On proportionality bias

This week The Rest is History dropped an excellent five-part series on Jack the Ripper. I managed to listen to all of it in two days. I strongly recommend it if you have any interest in that case, Victorian England, or the history of crime investigation, but also because Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook several times mention—albeit not by name—a useful concept for thinking about how we look for causes in past events: proportionality bias.

I’ve written about this briefly before, in a review of Rob Brotherton’s Suspicious Minds, on the cognitive aspects of conspiracism. Briefly, proportionality bias is our built-in tendency, when trying to explain something important, to look for something equally important as the cause. A cause that is, subjectively, incommensurate with the results is unsatisfying and tempts us toward identifying something else—usually something we are already suspicious of. Again, this is a built-in tendency, not a pathology, but while proportionality bias may be a helpful heuristic on the personal level, it does not scale to world events.

The go-to example is the JFK assassination. Many still can’t accept that the president of one of the most powerful states in history—a man involved in international intrigues at the highest levels including espionage, covert assassination programs, proxy wars, and near nuclear war—was killed by an unsympathetic loser who happened to have temporary work in a building his limousine happened to drive past. It happens to be true but is narratively unsatisfying. The conclusion that it must have been something or someone else comes first, and not necessarily consciously; arguments against Oswald are only meant to confirm it.

Something similar has been happening among certain types with regard to Charlie Kirk. It can’t have been a terminally online loser who killed him out of some half-formed, privately nursed political grievance; it must have been (insert fantasy villain of your choice, though one, the subject of a million crank fixations, keeps coming up).

In the case of Jack the Ripper, this is how we get theories of vast royal machinations or secret Masonic rituals—or some combination of the two—as the force behind the Whitechapel murders. That it was likely a still-unidentified local pervert who was skilled with a knife would, to many, prove disappointing. The imagination would prefer a dark cabal of willing actors, or at least a colorful weirdo, to the anonymous forces of poverty, deviance, and insanity.

Again, Holland and Sandbrook do a good job explaining this, even tying it back to their JFK series. The one point I would add to the above is the role that subjectivity of proportionality bias.

When I reviewed Brotherton’s book, I mentioned the assassinations of JFK and Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914. The former is still the subject of fevered speculation and conspiracy theory; the latter, though part of a flourishing conspiratorial worldview in the 1920s, not so much. Why? Because JFK’s murder still feels important to people in way Franz Ferdinand’s, having become something we learn about in middle school rather than discuss casually, does not.

By the same token, Jack the Ripper is important—to us, for reasons Holland and Sandbrook explain well. In the same way that protesters will show up to vandalize the statues of high-profile targets like Robert E Lee or Christopher Columbus but not for Magellan or Raphael Semmes, or that ancient aliens enthusiasts will fixate on famous landmarks like the Pyramids but not much more complicated ancient construction projects like Roman aqueducts, preexisting cultural cachet matters perhaps more than the arguments themselves. This should, by itself, raise our suspicions.

The UFO Experience

In the late 1940s, the US Air Force approached Professor J Allen Hynek with a request for his services as a consultant. The original wave of flying saucer sightings was at its height, and the Air Force, in its defense role, was investigating this strange new phenomenon. How many reports of strange flying objects were simply misidentifications of planets and stars? They hoped Hynek, a respected astronomer, could help rule such cases out.

Over twenty years and three Air Force projects later, flying saucer flaps had evolved into UFO mania, the reports had evolved from sightings to encounters to abductions, and Hynek had been there for all of it. The Air Force, however, having determined early on that, whatever UFOs really were, they weren’t Russian and apparently weren’t a threat, had lost interest. But public fascination with UFOs, thousands of sightings and rumored sightings, and the multiple competing mythologies growing up around the phenomenon only intensified. Due to Hynek’s high public profile thanks to the Air Force (he is the man who gave us “swamp gas” as a feature of UFO investigation), the curious often asked Hynek to recommend “a good book” on UFOs. The UFO Experience, published in 1972, was Hynek’s attempt to provide it.

This is an interesting book for two major reasons. The first is Hynek’s perspective, which is genuinely openminded and scientific. Hynek approached the problem of UFOs as a field researcher, requiring solid, extensive data and basing interpretations on the data rather than forcing data into preconceived explanations. This would prove one of his ultimate frustrations with the Air Force, a topic we’ll come back to.

But data by itself isn’t of much use—it must be organized before it can be interpreted. And so approximately the first half of The UFO Experience is a taxonomy of UFO sightings with ample reference to cases Hynek (mostly) personally investigated. This is certainly the most famous part of the book. Even if you haven’t heard of Hynek, you’ve almost certainly heard the phrase “close encounter.”

Hynek’s taxonomy falls into two major categories with three subcategories apiece. The first are mere sightings: of nighttime lights; of “daylight discs,” the iconic 1950s flying saucer; and strange objects picked up on radar, possibly offering a hard empirical record of something seen by human witnesses. The second category, the close encounters, sightings of UFOs within 500 feet, a distance theoretically precluding misidentification of stars or aircraft, are of the first kind (sighting of an object in the air), the second kind (sighting of an object on the ground or otherwise physically affecting the environment), and the third kind (sighting of an object with the additional presence of some kind of living occupant).

Not only is this the most famous part of the book, it also has the best stories—the Levelland, Texas UFOs, the Lonnie Zamora sighting, and more. It also illustrates the other crucial scientific aspect of Hynek’s approach, which is his rigorously applied standards of evidence.

