The UFO Enthusiasts

The 2016 resurrection of The X-Files lasted only six episodes watched by an ever-diminishing audience. Both Duchovny and his costar Gillian Anderson (playing his loyal but mostly unconvinced FBI partner and sometime lover, Dana Scully) looked worse for wear after 14 years, and the show itself seemed exhausted as it tried to interest its viewers in the discovery that Scully might be carrying alien DNA. But strangely enough, the Roswell cover-up narrative has gotten a shot in the arm from an unlikely but potent political source: Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton. And not just Clinton herself but her husband, former President Bill Clinton, and her campaign manager, John Podesta.

In a 2014 interview with talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel, Bill Clinton revealed that he “had all the Roswell papers reviewed” during his presidency. And although he hadn’t found anything exactly definitive in them, he told Kimmel he believed that we earthlings are not alone. Both Clintons had been lobbied extensively during Bill Clinton’s first term by the late billionaire venture capitalist and philanthropist Laurance Rockefeller, a UFO enthusiast. And in 1995 Hillary Clinton, perhaps along with Bill Clinton as well, had been a guest at Rockefeller’s Wyoming ranch, possibly to discuss the release of long-classified UFO documents that Rockefeller had urged.

In December 2015 Hillary Clinton told a reporter in New Hampshire that she planned to “get to the bottom” of the UFO issue if she became president. She reiterated this promise in a March 24 interview with Kimmel in which she also declared her preference for the less-kooky-sounding acronym “UAP” (“unexplained aerial phenomenon”) in contrast to the more common “UFO” (“unidentified flying object”). Then on April 7 Podesta, who had served as Bill Clinton’s chief of staff (and from 2014-2015 as counselor to President Barack Obama), told CNN correspondent Jake Tapper that Hillary Clinton as president would aggressively pursue the declassification of UFO-related documents in the government’s possession, especially as related to Area 51, an Air Force facility in Nevada about 100 miles north of Las Vegas, used for top-secret military aircraft testing. It is Area 51 whither the alien remains from Roswell were said to have been transported and where experiments are said to be conducted to this day in reverse-engineering the extraterrestrials’ technology. Podesta is known for his fascination with UFOs and his longtime insistence that the federal government is in possession of important UFO-related documents. One of Podesta’s favorite television shows was The X-Files, and Bill and Hillary Clinton were said to have dressed up as Mulder and Scully for a 50th-birthday celebration for Podesta in 1999.

In 1947 the local press in Roswell had described a mysterious downed object variously as a “flying disk” and a “flying saucer.” The U.S. Army, operating from a World War II-era airfield just outside of Roswell that later became known as Walker Air Force Base, decided to characterize the debris, largely consisting of tinfoil and rubber, as the remains of a weather balloon. That was an obvious Cold War obfuscation. In 1994, possibly in response to Rockefeller’s lobbying, the Air Force issued a report stating that the downed balloon had actually been part of “Project Mogul,” an ultra-secretive project monitoring sound waves generated by Soviet nuclear testing. Many doubted that story as well, along with a second Air Force report in 1997 concluding that reported sightings of alien corpses at Roswell actually represented psychologically altered memories of military casualties and crash-test dummies. During the early 1990s, just as The X-Files was getting off the ground, a murky 17-minute black-and-white film surfaced that purported to record a medical autopsy, filmed by a military cameraman, performed on the body of an alien being that had been killed either when its spaceship crashed or at some point following its capture. The widely broadcast film was later agreed to be a fake, although its London-based producer, Ray Santilli, continued to insist as late as 2006 that it was a reconstruction of authentic footage of an alien dissection that had deteriorated over the decades. A fictionalized version of the supposed autopsy, along with a vast array of conspiratorial storytelling that could be coaxed out of it, played a recurring thematic role in The X-Files.

The X-Files proved to be a godsend for the town of Roswell, which in 1995 launched its first annual UFO festival, coinciding with the Fourth of July weekend—because that was the time of year when the original Roswell crash broke into the news. Located on a flat, featureless plain in southeastern New Mexico near the Texas border, Roswell is about as far as you can get, geographically and culturally, from the picturesque adobe, the millionaire-boho art scene, the blue-corn tortillas, and the spectacular mountain vistas of northwest New Mexico that most visitors associate with the Land of Enchantment. Furthermore, the 1947 crash happened at a time of year when the desert heat of southeastern New Mexico is at its most searing: late June and early July (the first press reports of the “flying saucer” appeared on July 8, 1947). Temperatures hover in the 90s and can climb well into the triple digits in Roswell in early July.

