Among the ufologists

The New Criterion, March 1, 2018

International UFO Museum and Research Center, Roswell, NM, July 1, 2017 © Andrew Stuttaford

After losing my way last summer in a tiny town best known as the deathplace of Billy the Kid, I eventually located the right desert highway. Outperforming the alleged aliens who, seventy years before, had allegedly crashed their alleged spacecraft nearby, I swept past a welcome sign decorated with—in honor of a cow town’s real and imagined pasts—cattle and a flying saucer, and reached Roswell, New Mexico, in one piece:

The City of Roswell invites UFO enthusiasts and skeptics alike to join in the celebration of one of the most debated incidents in history.

History is not what it was.

Baymont Hotel, Roswell, NM, June 30, 2017 © Andrew Stuttaford

Alien kitsch at my hotel’s front desk, an alien face on the elevator floor and each elevator button too.

Baymont Hotel, Roswell, NM, June 30, 2017 © Andrew Stuttaford

Applebee’s held itself aloof, but Arby’s was ready to “welcome” unsuspecting aliens. A little green matador graced the walls of a Mexican restaurant, and the striking architecture of one local McDonald’s paid tribute to a saucer that never was. Downtown, an immense metallic construction with a pointed rocket nose turned out to be an old grain silo, a disappointment dispelled by a $2 “black light spacewalk” in a nearby souvenir store, the not-exactly-NASA  Roswell Space Center.

Roswell, NM, July 1, 2017 © Andrew Stuttaford

The Roswell story—or, appropriately, its fragments—can be found scattered across American culture. It starts in mid-June 1947 when ranch hand William “Mac” Brazel, a link to a legend of the Old West (his uncle may have killed Billy the Kid’s killer), stumbled upon the debris that propelled him into a legend of a space age that had yet to arrive.

Brazel wasn’t impressed by the “bright wreckage made up of rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather tough paper, and sticks” strewn out there in the desert, but a week or so later he heard that a sighting in Washington State had triggered America’s first proper UFO “flap” and, critically, a $3,000 reward for physical evidence of one of these contraptions. Even then it was a few days before Brazel (who had no phone) “whispered kinda confidential” to the sheriff during a routine visit to Roswell, some seventy-five miles away. The sheriff contacted the authorities at the Roswell airfield, home, perhaps fittingly, to the only unit on the planet then equipped to drop an atomic bomb: there are those who speculate that it was New Mexico’s role—from Los Alamos to White Sands—in so much of the development of America’s nascent nuclear arsenal that (supposedly) drew extraterrestrial observers to the Southwest. It was two humans, however, the intelligence officer Jesse Marcel and a colleague, who retrieved the wreckage from Brazel. On July 8, the base’s commander ordered his public information officer to put out a press release, and that’s what Lieutenant Walter Haut did:

The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence office of the 509th Bomb Group . . . was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc.

The wreckage had become a disc, the disc became a headline: “RAAF [Roswell Army Air Field] Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region,” was the Roswell Daily Record’s headline on a front page, still available for sale across town in formats ranging from T-shirt to magnet.

In the release, Haut also explained that the disc had been inspected, “then loaned by Major Marcel to higher headquarters.” It was there that Brigadier General Roger Ramey let the air out of the balloon by telling the press that the wreckage was a balloon, or, more precisely, what was left of a weather balloon and the radar reflectors it had been transporting. The Roswell Daily Record ’sheadline was bleak: “General Ramey Empties Roswell Saucer.” A “harassed” Mac Brazel, it related, was sorry he had “told” but added that “he had previously found two weather observation balloons on the ranch, but . . . what he found this time did not in any way resemble either of these”—intriguing, but not intriguing enough to be talked about for the next three decades.

Roswell, NM, June 30, 2017 © Andrew Stuttaford

But people continued to watch the skies. The suspicion that there might be something up there bubbled away, ginned up by an eager press and spinners—mad, Munchausen, mercenary, or misguided—of tall tales that won a huge following. An obsession fed by an entertainment industry that in turn echoed and amplified the stories that its own creations provoked among the credulous, flying saucers were made all the more believable by Sputnik, Vostok, and Gemini. If we could do it, why couldn’t they? Even Uncle Sam was curious and, with unknown Soviet weaponry also in mind, carried out studies—most famously Project Blue Book—into UFOs, only to conclude by the end of the 1960s that aliens were not involved. Many Americans (and not just Americans) disagreed, and it was revealed last December that between 2007 and 2012 the Pentagon ran a secret project (with an afterlife that apparently still continues) to take another look at what might be up there. Its investigations turned up some thought-provoking reports as well as startling video and audio recordings, but the fact that its funding has—so we’re told—been eliminated is pretty good evidence that there is no evidence that anybody green has come calling.

The postwar fascination with UFOs attracted the attention of Carl Jung, a man with a weakness for the strange. In a letter to the editor of the New Republic in 1957, Jung essentially conceded that—whatever UFOs were—they were real, but the title of his Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (1958) gives the game away, and its text is high Jung: Platonic months, “spring point enter[ing] Aquarius,” mandalas, manifestations of anxiety about atomic war. But the dodgy old sage was not wrong to spot traces of the spiritual in this phenomenon. The wave of interest in UFOs has occasionally curdled into flying-saucer cults, and some of their descendants, despite Heaven’s Gate’s opening to oblivion, still flourish today.

Roswell, NM, July 2, 2017 © Andrew Stuttaford

Both the Bible and concerns about the dangers of UFO cults helped inspire “Challenges to E.T.,” a conference held that seventieth- anniversary weekend in the Roswell Mall, a complex most notable for the crashed saucer lodged in the roof of its movie theater, and some way from the goings-on downtown. Perhaps that was just as well. Whatever the underlying reason for this gathering, its focus seemed to be on rejecting “the extraterrestrial hypothesis” in favor of just about anything else outré enough to draw a crowd, from human experimentation to, well, I’ll just quote from the best introductory slide I have ever seen: “Demons and the Pentagon: What the Hell?”

Roswell, NM, July 2, 2017 © Andrew Stuttaford

More benignly, belief in powerful, otherworldly aliens has a niche in the catch-all spirituality of our own time, a belief inspired by a notion, however weird, of technology, while satisfying an all-too-human craving for enchantment. The “God gene” is not easy to escape: those who would not normally consider themselves religious appear to be more likely to believe in ufos than their churchgoing contemporaries. Then again, why choose? In one store downtown, aliens shared shelf space with Jesus, Mary, and, if I’m not mistaken, a Hindu deity.

