UFO Summer Camp in November [TE]
Estimated reading time: 12 minutes, 45 seconds. Contains 2553 words
Welcome back to the Trenchant Edges, a newsletter about fringe culture and the people who make it. I’m your host Stephen.
I’ve written and scrapped two essays in the last week so I’ve decided to just lean into UFO shit.
So welcome to what I’m thinking of as, “UFO Summer Camp”.
I like the subject of UFOs but I find it very frustrating. There’s no closure and probably no closure possible without radical changes in either government policy or uh… physics. Well, our understanding of physics.
So we’re going to visit UFOland over the next few weeks and then leave it. We’ve collected many UFO threads you can read about here and I want to lean into some of them.
But before that I want to ground our exploration in some open assumptions. Having reviewed previous writing on UFOs, there are some good ideas I had earlier that I want to go back to.
Sorry about the delay if you wanted more Columbus or Dawn of Everything stuff. This is just what I can easily focus on now and I don’t want to let that go.
UFOs As Cognitive Treadmill vs UFOs as Critical Thinking Practice
The first thing I wrote about UFOs was a pitch for a book I, shocking everyone, didn’t write. That got me thinking about UFOs which got us here.
The gist of that was that UFOs are actually a pretty ideal place to learn how to think more clearly. There’s a ton of arguments, there’s no publicly accessible answer, and there’s an endless amount of information to sift through.
A ton of ambiguity and no closure.
And there are obviously liars on any side you might care to pick.
You may not like it but this is peak performance.
As with most things, what explanations someone prefers tells you a lot about them. UFOs are thus a kind of Cosmic Rorschach test. Handy if you want to know how someone thinks or what they believe in.
The other end of this is what I referred to as a cognitive treadmill. As in, you can put in an enormous amount of effort and still be standing in the same place.
UFO enthusiasts and believers hate it when I say this but the field hasn’t really moved much since like, 1950. We know a lot more about a lot more sightings but the overall outline is exactly the same as it was.
Sometimes people see strange things in the sky.
Sometimes strange things appear on sensors like radar.
Some of those things exhibit characteristics that appear to defy known physics.
Some of those observers appear sincere, of sound mind, and knowledgeable about flight.
Some of those people are or were in the military.
We’ve got more sensors to prod them now.
This line from the 2021 ODNI report on UAPs sums things up nicely:
“Most of the UAP reported probably do represent physical objects given that a majority of UAP were registered across multiple sensors, to include radar, infrared, electro-optical, weapon seekers, and visual observation.”
But despite many claims to the contrary, no solid evidence pointing to exactly what they are is public and there are strong reasons to assume things aren’t magically answered behind government and corporate secret projects.
There’s many other annexes here: Cattle mutilations, abductions, numerous psychic phenomena, etc. I’m focusing on the sightings mostly because I think they’re more tractable.
As I said in 2022: You can spend your whole lifetime studying this stuff and not come out with more solid knowledge than you entered with.
So while it’s handy to practice with, it’s also a potentially huge waste of time.
Oh, and did I mention decades of evidence of military and intelligence disinformation?
I probably should have mentioned that.
Contrary to what many UFO fans expect, there are many reasons to assume that despite their loud protests that there’s nothing to the UFO phenomenon, they do want people to believe in aliens.
The most clear case study about this is with Richard Doty and Paul Bennewitz. We’ll be doing that soon. The TLDR is Bennewitz was a defense contractor who found signs of some classified project and Richard Doty was an air force counter intelligence officer who lied to him about aliens a bunch.
It’s a whole thing.
So, uh, is this just a whole waste of time?
To be blunt, for most people, I think the answer is yes.
This is why I don’t mind skeptics who think there’s nothing to UFOs beyond hallucinations, delusions, and hoxes.
It’s a lot easier than trying to make sense of, well, *waves hands* and I’m not convinced UFOs are the most important subject in the history of humanity!
How important it actually is depends on what’s actually going on. And that could be just about anything. I’m partial to the UFOs as Wildlife concept as well as all the wacky ones like fairies or angels.
