Fifteen UFO Conspiracy Theories That Won’t Go Away
Whatever their preoccupations (JFK! Trilateral Commission! Faked Moon landing! Weather control!), conspiracy theories based in a belief in complex secrecy (to the detriment of society at large) are never easy to prove.
Unsympathetic observers can be quick to insist that claimants are paranoid, but to glibly classify a belief as “paranoid” and leave it at that is a little lazy. It’s certainly unenlightening. Further, the practice has an unintended leveling effect that makes all paranoia equal—a misstep, because some expressions of paranoia are considerably more reality-based than others.
Of all the conspiracy-oriented belief systems that have shown real endurance, UFO-related theories are among the liveliest. We look at familiar ones, such as Roswell, Men in Black, MJ-12, and Area 51, elsewhere in this book. Here are some others.
1. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI clamped a lid on credible postwar UFO reports for fear of public panic and unwanted release of American atomic secrets.
A January 31, 1949, FBI memo prepared for Hoover and military intelligence services reports that airspace above the Atomic Energy Commission facility at Los Alamos, New Mexico, was breached by unidentified flying objects during nine mostly non-consecutive days in December 1948. The craft displayed dramatic aerial maneuvers above the high-security facility. The memo also describes near-misses of airliners and UFOs, the latter traveling at “a minimum of three miles per second and a maximum of twelve miles per second.” And that, the memo adds, amounts to a “calculated mean speed” of 27,000 miles per hour.
Although the memo makes a token attempt to explain the objects in natural terms (“cosmic rays”), the text more firmly suggests that the objects were “man made,” possibly by the Soviets. The memo adds that UFOs, “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,” “Flying Discs,” “Flying Saucers,” and “Balls of Fire” are regarded by U.S. military intelligence as “top secret.” And if the FBI had anything to say about it, they would stay that way.
2. Earthlings are slaves to shape-shifting extraterrestrial lizards headquartered in the hollow Earth.
This notion came to the fore in the early 1990s, when David Icke, a British soccer player cum television broadcaster, pulled together conspiracy notions about religion, finance, politics and governments, science, and media, shaking them into a gigantic Slushie of subjugation in which we sheeple (Icke’s term) are duped, manipulated, and controlled by hidden, reptilian aliens. Apologists for hollow Earth acknowledge that the Earth is probably not hollow. But, they add, it is possible (according to them) that the inner Earth is composed of various electromagnetic dimensions and “frequencies” that are invisible to us. The denizens of the hollow Earth exist.
We just can’t see them. Icke wows receptive audiences at large, concert-style events he stages in Europe and New York.
3. President Kennedy and Vice President (later President) Johnson colluded with NASA to secretly send astronauts to the distant planet Serpo.
Grateful to U.S. military doctors that saved its life at Roswell in 1947, an alien invited Earthlings to visit its people, the Eben, on Serpo—a trip that, according to the alien, would be technologically possible, with shared Eben wormhole technology, by 1965. Twelve American astronauts made the journey during 1964–65. After a visit lasting twelve years (some sources say thirteen or more), two of the astronauts elected to remain on Serpo and explore the planet’s wonders; two more died of natural causes.
Because Serpo has twin suns that give off radiation dangerous to humans, the eight astronauts that returned to Earth later died. The “Project SERPO” story surfaced in 2005, and had adherents ten years later. In 2013, Len Kasten, a writer interested in astrology and Theosophy (an occult belief system preoccupied with divine wisdom imparted by human messengers), found the Serpo tale sufficiently compelling and marketable to support a book, Secret Journey to Planet Serpo: A True Story of Interplanetary Travel.
4. Wise aliens representing the Star Nations provided information that allowed the USA to build and launch a secretly orbiting spaceship fleet, code-named Solar Warden.
A variation on the true-but-shelved “Star Wars” missile- defense initiative, Solar Warden protects Earth from extraterrestrial invasion— which, apparently, is an ongoing threat. The SW spaceships are also on the lookout for terrorist mischief here on the ground. According to this belief, NACA and its follow-on agency, NASA, are mere dummy organizations designed to facilitate, maintain, and obscure the Solar Warden program.
Further, the U.S. government works hand in glove with the United Nations (frequently cited as a villainous force behind a great variety of conspiracies) to perpetuate the program.
5. Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 fell prey to UFOs, perhaps in collusion with humans. For reasons as yet unknown (at this writing), Malaysia Airlines’ Boeing 777 crashed into a remote section of the Indian Ocean on March 8, 2014.