With the closing of Walker Air Force Base in 1967, there hasn’t been a whole lot of economic or other action in Roswell for decades. Still, despite its inauspicious seasonal timing and its out-of-the-way location, the Roswell UFO Festival has been a runaway success. In 2015 an estimated 10,000 out-of-towners braved the High Plains swelter to pour into “Alien City” during the first weekend in July, generating as much as $5 million in revenues for Roswell and its businesses catering to UFO mania. During the festival the tourists could listen to bands, visit a UFO museum, enter their dogs and cats in an “alien pet contest” and themselves in an “alien costume contest,” watch fireworks, and, if they wanted to get serious, attend three days’ worth of lectures, films, and panel discussions presented by a cadre of people who take UFOs very seriously indeed.

Soon after the Roswell festival proved to be a moneymaker, copycat UFO-fests sprang up in other American towns that could claim contacts with extraterrestrials. One of the first clones started up in 1998 in McMinnville, Oregon, in the heart of the Willamette Valley, about 35 miles southwest of Portland. On May 11, 1950, Paul and Evelyn Trent, a middle-aged couple who lived on a farm about nine miles from McMinnville, claimed to have seen a large metallic-looking disc moving slowly across the evening sky. Paul Trent grabbed his camera and, as he said, managed to take two black-and-white photos of the object before it sped away over the horizon. The pictures ended up in a local newspaper and, eventually, in Life magazine. Even in 1950, according to Life, some wags were jesting that the photographed object looked more like the lid of a garbage can. As the decades passed, skeptics who examined the photos and their negatives maintained that they were a hoax; that the “flying saucer” in question was actually a model, probably suspended by a string from a power line visible at the top of both photos. No matter: McMinnville, pop. 32,000 today, had a genuine UFO hook, and its annual mid-May festival is now second only to Roswell’s in tourist draw.

Unlike the Roswell festival, which is vigorously promoted by city and state officials, the McMinnville festival is a proprietary affair, sponsored by McMenamins, a chain of hotels and pubs in Oregon and Washington that operates the Hotel Oregon, a funky turn-of-the-20th-century inn on a busy corner of McMinnville’s historic downtown main street. But the festival has been enthusiastically co-opted by McMinnville’s residents, business owners, and children. Its high point is a Saturday afternoon alien-theme parade that is a marvel of costumes and amateur float construction: E.T.-style extraterrestrials by the dozens, but also Star Wars and Star Trek characters, Coneheads, Starship Troopers insectoids, little (and large) green men, purple face-painters, tin-hat wearers, and just plain fantastical concoctions of gauze, aluminum foil, and masking.

It helps that northwestern Oregon in mid-May is an infinite improvement over southeastern New Mexico in early July: temperatures in the pleasant 60s and rhododendrons in glorious springtime bloom blazoning nearly every front lawn. It also helps that during the 1990s the Willamette Valley switched socioeconomically from the backwater turkey- and rabbit-farming of the Paul and Evelyn Trent era into upscale viticulture, organic produce, and free-range this and that. (A nostalgic “Turkey Rama” festival persists in McMinnville every July, although most of the big birds have flown the coop to Mexico and elsewhere.) Downtown McMinnville now boasts wine-tasting rooms and excellent restaurants serving up fresh-from-the-fields Pacific Northwest bounty. My husband and I have attended the UFO festival twice, in 2009 and, most recently, in 2015 (his brother lives nearby, so it’s a convenient excuse for a visit).

The problem for us was the “serious” portion of the McMinnville UFO-fest: all those lectures, films, and panel discussions that mimic—often literally, because they feature the same guest speakers who are stars of the UFO circuit—the offerings in Roswell. We bought tickets for the serious stuff both times, which meant that we sat for many hours along with several hundred other people in a darkened auditorium taking in presentations that typically lasted about two hours apiece. In 2009 that was an interesting experience, because of the sheer novelty (to me, at any rate) of UFO culture, but in 2015 it was excruciating, a tired rehash of 2009.

That was because the proposition that we earthlings have been visited by intelligent extraterrestrial beings, whether from nearby planets or from distant stars, has been an idea with a trajectory, and that trajectory—for nearly everyone apparently except the Clintons and John Podesta—seems to have drawn to a close, perhaps around the time that the original X-Files folded on television. For some reason, either the aliens have lost interest in us or we (except for a small, UFO-fixated minority) have lost interest in the very idea that they could be interested. Polls show that at least half of Americans believe in extraterrestrials, but there hasn’t been a dramatic spaceship sighting, much less a Close Encounters-style full-fledged abduction, for decades.

