Manifest(uf)o

Thoughts on the Perpetual UFO Psyop/Scam

With the recent “revelations” seeded to the national news media about crashed alien vehicles being kept by the United States military¹, I thought now is an appropriate time to put forth a Getting Spooked thesis statement of sorts. While it may be semi-obvious through my past articles, I have attempted readings of paranormal stories that are informed by a parapolitical/Fortean examination of the events, exploring the people involved and the contexts in which they occur. It is through this lens that I believe a more useful skepticism is invoked as opposed to flat-out debunking. Whereas a debunker might belittle or completely discount the experience of those involved, my intent has been to treat the humans who have paranormal experience respectfully while keeping a pulse on the general history of the paranormal, parapolitics, fringe cultures, and military psychological operations. This method has been utilized in both this newsletter’s short articles and the several ongoing series as an attempt to grapple with not only paranormal weirdness but spooky human behavior. This piece is not an attempt to explain away the recent “whistle-blower” but more an outline of a basic approach to these topics and so-called “disclosures” that keeps the history of the UFO milieu in mind.

What has remained consistent throughout UFO and alien abduction experiences of varying types throughout the decades—since the very inception of the phenomena in popular culture—is the presence of military and intelligence figures. In some ways, it is as simple as that. Putting our starting point at the Kenneth Arnold sighting, Getting Spooked has examined how quickly the intelligence sphere glommed onto the nascent phenomenon: Fred Crisman, suspected of myriad military-industrial complex schemes, attempted to steer the narrative at the Maury Island Incident to Nazi flying discs. Mere weeks after “flying saucers” entered the American lexicon, some stripe of military intelligence was orchestrating an apparent psychological operation. As Mark Pilkington writes: “It’s clear to see that military and civilian intelligence agencies acted as midwives in the birthing of the UFO myth.”² Very little has changed in the years since.

Throughout the past 8 months of Getting Spooked’s existence, I have looked in depth at: 1) A CIA employee who assisted in abducting South American civilians to perform psychological and medical tests giving further legitimacy to the alien abduction mythos. 2) A group of Army intelligence officers who were possibly tricked by one UFO psychological operation or were attempting to start another. 3) A group of Kansas housewives and a doctor who were led to believe in alien contact spurred further onward by a “government source.” 4) The branching influence of AFOSI agent Rick Doty’s psychological operation on Paul Bennewitz. I have no worries about a shortage of material to write about in the intersections of the paranormal and the parapolitical. The common factors are easy to see: Military or intelligence personnel and people who want to believe in the fantastic. I sympathize greatly with those who have an interest in or affinity for the paranormal as I am a disillusioned Fortean at heart. It is for these reasons that I get particularly incensed when the typically benign nature of these individuals or the public at large is taken advantage of.

These operations serve several different purposes. First and foremost, perpetuation of a UFO mythos obscures the existence of advanced, secret military aircraft from not only the American public but from enemies and allies abroad. So too, the infiltration of UFO communities has been a wellspring of intelligence sources, keeping tabs on what those who are looking at the skies the most see on a regular basis. Also becoming more common is perpetuating UFO stories as a means to convince the American public for more defense spending to both monitor or confront the possible enemies in the sky. Indeed, in recent years, the majority of publicized reports come directly from defense organizations and the majority of public funding for UFO investigation is given to defense organizations and contractors. Rather than independent investigations of unexplained phenomena, we instead get a continuous circulation of ideas in UFO sphere that never runs fair afield of the military-industrial complex. It increasingly appears plausible that UFO stories serve a very specific role within the continuation of the MIC. After all, we need defense funding in order to tackle the gargantuan threat these elusive craft present.

Even in the realm of UFO abduction, we have explored the possibility that experiencers are being experimented on with novel methods of torture/coercion or non-lethal weaponry. It should be alarming that a vast amount of abduction researchers’ case notes (without the consent of their “patients”) was handed over the Robert Bigelow, a major player in the realm of paranormal-oriented defense contractors.³ If Bosco Nedelcovic was telling the truth, like the UFO phenomenon in general, alien abduction too might be a crafted narrative obscuring nefarious government action. Even in the case of Nedelcovic, his State Department or CIA connections warrant immediate suspicion of his stories and motivations in coming forward.

What needs to be seriously established in UFO research is that military and intelligence action in the UFO sphere has a historical basis. Moreover, it is always more likely than an extraterrestrial explanation and generally any other paranormal explanation. While it has been documented in more concrete ways, a whistleblower alleging clandestine military psyops utilizing UFO narratives is invariably more trustworthy than a whistleblower alleging the existence of sentient aliens and crashed flying saucers. The common tactic for insisting on the existence of UFOs has become an argument from authority—government officials and decorated military officers are telling the public to believe in the UFO reality, who are you to say that they are incorrect?