Hynek excluded from his study single-witness reports as too easily faked (or at least impossible to corroborate) as well as the testimonials of “contactee” types, flying saucer cultists who claimed to receive regular visits from extraterrestrials who offered touchy-feely advice on disarmament, among other things. In addition to prioritizing up-close sightings with multiple witnesses—preferably independent witnesses of good character or reputation—he factored in the subjective strangeness of reported sightings, an often overlooked data point. Contactee stories, with their feelgood peace-and-love vibes, were too obviously wishful thinking; more compelling were stories of inexplicable close encounters by honest people in professions requiring steadiness and sobriety—cops, doctors, farmers, engineers, military and commercial pilots, radar technicians, air traffic controllers. That many witnesses had been previously uninterested in UFOs was another important factor.

And Hynek, interestingly, found a lot of these, enough to convince him that, having eliminated out huge numbers of hoaxes and misidentifications, something strange was still going on. But understanding or explaining it would require a systematic approach through observation and testing and conclusions that did not exceed the possibilities suggested by the evidence. Hynek is, for example, notably skeptical of the Betty and Barney Hill abduction story, repeating but by no means endorsing their “recovered memories” of boarding the UFOs and enduring medical exams, and never endorses the extraterrestrial hypothesis.

Hynek’s primary concern is always to discover what we can say, scientifically and certainly, about what people have seen, and no more. But this careful, judicious approach was not apparently to the taste of the military, the public, or fellow scientists. He would be repeatedly disappointed.

That leads into the second half of the book, in which Hynek reflects on his twenty years doing the Air Force’s shoe leather work and examines some of the ways UFO investigations had gone wrong. I picked up The UFO Experience specifically to read about Hynek’s methodology, standards of evidence, and taxonomy—with all the good stories, being a non-believing, mostly aesthetic appreciator of the UFO phenomenon—but was surprised to find this half as interesting as the first. That’s because Hynek, though a thoughtful, judicious man, had scores to settle.

The first and most extensive is with the US Air Force. UFO lore of the Roswell coverup and Men in Black ilk posits Project Blue Book and its agents as omnipresent suppressors of information. Nothing could be further from the truth. Hynek criticizes Projects Sign, Grudge, and Blue Book as underfunded, understaffed, and headed by junior officers more keen to get promoted out of the position than to gather and assess evidence. Apathy was the rule, information-gathering was slapdash at best, and conclusions, in those instances when they were actually provided, were flippant and unconvincing. This only worsened once the projects had fulfilled their original purpose of determining whether the Russians were behind the UFOs.

Hynek also had harsh words for the scientific establishment, which refused to question its own paradigms in light of new evidence—the opposite of true science—and resorted to ridicule, blackballing, and naked appeals to its own authority to answer criticism and shut down public questions. They were also too eager to lump the curious in with the kooks. Hynek, in a prescient passage, predicts that these attitudes and browbeating the public with what one might now call, say, “settled science” will undermine science itself.

Hynek ends the book with a call for genuine curiosity, a willingness to investigate and incorporate knew knowledge, and a continued commitment to scientific rigor. I suspect he’d be still be disappointed.

This brings me to the second major reason I found The UFO Experience interesting, the purely historical—its place in the history of this phenomenon. Hynek wrote and published his “good book” on UFOs after they had become a secure feature of the American imagination but before some of the aspects we most commonly associate with it today had become mainstream. Abduction stories like the Hills’ were a relatively recent addition to the legendarium. The Pascagoula incident the year after Hynek published this book, the Travis Walton story two years after that, and Whitley Strieber’s Communion in the mid 80s—which also popularized the almond-eyed greys so often read back into the previous history—made abduction the central pillar of UFO myth and inextricably associated them with aliens.

Hynek also published The UFO Experience just four years after Chariots of the Gods, the original “ancient astronauts” book. Hynek, for whom many of the close encounters of the third kind he relates are, by his own standards, suspiciously “woo-woo,” makes absolutely no mention of this variety of UFO enthusiasm, which was genuinely fringe. It would require decades to grow and metastasize. But alongside the Roswell incident, which was resurrected and backfilled with UFO lore after Hynek’s time, ancient astronauts theories seemingly provide historical validation beyond the sudden appearance of flying saucers in 1947 and are responsible for much popular enthusiasm for UFOs now, from the History Channel (so-called) to Joe Rogan.

This book, then, arrived at a historical sweet spot, a moment of huge potential poised between how the original UFO legend began, how Hynek, newly free of the burden of government apathy, hoped it could develop, and what it would actually become. And that was certainly not more scientific.

The UFO Experience is a fascinating attempt by a principled, hard-working, thoughtful man to wrest some degree of scientific sense out of a phenomenon already buried under speculation, lunacy, and mockery. His standards of evidence and organized, taxonomical mind make for a fascinating presentation of the subject, and the cases he recaps and examines prove all the more compelling as a result. Not only has Hynek’s example shown me, personally, a way out of pure contempt for the believers, it’s a reminder of how rigorous, systematic thought and high standards could still salvage something useful out of a field that has only grown more bizarre since Hynek first applied his mind to understanding it.

Plot holes in reality

By far the most tedious complaint about any given movie today is that it has “plot holes.” Technically, a plot hole is a contradiction or discrepancy in the actual storytelling that makes some part of the story logically impossible. These are not necessarily insurmountable—plenty of good movies have plot holes. But, in the way that the democratic spread of a technical concept always makes it stupider, the popular understanding of plot holes is that 1) they totally ruin entire movies and 2) consist of any unexplained detail in the story, no matter how minor.

This last point is key. Modern movie audiences both need everything spelled out for them and don’t pay attention, so even leaving out characters traveling between two points is sometimes called out as a plot hole. I wish I were making this up.

It occurred to me this morning while reading comments on the latest episode of an Unsolved Mysteries-type podcast that the plot hole has a close cousin in popular conspiracism—the “anomaly.”