Roswell, NM, July 1, 2017 © Andrew Stuttaford

A British speaker at “Challenges to E.T.” did more than most to decode the enduring interest in the Roswell Incident, comparing it with his country’s long-standing fixation with Jack the Ripper: people like a puzzle. I watched the audience at a session elsewhere in town, gripped by a grainy computerized reconstruction of otherwise illegible wording on the piece of paper—the “Ramey Memo”— photographed in the general’s hand as he studied what was either the wreckage from Roswell or, some maintain, a tawdry substitution for the real thing: “Now we come to a really intriguing group of words, which are clearly visible as on the ‘disk’ with discernible quotation marks around ‘disk’ . . . ”

Roswell, NM, July 1, 2017 © Andrew Stuttaford

But Roswell’s puzzle was meant to have been solved by Ramey. For decades it seemed that it had, remaining largely forgotten until the late 1970s. As recounted in the invaluable UFO Crash at Roswell: The Genesis of a Modern Myth (1997), a work in part anthropological study and in part persuasive forensic debunking, one of the preconditions for its resurrection was a growth in distrust of the U.S. Government (who else would have concealed the wreckage?), a precondition that the U.S. Government did its best to foster. It’s telling that a leading “ufologist,” Stanton Friedman, a retired nuclear physicist no less—has described Roswell as a “cosmic Watergate.”

Roswell, NM, July 1, 2017 © Andrew Stuttaford

Suspicion of dark doings by the government is as American as dark doings by the government. The sight of conspiracy theorists being welcomed into a red, white, and blue town is not so very contradictory. Banks and fast food joints advertised their support for the police and the military while street lights were topped with alien head globes but wrapped in Old Glory (July 4th was approaching). And there is something splendidly American about the way that a remote city of fifty thousand not known for very much milks the cash cow that didn’t fall to earth.

Roswell, NM, June 30, 2017 © Andrew Stuttaford

A section of downtown had been blocked off. Businesses vied for the best alien (“or patriotic”) window display. Supplementing a distinctive collection of stores—Alien Invasion, Alien Headz, Alien Stop, Alien Zone—were booths offering alien this, alien that, and alien tat. Vendors sold snacks of any description and snacks beyond description. There were pony rides, a water slide (the temperature was in the nineties), an alien costume contest for pets, and an alien costume contest for humans. A man under a canopy invited passers-by to “receive prayer,” while a rival peddled an enlightenment all his own: “The hierarchy of the cosmos and the connection between God, aliens, and man.” Attractions in front of the fine early-twentieth-century courthouse included a welcome tent, the Ten Commandments carved in stone, and a signpost to the planets. Bands played soft rock and Tejano, a borderlands mingling.

Alien Costume (pet) contest, Roswell, NM, July 1, 2017 © Andrew Stuttaford

A block or two away, at the International UFO Museum and Research Center, much expanded since, oh yes, my last visit in 1995, there was work to be done. Travis Walton discussed his abduction by aliens in 1975, a distressing if dubious story subsequently turned into the unexpectedly entertaining Fire in the Sky, a movie released during the early ’90s abduction boom. Other stars in the Roswell Galaxy spoke on the government cover-up, physical evidence of the crash, and additional matters that, if proven, would change our understanding of everything. Yet a touch of carnival had crept in. A flier (“the alien bodies! wow!”) promoted a workshop hosted by the “alien hunter” Derrel Sims (admission $10).

Roswell, NM, June 30, 2017 © Andrew Stuttaford

More than a touch: to be sure, there was a well-stocked library crammed with ufological scholarship, but the gift shop struck a more frivolous note: alien T-shirts, alien sweatshirts, alien sippy cups, alien key-rings, alien pens, alien onesies, alien ashtrays, alien beanies, alien magnets, plush aliens, plastic aliens, blow-up aliens, everything alien except the real, elusive thing. Educational materials lined the walls of the main hall—those photographs that can’t always be so quickly explained away, pictures of “ancient astronauts,” the usual—but a replica of the robot from The Day the Earth Stood Still stood still nearby, not far from a recreation of that infamous alien autopsy and an engaging display in which a flying saucer whirled behind four forbidding animatronic aliens. The UFO  museum, “a 501(c)(3) non-profit educational organization,” may maintain a claim to represent the “serious side” of UFO research, but it subverts that seriousness with a wink and a nod.

International UFO Museum and Research Center, Roswell, NM, June 30, 2017 © Andrew Stuttaford

Many of those thronging its premises understood that very well. Yes, true believers parted respectfully when Stanton Friedman made his way through his flock and gathered earnestly around Travis Walton. But others seemed less convinced, sci-fi curious perhaps, intrigued maybe, believers even, but without the conviction to take their belief very seriously. They were playing a game they half-hoped was real. Others were just there for the fun, their pilgrimage more Mardi Gras than the Camino de Santiago, four girls in shiny skirts and headphone hairstyles, three middle-aged ladies in “alien” eyeglasses vamping in front of those forbidding aliens as the dry ice billowed. Uncle Sam sauntered around the main exhibition hall on stilts, his presence a salute to the doomed spacecraft’s touchdown into American folklore.

International UFO Museum and Research Center, Roswell, NM, July 1, 2017 © Andrew Stuttaford

The deliberations weren’t confined to the museum and the mall. The Roswell Daily Record hosted a series of lectures in a conference room behind K-Bob’s Steakhouse. At the city’s convention center, topics included abductees’ civil rights and, the horror, “the origins of the UFO ridicule factor.”

Roswell, NM, June 30, 2017 © Andrew Stuttaford

Bryce Zabel, one of the creators of Dark Skies, a UFO-conspiracy TVshow from the mid-nineties, once observed that “true or untrue . . . Roswell is seminal.” True or untrue.

It took more than Vietnam and Watergate to bring a long-lost moment in New Mexico’s history back to life. Possibly it was only a coincidence that, as is noted in UFO Crash at Roswell, tales of crashed saucers were beginning to come back into vogue in the late 1970s, but it was then that the not-always-reliable Jesse Marcel (by now, he said, a believer in UFOs, certain that the wreckage “was nothing that came from earth”) gave an interview to National Enquirer, a magazine known for publishing items that could be believed, half-believed, or believed not at all.

Other stories too were recalled: the same issue of the Roswell Daily Record that had featured Walter Haut’s press release had also contained a report of how the “hardware man” Dan Wilmot, “one of the most respected and reliable citizens in town,” and his wife had witnessed “a large glowing” object “zooming” over Roswell on July 2, 1947 (awkwardly a week or so after Brazel had discovered that mysterious wreckage, an inconvenient truth that failed to deter some of the faithful or the fraudulent from treating the two stories as one).