Even during the 1950s the Roswell crash and the Trents’ photographs were news flashes in the pan, although they had a distinct cultural context that dated to the late 19th century, when the Boston astronomer Percival Lowell announced that he had discovered canal-like features on the surface of Mars indicating that intelligent beings had constructed a sophisticated irrigation system on the Red Planet. Lowell’s theories never gained much credence among his fellow astronomers, but they captured the imagination of science-fiction writers. H. G. Wells published The War of the Worlds in 1897; its plot involved a successful invasion of Earth by monstrous-looking but technologically advanced Martians. In 1938 Orson Welles adapted Wells’s novel into a radio drama so grippingly realistic (it took the form of a series of news bulletins) that it caused some listeners to panic. Then, starting in the 1940s, airplane pilots and others began reporting sightings of mysterious “lights in the sky” and other unaccounted-for celestial objects that often took disc-like shapes. The famous psychoanalyst C. G. Jung, as one of his last published books before his death in 1961, wrote Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies. Jung contended, in typical Jungian fashion, that the sightings represented a fundamental human religious impulse dislocated by modernity, a longing for contact with the gods. He noted that the circular shape of flying saucers resembled the mandala, the Jungian-archetypal symbol of wholeness.

Still, both the Roswell crash and the McMinnville sightings quickly disappeared both from the news media and the public consciousness, not to be revived until the 1970s. That’s when pioneer “ufologist” (the name that those who study, and believe in the existence of, such phenomena have given themselves, as the preferred acronym UAP hasn’t caught up with them yet) Stanton T. Friedman introduced the exciting element of an elaborate government conspiracy into the celestial mix. Friedman, possessing a master’s degree in nuclear physics from the University of Chicago and a career as an industry physicist for such well-respected companies as General Electric and McDonnell Douglas, brought scientific street-cred to his investigations (in the National Archives and elsewhere) of the Roswell incident, which he concluded had involved the genuine crash of an alien spacecraft that the U.S. military had effectively concealed. During the 1990s, Friedman endorsed the existence of the “Majestic Twelve,” the code name for a top-secret committee of a dozen academic scientists, military leaders, and high government officials that had supposedly been created by Harry S. Truman in 1947 in the wake of the Roswell crash. The Majestic Twelve’s existence was purportedly evidenced by a leaked film of eight pages of government documents that surfaced in 1984 and contained instructions for exploiting the aliens’ technology and engaging with extraterrestrial beings in the future.

Meanwhile, in 1978, Jesse A. Marcel, a former Army Air Force intelligence officer who said he had personally picked up some of the Roswell crash debris in 1947, told Friedman and two writers, Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore, that he had found the remains of a flying saucer, complete with mysterious purple hieroglyphs, but had been ordered by his superiors to keep mum. Other witnesses in and around Roswell interviewed by Friedman claimed to have seen alien bodies amid the wreckage: child-size humanoid creatures with enormous heads and huge, almond-shaped eyes, the standard E.T.-esque physiognomy that we now associate automatically with visitors from outer space. Berlitz and Moore wrote up their reporting in the best-selling The Roswell Incident (1980), which made the sun-scorched New Mexico town famous. It mattered little—in fact, it was a conspiratorial godsend for the UFO cover-up theorists—that both the FBI and the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations conducted their own probes of the Majestic Twelve documents and deemed them to be bogus. It was Berlitz and Moore, along with Friedman, who also put Area 51 onto the ufologist map.

During the 1970s and 1980s, the theme of human contact with beings of superior intelligence residing on distant planets captured the popular imagination. A Jungian might point to the cultural disruptions of those decades and to the death-of-God theology that essentially killed off mainline American Christianity as underlying sources for this phenomenon. Steven Spielberg’s runaway-hit movies Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) dealt with themes of divorce, family tension, and the suburbs in which most middle-class Americans by then lived: simultaneously cozily familiar and cookie-cutter alienating. Slightly later, in 1996, Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day, another runaway hit, was set in part in Area 51, which in the film housed three alien bodies and a downed attacker ship.

Stanton Friedman, now a white-bearded age 81, is a regular on the UFO panel circuit (he spoke at both Roswell and McMinnville, where I heard him in both 2009 and 2015). So is Kathleen Marden, a blonde former schoolteacher now in her late sixties, who had the good luck to be the niece of Betty Hill and her husband Barney. Now both deceased, the New Hampshire couple had claimed to have been kidnapped and transported onto a spaceship on the night of September 19, 1961, while they were driving back to their home in Portsmouth from a vacation in Niagara Falls and Montreal. Their story, a template for dozens of alien-abduction tales in the decades that followed, became an NBC made-for-television movie, The UFO Incident, in 1975, starring James Earl Jones and Estelle Parsons (Barney Hill, like Jones, was African-American, while Betty Hill, like Parsons, was white). At first the Hills seemed to have no idea that they’d been abducted. As they were winding their way south along U.S. Route 3 through New Hampshire’s White Mountains, the couple claimed to have been pursued by a bright moving light that eventually revealed itself to be a pancake-shape illuminated aircraft. At one point Barney got out of the couple’s car with his binoculars and, as he told people afterwards, saw several humanoid figures staring down at him from the enormous hovering object. The couple raced home—or rather, found themselves at home after a mutual memory lapse that lasted several hours.