Basic dictionary definitions of anomaly emphasize deviation from norms or expectations. Statisticians and scientists routinely talk about anomalies in their data, i.e, results they didn’t expect or that contradict the findings of similar research. But, as with plot hole, anomaly has a broader, looser, darker popular meaning. Read discussions of any recent event that has a conspiratorial angle on it and “anomalies” will pop up not as outlier data or unexpected details, but as trace elements of coverup, alteration or fabrication by Them, and evidence of hidden truths. This usage of anomaly is not coincidentally well suited to insinuation.

Both plot holes and anomalies may be minor unexplained details. The difference is that plot holes exist within the limited worlds conjured by storytelling or filmmaking and, unless the author invents an explanation as a patch, are simply mistakes or information too unimportant to bother about in the first place. An anomaly—as understood by the internet type scrubbing through footage of, say, the Charlie Kirk assassination one frame at a time—admits of explanation because it occurred in reality, limitless and limitlessly complicated. One only has to do good-faith research.

But, in actual practice, calling something an anomaly usually just creates permission to discard valid evidence because it isn’t perfect, to speculate and point fingers, or to venture entirely into a theory the conspiracist has already settled on. X is unexplained or unexpected, therefore A, B, and C.

Just an observation—perhaps more later. The aforementioned podcast episode was disappointingly weak for a generally good show, so this will probably be on my mind for a while. More than usual, anyway.

Addendum: An anomaly in written accounts or eyewitness testimony will usually be called a discrepancy, with almost identical results.

The Ambler paradox

Last night I finished reading Judgment on Deltchev, Eric Ambler’s first postwar novel and a masterpiece of plotting, tension, and especially foreshadowing. (Seriously—if I ever teach creative writing in any capacity, I will assign this or another of Ambler’s early thrillers to teach foreshadowing.) It also has many of Ambler’s sharp, wry observations.

Here’s one from near the end. The narrator, Foster, an English playwright commissioned to report on a show trial unfolding in an unnamed Balkan country, finds himself entangled like many another Ambler protagonist in the preexisting schemes of people much more nefarious and capable than he is. Gradually he becomes a pawn.

In a passage foreshadowing some of what is to come, Foster notes that the Stalinist puppet regime, later, will scapegoat him, condemning him as an agent of British intelligence (among other things), an accusation he finds painfully hard to deny:

With the newspapers it was not difficult; I did as I had been asked and referred them to the Foreign Office. With friends and acquaintances it was less simple. It is, I find, extraordinarily embarrassing to be described in print as a member of the British secret service. The trouble is that you cannot afterwards convince people that you are not. They reason that if you are a member you will still presumably have to say that you are not. You are suspect. If you say nothing, of course, you admit all. Your denials become peevish. It is very tiresome.

A bit of coy reverse psychology suggests itself but is both dangerous and unattractive for the fundamentally honest man:

Probably the only really effective denial would be a solemn, knowing acknowledgment that there might be some truth in the rumour. But I can never bring myself to it. Foreign Office or no Foreign Office, I have to explain what really happened.

There’s a threshold of secrecy and paranoia beyond which all denials are confirmations. This kind of ambiguity offers security for the professional but proves an inescapable trap for the passerby who blunders into this world. It’s a dangerous place for the mind and soul. Witness the conspiracy theorists who go down the rabbit hole deep enough to get into this everything-proves-my-theory mindset. Per Forster, “it is very tiresome.”

It is also a great device for creating irony and tension. Ambler’s thrillers are built on the overlapping realities of the professional intriguer and the bourgeois amateur, and his characters, ordinary people tainted by their contact with these other worlds, have to live with the paradox that their good-faith denials sink them deeper in suspicion. More than one of his narrators uses the telling of the story to try to clear their name and strike back at critics.

The first of Ambler’s novels that I read was The Mask of Dimitrios (aka A Coffin for Dimitrios) early last year. Here’s a similarly trenchant set of observations I quoted from that book at the time, and here’s my full review. Back in the spring I also read and reviewed The Levanter, which features another strong dose of the paradox.

The Mooch takes Dealey Plaza

This week on The Rest is History Club bonus episodes Dominic Sandbrook hosted Anthony Scaramucci, whom you might—might—remember as Donald Trump’s White House communications director for a week and a half in 2017. They talk through presidential history and their picks for the best of the lot. Despite my disagreeing with a lot of their choices it’s a generally fun conversation and Scaramucci is a smooth talker with a certain oily New York charm, like an ingratiating mid-tier Corleone enforcer who desperately wants you to know how many Douglas Brinkley books he’s read.

In the course of discussing JFK, Sandbrook teased that Scaramucci disagrees with the conclusions Sandbrook and Tom Holland laid out in their excellent series on Oswald and the Kennedy assassination. After a bit of puffing insinuation—“Remember I was in the White House, so I’m not really at liberty to talk about it,” as if the staffer who holds press conferences is going through highly classified FBI files in his off hours—Scaramucci says:

“But I would just ask you to look at the Zapruder film very closely—look at those three or four frames—and you tell me where the shot came from. Okay? Take a look. And if you believe the ‘magic bullet’ theory—”

Okay. The shot came from behind. Take a look at the Zapruder film however closely you want, but that’s not going to transform what you see in frame 313 into anything other than an exit wound.

Most of the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories, for me, founder upon a few immovable physical facts:

1. The first shot to strike Kennedy passed through him into Governor Connally. You can see both men react to the shot simultaneously in the Zapruder film.

2. No “magic” is necessary to explain the effects of that shot, as bullets do not move in straight lines, especially when passing through solid objects like human bodies. Read even a little bit about combat medicine and this should be obvious.

3. Regardless of which direction Kennedy’s head moves, the shocking head wound visible in the Zapruder film is an exit wound, meaning, again, that the bullet struck Kennedy from behind.

4. Shooting from behind was easier than the shot from the grassy knoll that Scaramucci and so many others either suggest or insist upon. A shooter on the grassy knoll would have to traverse left-to-right to hit a target moving across his line of fire. For a shooter above and behind Kennedy—in, say, the upper floors of the Texas School Book Depository—his target would be sitting almost motionless in his sights as the presidential limo moved down and away from him.