What should have been an interlude of sober reportage became a sensationalized, non-stop media rave-up. The chief culprit, the CNN cable news network, regarded the accident as a potential ratings bonanza, and covered it to the exclusion of all other news—for weeks. Because hard facts were elusive, CNN put together endless panels of aviation experts for insights into what might have happened. On-air reporters planted themselves inside airliner flight simulators to demonstrate what could have brought the plane down. Staff meteorologists chattered endlessly about air currents and storms.
Security analysts discussed the possibility of a terrorist act. Political operatives warned of possible international implications. When Malaysian officials stalled in their search for answers, CNN abruptly scaled back its coverage to almost none at all. Although the mass sensationalism had ended, failure to come to a neat resolution encouraged the impatient natures of some conspiracy fans. The UFO-snatch explanation, though marginal, maintains adherents because the notion of 239 souls at the mercy of meddling extraterrestrials is more exciting than a plain blank wall.
6.The dark side of the Moon is home to a secret alien base.
Despite Apollo 20 and other NASA flybys that photographed and mapped the so-called dark side, the alien-base idea flourishes because, well, you can’t see the dark side of the Moon from your backyard, or from anywhere on Earth. Clearly, then, something hinky is going on up there. The military/surveillance/world dominance purpose of the base is reasonably consistent from story to story, but the base’s origin is attributed to numerous factions. One familiar claim is that the base is the creation of fugitive Nazis that utilized German rocket technology to flee Earth in 1945. Another theory credits the U.S. government, acting alone, with the base; yet another is that the base is a U.S. concern created with reverse-engineered alien technology captured at Roswell in 1947.
Alternatively, the base is a joint U.S./alien endeavor, or (with sinister overtones) a joint project of the U.S. and Russia (or China); or the United Nations, with or without alien assistance. Familiar bogeys such as the Trilateral Commission (a nonpartisan think tank founded by David Rockefeller), world bankers (international Jewry, that is), the New World Order (super-rich and authoritarian power elite), the Illuminati (a secret society with mystical overtones and authoritarian ambitions), and other-dimensional demons are occasionally invoked in discussions of the darkside Moon base.
7. Humans walked on Mars in 1979, the culmination of a clandestine NASA space program established with technological assistance from aliens.
This flamboyant idea has roots in claims from a woman who called in to America’s Coast to Coast AM radio program in 2006, identifying herself as “Jackie” and claiming to be an ex-NASA employee. A clandestine manned Mars program, she said, got underway in 1968 and achieved a remarkable, and very secret, Mars landing eleven years later. Jackie saw the astronauts walking and running on the Martian surface while she worked with a “downstairs” NASA team running telemetry from the astronauts’ roving Viking lander.
Even if we grant that Jackie meant “video feed” when she said “telemetry,” the fact is that the Viking lander was not designed to send back video. Further, the Viking lander was just that, a lander, with no wheels. It could not have been roving about. (A possibly partisan add-on to this theory is that the NASA/alien cabal sent teenage Barack Obama to Mars around 1979.) Some critics that dismiss Jackie’s claims say that she did not inadvertently see Mars but NASA footage of the faked 1969 Moon landing—a landing that, according to these theorists, never happened.
8. A still-popular 1956 UFO thriller from Hollywood, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, has hidden documentary and political underpinnings that Washington did not want discovered by the public.
On two occasions in July 1952, witnesses in and near Washington, D.C., reported formations of spherical or disc-shaped lights moving over the city—most famously, over the Capitol dome. Although the Air Force quickly credited the objects as tricks of light caused by “temperature inversions,” interest in the sightings remained high for many years. In the mid-1950s, filmmaker Charles Schneer, a producer attached to Columbia’s B-picture unit, sold the studio on what he described as a loose take on Maj. Donald Keyhoe’s popular book Flying Saucers from Outer Space.
Washington tolerated Keyhoe, but hardly wanted additional dissemination of his ideas about craft of extraterrestrial origin. (For more on Major Keyhoe, see chapters one and nine.) A resourceful and talented journeyman director, Fred F. Sears, brought a brisk hand to Earth vs. the Flying Saucers; stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen (whose earlier professional work included the fabulous dinosaur that was The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms) provided startlingly believable special effects. Harryhausen’s conception of the classically shaped flying saucers remains chilling, for although the craft are essentially featureless, they display rapidly rotating top parts, and extender arms that emerge from their bellies to send withering heat rays against tanks, ships, and troops. (In a sequence that exploits the paranoia caused by a handful of West Coast American deaths caused by fiery Japanese “balloon bombs” late in World War II, Harryhausen’s saucers set an entire forest ablaze.)