The Wilmots’ account was at least published contemporarily. Vern and Jean Maltais were not so timely. Two prominent members of the long cavalcade of hoaxers, grifters, pseudo-sleuths, opportunists, attention-seekers, and fantasists who have contributed to the ever-shifting Roswell narrative, they emerged in 1978 to claim that they had been told by a friend that he (and, naturally, given the rich cast of characters who wander in and out of this saga, some archeologists) had discovered alien wreckage (and small alien corpses) in the Plains of San Agustin, New Mexico, or maybe somewhere else. This was enough for Charles Berlitz, a linguist (one of those Berlitzes) and the author of books on Atlantis, the Bermuda Triangle, and other concocted mysteries, and the ufologist William Moore. With the help of research by Stanton Friedman, they published The Roswell Incidentin 1980, a farrago of speculation that arguably did more than anything else to turn a spurious crash into a genuine sensation. The most interesting thing about it was how well (very) it sold.

Roswell, NM, July 1, 2017 © Andrew Stuttaford

As the Roswell industry grew, clarity shrank, dates blurred, locations went walkabout, saucers changed shape, there was one crash, there were two, the aliens all died, one survived, a local undertaker was asked about the availability of undersized coffins, a “missing” nurse saw more than she should, the military (a mean-eyed, red-headed colonel or captain, a black sergeant) bullied witnesses into silence, evidence was stolen. Documents showing that Eisenhower was briefed were later shown to be forgeries and set off a schism, but were the forgeries created to discredit those who were coming too close to the truth?

Roswell, NM, June 30, 2017 © Andrew Stuttaford

As it happens, there probably was a cover-up, of sorts. The U.S.Air Force published two reports in the mid-1990s, just after TheX-Files, a television show that played off (and further popularized) the Roswell myth while weaving it into a dense conspiratorial mix that spread far beyond the small screen, had begun its long run. The first, the exhaustively researched and at times drily amusing The Roswell Report: Fact vs. Fiction, brings a touch of much-missed Mission Control rigor as it cuts through the miasma, both pre-modern and post-, which envelops so much of the Roswell debate. If you’ll forgive the spoiler, its writers found “no evidence of any extraterrestrial craft or alien flight crew.” What they did find “[was] . . . a shadowy, formerly Top Secret project, code-named mogul,” involving the launch of “balloon trains” some six-hundred feet long and laden with sensors designed to detect whether the Soviets had successfully tested a nuclear device (America’s nuclear weapons monopoly only ended in 1949). Given the secrecy that surrounded mogul, Ramey either didn’t recognize the Roswell wreckage or was unwilling to identify it: either way, he left enough of a gap for the conspiracy theories to seep through.

The Roswell Report: Case Closed was a sequel designed to address the question of alien corpses. Rather charitably, it suggests that recollections of these extraterrestrial unfortunates were the result of memories—muddled over the decades—of Air Force anthropomorphic test dummies parachuted from high altitudes over the desert and, separately, two accidents in which Air Force personnel were killed or injured in the late 1950s.

To some, these reports were merely a new twist on an old cover-up. Facts rarely get in the way of a good story or a satisfying cult. The Roswell show rolls on, sporadically spiced up by the rise and fall of ever-more-innovative embellishments and now graced by a hereditary nobility of sorts: at one meeting we were invited to applaud descendants of the principal witnesses, proud to carry a torch that sheds no light. No matter: according to a 2013 survey, roughly a fifth of Americans believe that a saucer crashed near Roswell and the government covered it up. The UFO museum received some two hundred thousand visitors in 2016 and fifteen thousand people reportedly showed up for the seventieth anniversary celebrations.

Roswell, NM, July 1, 2017 © Andrew Stuttaford

No pilgrimage is complete without a procession, no Mardi Gras without a parade. On the Saturday night of my visit, we lined Main Street as hot dusk cooled into warm darkness, some in costume, some prudently sporting tinfoil hats, one (your correspondent) clad in a white linen jacket that had already attracted some comments from more casually dressed attendees earlier in the day. At around 9 P.M., the Electric Light Parade began; illuminated floats and illuminated cars coasted by, escorted by a retinue of illuminated aliens and a zig-zagging skater encased in a glowing green saucer. The High Desert Pipes and Drums of Albuquerque brought up the rear, its marchers illuminated and kilted, drums beating and pipes skirling their way through—of course—Scotland the Brave into the New Mexico night.

Roswell, NM, July 1, 2017 © Andrew Stuttaford

Area 51 Revisited

National Review Online, May 23, 2003

The White Letterbox, August 2002  © Andrew Stuttaford

The famous "black mailbox" is, these days, white. It is battered, chipped, and covered with graffiti, but white, definitely white, not black at all — a suitable symbol for Area 51, a place where legend and reality never quite seem to match. To find it, drive north from Las Vegas into the Nevada desert, bleak and broiling at the time of my visit, blistering in the late August sun, an empty, strangely lovely place of dust devils, triple-digit temperatures, and massively overheated imaginations. Highway 93 will take you most of the way. Just past the supermarket at Ash Springs, turn left at the intersection onto that stretch of Highway 375 now officially (thank you, Governor Miller!) known as the Extraterrestrial Highway. No little green men, but a large green sign — decorated, naturally, with a couple of flying saucers — tells the visitor that this is no ordinary scenic route. This is a drive where it is wise to watch the skies as well as the road.

The mailbox itself is another 20 miles farther along. It stands, a solitary sentinel in the desert, just to the left of the highway. A dirt track heads southwest, to the mountains in the distance and, much nearer, to a far more formidable obstacle, the boundary of a vast forbidden zone: Area 51, the secret installation that some call Dreamland.

Area 51! The name follows the numbering pattern established for mapping the old nuclear-testing site that it, alarmingly, adjoins. The notoriety dates from that moment, sometime in the early 1990s, when America's interest in UFOs, never a field reserved solely for the sane, tipped over into outright mania — a mania exploited by the entertainment industry to create a series of movies and TV shows that simultaneously fed off, and fed, the narratives and obsessions of those who believed E.T. had come for real. The result was to create an echo chamber of the ludicrous, where fiction, fantasy, and (very rarely) fact bounced off one another to create ever-amplifying myth, paranoia, and pre-millennial speculation. For some, the story centered on the sweaty, delusional sexual psychodrama of all those probing, prying, prurient abductions; for others it was a blend of gearhead fantasy and conspiracy theory centered on a mysterious, lonely base baking in the Nevada sun.

Extraterrestrial Highway, August 2002  © Andrew Stuttaford

Area 51! It was a video game, a book (many, many books, actually, including Area 51, Area 51: The Reply, Area 51: The Truth, Area 51: Excalibur, Area 51: The Mission, Area 51: The Sphinx, and Area 51: The Grail), and a rap CD by the Body Snatchaz. It was the subject of sci-fi drama, numerous documentaries, frequent articles, and wild, wild rumors, all fed by tall tales and repeated sightings of lights in the sky — enigmatic, hovering, darting, pulsating, unexplained, all colors, all shapes, and, for the credulous, all meanings. It was, inevitably, a place where Mulder and Scully came calling and it was, only slightly less predictably, the base from which Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum saved the world in Independence Day.