But then the lack of evidence inevitably comes up in conversation. As the dust has settled on the recent assertions of David Grusch—that the US has possession of several otherworldly spacecraft from non-human intelligence—some commentators began to ask what actual evidence had been presented beyond his character and references. The simple answer is that no evidence has been presented. Explaining his doubts to Adam Gabbett at The Guardian, author Garrett Graff noted:

The story aligns with a lot of similar stories that have played out, going back to the 1980s and 1970s, that together allege that the US government has kept an incredible secret (…) with no meaningful leak or documentary evidence to ever come forward. (…) And I think when you look at the government’s ability to keep secret other really important secrets, there’s a lot of reason to doubt the capability of the government to do that.⁴

Beyond the fact that the idea of the government being “unable keep a secret” is asinine, a key conclusion goes unspoken in Graff’s comments about the recycled UFO narratives: The fact that the US government and DoD has both crafted, molded, and maintained the UFO mythology. Further than that, he makes no mention of the fact that Grusch himself comes from the very profession that has utilized UFO stories and the UFO community to their advantage for nearly a century, that of military intelligence. With stints in the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and National Reconnaissance Office, Grusch is the very definition of a spook. Beyond the notion that this is the very last person to be trusted in the UFO subject, all of his information is seemingly coming second-hand—spurred forward by lifelong military/intelligence personalities such as Lue Elizondo, Hal Puthoff, and others in the enthusiastic milieu of government-connected individuals who want the world to know that UFOs are real and a security menace.⁵ While virtually no one is calling it a psychological operation, the fact that this story was able to make national news on such flimsy evidence gives the impression of something like the Bennewitz Affair on a grander scale. People within the government and military are simply itching to bring belief in UFOs into vogue as well as the idea that they are national security threats that require hefty funding if we ever want a chance in hell of confronting them. Medium writer INFO_OPS makes the key observation that the recent spate of “false claims share an obvious common design which is to draw attention away from the DoD as the instigator of these UFO-related news events.”⁶

My honest recommendation when it comes to military or intelligence contributions to the field of ufology is to throw out both the bathwater and the baby—the bathwater is radioactive and the baby is DOA. We can only perform an autopsy and retrospective analysis to see where we went wrong. As it stands now, the UFO community holds a great respect for the very forces that have deceived it and taken advantage of it in the past. The path forward is not so clear, but a deep mistrust of the military, intelligence agencies, and defense contractors should be a given. Their motivations for instilling a sense of UFO reality in the populace are self-serving in virtually every respect and should be met with great skepticism. Ufologists made a grave misstep when the sightings and beliefs of an intelligence officer began to hold more weight than that of any other individual. The study of UFOs has come to require a reverence for the US government and all of its military apparatuses—warts and all. I would urge a movement away from this, instead adopting a useful suspicion of the motivations of these figures and the common coercive propaganda tactics used in ramping up military support. As mentioned earlier, I am a disillusioned Fortean. Charles Fort was a man distrustful of any authoritative stance on unexplained phenomena and while the world of the paranormal is vastly different today, I think an approach such as his is warranted once again. An even-keeled paranoia is an appropriate and necessary method of analysis to tackle the endless disinformation, infiltration, and weaponization of ufological communities. I say this not as a skeptic, but as someone who finds the world of Forteana fascinating and worth protecting from aggressive co-optation and military fervor.

For further information which supports this reading of the state of ufology, check out the essential Getting Spooked reading/viewing list:

• Mark Pilkington’s Mirage Men: A Journey in Disinformation, Paranoia and UFOs (2010)

• Phil Patton’s Dreamland: Travels Inside the Secret World of Roswell and Area 51 (1998)

• Adam Gorightly’s Saucers, Spooks, and Kooks: UFO Disinformation in the Age of Aquarius (2021)

• Jack Brewer’s The Greys Have Been Framed: Exploitation in the UFO Community (2015) and Wayward Sons: NICAP and the IC (2021)

• Martin Cannon’s The Controllers: A New Hypothesis of Alien Abduction (1992)

• Leon Davidson’s “ECM + CIA = UFO or How Cause a Radar Sighting” (1959) and “Why I Believe Adamski” (1960)

• Robert Skvarla on Twitter and Mondo Americana

• INFO_OPS on Medium

• The YouTube channel Weird Reads with Emily Louise

• Area503’s Who is Luis Elizondo? Who’s Lue? (2022)

• Other Twitter users such as @seriations, @bpleasies, @BoltzmannBooty, and @jessejrobertson.

Thank you for reading Getting Spooked, I hope you’ve enjoyed this less research-heavy meditation on ufology. If you’ve liked what you’ve read, consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support the publication. My sincere thanks goes out to anyone who has done so. The 50^th paid subscriber of any tier will receive a copy of my book The Fortean Influence on Science Fiction. Reach out to me at gettingspooked@protonmail.com for any comments, requests, paranormal stories, or party invitations. I can also be found on Twitter at @TannerFBoyle1. Until next time, stay spooked.

1. Gabbatt, Adam. “US urged to reveal UFO evidence after claim that it has intact alien vehicles.” The Guardian. 6 June 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/06/whistleblower-ufo-alien-tech-spacecraft.

2. Pilkington, Mark. Mirage Men: A Journey in Disinformation, Paranoia and UFOs. London: Constable, 2010. Page 71.

3. Brewer, Jack. The Greys Have Been Framed: Exploitation in the UFO Community. Self-published, 2016. Page 136.

4. Gabbatt, Adam. “A whistleblower claims the US has alien vehicles. But where’s the proof?” The Guardian. 9 June 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/09/ufo-alien-vehicles-us-whistleblower-evidence-where-is-proof.

5. Colavito, Jason. “UFO "Whistleblower" Has Suspiciously Close Ties to the Usual Suspects.” Jason Colavito Blog. 7 June 2023. https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/ufo-whistleblower-has-suspiciously-close-ties-to-the-usual-suspects.

6. INFO_OPS. “The UFO Information Operation.” Medium. 23 November 2021. https://ufo-info-ops.medium.com/the-ufo-misinformation-operation-a65f150e9166.