to as ufology's 'dark side'."

UFO Cover-Up?: Live!

In 1980, the term "Area 51" was used in the popular press after Delta Force trained there for Operation Eagle Claw, the failed attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran. Press again discussed the site in 1984 after the government seized adjacent land.

On October 14, 1988, actor Mike Farrell hosted UFO Cover Up? Live, a two-hour television special "focusing on the government's handling of information regarding UFOs" and "whether there has been any suppression of evidence supporting the existence of UFOs".

Bob Lazar and Area 51

In November 1989, Bob Lazar appeared in a special interview with investigative reporter George Knapp on Las Vegas TV station KLAS to discuss his alleged employment at S-4. In his interview with Knapp, Lazar said he first thought the saucers were secret, terrestrial aircraft, whose test flights must have been responsible for many UFO reports. Gradually, on closer examination and from having been shown multiple briefing documents, Lazar came to the conclusion that the discs must have been of extraterrestrial origin. He claims that they use moscovium, an element that decays in a fraction of a second, to warp space, and that "Grey" aliens are from the Zeta Reticuli star system. According to the Los Angeles Times, he never obtained the degrees he claims to hold from MIT and Caltech. By 1991, Nevada press reported tourists traveling to the Groom Lake region in hopes of glimpsing UFOs.

1990s

The Branton Files are a series of documents espousing various conspiracy theories circulated on the internet since at least the mid-1990s. They are most often attributed to Bruce Alan Walton who claims to have been a victim of alien abduction and had contact through "altered states of consciousness" with humans "living in the inner earth". The files have been characterized as "high fantasy" filled with "complex and convoluted conspiracism".

"Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction"

Main article: Alien Autopsy (1995 film)

Phil Schneider and Dulce Base

In 1995, a man calling himself Philip Schneider made a few appearances at UFO conventions, espousing essentially a new version of the theories mentioned above. Schneider claimed to be the son of U-boat commander who was captured by the allies and switched sides. According to Schneider, his father has been part of the Philadelphia Experiment. Schneider claimed to have played a role in the construction of Deep Underground Military Bases (DUMBs) across the United States, and as a result he said that he had been exposed to classified information of various sorts as well as having personal experiences with EBEs. He claimed to have survived the Dulce Base catastrophe and decided to tell his tale.

According to folklore, Schneider died on January 17, 1996, in a death ruled a suicide, though some of his followers reportedly believed he may have been murdered.

David Icke and reptilians

Main article: David Icke

In the 1990s, author David Icke proposed that world elites are actually "reptilian" aliens. Scholars note that the science-fiction franchise V had told a similar story from 1983 to 1984.

2000s

In 2000, Die Glocke ('the bell') was described by Igor Witkowski as a Nazi wonderweapon.

On December 16, 2017, The New York Times broke the story of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, a Defense Intelligence Agency program to study "unidentified aerial phenomenon" The program's director, Luis Elizondo, has claimed there is a government conspiracy to suppress evidence that UFOs are of non-human origin. From 2019 to 2021, Dave Grusch was the representative of the National Reconnaissance Office to the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force; Beginning in 2023, Grusch publicly claimed elements of the US government and its contractors were covering up evidence of UFOs and their reverse-engineering.

Benjamin Radford has pointed out how unlikely such suppression of evidence is given that "[t]he UFO coverup conspiracy would have to span decades, cross international borders, and transcend political administrations" and that "all of the world's governments, in perpetuity, regardless of which political party is in power and even among enemies, [would] have colluded to continue the coverup."

In popular fiction

Works of popular fiction have included premises and scenes in which a government intentionally prevents disclosure to its populace of the discovery of non-human, extraterrestrial intelligence. Motion picture examples include 2001: A Space Odyssey (as well as the earlier novel by Arthur C. Clarke), Easy Rider, the Steven Spielberg films Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Hangar 18, Total Recall, Men in Black, and Independence Day. Television series and films including The X-Files, Dark Skies, and Stargate have also featured efforts by governments to conceal information about extraterrestrial beings. The plot of the Sidney Sheldon novel The Doomsday Conspiracy involves a UFO conspiracy.

In March 2001, former astronaut and United States Senator John Glenn appeared on an episode of the TV series Frasier playing a fictional version of himself who confesses to a UFO coverup.

Timeline

• March 1946 - Palmer's Amazing Stories publishes Shaver's "A Warning to Future Humanity"
• June 1946 - Palmer's Amazing Stories publishes Crisman's letter corroborating Shaver's claims
• July 1947 - Palmer hires original saucer witness Kenneth Arnold to investigate Crisman's Maury Island incident; USAF investigators killed in plane crash
• October 1947 - Palmer's Amazing Stories published letter by Shaver saying the truth behind the discs "will never be disclosed to common people".
• April 3, 1949 - Winchell alleges cover-up of saucers being Soviet
• December 26, 1949 - Keyhoe's article "The Flying Saucers Are Real" published in True
• October 1949 - Scully's article on Aztec hoax introduces alien bodies
• 1952 - Arnold's The Coming of the Saucers introduces Maury Island hoax to wider audience
• April 1952 - "Have We Visitors From Space" published in Life Magazine
• July 31, 1952 - Samford press conference
• 1955 - Keyhoe authors The Flying Saucer Conspiracy
• 1955 - Morris Jessup authors The Case for the UFO, an anonymously-annotated copy of which introduces "The Philadelphia Experiment".
• 1956 - Keyhoe's The Flying Saucer Conspiracy links UFOs and Bermuda Triangle
• 1956 - Ruppelt authors The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects
• 1956 - Chop's film Unidentified Flying Objects: The True Story of Flying Saucers released
• 1956 - Barker authors They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers introduces Men in Black
• January 22, 1958 - Keyhoe mic cut on live TV
• March 20-21, 1966 - Michigan "swamp gas" UFO reports occur; Hynek's explanation is ridiculed
• April 3, 1968 - 2001: A Space Odyssey released
• October 31, 1968 - Crisman subpoenaed in Clay Shaw JFK assassination case
• January 9, 1969 - Crisman accused of being one of the three tramps
• 1974 - Emenegger releases film UFOs: Past, Present, and Future introduces summoned landing
• 1974 - Carr alleges alien bodies from Aztec are stored in "Hangar 18"
• 1974 - Hynek alleges a 'Cosmic Watergate'
• 1976 - Palmer links "flying saucers, The Shaver Mystery, The Kennedy’s assassinations, Watergate and Fred Crisman"
• November 16, 1977 - Close Encounters of the Third Kind released
• November 1979 - Jesse Marcel suggests Roswell was extraterrestrial in Friedman documentary
• November 12, 1980- Moulton Howe's documentary A Strange Harvest links cattle mutilations to UFOs.
• October 14, 1988 - UFO Cover Up? Live introduces Majestic 12 and Area 51
• July 1, 1989 - Bill Moore addresses MUFON
• November 1989 - Bob Lazar first televised interview
• 1991 - Cooper's Behold a Pale Horse published
• September 10, 1993 -The X-Files premieres
• July 3, 1996 - Independence Day premieres
• July 2, 1997 - Men in Black premieres
• December 16, 2017 - New York Times publishes story about AATIP and the Nimitz case