It was only later, after Betty had a series of vivid dreams and both Hills underwent hypnosis, that their abduction story and way of accounting for the lost hours coalesced. They then insisted that they had been escorted onto the spaceship and “medically” examined by the aliens in a procedure involving genital probes that seems to be a hardy staple of alien-abduction narratives. Skeptics have maintained that the Hills had ample opportunity to correlate and elaborate on their claimed experiences over the many months of the hypnosis sessions. Furthermore, according to Kathleen Marden, Betty Hill’s sister Janet (Marden’s mother) had reported her own UFO sighting to the family in 1957, leading some critics to speculate that Betty’s story had been triggered by her sister’s.

Marden, by her own account, didn’t get seriously interested in her aunt’s story until around 1990, when she dropped out of teaching to become a professional ufologist. She affiliated herself with the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), a 46-year-old nonprofit dedicated to investigating extraterrestrial sightings, from a perspective that critics have deemed overly credulous. As Marden explained during her presentation in McMinnville last May, her main criterion for deciding whether an alien-abduction narrative is credible seems to be whether the claimed abductees socioeconomically resemble the Hills: whether they, like the Hills, aren’t obvious kooks but solid middle-class citizens. (Barney Hill had been a career post-office employee and NAACP officer, and Betty Hill had been a social worker employed by the state of New Hampshire.) In 2007 Marden teamed up with Stanton Friedman to publish Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience. The book’s cover displayed, along with a black-and-white photograph of the Hills, an image of another of those almond-eyed, skinny-necked figures of etiolated physique that are part of the standard iconography of extraterrestrials. Most recently, in 2013, Marden published The Alien Abduction Files: The Most Startling Cases of Human-Alien Contact Ever Reported. Her collaborator this time around was Denise Stoner, who, along with her husband, Ed, reports having been kidnapped by extraterrestrials twice, in 1982 and again in 1991. Marden devoted a substantial portion of her presentation in McMinnville last year to grainy video footage of a hypnotized Denise Stoner foggily recalling her adventures aboard the distant-planet spacecraft.

But 1961, the year of the Hill abduction, was a long time ago—55 years ago, to be precise—and even 1991 is not exactly recent. The Roswell incident of 1947 is getting close to ancient history. Hasn’t anything new happened in the annals of alien contacts? The answer, at least in McMinnville last May, was: not much. I was already so familiar from my 2009 attendance with what Marden had to say that I could have jumped onstage myself to retrace the Hills’ midnight automotive adventures along U.S. Route 3.

The star of 2015’s McMinnville event, for example, was Travis Walton, probably the most famous alien abductee in history, although his story, like those of the others at the festival, was a bit hoary. At 6 p.m. on November 5, 1975, Walton, then age 22 and part of a U.S. Forest Service brush-clearing crew near Heber, Arizona, had been headed back from the job site in a truck with some of his fellow crew-members. The crewmen spotted one of those bright lights in the sky that always seem to signal extraterrestrial visitors, and the light quickly took the shape of a golden disk. Walton jumped out of the truck and was running toward the light, his fellow crew members said, when he was zapped by a beam from the disc and knocked to the ground. The rest of the crew cleared out of there pronto. Walton went missing for five days and was the object of an extensive manhunt, but he eventually turned up dazed and disoriented outside a gas station in Heber. Ufologists had gotten wind of the story by this time, and so had the National Enquirer, which financed an investigation by the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, a predecessor group to MUFON, in return for access to Walton and his family. Under hypnosis Walton narrated an elaborate tale of waking up on a hospital-like bed inside the spacecraft surrounded by the short-of-stature humanoids with outsize domed heads and immense eyes who seem to inhabit every distant planet. He wandered around the spaceship and even manned the controls briefly, encountered more aliens of varying degrees of friendliness and hostility, and was ultimately released.