Area 51! Depending on who you chose to believe, it was a top-secret testing ground for the U.S. Air Force, a treasure house of extraterrestrial technology, a morgue for little green (well, gray actually) corpses, or, more cheerfully, a facility (ever since a treaty signed with Eisenhower in 1954) for aliens who were still alive. More lurid still, there was talk of genetic experimentation, of ghastly unnatural cocktails of human and alien DNA, and of subterranean vats filled with body parts and other unknown horrors.

Subterranean vats filled with body parts? If that's not enough to put off uninvited visitors to Area 51, a locally produced pamphlet warns what the U.S. government will do to those who stray too close:

When you approach the boundary… there are signs on both sides of the road — Do Not Pass The Signs or you will be arrested on a charge of trespassing on the Nellis Bombing and Gunnery Range. The fine for a first offense is $600… You will see two tripod mounted surveillance cameras. You may also see guards in white jeep Cherokees or champagne colored Ford pick-ups watching you from nearby locations. As long as you do not violate the boundary, they have no authority to interfere with your activities. If you hike near the border — do not pass any of the orange posts that mark the boundary!

Well, that sounded like way too much trouble, the sort of challenge more suited to a fearless investigative reporter than to me. Craven and cautious, I rejoined Highway 375 and headed further west, to Rachel, Nev., home of the Little A'Le'Inn.

Little A'Le'Inn, Rachel, NV, August 2002  ©  Andrew Stuttaford

Rachel is a slight, scrappy settlement with a population of under 100 — an encampment more than a town, little more than a few trailers and a Baptist church dumped in the middle of the high desert plain. Except for the alien invasion just across the horizon, not a lot is going on in this burg. For entertainment, there's checking the readings on the radiation-monitoring station (a reminder of all those nuclear tests), hanging out at the Quik Pik convenience store, and, of course, the Little'A'Le'Inn (formerly the Oasis, Club 111, the Stage Stop, the Watering Hole, and the Rachel Bar and Grill), the Silver State's best-known intergalactic diner/motel, home of the "World Famous Alien Burger" ("served with lettuce, tomato, pickle, onion, and our Special Secret Alien Sauce") and notorious epicenter of Area 51 intrigue.

The diner ("earthlings," a sign says, are "welcome" — phew!) itself is impossible to miss. Alien figures peep out through its windows, and a tow truck is parked outside — a small flying saucer hanging forlornly from its hoist. To enter, go through the door invitingly marked "Notice — Cancer & Leukemia cases… Possible Compensation Available!" (another souvenir of those pesky nuclear tests) and you will find yourself in a large, low-ceilinged dining room with a pool table, a bar, and the biggest collection of alien ephemera outside the flea markets on Jupiter.

There are rubber aliens, plastic aliens, glow-in-the-dark aliens, inflatable aliens, gray, green, purple, and orange aliens, aliens in T-shirts, an alien in a dress, and mom, pop, and junior alien all sharing a comfortable chair. The walls are lined with more — alien yo-yos, alien cigarette lighters, alien ashtrays, alien sippy cups, alien guitar frets, alien playing cards, alien beer coolers, alien beer mugs, alien sunglasses, alien jewelry, alien key rings, alien refrigerator magnets, alien postcards, alien Christmas decorations, alien baseball caps — and the T-shirts, as countless, it seems, as the stars in the sky: "Area 51 — it doesn't exist and I wasn't there."

For more dedicated enthusiasts, there are books, magazines, pamphlets, videos (yes, that old autopsy film — again), and, lining the walls, those inevitable blurred, ambiguous pictures of lights in the sky that are always a feature of places such as these. And then there are the bumper stickers praising Newt Gingrich and attacking that hopeless man from Hope.

Gingrich? Clinton? There is a sense that this is a place that time may be passing by, that the Little A'Le'Inn may be becoming the Little A'Le'Out. Back in the 1990s, Rachel was a hotbed of alien activity (or, at least, the search for alien activity), complete with a research center/trailer (close to the Quik Pik) run by one Glenn Campbell (not to be confused with Glen Campbell — one "n," Rhinestone Cowboy). The town played host to UFO seminars, UFO Friendship Campouts, UFO technicians (supposed ex-Area 51 employee Bob Lazar — worked on alien technology, saw mysterious alien writing), Ufologists, UFO tourists, and, of course, Larry King. Yes, Larry King — UFO Cover-Up? Live From Area 51. You missed it?

Rachel, Nevada, August 2002  ©  Andrew Stuttaford

But that was then. The saucers will return, doubtless, to soar again over our popular culture, but UFOs, for now, appear to be going the way of the hula hoop, and it's going to take more than Spielberg's revealingly lackluster Taken (complete with Area 51 references) to bring them back. That's not to say that Rachel's visitors have been reduced solely to the ranks of the extraterrestrial. Some humans — true believers or just the curious — are still coming to scrutinize the skies, to peer at the base, and to dodge the fearsome "cammo dudes" who guard its perimeter. Others show up just to giggle, cheerfully buying the tchotchkes that celebrate a phenomenon in which they do not really believe.

The small group of diners at the Inn was mainly European, strangers in a stranger land, laughing as they chowed down on alien burgers and surveyed the alien kitsch. They had found their alien Graceland, a desert theme park of the absurd, another piece of exuberant Americana to treasure and to mock, a spectacle impossible to imagine in their own constrained, more sober continent. Gamely, a member of the Inn's staff told her story. She had, naturally, seen those "lights in the sky." That's not so peculiar in the vicinity of an air base where new planes and other hardware are tested, but no one seemed to mind.

It's telling that Glenn Campbell has moved on. They remember him with a smile at the Quik Pik, but the self-dubbed "Psychospy" has abandoned Rachel for cyberspace. According to his website, Area 51 is now a "has-been." The Research Center "has moved on to broader issues." And so has the U.S. The saucer frenzy of the 1990s was self-indulgence for safer times, play-acted paranoia suitable for an era when the country believed it had no real enemies. Now the adversary is visible, his strength, ironically, the product not of some highly advanced technological civilization, but of something almost more alien — a primitive, theocratic fanaticism that should have been buried centuries ago. Under these circumstances, talk of an extraterrestrial menace seems embarrassingly frivolous. Besides, nowadays most people rather like the idea of secret bases.

So long as they are on our side.

Spirits in the Sky

National Review Online, January 17, 2003

Their cloning techniques may (or, more likely, may not) be cutting edge, but there's nothing particularly novel about the Raelians. That's true both literally (they have been around since the 1970s) and, ahem, spiritually — the wilder realms of UFO lore have long been filled with numerous cults, creeds, and true believers in salvation from the skies.

