Science journalist Sarah Scoles’s book can be divided into three sections. The first covers the background of the story that military pilots had taken videos of flying saucers in 2004, videos that became known as the Tic Toc videos. Then there is a short section on the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), which blends nicely into a long final section on Area 51 and other UFO pilgrimage sites. Each section of the book makes contributions to the skeptical understanding of what is behind parts of modern UFO mythology.
This is not a debunking book. Scoles’s approach is sympathetic to, and she clearly enjoyed interacting with, the characters she met while working on the book. The book starts with a description of a very impressive almost–UFO experience she had while researching the book. This event helped her understand how people can find such experiences so compelling as evidence for some sort of inexplicable phenomenon.
The first section contains important information on one of the biggest UFO stories of the 2010s. This was the claim that military fliers had captured video images of flying saucers back in 2004. A credulous New York Times story on December 16, 2017, by Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean reported the event. None of the authors were science journalists. Blumenthal had written a 2013 piece that suggested that UFO abductions were real. Kean was a UFO promoter. Cooper was a Times Pentagon correspondent who had previously written extensively on trade and foreign policy. Thearticle revealed a top-secret military program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) that ran from 2007 to 2012 to investigate UFOs. The story was “all but a declaration not just that UFOs are extant, but also that they are extraterrestrial. They have landed, the Pentagon knows about them, and they may have measurable effects on human beings” (11). Scoles tells the full story of the origins of AATIP and some of the people behind it.
The story starts with Robert Bigelow, a wealthy cut-rate hotel businessman and a major donor to Henry Reid, Nevada Senator from 1987 to 2017. Bigelow had a serious interest in UFOs and all things paranormal. In 1995, he created the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS), which was to investigate everything from “UFOs to the possibility that consciousness survives death … with real scientists, real instruments, real experiments” (83). One of the “real scientists” that Bigelow put on the NIDS advisory board was Harold Puthoff, who had been conned by Uri Geller years previously. In 1996 or 1997, Bigelow purchased the Skinwalker (or Sherman) Ranch in Ballard, Utah, an area known for being a hotbed of paranormal and UFO activity. Despite all the serious investigative equipment and expertise brought to the ranch, nothing paranormal was ever found. Bigelow gave up this line of investigation in 2004.
About the same time, Bigelow spoke to Senator Reid about his interest in UFOs. Reid “thought the government should be studying those [UFOs]” and “pushed a potential project forward” (11), which resulted in the AATIP with a funding of $22 million. Most of this money went to the Bigelow Aerospace Company.
So UFO believer Bigelow was behind the creation of the AATIP and profited from it. Another company founded by some of the same people involved in Bigelow’s operations was the To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences. Harold Puthoff was the vice president for science and technology. The Academy had as one of its goals to investigate fringe science and UFOs. Scoles found that many of the sources for the Times’December 16 story on UFOs were from or associated with the Academy.
In the second section, Scoles delves into one of the largest contemporary UFO organizations, the Mutual UFO Network. She interviewed MUFON officials and attended their meetings. Scoles emphasizes the problems with UFO sightings and eyewitness reports—problems of memory and perception familiar to readers of this journal. She has insight about the love/hate relationship that organizations such as MUFON, and UFOlogy in general, have with science. UFOlogists reject the rigid standards of proof required by real science,
[but] they seek [the scientific establishment’s] approval and revere its authorities: When someone with a PhD or a study in a peer-reviewed journal nods at UFO research or extraterrestrial visitation, many UFOlogists say, essentially, “See?” When a symposium speaker has worked for NASA or had a metal sample tested by a university professor, they say, “So you know it’s legit.” (118)
In the third section, Scoles visits several famous (and not so famous) UFO sites. It is in this section that the book tends to wander a bit and lose focus. These four chapters give a feel for the culture of the UFO enthusiasts who populate these places. Scoles makes an important point about the motives of UFO enthusiasts: “People also sometimes feel compelled to chase wonder, because the world doesn’t have many surface-level mysteries left” (142). Surface-level is a key term here. There are many mysteries left, but to address them, one needs at least some degree of scientific training, which many (most?) of these wonder seekers lack or reject.
Area 51 is first on the list of sites visited. At one point, Scoles and a friend test the security of the area by approaching, at night, the base’s boundary beyond which “lethal force” is apparently authorized. A few guards turn on their SUV’s headlights. But that’s all that happens, and “it’s all very underwhelming” (139). That pretty much sums up the entire visit. Next is Roswell. There are good descriptions of the people in town who cater to the UFO crowds. Scoles clearly labels the Roswell story a myth and says that UFO beliefs persist in part because UFO enthusiasts have been given “a precious gift: unfalsifiability” (155), such that if a UFO report is not explained, it must be true and, conversely, if it is explained, that explanation is part of a cover-up, so the report is also true.
Chapter nine is the about a bizarre event that took place at the Sunspot Solar Observatory in New Mexico in September 2018 when it was discovered that the observatory grounds were deserted. Much speculation, amateur investigation, and conspiracy-theory mongering ensued. The “official” explanation was that a janitor at the observatory had been using one of the computers there for child pornography. He had apparently made violent threats, so the grounds were cleared for safety reasons. But was that really what was going on? Was the place shut down because of … aliens? Conspiracy theorists think so.
The UFO Watchtower in the San Luis Valley in Colorado, about 200 miles south-southwest of Denver, is the subject of the penultimate chapter. This seems to be UFO central at the moment. It opened in 2000 and “draws thousands of believers, skeptics, agnostics, spiritualists, self-proclaimed psychics, and antagonists each year” (193). The chapter gives the reader a revealing and amusing glimpse into the goings on at the Watchtower, the personalities involved, and the history of the place.
In the final section, Scoles focuses on Gerrit Verschuur, a radio astronomer who doubts that UFOs are alien spacecraft or that extraterrestrial civilizations exist at all. After smoking marijuana, going into sensory deprivation tanks, and hearing voices, he came to believe that UFOs and aliens represent some sort of Jungian myth where humans project “our own image onto the universe” (225). So “they are already here” in the minds of believers and even nonbelievers. This is not a particularly useful conclusion, and the fifteen pages devoted to Verschuur are far too many.
The value of the book lies in the first section where the relationships between Robert Bigelow, the AATIP, and the authors ofthe New York Times story on the 2004 military UFO videos are revealed. The rest of the book is certainly interesting as a look into the psychology of MUFON and UFO believers.