Argue all you like about Oswald, the Mafia, the Cubans, the CIA, or whatever, but no theory that contradicts these facts is credible.

I come down, like Sandbrook and Holland, firmly in the camp that it was Oswald acting alone in a politically motivated crime of opportunity, but I am willing to entertain some alternative that fits within the physical limits imposed by 1-4 above. For a detailed example worked out in fiction, see Stephen Hunter’s Bob Lee Swagger novel The Third Bullet. Hunter, who actually knows something about guns, ballistics, and marksmanship, posits a second shooter in the building across the street from the Texas School Book Depository firing along almost the same axis as Oswald, who is still in his historical position and still fires at Kennedy. I can’t remember who or what is behind this convoluted backup plan in Hunter’s story, but it works within the known facts.

I don’t believe it, but this is far more likely than whatever it is Scaramucci wants impressionable listeners to think he knows.

UFO

I’m going to start this review in an odd place—with online criticism. As I read Garrett Graff’s UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here—and Out There I looked through the one- and two-star reviews on Goodreads and saw lots of complaints that UFO doesn’t cover a specific sighting or incident, or doesn’t cover it in enough detail, or leaves out a reader’s favorite “researcher” (or skeptic), or—at the extreme end—that Graff is in the pocket of the CIA and his book is a psyop.

Leaving that last tinfoil hat line of criticism aside, the other disappointed or angry reviewers missed a crucial detail about a book like UFO: it is a survey.

When I introduce my courses at the beginning of every semester—I’m set to repeat this speech bright and early Wednesday morning—I explain what I mean by “survey” by talking about hiking back home. From the top of a mountain, as one surveys the view, one does not examine every tree, climb every peak, or dip into every hollow, one simply takes in a literal overview. Surveying the view provides context. This, in a metaphorical sense, is what makes a class like my Western Civ I or US History II or a book like Graff’s UFO useful—it gives an overall shape to the thicket of specifics in which it is easy to get lost.

From saucers to Tic Tacs

Graff narrates the history of UFO sightings and the many attempts to research and understand them from the immediate post-war world of the mid-1940s through the recent past. UFOs and aliens—two topics that we tend to forget don’t necessarily overlap—have become such an archetypal staple of our culture that we tend to forget how different the world was when they emerged.

Beginning with the Roswell incident in 1947, Graff tells the story through three major interweaving narrative threads. First are major incidents that shaped and directed the UFO phenomenon, including the initial Arnold sightings; the Mantell incident, in which a P-51 pilot crashed in pursuit of a high-altitude object; the Lonnie Zamora incident in Socorro, New Mexico; the Betty and Barney Hill and Pascagoula abductions; the Phoenix lights; and the Flying Tic Tac. The second thread, the one most clearly indicated in the book’s subtitle, consists of the various often halfhearted attempts by the US military and federal government to assess and understand UFOs.

The last thread of the story, interweaving with the previous two, consists of the researchers, a wide and colorful cast including Project Blue Book’s J Allen Hynek, celebrity astronomer Carl Sagan, Jacques Vallée, former intelligence officer Luis Elizondo, and a host of enthusiasts and cranks and shysters who sought to profit from the various phases of the UFO craze. Graff gives good attention to the rifts between these individuals and groups, especially those who, like Hynek, sought a genuinely scientific approach and viewed the feel-good peacenik messaging of people like George Adamski’s “contactees” as a distraction from real research and who was, in his turn, looked down upon by figures like Sagan.

These three aspects—the institutional, the personal, and the incidents themselves—and the decades-long perspective Graff offers are especially helpful in seeing how the phenomenon unfolded, first as flying saucers, then as UFOs, and recently as UAPs. The postwar context also helps explain the US military’s initial keen interest and later apathy. Once the military had determined UFOs were not Soviet weaponry or an intergalactic threat, they lost interest and ceded the field to the enthusiasts—who had been itching to take control anyway.

The historical perspective the book offers also demonstrates clearly how the mythology evolved and just how much time it had to do so. Hynek and the Air Force’s investigations went on in fits and starts and the long, slow process of declassification of projects like Mogul, the nuclear-monitoring balloons responsible for some early sighting and the Roswell debris, also fed speculation. Notably, Roswell was forgotten until its reemergence in the lore during the 1980s, when it was recontextualized as an important event—with lots of suspicious new testimonial—by UFO hobbyists.

Surprises and sympathies

That point about mythology brings me to the two surprises UFO gave me. First, early in the book, Graff quotes Carl Jung, who lived long enough to see flying saucer enthusiasm through its earliest phases and who viewed the mania—whatever the reality behind it—as the genesis in real time of a new world mythology.

This insight may not explain the entire phenomenon but is clearly correct. Viewed in chronological order, without the cross-pollination of details from different stories and the projection of later elements of the mythology backward onto earlier parts,* it is easy to see the UFO phenomenon evolving and growing in intensity and complexity—from sightings to encounters to abductions to speculation about government treaties with aliens and underground bases full of reverse-engineered alien tech. UFOs, which are ambiguous enough to mean different things to almost everyone, provide a decentralized, do-it-yourself mythology for an age of disenchantment and materialistic science.**

The second great surprise for me stems directly from the narrative shape UFO’s survey offers, and that is the sympathies I developed for different groups of researchers. UFO includes a number of cads and frauds, the kind of “flying saucer people” Charles Portis’s Gringos so sharply parodies, but beyond these low-hanging fruit are two different groups of genuine scientists who engaged with the UFO phenomenon.