Walton’s credibility remains mired in controversy. After his disappearance his crewmates who claimed to have seen the beam of light were given polygraph tests by the local sheriff, who suspected foul play on their part. All passed the lie-detector tests except for one man who failed to complete his. Walton himself was said to have conspicuously flunked (and also to have tried to game the results by holding his breath) a polygraph arranged by the National Enquirer, which decided to suppress the results. Walton later passed two other polygraphs, but the suppression of the first test dogged him through the years. Nonetheless, he wrote up his alleged abduction in a 1978 book, The Walton Experience. That book became the basis of the 1993 sci-fi cult movie Fire in the Sky, clips from which formed part of Walton’s McMinnville presentation in 2015. Actor Robert Patrick, most famous for his impassive killer-robot role in Terminator 2 (1991), played Walton’s boss and best friend, Mike Rogers, in Fire in the Sky, so impressing X-Files creator Chris Carter that he carved out a part for Patrick during the last two years of the original series.

Speaking in 2015 in McMinnville, Walton, who is the subject of a just-released documentary, Travis: The True Story of Travis Walton, looked like a fly preserved for 40 years in 1970s amber, complete with sideburns and soup-strainer mustache. He also came across as oddly defensive, as if he couldn’t get past his polygraph fiascos. (In 2009 Walton had again failed a lie-detector test, as a guest on the now-defunct reality show Moment of Truth.) “You know that polygraphs are only accurate 97 percent of the time,” he told us at one point, not exactly sounding persuasive.

Indeed, Walton, Friedman, Marden, and other McMinnville regulars seemed to spend as much time arguing against the “debunkers,” as UFO-believers call the skeptics who try to destroy their stories, as they spend describing their own experiences and research. The most vilified of all the debunkers, the Clare Quilty of the UFO world—even though he has been dead for 11 years—is Philip J. Klass. Klass, a trained engineer and longtime senior editor of Aviation Week & Space Technology, made a lifetime hobby out of poking holes in narratives of extraterrestrial encounters. He had been particularly hard on the Majestic Twelve documents, which earned him a lengthy blast by Friedman at McMinnville in 2015. Travis Walton also delivered a blast at Klass, who at one point had suggested that Walton and Rogers had cooked up the UFO light show and kidnapping in order to get out of an unprofitable Forest Service contract. (Other skeptics have maintained that the strange lights in the sky in 1975 were probably Air Force test flights, then frequent in that part of Arizona.)

And for good measure, Friedman threw in some jibes at Carl Sagan, dead for 19 years but active during his lifetime in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, which holds that alien life forms may exist but not that they’ve paid visits to Earth that the government has concealed. “Carl Sagan was in some of my classes at the University of Chicago,” Friedman jeered. “I know all about Carl Sagan.”

It’s true that there is no lack of reported UFO sightings that are a little less than two or four or seven decades old. On one website I counted 12 of them in January 2016 alone (fun fact: The new generation of aliens seems to have largely switched from the disc-shaped flying saucers of the 1950s to sleeker triangular-shaped vehicles). Interplanetary contacts are still a staple of Coast to Coast AM, the wee-hours talk-radio show for paranormal-fixated insomniacs, although the extraterrestrials compete with witches, ghosts, giant squids, crop circles, cattle mutilations, and time travel. But in a world that is infinitely more technologically interconnected than it was even 20 years ago, it’s also infinitely easier to figure out quickly that most, if not all, of the claimed extraterrestrial spacecraft have actually been balloons, airplanes, helicopters, searchlights, shooting stars, or just plain imaginary. UFOs are like Bigfoot: People stopped finding traces of the elusive yetis once the formidably forested Pacific Northwest got more developed during the 1980s. And perhaps, from a Jungian perspective, people’s dislocated religious yearnings have simply fastened onto other things: near-death and post-death experiences, life-extension, or colonizing Mars, which is in fact almost as fantastical a prospect as meeting a little green man from Mars. Even Chris Carter, when he revived The X-Files in the 2008 movie I Want to Believe, dropped the Roswell theme and centered his plot around head transplants instead. And he might just as well have stuck to head transplants, given the flop this year of the series revival.

None of this should bode ill, however, for the future of the UFO festivals at Roswell, McMinnville, and other locales that have claimed close encounters with extraterrestrials. At McMinnville the “serious” presentations by Walton, Marden, Friedman, and others were strictly for diehards. The vast majority of the attendees never got near the auditorium; they were out on the streets to eat and drink, take in (and show off) the phantasmagorical costumes and buy bobble-headbands with alien skulls at the souvenir stands. UFO sightings may not be genuine, but they are genuine Americana. During The X-Files‘ original long television run, episodes would end with the colophon “The truth is out there.” Indeed it is, although perhaps not in the places where the ufologists might expect. Or Hillary Clinton.

Charlotte Allen is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.