Distinguishing between all the varieties of alien enlightenment can be confusing. To use a possibly unfortunate word, "space" does not permit a detailed survey of what is on offer, so here's a quick guide to some of the players, with a handy comparison of certain key issues to help you choose the group best suited to your needs. NRO's dedicated team of in-house sensitivity counselors insist that the word "cult," with its pejorative connotations, be avoided, so let's just say that all these people have managed, at one time or another, to attract an enthusiastic following. All claims of alien contact have been taken at face value.

Before making your choice, here are some questions you might want to ask:

Should I go for an established brand?

Undoubtedly. We have selected four for your consideration.

The grandfather of galactic goodwill was George Adamski. Highly qualified in both bunkum (he founded the "Royal Order of Tibet" — in, naturally, California), and burgers (he ran a fast-food stand), Adamski's rendezvous with destiny was in 1952, the year he first met up with the likeable Venusian, Orthon. Subsequent highlights included a trip to Saturn and a number of best-selling books. Less successful than some in his field, Adamski failed to transform his saucer sorties into a more-lasting creed, despite claims of a mysterious meeting with Pope John XXIII. Adamski died in 1965, leaving behind a rich legacy of blurry photographs, wild tales, and entertaining conspiracy theories. His memory lives on at the Adamski Foundation.

A year or so after Adamski and Orthon first exchanged small talk (via hand signals and telepathy) Englishman "Sir" George King heard a voice telling him that he was to become the "voice of the Interplanetary Parliament." King was, apparently, "shocked by the implications of this statement" but rapidly came to terms with his new role, which included contact with a "Cosmic Master" known as Aetherius, also based in Venus, but not, strangely, an acquaintance of Orthon. Not long afterwards, "Sir" George founded the Aetherius Society, probably the first UFO-based religion. It's still in existence today after almost half a century, an impressive feat — the original Star Trek only lasted three seasons.

Nearly two decades later, it was Claude Vorilhon's turn. Following an encounter with a pint-sized alien exuding "harmony and humor," Claude, a French journalist, became the prophet Rael. His disciples, the Raelians, are now said to number 55,000 — not counting clones.

Aliens have even been seen in Switzerland, a sensible country generally better known for its banks than its cranks. Despite this, at least one of its citizens, Eduard "Billy" Meier, has been chatting to extraterrestrials for years. Matters really took off, so to speak, in the mid-1970s when Semjase, a sexy siren from the Pleiades, started allowing Billy to photograph her "beamships." It wasn't long before fame and Shirley MacLaine came knocking at Meier's door. The actress went away "amazed" and she wasn't alone. Meier admirers soon formed themselves into an acronym known as FIGU, an ambitious institution dedicated to the "worldwide dissemination of the truth" — under the circumstances a possibly self-defeating enterprise.

Will my new friends ask me to commit suicide?

Probably not, but the Heaven's Gate fiasco offers some useful hints for those wishing to avoid such unwelcome requests. References to human bodies as temporary "vehicles" are a bad sign. An unhealthy interest in plastic bags, sleeping pills, and vodka is even worse. Do not accept any offers of Kool-Aid.

Morks or dorks? How cool are their aliens?

The aliens featured in this survey all predate the Model E. T. standardized in the popular imagination by Close Encounters of the Third Kind. As a result they look more like inhabitants of this planet than Spielberg has taught us to expect. Billy Meier's Semjase, tall, slender, blonde, and blue-eyed, a space chick with more than a hint of Stockholm about her, is undoubtedly the coolest in this cosmic collection, but that's not saying much. Look at the competition. Orthon (one-piece brown leisure suit, red shoes) had no style and Rael's alien (four-feet tall) had no stature. It's difficult to draw any conclusions about the elusive "Cosmic Masters" favored by the Aetherius Society. They appear to believe that they should be heard, but not seen, and clearly prefer to communicate through human intermediaries.

Did the group's founder change or otherwise enhance his name?

This seems to be essential. Claude turned into "Rael," and Eduard became "Billy," a homespun, if not particularly Swiss choice, somewhat eclipsed by the names of Billy's kids — Gilgamesha, Atlantis-Sokrates, and Methusalem. Adamski was a "professor" and "Sir" George King discovered that a knighthood was not enough. He ended his career as both a "prince" and an "archbishop."

Should I worry if the group's founder looks a little weird?

No. Would-be recruits for these groups have much more-important things to worry about. Still, it's an understandable question when confronted with pictures of Billy Meier's beard (a Jehovah/ZZ Top mix) and Rael's topknot, which functions, reportedly, as an excellent antenna for extraterrestrial communication.

They may be nuts, but are they liberal nuts?

An important question for any regular reader of NRO and the answer, regrettably, is yes. Our alien friends often come across as Left-wing Democrats, particularly in their loopy environmentalism (insert Al Gore joke of choice here), welfare largesse, pacifist leanings, and hopelessly utopian worldview. Is it only coincidence that Jimmy Carter once claimed to have seen a flying saucer?

The current tensions in the Middle East are, naturally, a focus of concern. Rael, who has had an interest in the region for many years (there were long-standing plans to build an embassy for incoming aliens near Jerusalem) is opposed to an invasion of Iraq, and, if recent commentary published by Billy Meier's FIGU is any guide, so is Semjase. The "war-waging howling American, G. W. Bush" clearly has a major P.R. problem in the Pleiades, but Dubya's support elsewhere in our solar system remains unclear. Orthon hasn't been heard from for years, but a patchy Cold War record suggests that Adamski's spaceman would not be chummy with Rummy. That's no surprise. Orthon came from Venus, not Mars.

What will be expected of me?

This can vary, but it may be more than just cash. For example, members of the Aetherius Society are often busy charging "Spiritual Energy Batteries" (don't ask) and climbing the mountains first charged with spiritual power back in the heady days of Operation Starlight.

Raelians seem to prefer mounting to mountains. Their "sensual education" ("sensual education allows us to learn to take pleasure with our organs") may be as strenuous as an Aetherian hike, but it sounds like more fun. (For more on this topic, see Any chance of a date?, below).

Will I be cloned?

It's only the Raelians who are concerned with cloning. All life on earth is, apparently, the product of genetic engineering by an alien race known as the Elohim. The Raelians want to repeat the trick, but their cloning technology is optimistic, not mandatory.

I'm interested in one of these groups, but has it ever suffered any embarrassments?

You're considering signing up with one of these groups and you are concerned about embarrassment? That's like being worried about the beard and the topknot. The answer to this question ought, of course, to be yes. These beliefs are the superstitions of a technological age. They are often attached to highly specific "scientific" claims, which have a nasty habit of being subsequently refuted. The Raelians might be about to run into this difficulty very shortly. However, such moments tend to turn out to be less of an embarrassment than might be thought. To take one analogy, many religious sects have a long tradition of forecasting the end of the world on a specific date — only to see that day pass by without apocalyptic incident. They then continue on as if nothing had happened, which indeed it hadn't.

