Insiders in the UFO business these days are often heard to say that the belief that UFOs are extraterrestrial craft is silly. There is insufficient evidence to justify such a belief. Further, the logistics of space travel from some distant star are too difficult. (In this they agree, surprisingly, with Carl Sagan [1972] when he points out the difficulties in overcoming such obstacles to space travel as the speed of light and the amount of fuel needed.) Do these “avant garde” UFOlogists conclude from all this that UFOs exist only as perceptual constructions, misidentifications, and hoaxes? Not at all. Instead, a host of bizarre new hypotheses has sprung up to save the dedicated UFOlogist from having to admit that there is no foundation to all the reports. One UFO group called Samisdat, based in Toronto, Ontario, believes that UFOs are really secret Nazi aircraft. Supposedly, just as World War II ended in May 1945 Hitler and all the other missing leaders of the Third Reich were whisked away by UFO to a secret Nazi hideout in the Antarctic, where they reside today, plotting the rise of the Fourth Reich. This same group also markets Nazi propaganda.
Some fundamentalist Christian groups believe that UFOs are really angels and foretell the Second Coming or Judgment Day. Of course, only those who truly believe in the UFOs will be saved when the world ends. Actually, this type of group has a longer history than might be suspected. Even in the 1950s there were groups who believed that UFOs were harbingers of the end of the world, sent to save believers. One such group was infiltrated and studied by several social psychologists who wrote a classic book on the dynamics of such a group and the group’s response when the end of the world did not come as predicted (Festinger, Riecken and Schachter 1956). As you might expect, the failure of the world to end on schedule did not suggest to several members of the group that their belief was wrong. Instead, they rationalized events to convince themselves that they had simply miscalculated. That particular group is no longer in existence, but another group that has suffered several failed end-of-the-world predictions is still around: the Seventh-day Adventist Church. This sect was founded in the 1840s when one William Miller predicted that the world would end in the year following March 21, 1843. It didn’t, so Miller promptly recalculated that the end would come on October 22, 1844 (Randi 1980; Numbers and Butler 1987). It didn’t. Nonetheless, the church is still in business. They now contend that the end of the world is near, although they are wise enough to avoid making specific predictions about the date.
Occasionally these end-of-the-world movements are, at least in part, financially motivated. In the west in the late 1970s two people, variously called “Bo and Peep” or “The Two,” convinced several hundred people that the world would soon end. They told their followers that they would be saved by UFOs, that to purify themselves they should give up all their worldly goods (by transferring them to Bo and Peep), and that they should follow “The Two” into the Montana wilderness.
Alas, Bo and Peep did not just vanish into the Montana wilderness to live happily ever after on the money they had scammed from their gullible victims. Rather, they reappeared in the mid-1990s as leaders of what was to become the deadliest UFO cult in history. This was the Heaven’s Gate cult. Led by Bo, its members believed that there was a flying saucer in the tail of Comet Hale-Bopp, that superior beings were aboard that craft, and that earthlings who chose to voluntarily leave the primitive “vehicles” of their bodies would be transported to the UFO and to the next level of existence. They also believed that Christ had been an alien. They believed that de- emphasizing the mundane, earthly pleasures of existence—such as sexual pleasure—would help them reach the next level. Several male members believed this to the extent that the had themselves castrated. (Ouch! And you thought flying coach was painful!) The cult came to a horrible end in March of 1997 when Bo and thirty-eight followers committed suicide by taking poison and tying plastic bags over their heads. They were all spiffily attired, including Nike running shoes, and their bodies were covered with purple cloaks. Videotapes left behind documented that they were looking forward to dying. “I just can’t wait to get up there,” one member said on tape (Kurtz 1997; Gardner 1997). If ever there was any doubt about the harmful effects of naive, uncritical belief in such things as UFOs, the Heaven’s Gate episode should remove it.