As part of his research, Harryhausen met with Californian George Adamski, who claimed numerous, voluntary contacts with friendly aliens. Washington had seemed content to allow Adamski to exist on what it considered the fringes of UFOlogy, but the film’s dark variation on the Adamski experience—the abduction, “brain drain,” and murder of an Army general—cut too close to home. And in the script’s climax (clearly inspired by Kehoe’s interest in the 1952 D.C. sightings), the saucers mount an attack against Washington, panicking thousands, slicing through and toppling the Washington Monument, crashing into the Capitol dome, and setting down on the White House lawn.
Although Schneer and Columbia geared themselves to promote Earth vs. the Flying Saucers as fiction, they received no preproduction cooperation from the U.S. government or military. The movie’s Washington, D.C., sequences were cleverly cobbled together with miniature buildings, process plates, and street scenes filmed on the Columbia back lot in California. Only a handful of second-unit footage, most of it “establishing” material shot without sound, showed some of the cast in genuine Washington locations. The saucer’s destructive interactions with the military combined process plates with stock footage of exploding ships and crashed military aircraft. In the story, the military is helpless, and the saucers are vulnerable only to a sound-wave gun, devised by a scientist working largely on his own, that disrupts the saucers’ gyroscopic stabilizers.
Given that the U.S. armed forces take a fall in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, one cannot be too surprised that the military was disinclined to help facilitate the film’s production. That refusal, and Washington’s fondness for the “temperature inversion” explanation offered in 1952, suggests a “stonewall” action that some observers have tied to a conspiracy.
9. Cattle mutilations, although the work of terrestrial flying saucers, are falsely attributed to extraterrestrial craft in order to hide nefarious medical experiments conducted by American military doctors.
According to this theory, flying saucer technology came to Washington via Nazi scientists and airmen relocated to the United States beginning in 1945, as part of Operation Paperclip and other quasi-secret government programs. Saucer technology that had been developed by the Nazis was effectively kept out of Soviet hands at war’s end, and put to use by U.S. researchers interested in avionics, weapons systems—and eccentric disciplines the likes of cryogenics, radiation exposure, covert sterilization, and anti-coagulants.
Adherents of this theory cite cattle as ideal study subjects—though one would think that, physiologically, pigs are a better match to humans. Regardless, the government’s particular interests explain the ravaged state of cattle taken and then returned by saucers: animals left without blood, tongues, genitals, and various organs. To divert attention from its saucer and cattle program, the perpetrators spread rumors of extraterrestrials, murder cults, Satanists, and end-times ravers.
10. U.S. government dupes, in the thrall of takeover-minded extraterrestrials, murdered President Kennedy because the president planned to reveal the aliens’ existence.
Some proponents of this idea trace alien control of Washington to President Eisenhower, who made the mistake of dealing with extraterrestrials in return for advanced alien technology and government obfuscation of UFOs. Working through secret societies that included Skull and Bones, the Illuminati, and the Masons, Earth’s hidden alien overlords control governments and economies around the world. JFK uncovered the plot while in the White House, and planned to expose it during (according to some accounts) a simultaneous three-network television broadcast in late 1963 or early 1964. (Yes, this theory is in direct opposition to the one that is number three on this list.)
The identity (or identities) of the shooter are a little vague, but a violently Libertarian Arizona man named Milton William Cooper fingered JFK’s limousine driver as the culprit. According to Cooper, William Greer killed Kennedy with an alien-engineered “gas pressure device.” The Zapruder footage and still images reveal that Greer turned his head to look back at the President following the first shot; in Cooper’s view, Greer was checking to see whether his alien weapon had done its work. Cooper broadcast his conspiracy and antigovernment views on his own shortwave radio program, and published a conspiracy book, Behold a Pale Horse, in 1991.
He identified abduction-author Whitley Strieber as a CIA agent assigned to spread falsehoods about extraterrestrials. Cooper also outed mainstream UFO researchers Linda Moulton Howe and Stanton Friedman, as well as noted astronomer Richard Hoagland, as government/alien catspaws. During the last twenty years of his life, Cooper became preoccupied with the armed militia movement. Wanted for tax evasion, he retreated to a homestead in Arizona, where, in November 2001, he was shot and killed by Apache County sheriff’s deputies after Cooper shot one officer in the head.