The first include people like Hynek, who worked for decades with the Air Force and then on his own to understand what people were seeing and—increasingly from the early 1960s—encountering and even boarding. Men like Hynek did actual field work—when they had the funding and the manpower, anyway—visiting sites, talking to witnesses, and making a good-faith effort to sort genuine unidentified objects from those that had clear this-worldly causes. Further, they were open-minded enough to change their minds and acknowledge mistakes, which became a key part of Hynek’s story specifically.

Meanwhile, the second group are those like Carl Sagan, who dabbled in UFO research before contenting themselves with ivory tower activities—gazing deep into the navel of the Fermi paradox, fussing with the arbitrary numbers in the Drake Equation, hypothesizing about Dyson spheres as a measure of civilizational progress, fretting over the best ways to encode stick figures in signals to be transmitted to distant stars, opining on the insignificance of earth and its human inhabitants, begging for more and more taxpayer money, and occasionally abandoning spouses. For all their posture of superiority to men like Hynek, it was the latter who seemed to have his feet more firmly planted in the real world, who most directly engaged with the real, particular mysteries of the phenomenon. Not all UFO researchers are created equal.

UFO therefore does what it sets out to do: provide an overview of the history of UFO sightings and abduction stories from the perspective of researchers, both military- and government-affiliated and private enthusiasts. The book covers about eighty years of an complex and controversial topic in just over 400 pages and even manages to work in lots of odd side stories—the men in black, UFO cultists, the Majestic 12 documents, and the attitudes of various presidents to UFOs among them. Graff simplifies and excludes of necessity, but what he includes is very good, and he proves remarkably evenhanded in his treatment of ambiguous evidence.

Caveats

That said, UFO does have flaws.

The first I’d point out is a matter of emphasis. Given that Graff’s focus on the noteworthy “unexplained” cases from the early Air Force investigations, it is easy to miss that the overwhelming majority of UFO reports were and are “explained”: misidentifications, panics, and fakes. The noise-to-signal ratio is lopsidedly noise. This fact is present in UFO, between the lines—the wearying quality of UFO investigation, at least for a sincere, scientific mind, comes through clearly—but could have used closer attention.

Second, UFO has numerous puzzling footnotes, many of which have little to do with the passage they annotate. Others seem to be there to take potshots at figures like J Edgar Hoover or to work in information Graff presumably turned up for his previous book on Watergate. Most of them could be cut.

A third flaw is thematic. Graff makes much of the openness of non-Western religions and Mormons like Harry Reid to life on “other worlds.” He implies more than once that scientific resistance to extraterrestrial life stems, directly or indirectly, from Christianity, which in his telling limits intelligent life to earth and would be threatened by its existence elsewhere. This is a myth reinforced by the pronouncements of the irreligious. Here, contra that idea, are the evangelical Michael Heiser and Catholic Jimmy Akin on actual Christian approaches to life on other planets. This is a minor point but an annoying one.

The fourth flaw has more to do with the subject itself. As UFO folklore spread and evolved it grew enormous. A survey like this must be selective, and Graff mostly selects well. But the later chapters, covering the 1980s to the present, felt rushed compared to the earlier sections, and it is here that there is some merit to accusations that Graff has omitted crucial material. The most obvious example is Bob Lazar, a man I take to be a fraud but whose testimony has had a death grip on UFO enthusiasts for decades. He is not even mentioned. Given Lazar’s purported background at Area 51, this material is firmly within the book’s subject area and could have been useful in conveying how the phenomenon has evolved in the recent past, especially considering how often he comes up in UFO discussions now. Again, not everything can—or should—make it into a book like this, but bringing in Lazar and emphasizing the increasing influence of Erich von Däniken’s ancient astronauts theories, among other recent aspects of the movement, could have strengthened the later passages of the narrative.

The final flaw with UFO is something I rarely bring up, but that is presentation. UFO has the most typos, misspellings, and syntactical mistakes of any professionally published book I’ve ever read. Every chapter has multiple errors. I don’t take this to be Graff’s fault, but it’s so pervasive it’s worth mentioning. If Graff ever produces a second edition, I hope the publisher will take more care over this.

Conclusion

Even with those quibbles in mind, UFO is a timely, useful, and enjoyable book, covering a vast amount of material from numerous perspectives. With new if inconsequential UFO revelations every year and more and more rampant speculation, especially in the podcasting world, where the last eighty years of material can frantically crossbreed newer and more powerful conspiracy theories, having a survey view of how this all began should prove helpful to anyone interested in the topic. UFO may not cover everything, but it offers a detailed and nuanced look at the people and events that gave rise to our present obsessions with the little green men.

* “Greys,” for example, which come into the mythology relatively late with later versions of Betty and Barney Hill’s story before being heavily popularized by Whitley Strieber (whom Graff writes about) in the 1980s, are often inserted into modern visual interpretations of earlier incidents like the Eagle River “pancakes from outer space” incident (which Graff does not include), in which a Wisconsin farmer encountered the occupants of a UFO and afterward described them in entirely humanoid terms. Later depictions frequently substitute greys for what he described.

** As I have theorized here recently, UFOs and aliens offer the thrill of the gothic within non-threatening materialistic modern parameters.

Not mincing words, words, words

Every once in a while the YouTube algorithm gets one right. A few days ago it recommended a recent video called “The truth about Shakespeare” (thumbnail blurb: “You’re being LIED TO about Shakespeare”) from the RobWords channel. This wouldn’t usually entice me but for some reason it piqued my interest in just the right way, and I gave it a chance.

I’m glad I did. It’s a good short video concerned primarily with the commonly repeated factoid that Shakespeare himself coined 1,700 words—or perhaps 3,500, or perhaps 20,000. I’ve even seen this presented as an important reason to read Shakespeare, or at least learn about him in school. I’ve been skeptical about both claims for a long time.