That said, I do think there are some real reasons to study this stuff. For one thing it’s part of a neo-volkish movement overcorrecting against established authority and institutions established after WW2. It’s making people more skeptical of the government and military in ways they’ve never been.
And a ton of this plays out in fully reactionary ways like the backlash to covid. Which drove millions of people towards even less reliable healthcare choices.
For me at least the real moneyshot is it’s an unusually good angle to see counter intelligence at work in the US. UFO fans have been subject to many of the same tactics and tricks as civil rights groups, environmental groups, and animal rights groups. COINTELUFO.
The US government has conditioned many aspects of US society with propaganda and continued that with, uh, other means. We do need to point that out.
Even if UFOs aren’t anything other than hoaxes, delusions, or hallucinations the US government has spent most of the last 70 years lying about them anyway.
How To Study UFOs
In the years since my renewed interest I’ve developed a perspective that I think lets me at least minimize the cognitive treadmill aspects of UFOs. It’s the easiest thing in the world to get caught up in your own conclusions or try to haggle about how credible particular cases are.
The most important part of my approach is statistical. I know that most UFO reports are going to turn out to be mistakes or misidentifications. Some fraction will turn out to be UFOs and some will turn out to be true unknowns.
Many of those unknowns will simply just have reports that don’t contain enough information.
The least-dubious (lol) concrete numbers on this come from the US military. Either the USAF’s Project Bluebook Special Report 14 and the 2021 ODNI Preliminary Assessment On UAP.
While there’s little reason to fully trust either report, I think they’re worth using because they’re institutionally likely to pick the most conservative numbers they can justify. This is important for me for reasons we’ll get to.
In the ODNI assessment, 18 of their 144 cases had unusual and unexplained flight characteristics representing 12% of their total.
Bluebook Special Report 14 is considerably more interesting
Those are mostly self explanatory.
Reports were coded into each group and then categorized as either Known or Unknown. “Other” seems confusing but it means stuff that had a mundane explanation that didn’t have enough examples to get its own category.
They had 3,201 reports and cut out about 800 of them for being contradictory or factually incorrect. Another 200 or so reports were condensed into Object Sightings
So the final number of objects reported is 2199. To my knowledge this is the largest rigorous study on UFOs ever done. As best I can tell from the conclusions, I consider it more or less reliable.
You might think this would bias their reporting against the Unknowns category. That’s kind of what they said publicly in the 50s about Special Report 14. But reading it shows something else.
If you were trying to discredit UFOs, you’d want the people rated most trustworthy to have the fewest unknows.
But here we see as the quality of the reporting goes up, the number of unknowns doesn’t just increase it doubles from 16.6% for the bottom quintile of reliability to 33.3%.
You may then wonder why Special Report 14 and Project Bluebook in general have such a bad reputation.
When it was initially unclassified the Air Force mischaracterized Special Report 14 considerably, saying the unknowns were only a fraction of the actual number. This number is 434/2199 or 19.7% Unknown.
Using another Bluebook document from the mid 60s, it suggests that hoaxes make up only about 2% of the total number of UFO reports.
So my statistical estimates look a bit like this:
80-85% of reports are conventionally explained
10-15% of reports can’t be explained
5% of reports are hoaxes
This is intended to counterbalance the fact that I want aliens to be real. And I want something weirder than aliens to be real more than that.
If the US has diplomatic relations with Fairies, I’d be absolutely thrilled.
But more than anything, I want to believe what’s true.
So I have to underestimate and hope errors cancel out instead of compound.
How does this work out in practice?
Well, when reading or listening to a UFO report, I follow it carefully and listen for similarities and differences between it and other reports. One thing I like Project Bluebook for mentioning is that the more reports you read the less new information each of them seems to contain. It can all become very routine.
What I don’t do is try and figure out how the person is right or wrong. Most will be wrong and that’s OK. Trying to explain away UFO sightings is how you get shitforbrains ideas like swamp gas reflecting off the light of Venus and people confusing a lighthouse they can see with the moving around lights that definitely aren’t the lighthouse.
From there, I look to keep an eye on the range of possibilities instead of trying to nail down exactly what happened.
I’m here for the *mystery* of it all. So that works for me both aesthetically and intellectually.