In similar vein George Adamski was unperturbed when shown the first photographs (taken by the Soviet lunar orbiter — Luna 3) of a bleak and lifeless dark side of the moon (a place where this most curious George had earlier claimed to have seen trees, cities and snow-capped mountains). Adamski simply denounced the pictures as fakes, a subject on which he was something of an authority, and stuck to his stories of those handsome folk from Saturn, Venus and Mars. In this field, ordinary notions of embarrassment do not seem to exist.

Despite this, the Aetherius Society has been more cautious:  "People on Venus, Mars and the other planets in this solar system are living on higher vibratory planes and even if we go there we will not see anybody unless they decide to make themselves visible to us." 

Disprove that.

Any chance of a date?

That's hard to say. When it comes to sex, no sects are the same. Nineteenth Century Christianity included the Shakers (celibate) and the Oneida Community (not at all celibate). The same is certainly true in the UFO sphere. The best bet for space-age swingers? Probably the Raelians. They seem to be up for pretty much anything. This has led, naturally, to stern criticism in NRO but it may explain why the Raelians were always more successful in attracting recruits than the determinedly asexual (some devotees even chose to be castrated) Heaven's Gate.

Conclusion

Are you now bewildered, lost, and completely confused? Has your mind now been filled with useless "knowledge"? Excellent. You are now ready to make your choice.

The truth is out there.

Contact

Christopher Buckley: Little Green Men

National Review, April 18, 1999

SPACE aliens are a nasty, bug-eyed lot, always plotting to subjugate the galaxy and firing off death rays. Not much use to us humans, you might think. But you would be wrong. As a plot device, the extraterrestrial can he most useful, a light shone on the peculiarities of this planet. And so, in his latest, and very funny, novel, Christopher Buckley employs a motley and distinctly home-grown bunch of ETs to take a look at a close encounter between two different worlds, both of which happen to be located here on Earth. His hero, John Banion, is a king of the first of these worlds, Beltway Washington: a prince of pundits, a griller of presidents, his Sunday-morning show in D.C.must-see. And the Washington Buckley portrays with his customary collection of one-liners and insightful zingers is a venal, absurd place. He reproduces its portentous language with perfect pitch (an intern program—no, not that one— called "Excellence in Futurity") and its pretentious inhabitants with perfect bitch.

The city described here is salon Washington, the home of power politics at its most trivial, inhabited by a Renaissance Weekend of grotesques, including a widowed hostess who married a fortune and became an ambassador in Europe, and a "suave, immense, baritone-voiced" African-American, the president's "first friend." What of the president himself? He's an "ozone-hugger" who speaks in a "slow, overly patient tone of voice that suggested he wasn't sure English was your first language."

Which may be wise, for as John Banion is soon to discover, it's a different world out beyond the elite enclaves. In The Bonfire of the Vanities, Sherman McCoy arrived there by means of a wrong turn after the Triborough Bridge. For Christopher Buckley's soon-to-fall Master of the Universe, there's no wrong turn—in effect, somebody else grabs the wheel. The luckless pundit is abducted by things, subjected to unpleasant procedures, and then abandoned on a golf course, with a pain down below "that reminded him of how he'd felt after the colonoscopy, a feeling of stretching ..."

It gets worse. A second abduction convinces Banion that the alien threat is real. He has to become the "Paul Revere of the Milky Way" and warn the world. The problem is that his world, the Washington world, doesn't want to know. He quickly becomes an embarrassment, an intergalactic Pierre Salinger. With wicked relish, Buckley shows us how Banion loses wife, contacts, and contracts. Cruel man that he is, the author even makes his Job-like hero go through the ordeal of an AA-style "intervention" by friends.

The inhabitants of another world altogether. Planet Ufology, however, prick up their (wish-they-could-be-pointed) ears when they hear Banion's message. The newsman is just what the saucer crowd has been waiting for. He's famous, possibly even sane, a plausible spokesman far closer to the mainstream than most in the UFO world, a world that Buckley bas obviously researched with care. Its celebrities (with changed names: flying writs are more dangerous than flying saucers) are on parade. And so are its stories, speculations, and just plain hoaxes: Roswell, Area 51, Grays, Nordics, cattle mutilations, even that Richard Nixon/Jackie Gleason business (long story, but, as usual in these matters, it involves alien corpses). And Banion? Well, he's no Sherman McCoy. He refuses to remain fallen but instead picks himself up and becomes a master of this new universe.

Yet even as he is lionized by the crowd at a (marvelously described) UFO conference, our protagonist can't help noting that "there was something lacking in these people's lives." The ultimate insider exchanges his Washington post for plebeian life in the USA today but . . . well, as Egalitarian of the Year he simply does not cut it. Nor does the author, who cheerfully resumes the political incorrectness displayed so enjoyably in his last novel. Thank You for Smoking. Potential offendees include Canada, dwarves, the space program, Eleanor Roosevelt, PBS, electric chairs, Cuban detainees, Indiana housewives, and Sammy Davis Jr.'s missing eye.

As we discover, the UFO nation is not a small one. In fact, you are living in it. Its credulous hordes are large enough to overwhelm John Banion's old Washington kingdom, and the rewards it offers, both financially and in terms of sheer adulation, are far greater. Like one of those Roman generals sent off to deal with the barbarians in the latter days of the empire, Banion is able to return to torment the capital at the head of a vast army of co-opted provincials, in his case a three-million strong "Millennium Man" march.

Then what happens? What can be disclosed without spoiling the plot (the author reveals this detail early on) is the book's underlying premise that the whole UFO business, including Banion's abduction, was a fraud from the very beginning, engineered by Majestic, the most secret of all government departments. Its purpose? Initially, to worry Stalin, but later to keep the U.S. taxpayer sufficiently "alarmed about the possibility of invasion from outer space ... to vote yea for big weapons and space programs."

It's possible (think of the health-care "crisis" or global warming), but X-philes who read this book will find the idea a little far fetched, even for a satire. Conspiratorially, they will talk about the documents that purport to show that Majestic really did exist. Patiently, they will explain that the aim of this real Majestic was not to fabricate UFO evidence, but to conceal it. Darkly, they will tell you that, if these documents are genuine, Buckley's tale can only help to mislead a country that has already been misinformed for far too long.

And why would the author do this? For a clue, check out the career of his hero, the television pundit be puts in the firing line. That's also his father's job. Yes, his father, that same "W. F. Buckley" who was mentioned twice in Jim Marrs's Alien Agenda, last year's expose of the UFO cover-up. Could Buckley the Son be part of the conspiracy?