My own favorite way-out theory of UFOs is that they come from an advanced civilization not somewhere in space but right here on Earth. Where might such a civilization be hiding? Where else but inside the earth? The earth is hollow, this theory maintains, and an advanced civilization is hiding there, complete with UFOs. This hollow-earth theory is the creation of the late Ray Palmer, a science fiction writer who believed not only that the earth is hollow but also that it has a hole at the north pole through which the flying saucers come and go. And how has this hole and the hollowness of the earth escaped the notice of geologists, explorers, airline pilots, and governments? Palmer maintained that they all know about it and are involved in a giant cover-up to hide this important knowledge from the rest of the world’s people. Only those few who have managed to penetrate the curtain of silence and who are trying to bring this momentous news to the public can be trusted. Gardner (1987b) describes the origin of the hollow-earth theory in some detail.
A case of collective delusion that lasted ten years, beginning about 1969, and covered a large part of the western United States was, and sometimes still is, blamed on UFOs and their occupants. This is the so-called cattle mutilation mystery. Starting in 1969 and gathering steam over the next few years, reports of mysteriously mutilated cattle found on the range in the West became quite common. What was causing these deaths? The deaths could not have been due to natural causes, people believed, because there were surgically sharp incisions on the bodies —incisions in very strange places—the anus was often cored like an apple, and the eyes, vagina, penis and testicles, tongue, and other soft parts of the body were removed. In addition to the UFO hypothesis, some felt that satanic cults or supernatural forces were at work. As reports increased in numbers, there was a call for the government to take action. In April 1979 the Justice Department funded an investigation of the problem by a former FBI agent. His report (Rommel 1980) and Kagan and Summer’s (1983) book set to rest the claims for UFO or paranormal causes of the mutilations. The cattle were dying of natural causes, such as eating poisonous plants, and the bodies were being attacked by scavengers. Scavengers find it difficult to chew through tough cowhide. Instead, they attack the soft areas of the body, and these were just the areas found missing in the “mutilated” cattle. What about the surgical precision of the incisions? In fact the incisions weren’t surgically precise at all. This was easily seen when an actual scalpel was used to make an incision on the body of a dead cow, as was done as part of Rommel’s investigation. The scavenger-caused wounds simply had a sharper edge than one would expect. Few ranchers, coming on the dead and partly rotted body of one of their cattle, would bother to inspect the wounds for the small tooth marks that would be visible. Also, as a body decomposes, gases build up within and the body swells. The edges of any wounds are thereby stretched and come to appear sharper than they originally were.
The media played a role in the continued hysteria over the cattle mutilation reports. Sensational reporting that played up the outlandish speculations and ignored the true explanation probably prolonged this particular episode well beyond its natural life span.
THE GREAT UFO COVER-UP
The existence of absurd beliefs like the hollow-earth theory and the fact that some people strongly believe them raise interesting questions about the distinction between charming eccentricity and certifiable craziness. Presumably, no sane individual would take seriously the ideas of Ray Palmer and his followers. But just such charges of a massive government conspiracy to hide the truth about UFOs from the American people have been made for decades by UFO proponents, all without a shred of evidence to support the charges.
The basic idea is that the government has conclusive evidence that UFOs are real extraterrestrial spacecraft and that it has had this evidence since shortly after the first modern UFOs were seen in 1947. Further, the government is hiding this evidence from the American public. Only a few dedicated UFOlogists have managed to penetrate the cloak of government secrecy to find the truth, often at considerable risk, and bring it to the attention of the public. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is said to be heavily involved, along with the military and almost every other branch of government.
Before considering the evidence put forth to support this conspiracy theory, let us examine it on purely logical grounds. Logically, the conspiracy theory is absurd. Over the past several decades the government has shown its inability to keep even extremely important secrets. The Pentagon Papers were leaked to the press. The power of the presidency was not enough to keep the secret of Watergate. The secret bombings in Cambodia at the end of the Vietnam war weren’t secret for long. In the late 1980s, the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages deal was revealed. And yet, over a fifty-year period, what would be the biggest news story of the century—the discovery that