The Rest of the Method
As I’ve said elsewhere, I try to look to folklore studies and literary analysis to understand UFOs. There’s always a wake of rumors around anything people do and this is just a kind of far shore of those possibilities.
What draws people to or away from the subject?
What does purpose does it serve in their lives?
What kinds of social forms spring up in its wake?
And like myself, many people are drawn to UFOs as a source of potentially authentic mystery in a world reduced to competing advertising messages.
It’s not even really a conspiracy theory at this point, but a full blown subculture with its own extensive lore and social conventions. It’s people’s lives!
And that’s all lovely. But don’t we also want to try and nail down what’s actually happening?
This is hard because of all the hired bullshit. Hoaxes might not be likely, but they do happen. And there are plenty of other ways to put out false information.
Because of that I’ve got a significant bias towards official documentation. Not so much because I think it’s accurate or complete, but because it’s something you can tie down in place and time. Even if fraudulent, *someone* wrote it.
Well, at least before 2022. Now at least someone prompted for it.
There’s another thing I like about official documentation.
This is part of the cover sheet for Special Report 14.
And sometimes little details can lead you down rabbit holes. Air Technical Intelligence Center is maybe the most interesting thing I’ve stumbled into in the whole field.
We’ll come back to it at some point. The big problem is it was obscenely classified and there’s not really a comprehensive history of it.
I suspect there’s a bunch of interesting, if not necessarily UFO related, things stuck around a file cabinet that could be FOIA’d.
But I digress.
And we’d be negligent if we didn’t talk about the weirdest category of UFO speculation.
Like, if UFOs are time traveling humans from the far future… what do you do with that? Can that inform anything in your life?
Same thing with interdimensional beings, trickster archetypes, and emanations of the human soul we’re too alien to recognize.
I enjoy these ideas but I’m not really sure how to develop them or what else can be said there.
That’s why I like the government: There’s always more paperwork to demand.
And they mostly don’t want to give it so it’s a win-win!
There’s one more elephant in the room I want to talk about today.
The Government Coverup
So, it’s kind of unavoidable that we have to discuss the ways the state, military, and intelligence agencies have hidden information about UFOs.
The conventional wisdom within the UFO community is that the government is hiding proof that aliens are real.
Let’s say I’m skeptical.
There are many, many signs that the notion of a government coverup is too simple to describe the relationship between UFOs and various government agencies.
It’s clear that denying, minimizing, and collecting evidence of UFO reports (and allegedly their crashes) has happened more or less consistently since 1947. There absolutely has been faux debunking and a lot of ridicule.
But there are also many hints of how UFOs have been very useful to certain state functions, most notably counter intelligence.
Which brings us to our next subject, who I’ve been teasing for a while.
We’re doing it. It’s Richard Doty time.
The short, short explanation is Doty was an Air Force Counter Intelligence guy in the 80s where he befriended a local defense contractor named Paul Bennewitz. Bennewitz found some weird electrical interference related to some top secret project. They told him he found proof of aliens.
And he told everyone who’s anyone in the UFO scene.
It eventually drove him psychotic.
These events were the catalyst for Bill Moore, who helped put Roswell on the map, to reveal he’d been an intelligence asset during the 80s at the 1989 MUFON conference.
It’s a whole thing. We’re gonna dig in.
We shouldn’t be surprised that the government’s response to this is really messy as there are literally millions of federal workers and very few of them do anything related to UFOs.
Even the early records of Projects Sign, Grudge, and Bluebook show many signs of disagreements over what UFOs are and how they should respond to the problem.
So, one of my questions is this: If Famous UFOlogist William Moore was working for the feds, who else was? What parts of UFO lore are just government ordered bullshit?
Hell if I know.
And we probably won’t have real proof of anything. But we can try, right?
Wrapping Up
Glad to have that out.
Pretty happy with how this one turned out. Feeling more focused than I’ve been in a while.
I did want to dig into The Dawn of Everything but the more I read from its sources the less I understood and the jankier the original plan I had for the essay became.
This has been something that’s just been sitting around my brain for a couple years to do right.
So that’s where we’re going.
See you soon.
-S