I don't know, but next time you are in the Buckley neighborhood, watch out for those black helicopters.

Lost in Space

Jim Marrs: Alien Agenda

National Review, July 28,1997

Red Planet Diner, Sedona, Arizona, 1997  © Andrew Stuttaford

So now we know. The controversy is over. UFOs are real, and never mind the latest Air Force denial, hopefully entitled The Roswell Report: Case Closed. Armed with the credibility that comes from a previous book that was "a major source for Oliver Stone's film JFK." Jim Marrs's "monumental undertaking" is, in the opinion of his publishers, "no less than the last word on the subject." Even for those members of the "smug . . . intelligentsia" who persist in their disbelief, this could make for an interesting read. For, as Mr. Marrs makes clear, UFOs are now part of our culture. That is why HarperCollins publishes this book, and why NR reviews it. Aliens infest our airwaves and our bookstores. "Documentary" footage of the autopsy performed on one unlucky extraterrestrial has been shown on prime time. UFOs have been the subject of congressional hearings, and a President (well, Jimmy Carter) has reported a sighting. According to Gallup, more than 40 per cent of American college graduates believe that our planet has been visited by UFOs. Not always successfully. July sees the fiftieth-anniversary celebrations of the saucer "crash" at Roswell, New Mexico.

So a cogent presentation of current beliefs about UFOs, even if from a partisan viewpoint, would be welcome. Alien Agenda doesn't fit that particular bill, though it begins well enough. There is interesting speculation about the real nature of the moon ("The greatest UFO"), followed by a brisk discussion of the von Daniken "God was an astronaut" school of ufology. But then we enter hyperspace.

As so often happens, the first sign of trouble comes with the "black-clad" SS. Can the 1947 UFO wave be explained by Nazi work on saucer technology? Mr. Marrs never really says. He merely leaves open the possibility, a possibility that he buttresses with anecdote and hearsay. True, he concedes that the idea of a secret Nazi base in Antarctica "stretches belief to the breaking point." But this is a pseudo-skepticism, typical of the somewhat unconvincing "objectivity" that permeates this book in the hope, doubtless, of giving it some faint plausibility. It is a clever approach, not too dissimilar from that used in other, less savory, areas of revisionist history, A defender of Stalin, for example, might "concede" that there were "excesses," while denying the existence of a deliberately murderous Gulag. In Alien Agenda Mr. Marrs may reveal his doubts about the Third Reich's Antarctic extension, but "there can be no question that the business and financial network created by Bormann wields a certain amount of power even today."

Note too the way that statement is carefully qualified. Writing that the Bormann crowd enjoys only a "certain" amount of power makes the assertion more difficult to challenge. The author manages to sound even-handed while at the same time leaving the impression of a still effective Nazi network. This is typical of a book where the author often will affect a studied neutrality over a particular UFO incident while leaving no doubt as to the general conclusion his reader should be drawing.

To be fair, Mr. Marrs never conceals his agenda. Moreover, his choice of evidence seems selective, to say the least. Inconvenient facts tend to be treated cursorily, if at all. His language is just as revealing. The waspishly pedantic Philip Klass, whose skeptical writings are the best in the field, is little more than a "debunker." By contrast Linda Moulton Howe, the best-known proponent of the theory that aliens are experimenting on Western cattle, is an "expert."

Well, Mr. Marrs does not appear to be one. There have been sightings that are genuinely difficult to explain, but the details are lost as the author hurtles on in search of ever wilder stories. Even Jacques Vallée,  one of the more prominent ufologists and no skeptic, will on occasion concede that a given UFO case runs into a "wall of absurdity," To Mr. Marrs, this seems to be no problem. He just jumps right over it into the arms of people like "Billy" Meier (or rather, arm—Billy has only the one), the Swiss handyman allegedly in touch with a civilization from the Pleiades. The other side of the wall is a place where our science (too puny, too materialistic) is deemed not to apply and the idea of objective truth is a mirage. It sounds, in fact, a bit like the United States.

Which is why this book has found a mainstream publisher. In a saner time. Alien Agenda would have been a crudely mimeographed pamphlet, pushed into your hand by a disheveled gentleman on a street corner. In the America of 1997 it will probably be a hit. And there is a sting in this campfire tale. The UFO myth mingles with and reinforces the other folk beliefs that increasingly shape a country where reason has gone quiet. Stories of alien abduction can easily shade into a belief in ritual child abuse. "Memories" can be recovered, families shattered, and innocents jailed.

This, taken to an extreme, can even lead to a Timothy McVeigh. In a way, this is not surprising. Saucer buffs have long reflected America's healthy distrust of government. When ufologist Stanton Friedman describes Roswell as a "cosmic Watergate," he can strike a chord with reasonable people, which Mr. Marrs then amplifies, Governrrient becomes a monstrously untrustworthy, threatening presence. "If they lied about one thing [in the context of Roswell], it stands to reason they would lie about another." Really?

But Mr. Marrs is not so much a militiaman in the making as a potential leader of ufology's Buchananite wing. There is dark talk of the ruling elite. The alien agenda itself seems, by the way, to be something New Agely spiritual, but Jim Marrs is much more interested in the conspiracy down here. There is a cover-up, naturally. "They" don't want us to know what is going on. Even the "notorious" Trilateral Commission rates a mention. Silly stuff, yes. But of itself, not dangerous, just another drop in an ocean of nonsense. Why the cover-up? Oh, the usual. Monopoly of alien technology, that sort of thing. Buy the book if you still care. But here's a clue. WFB is mentioned not once, but twice.

Now are you scared?

Grey Zone

John E. Mack: Abduction - Human Encounters With Aliens

C. D. B. Bryan: Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind 

National Review, September 11, 1995

Back in the 1950s space aliens were a straightforward bunch. By and large, they wanted little more than world conquest. Comfortingly, they were also imaginary. To be sure, there were those who claimed they have seen UFOs, but the aliens themselves remained elusive, "space brothers" of interest only to "contactees" such as "Professor" George Adamski, a California hamburger vendor with an extensive Venusian social circle. However, by 1992 the B-movie bogeyman had become real, moving from Hollywood to the even stranger surroundings of a five-day conference at MIT organized by David Pritchard, an MIT physicist, and John E. Mack, professor of psychiatry at Cambridge Hospital, Harvard Medical School. A curious Courtlandt Bryan attended, and Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind recounts what he found. The aliens, it would appear, have been busy. The old stories of global domination have been replaced by tales of abduction "recalled" by hundreds of people and, this time, believed to be true.