Rob does a good job interrogating just what these figures are supposed to mean, pointing out the difference between coining a word, modifying a word, or simply being the first known person to write a word down. He also notes that some of the words credited to Shakespeare either mean different things the way he used them (bedroom being an instructive example) or are attested years before Shakespeare in other writers like his earlier contemporary Marlowe or the much earlier William Caxton.

All this alone makes it a worthwhile video. But near the end, Rob raises the question of authorship—and rightly doesn’t spend much time on it. Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. The theories that he didn’t arise suspiciously late, being popularized in the late-19th and early 20th centuries by colorful cranks like Atlantis enthusiast and sometime vice-presidential candidate Ignatius Donnelly or—you can’t make names like this up—J Thomas Looney.

If it took more than two hundred years for people to question Shakespeare’s authorship, why did they eventually start at all? And they do some people keep questioning it? Rob has a suggestion: “To my eyes the main argument is essentially classist.”

The editors’ introduction to the Pelican Shakespeare editions of the plays, which I’ve had since college, put it even more bluntly. Regardless of which alternate author an anti-Stratfordian puts forward as the “real” playwright behind Shakespeare, the conspiracy theorists all “have one trait in common—they are snobs”:

“The Baconians, the Oxfordians, and supporters of other candidates have one trait in common—they are snobs.”

Every pro-Bacon or pro-Oxford tract sooner or later claims that the historical William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon could not have written the plays because he could not have had the training, the university education, the experience, and indeed the imagination or background their author supposedly possessed. Only a learned genius like Bacon or an aristocrat like Oxford could have written such fine plays. (As it happens, lucky male children of the middle class had access to better education than most aristocrats in Elizabethan England—and Oxford was not particularly well educated.) Shakespeare received in the Stratford grammar school a formal education that would daunt many college graduates today; and popular rival playwrights such as the very learned Ben Jonson and George Chapman, both of whom also lacked university training, achieved great artistic success, without being taken as Bacon or Oxford.

Curt, to the point, and inescapably true. There is, in fact, at least one inattentive person in the comments of RobWords’s videos making exactly this argument.

Western literature is replete with geniuses who came from nowhere—blind (or at least illiterate) bards, failed politicians, school teachers, orphans who turned to journalism, whole armies of anonymous monks and clerics, and, yes, even the son of a glovemaker. Genius is neither rational nor dependent on resources, and it would mean nothing if it were distributed only to the people we would expect to have it. To argue otherwise is not just crankery, but snobbery.

If you’re interested in this question, Stanley Wells’s William Shakespeare: A Very Short Introduction and Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare: The Worlds as Stage both offer accessible, well-argued short introductions and responses to these theories. And be sure to give RobWords’s video a watch, especially if you’ve ever been told Shakespeare’s value is in his coinages rather than his stories.

Wanting to believe

Back before the hurricane, Micah Mattix’s Prufrock Substack quoted a recent essay by Clare Coffey in the The New Atlantis, “Who Wants to Believe in UFOs?” It’s an excellent essay, making the case that the rinse-repeat pattern of UFO revelations—purported new evidence, new whistleblowers, new openness on the part of the government and media, and new excitement followed by… nothing much—indicates a turn toward “something much older and weirder” in the way the public thinks of this phenomenon.

That Coffey also brings in two works on our changing views of the cosmos over time, CS Lewis’s Discarded Image and his close friend Owen Barfield’s Saving the Appearances, as well as the work of the late Michael Heiser, an expert ancient Semiticist with a sideline in “anything old and weird,” only makes it that much better. It’s well worth your time.

Two specific aspects of Coffey’s essay gave me a lot to think about. First, her informal taxonomy of attitudes toward UFOs etc. If mentioning Lewis and Barfield is bait, giving my wannabe Aristotelian mind a set of categories to sort things into is setting the hook. Coffey gives us three basic groups:

• Disinformation non-enjoyers—aggressive skeptics who “do not merely disbelieve in aliens; they see public discussion of UFOs as an embarrassing social scourge foisted by hucksters on an ever-gullible populace.”

And among believers:

• Explorers—adherents of the more scientifically- and technologically-oriented and, until recently, culturally predominant vision of UFOs as evidence of intelligent life “over there,” elsewhere in the same universe we inhabit and bound by the same laws. Hence the emphasis on technology.

• Esotericists—the burgeoning newer view, a vision of UFOs as evidence of deeper hidden truths “in here,” which naturally lends itself to theory-of-everything mix-and-match worldviews in which everything is evidence of everything else though, seemingly paradoxically, they “are both profoundly open and restlessly systematizing.”

Both types of believer have specific fundamental assumptions and hopes. Both also have shadow forms or “negating modes”:

• Negating explorers believe the evidence but interpret it as part of some kind of purely terrestrial psyop.

• Negating esotericists are the folks who interpret aliens as demons in disguise.

As Coffey herself points out, these are loose categories with fuzzy boundaries and significant overlap. I’ll add that, even if the esotericists in the form of the Graham Hancock and Missing 411 and Joe Rogan types are gaining the upper hand, they are not new. Charles Portis, a sharp-eyed observer of the UFO scene circa 1975, just after von Däniken made the ancient astronauts thesis popular, portrays the type realistically in Gringos, as I’ve noted here before.

To lay my cards on the table, especially since I’ve written about this stuff several times and don’t want to be misunderstood, I’m probably about 15% negating explorer and 85% solid disinformation non-enjoyer. I’m simply never impressed with the purported evidence, its interpretation, and the fact that new whistleblowers inevitably turn out to be frauds. Not that I’m a killjoy. My attitude is basically that of Jimmy Burns in Gringos, one of amused observation and even enjoyment without a bit of belief: “[T]he flying saucer books were fun to read and there weren’t nearly enough of them to suit me. I liked the belligerent ones best, that took no crap off the science establishment.”