See also

• Alien abduction
• Area 51
• Brookings Report
• Cattle mutilation
• Crop circle
• Flying saucer
• List of alleged extraterrestrial beings
• List of major UFO sightings
• Men in black
• Planetary objects proposed in religion, astrology, ufology and pseudoscience
• Project Blue Book
• Rendlesham Forest incident
• Roswell incident
• Storm Area 51

Notes and references

Bibliography

• "Air Force Freezes UFO Story". Ann Arbor Sun. Zodiac News Service. November 1, 1974 – via Ann Arbor District Library.
• Baker, Nicholson (31 January 2024). "How We Lost Our Minds About UFOs". New York Magazine.
• Blum, Howard (1990). Out There: The Government's Secret Quest for Extraterrestrials. New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-0-671-66260-8.
• Carr, Timothy (July 1997). "Son of Originator of 'Alien Autopsy' Story Casts Doubt on Father's Credibility" (PDF). Skeptical Inquirer. Vol. 21, no. 4.
• Disch, Thomas M. (July 5, 2000). The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World. New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-0-684-85978-1.
• Erdmann, Terry J.; Block, Paula M. (2000). Deep Space Nine Companion. New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-0-671-50106-8.
• Fuller, John G. (1966). Incident at Exeter. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. OCLC 712083.
• Goldberg, Robert Alan (2001). "Chapter 6: The Roswell Incident". Enemies Within: the Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-13294-6.
• Gulyas, Aaron John (2014). The Chaos Conundrum: Essays on UFOs, Ghosts & Other High Strangeness in Our Non-Rational and Atemporal World. Luton, Bedfordshire: Andrews UK Limited. ISBN 978-0-9916975-8-8.
• Gulyas, Aaron John (2016). Conspiracy Theories: the Roots, Themes and Propagation of Paranoid Political and Cultural Narratives. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland. ISBN 978-1-4766-2349-8.
• Jones, Jack (October 12, 1974). "No Green Men Here, Base Officials Say". Dayton Daily News – via Newspapers.com.
• Kloor, Keith (2019). "UFOs Won't Go Away". Issues in Science and Technology. 35 (3): 39–56. JSTOR 26949023.
• Korff, Kal (1997a). The Roswell UFO Crash: What They Don't Want You to Know (First ed.). Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books. ISBN 978-1-57392-127-5.
• May, Andrew (2016). Pseudoscience and Science Fiction. Cham, Zug: Springer International. ISBN 978-3-319-42605-1.
• Moore, Bill; Pratt, Bob (2007) [9 July 1982]. "Pratt Sensitive" (PDF) (Transcript of tape-recorded conversation). Archived from the original (PDF) on February 27, 2008.
• Nickell, Joe; McGaha, James (May–June 2012). "The Roswellian Syndrome: How Some UFO Myths Develop". Skeptical Inquirer. Vol. 36, no. 3. Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. Archived from the original on January 26, 2013. Retrieved February 6, 2013.
• Olmsted, Kathryn S. (2009). "Chapter 6: Trust No One: Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theories from the 1970s to the 1990s". Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11. Oxford University Press. pp. 173–204. ISBN 978-0-19-975395-6. Retrieved 2016-03-16.
• Peebles, Curtis (1994). Watch the Skies!: A Chronicle of the Flying Saucer Myth. Washington, DC: The Smithsonian Institution. ISBN 978-1-56098-343-9.
• Pflock, Karl (2001). Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books. ISBN 978-1-57392-894-6.
• Sagan, Carl (1997). The Demon-Haunted World (Paperback ed.). London: Headline. ISBN 978-0-7472-5156-9.
• Smith, Toby (2000). Little Gray Men: Roswell and the Rise of a Popular Culture. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. ISBN 978-0-8263-2121-3.

Further reading

• Barkun, Michael (2003). A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America. University of California Press; 1 edition. ISBN 978-0-520-23805-3.
• Peebles, Curtis. Watch the Skies! A Chronicle of the Flying Saucer Myth. Washington, DC:Smithsonian Institution, 1994. ISBN 1-56098-343-4.

External links

• CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947–90 Archived 2019-10-01 at the Wayback Machine
• National Security Agency UFO Documents Index Archived 2015-07-22 at the Wayback Machine
• 20th Century UFO Conspiracies, a lecture by Emory University Professor Felix Harcourt