Most of these recollections are strikingly similar. The luckless victims are transported to the alien craft, where they are subjected to various unpleasant medical procedures associated with some sort of breeding program. Even worse, the aliens seem to have embraced a lunatic environmentalism worthy of our Vice President, raising once again the question of where Mr. Gore is really coming from. The aliens that have been seen come in a number of shapes and sizes, but, somewhat suspiciously, in the United States they mainly resemble those in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In general they are spindly creatures, about four feet in height, grey skinned with large, black, tear-shaped eyes. These "small greys" are often said to be supervised by a "doctor," a larger grey skinned humanoid.

The good news, if you are over thirty, is that if you have not been abducted by now, it's not likely to happen. The aliens are said to focus on younger people, with abductions often beginning in childhood. The bad news is that you may already have been abducted but just cannot remember. The aliens, it is believed, tend to "mask" memories of abductions. It is only recently that these memories have begun to surface in significant numbers. Often the stories emerge painfully in therapy sessions such as those conducted by John Mack, sometimes, but not always, using hypnotic regression techniques. The aliens, it is claimed, have abducted hundreds of thousands of people.

Mr. Bryan himself makes little attempt to judge the phenomenon. He simply, and at times vividly, describes the conference sessions and the people he met. The book also features fairly lengthy interviews with some of the participants, as well as all too brief synopses of some of the competing theories. The broader UFO debate is also well covered in passages that range from a discussion of the tantalizing early sightings to the increasingly ornate conspiracy theories that now infest the field. In a book that has room for nor merely one but two supposed UFO crashes near Roswell, New Mexico, it would have been good to hear more from the skeptics, but Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind provides an excellent, if somewhat uncritical, introduction to the whole subject.

The reader also benefits from the fact that, throughout, Bryan managed to retain both his sense of humor and his open mind. Told of an organization of worlds run by "Zar," he had to "fight the steadily growing conviction that [his] abductee dinner companion was crazy as a loon." He steels himself to remain nonjudgmental, for "Zar would want that."

Mr. Bryan, by his own account, wishes to believe that aliens are coming our way. As the abductees call it, however, this may not be a pleasant experience. Their eerie stories dominate his book. In the end Bryan is not convinced that the abductees experienced extraterrestrial visitations, but he did "come away a believer in the sincerity and merit of their quest."

This must be right. Whatever it is, this phenomenon warrants serious, dispassionate investigation. Sadly, this is something that, judging by this book, it did not get at a conference that seems to have been part revival meeting, part Geraldo, and part public therapy. When Dr. Mack declares that "we must rethink our whole place in the cosmos," he is interrupted by a standing ovation.

Abduction, Dr. Mack's best-selling but drearily written book, published in 1994 and recently released in a revised paperback edition, is not much more enlightening. Here abductees tell their stories to the sympathetic Dr. Mack, who turns to metaphysics for a solution. "Western" science, we learn, "relies primarily on the physical senses and rational intellect." As such, concludes the Harvard professor, it is a "restricted way of knowing"' incapable of rising to the challenge posed by the abduction experience. Well, of course. Something about the way Dr. Mack uses the word "Western" signals that he is going to come to that conclusion.

John Mack moves quickly. He started meeting abductees in 1990. By April 1992 he was in India discussing these matters with "Tibetan leaders." A month or two later he told the MIT conference that he had "kind of moved away from trying to persuade the mainstream culture of the validity of this phenomenon." If his scientific forebears had shown such perseverance, we would still be living in caves.

Dr. Mack is careful to state that he is not "presuming that everything [the abductees] say is literally true." Nevertheless he writes of his "growing conviction about the authenticity of these reports . . . No plausible alternative explanation . . . has been discovered." He forgets, however, that these are early days in the exploration of this phenomenon. Alternative explanations, if not as yet entirely satisfactory ones, already abound. It seems, for example, that acute psychotic episodes and temporal-lobe dysfunction can produce impressions akin to those recalled by an abductee, albeit without the generally flimsy corroboration that sometimes exists in the abduction cases.

It is also necessary to look at the relationship between the abductee and his or her therapist. Dr, Mack is clearly sensitive to this point, which he discusses an increased length in the revised, and more cautious, version of his book. Interestingly, a good number of the "hypnosis" or "regression" sessions featured in the original edition arc now described as "relaxation" sessions, while some patients' "trances" have become "altered states of consciousness."

Dr. Mack would disagree, but these are, one suspects, distinctions without much of a difference, in which case the "reality status" (to use his phrase) of the abductees' memories must be even more questionable. In 1985 the American Medical Association's Council on Scientific Affairs warned that "recollections obtained during hypnosis not only fail to be more accurate but actually appear to be generally less reliable than recall." Hypnosis does, however, appear to increase the subject's confidence that something real is being remembered, whether or not it be the case.

Many abductee stories are uncannily similar to one another, something that struck Dr. Mack from the beginning. Charles Mackay, the splendidly acerbic author of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841), would not have been so surprised. Writing of medieval witchcraft trials, noted that "the great resemblance between the confessions of the unhappy victims was regarded as a new proof. . . but this is not astonishing . . . the same questions . . . were put to them all, and torture never failed to educe the answer required by the inquisitor."

"Relaxation" with the undoubtedly kind-hearted Dr. Mack is far removed from a torture session in a European dungeon. Nevertheless the question remains. Do abduction therapists somehow "lead" their patients into giving, consciously or otherwise, the sort of answers the patients think their therapists want to hear? Dr. Mack appears to concede that this could occur, but not in his sessions, even if they sometimes are, as he puts it, "co-creative."

If the impact of "co-creativity" on a "memory" is uncertain, what is the effect of that memory on the rememberer? This is a crucial difference between the UFO controversy and the abduction controversy. The existence of UFOs is generally no more than a fascinating mystery, even to those who may have seen them. However, for those who believe that they, and sometimes their children as well, are being repeatedly abducted for use in an alien breeding experiment, it is difficult to argue that life must simply go on. The therapist who encourages or sustains these beliefs is taking on a heavy responsibility,particularly given the somewhat fragile personalities of some of the abductees. Dr. Mack had two boys under age 3 in his own group of interviewees.

Ominously it was only on the last day of the MIT conference that these issues seem to have been discussed at any length. "We must," said one therapist, "be able to demonstrate . . . that what we are doing is reasonable, safe, and effective." This comment did not, apparently, merit a standing ovation. In fact, not only the abductees but the whole abduction mystery begs, in the words of David Pritchard, "for a careful and multidisciplinary investigation." To John Mack, however, this would be just "fussing over whether we have got something real here."

As Jung noted in his book on UFOs, "the Middle Ages . . . live on merrily." In an increasingly irrational and anti-scientific America, "fussing" about what is real is just what is needed, although it will pro ably end up telling us more about ourselves than about any extraterrestrial visitors, The alternative will not take us to the stars, but it might take us to Salem.