Which brings me to what I think is the one weakness of this taxonomy: its inability to account for what I’ll call aestheticists. These are people for whom the actual existence of UFOs is immaterial; their interest is purely in the atmosphere, the vibe of UFOs and aliens.

My recently developed pet theory is that UFOs and UFO lore have, for modern people, filled the hole left by the gothic. Where the Romantics, when in search of a tingly spine, went to windswept moors under the light of the full moon, relict beasts of bygone ages, decaying houses full of dark family secrets, and the inexplicable power of the supernatural—to the otherworldly of the past—if we want the same sensations in the present we go to the strange lights in the night sky, the disappearance, the abduction, cold intelligences from the future, decaying governments full of secrets, and the inexplicable power of interstellar technology.

I suspect a significant subset of interest is based on this appeal. Add this as a third-dimensional Z-axis to the X and Y axes of the explorers and esotericists and I might be able to plot myself more accurately. I’ve always gotten a similar kind of thrill from both Baskerville Hall at night and the atmospheric dramatizations of “Unsolved Mysteries.”

That’s a quibble, but I think a potentially fruitful one since Coffey does not discount the human need for the uncanny. (Her section on the flaws in the argument that UFO obsession is a substitute religion, something I’ve suggested here myself, is especially good and probably mostly right. The religious impulse is real but better fulfilled elsewhere, though I still think that the religious overtones of much UFO lore is not accidental.)

The other thing that I found particularly thought-provoking is, in a reconsideration of the “roundelay discourse” on UFOs, the endless cycles of approach to new knowledge that never actually reveal anything, Coffey’s argument that the “meta-discourse” of the phenomenon—talking about what the enthusiasm about UFOs and aliens means in and of itself—is “the only productive line of inquiry.” She goes through five possible explanations and repercussions based on which of the groups in her taxonomy turns out to be right. I won’t recap it here in the interests of space, but it’s excellent—another good reason to read the essay.

And it leads into Coffey’s concluding thoughts on the reason the UFO phenomenon is impossible to “culturally metabolize”—cosmology or worldview. Reductivist, mechanistic materialism has ingrained itself so deeply in our culture that it shows up in our unthinking turns of phrase, even among the religious:

The biggest development seems the elevation of chemical and electrical mechanisms within the machine universe: we love to talk about love as “a chemical reaction,” and our Twitter compulsions as “dopamine hits,” as if we were actually clearing obfuscation by speaking in these terms. We love to discuss thinking as “our synapses firing” and our world as a tiny rock hurtling along its orbit through space.

UFOs, at least as interpreted by esotericists, flout this conception of the world, and the esotericists know this. “[T]hey are tired of the machine universe,” Coffey writes. “They want out.”

I do not think, as Coffey seems to suggest, that the disinformation non-enjoyers feel threatened or that they need to defend a materialist, mechanistic universe. Far from seeing earnest UFO obsession as a threat, I’m usually simply grieved by it, and Lord knows I am no materialist. But this essay is an excellent examination of much of what is going on in popular enthusiasm for UFOs and I recommend it heartily.

On the fine art of insinuation

Eric Idle and Terry Jones in Monty Python's "Wink Wink, Nudge Nudge" (1969)

Earlier this week, in my notes on a recent historical controversy, I mentioned some of the “dark insinuations” that were one part of the furor. That particular aspect of the controversy wasn’t the point of my post, but I did want to revisit it in general terms—especially since I was working on a post on the same topic last year, a post I eventually abandoned.

Since facts and sound historical interpretation prove dangerously prone to turn back on them, conspiracists rely heavily upon insinuation—the “you know what I mean,” “wink-wink, nudge-nudge” implications of whatever factual information they do put forward. This approach allows them to present information in what seems to be a purely factual way, but with a tone that implies the conclusion they want you to reach. It’s a technique used in what David Hackett Fischer called “the furtive fallacy” in historical research.

The fine art of insinuation crossed my mind again just before the interview that prompted my previous post when I watched a recent short video on the Cash-Landrum incident, a genuinely weird and interesting—and genuinely unexplained—UFO sighting in Texas in 1980. Briefly, during a late night drive on a remote East Texas highway, two ladies and a child spotted a glowing, white-hot, fire-spewing object that hovered in their path for some time before drifting away, apparently escorted by US Army helicopters. The ladies subsequently developed severe illnesses related to radiation poisoning.

It’s a decent enough video, so please do watch it, but the YouTuber behind it provides a few textbook examples of insinuation. After describing the ladies’ attempts to get compensation from the military and the government following the incident, the narrator relates the first formal third-party research into the incident this way:

[Aerospace engineer and MUFON co-founder John] Schuessler agreed to investigate the case and was taken by Betty and Vickie to the site where they claimed it had happened. When they arrived, they found a large circular burn mark on the road where the UFO has supposedly been levitating, cementing more credibility to their claims. However, several weeks later, when Schuessler returned to the spot, the road had been dug up and replaced, with witnesses claiming that unmarked trucks came by and took the burnt tarmac away.

This is already a UFO story, and now we have unmarked trucks destroying evidence! The story autopopulates in your mind, doesn’t it? But this part of the story, as presented for maximum insinuation, is vague—which points toward the best tool for combating the use of insinuation: specific questions. For instance:

• What’s so unusual about a damaged road being repaired?

• Did Texas DOT vehicles have uniform paint schemes or other markings in 1980?

• Who were the witnesses who saw these unmarked trucks?

And, granting for a moment the conclusion that the narrator is trying to imply:

• If some powerful agency was trying to cover up what had happened, why did it take “several weeks”? And why did they allow witnesses to watch them?

Insinuation relies on context, especially our preconceptions and prejudices, to do its work. It’s a mode of storytelling that invites the listener to complete the story for you by automatically filling in details. Questioning the vague prompts and implications that start this process can bring the discussion back down to earth and the basic level of fact and source. And, perhaps more importantly in this kind of discussion, specific questions can force people to say what they mean rather than letting them get away with insinuations or implication.