11. A violent 1979 clash of extraterrestrials and humans in New Mexico in 1979 resulted in the deaths of nearly four dozen human scientists.
The secret base at Dulce, New Mexico, is at the center of even more purported government cover-ups than are detailed earlier in this chapter. A 1962 government plan to repair and fly some of the dozens of alien spacecraft recovered since the late 1940s became the seed for a more ambitious project initiated in the late 1960s.
The linchpin of that later program brought human scientists and aliens together at Area 51’s S4 Nevada facility and at a base outside Dulce, New Mexico. At those places, aliens provided Earth scientists with advanced avionics and other technology in return for limited access to human beings selected by the aliens for abduction and biological study. U.S. military and intelligence insisted that the ETs prepare lists of names ahead of time, and that abductions had to be approved by S4 and Dulce officials. In the early 1970s, though, human officials discovered that the extraterrestrials had taken many more people than the relative handfuls whose names appeared on the lists.
In fact, the aliens had abducted thousands of people, implanting some of them with mind-control devices before their release and killing others outright, carving away at their genitalia and other organs, to acquire the base materials needed for the creation of artificial, quasi-human organisms. The two factions reached an apparent rapprochement, but by 1979 (some sources say 1978), government officials had been pushed to the limit. Fearful of exposure, the U.S. officials demanded that the ETs cease unrestrained abductions.
Subsequent alien intransigence led to the deaths—possibly by execution—of forty-four human scientists, and drove a stake into human/alien cooperation.
Ever since, aliens have busily implanted mind-control devices in countless more humans, preparing them for use as fifth columnists.
12. A 1996 sighting of an extraterrestrial by multiple witnesses inspired the Brazilian army to blame the whole thing on a corpse.
The most dramatic of all Brazilian UFO cases occurred in January 1996 in Varginha, a city of about 120,000 located in Brazil’s upper southeast: three young women spotted a creature they described as “short, dark, with some sort of sticky liquid all over the body.” The witnesses described three small horns on the creature’s head, and a face dominated by large red eyes. Soldiers from the Brazilian army captured the creature—and then denied doing any such thing. The official explanation for the sighting wouldn’t convince a nine-year-old: army troops had been in town to drop off a body at a local funeral home, and the women had simply glimpsed the corpse. On the inadequacy scale, the army’s account is right up there with sticking your finger into a leak to hold back a bursting dam.
Brazilians were disinclined to believe army claims about most anything, and the “corpse” explanation inspired a great deal of jaundiced laughter. The laughs vanished and the public grew cynical when news leaked that Brazilian authorities had been alerted to a UFO by NORAD (North American Air Defense Command) shortly before the creature sighting, and that the army had squelched farmers’ eyewitness accounts of a silent, gliding craft. Despite the army’s connivance and ineptitude, locals seem to have come to terms with the official obfuscation, for Varginha’s centrally located municipal water tower is in the shape of a flying saucer. At night, it is variously bathed in pink and green light.
13. Worldwide Islam fears UFOs because extraterrestrials are neither human nor angel, but demons.
Based on a gross simplification of Islamic ideas, this notion suggests an all-out Muslim war against aliens, specifically, an assault launched from Pakistan, the only Islamic nation (at present) with nuclear weapons. (Mainstream Islam, particularly as practiced in the West, emphasizes the importance of scientific inquiry in human affairs, and maintains an open- minded—and calm—attitude about intelligent extraterrestrial life.)
14. Schemers in Washington manipulate UFO evidence and fabricate absurd disinformation of their own, and encourage conspiracy rants from the likes of radio host Alex Jones in order to discredit serious UFO investigators.
The most commonly cited reason for this scheme is Washington’s desire (and the desire of other, faceless powers) to collude with extraterrestrials without worry of public awareness and the oversight of politicians.
15. The only UFO conspiracy theory that matters is the one perpetuated by the U.S. government, in order to study citizen reactions to fabricated information about flying saucers.
According to this convoluted and sinister idea, visual sightings, radio signals, and other manifestations of UFOs are inventions of Washington’s military and psy-ops communities. Some people who become obsessed with the spurious evidence fall into paranoia and other mental illnesses. The most extreme of such reactions become tailor-made case studies that Washington applies to larger issues of psychological warfare and national security. A 2014 documentary, Mirage Men, cites a memo (reportedly uncovered by Edwin Snowden) instructing spies on fruitful ways to manipulate citizens’ minds in this and other ways. As with all conspiracy theories, this one depends on the unlikely ability of thousands of conspirators to keep their lips buttoned.