A 44-year old UFO sighting offers a pretty harmless test case for interrogating this technique, but pressing for clearly stated details might have proven more helpful to everyone—as well as more revealing—during that interview last week.

The Cash-Landrum incident was memorably dramatized in a 1991 episode of “Unsolved Mysteries,” which you can watch here. It’s worth noting that the ladies involved always assumed the UFO was purely terrestrial and that they were the victims of some kind of government or military test gone wrong.

Master of the petty indignity

This week on my commute I took a break from podcasts to revisit Charles Portis’s oddest novel, Masters of Atlantis. Though I love and enjoy all of Portis’s books and Masters of Atlantis has much of what make his others so good, it has gradually sifted to the bottom for me. One of these days I might write a full review if only to sort out exactly what it is that doesn’t work for me.

In the meantime, one of the things that works brilliantly throughout Masters of Atlantis is Portis’s use of the “petty indignity.” Character after character is embarrassed and deflated in minor ways.

The funniest instances involve the main character, Lamar Jimmerson, perhaps the most passive protagonist of any novel I’ve read. After being duped into founding a secret society based on purported Atlantean arcana, Jimmerson spends most of the book in a state of gentle obliviousness, pottering around the Gnomon Society’s headquarters in Indiana, book in hand, and ballooning in size like Ignatius J Reilly at 1/100 speed. Every few decades, some shady type ropes Jimmerson into a scheme to bring Gnomon wisdom into the spotlight and establish it in its rightful place of influence.

These schemes usually involve politics. In 1942, Jimmerson is convinced to visit Washington, DC, where he believes he’ll give an important speech about America’s path to victory—following the esoteric geometric principles in the Gnomons’ Codex Pappus—and visit important leaders for one-on-one consultation. Jimmerson dutifully dresses in his ceremonial robes and poma, a goatskin dunce cap that signifies his office as master, and sets out.

The trip turns into a conga line of petty indignities. An overcrowded train means he has no berth to sleep in and he arrives in Washington already fatigued. As it turns out, his assistant has not actually contacted Congress or national broadcasters about hosting Jimmerson’s speech, and during their search for someone important to whom Jimmerson can impart his secret knowledge he gets lost. He wanders Washington until his robes are soaked in sweat and his flimsy sandals disintegrate. Everyone in the city gawks at him.

Portis captures the mood perfectly. Upon Jimmerson’s arrival:

Hotel rooms were all but impossible to get. At the last minute their congressman was able to secure them one small room at an older downtown hotel called the Borger. It was a threadbare place near the bus station. The trip was hot and tiring. At the Borger a midget bellboy called Mr. Jimmerson a “guy.”

“Is that guy with you?” he said, in his quacking midget voice, as Mr. Jimmerson, a little dizzy from his long train ride, veered off course in crossing the lobby.

“Yes, he is,” said Popper.

“Hey! Hey! Hey! Yeah, you! Where do you think you’re going? The elevator’s over here!”

And later, after getting lost:

At the zoo a bum called Mr. Jimmerson a “schmo.” The bum was reclining on the grass with a friend and said, “I wonder who that schmo is.” The other bum ventured no guess. Mr. Jimmerson passed the rest of the day there admiring the great cats and looking into the queer dark eyes of the higher apes. There was reckoning behind those eyes but the elegance of the triangle would forever escape them. In the lion house he found a dime. His corset would not allow him to bend over far enough to pick it up. He pushed it along with his foot while trying to form a recovery plan, and then a boy came along and grabbed it.

When Jimmerson finally arrives back at the hotel, he finds that his mission to pass his wisdom to the Federal government has been superseded. His assistant has met an even bigger crank, an ambidextrous Romanian alchemist, and the whole trip has been for nothing—the crowning indignity. Jimmerson ends the chapter a broken man, lying in bed thinking about picking up chocolate for his wife while his assistants natter about gold all night. A later run for the governorship of Indiana and a state senate hearing in Texas go about as well as you’d think.

What Portis does brilliantly is to prepare you to feel the offense of being called a “guy” or a “schmo” by strangers. Jimmerson feels constantly put on the spot. He is so tense, so anxious to complete his exalted mission, that every petty indignity finds its mark. His self-consciousness is his undoing.

But this is about as self-conscious as Jimmerson ever gets. As I mentioned, he spends most of the novel unaware of anything. Here, for contrast, is Ray Midge, narrator of Portis’s previous novel, The Dog of the South:

I ordered a glass of beer and arranged my coins before me on the bar in columns according to value. When the beer came, I dipped a finger in it and wet down each corner of the paper napkin to anchor it, so it would not come up with the mug each time and make me appear ridiculous.

I’ll admit here that this level of detail-oriented self-consciousness is uncomfortably familiar.

But what Ray Midge has that Lamar Jimmerson does not is self-regard. He’s self-deprecating about it throughout The Dog of the South but he can’t resist mentioning his many skills and talents. Jimmerson hardly thinks of himself, or much of anything but Gnomon triangles. Couple self-consciousness and self-regard and you’ve got a volatile mix. The petty indignity can embarrass a character like Jimmerson—who is motivated, when he has any motivation at all, by a pious sense of duty—but self-serving characters like Austin Popper, his assistant and general shyster, or Sir Sidney Hen, Jimmerson’s brother-in-law and chief rival, can be destroyed by it.

After all, destruction follows after pride, which is what we’re really talking about here.

And Portis exploits pride really well. He peopled all of his novels with blowhards, arrogant cranks, self-appointed grandees, and at least one false Messiah—all people who live permanently on their high horse—and all of his novels feature the humbling comeuppance. In that way Portis’s novels, in addition to picaresques, sharply observed local color tales, and comic shaggy dog stories, are also morality plays.