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Long before the 1947 Roswell incident brought “little green men” into the public consciousness and prompted an explosion in UFO sightings, writers and scientists have speculated about the existence of life beyond our planet. H. G. Wells laid the groundwork for modern science fiction with novels like The War of the Worlds (1898), one of the first books to imagine an extraterrestrial invasion. Before Wells, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835-1910) sparked the imagination by discovering “canals” on Mars. But for the first recorded instance of humanity pondering the possibility of alien life, we have to go all the way back to ancient Greek and Roman times. In the first century B.C., Roman poet Lucretius wrote, “Nothing in the universe is unique and alone and therefore in other regions there must be other earths inhabited by different tribes of men and breeds of beast.” Not exactly a controversial supposition; still, whether or not such tribes have come to our planet remains impossible to prove, and those who claim to have encountered alien beings have long been dismissed.

That said, in recent years, the concept of otherworldly visitors has begun to shift toward the mainstream. In 2022, the U.S. Department of Defense established the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, the latest governmental entity devoted to investigating unexplained sightings. Even the term of choice, “UFO,” has given way to “UAP”—unidentified aerial (or anomalous) phenomenon. And just this June, former U.S. Air Force officer and intelligence official David Grusch claimed that the U.S. government had retrieved remains of several aircraft of “non-human” origin. The fallout from Grusch’s claims is yet to be determined—as is their veracity—but it seems likely that, in the end, the world will settle back into the binary of believers and skeptics, with no concrete evidence to settle the debate. Regardless of which camp you fall into, some of us will always look skyward with hope; we may never be able to scour the entirety of the universe, but it’s hard not to thrill to Lucretius’ logic. In the meantime, the longform articles collected here offer a fascinating glimpse into the UFO community and the stories that have shaped our modern understanding of the topic.

I Want To Believe (Brad Badelt, Maisonneuve, July 2021)

For me, what makes alleged alien encounter testimony so compelling is that—regardless of whether I believe the person’s interpretation of events—the incident had an undeniable and profound effect on their lives. This may not be true in every case, but even if you write off many accounts as delusion or whimsy or simply fiction, you’re still left with a legion of people who have been dramatically changed by their perceived experiences. It’s comforting to know, then, that for those such as Jason Guillemette, a character in this piece about amateur ufologists, communities exist where one can share their experiences without judgment.

In Guillemette’s case, that community is the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), a non-profit, volunteer-run organization active in more than 40 countries—and one whose members are as rigidly skeptical as Guillemette. For most MUFON alumni, this is a quest for truth, not validation; members work rigorously to find earthly explanations for reported sightings. And as Badelt widens his scope to other folks in other organizations, you can’t help but be moved by people’s stories. After all, if you were to have a life-changing close encounter, with whom would you share that knowledge?

Most of the time, he’s able to find an explanation, he says. He often sends videos to other volunteers at MUFON who specialize in analyzing computer images. He refers to websites that track the flight patterns of satellites and planes and the International Space Station—the usual suspects when it comes to UFO sightings, he says. Guillemette described a recent case in which a couple reported seeing strange lights hovering above a nearby lake. The lights circled above the lake and then dropped down into the water, only to rise up a moment later and zip away. It turned out to be a plane, he says—filling up with water to fight a nearby forest fire. “Not everybody likes what we come up with,” he says, “but sometimes it’s really evident.”

Crowded Skies (Vaughan Yarwood, New Zealand Geographic, April 1997)

The history of UFO sightings in New Zealand dates back to the early 20^th century. It seems such a tranquil and unassuming country—cinematic hobbit history notwithstanding—which perhaps makes the events recounted here even more unsettling. These are all-too-human tales of altered lives. Some cases, such as that of Iris Catt, a self-proclaimed alien abductee whose nightmarish encounters go back to her childhood, are heartbreakingly tragic. Others follow more positive narratives, believing that aliens are beaming down rays of positivity and openness, gradually bringing humanity to a point where it is ready for formal communication.

When I was at university in the 1990s, “regression therapy”  became big news, with countless stories of trauma-blocked memories and past-life remembrances unearthed through hypnosis. Just as suddenly, regression therapy drowned in a flood of peer-reviewed criticism, relegated to yet another pseudoscience. The concept never went away entirely and it pops up again in Vaughan Yarwood’s story, cautiously approved by academic institutions for its utility in specific circumstances. It’s complex territory, but Yarwood navigates it with clarity and sensitivity.

Iris Catt, a mild-mannered, unprepossessing woman in her 40s, then introduces herself. She is an abductee. It appears certain aliens have had their eye on her from an early age. She recounts her night horrors calmly, the way people do who have learned to accept their scars, to make their hurt and anguish a part of themselves.

“It is happening every day, and it is happening in New Zealand,” says Iris. “It is not going to go away. I truly believe that more and more people are beginning to remember what is happening to them because the time is getting closer when we are going to have to recognise that we are not the only intelligent form of life in the universe.”

Her audience understands. She is among friends.

Alien Nation (Ralph Blumenthal, Vanity Fair, May 2013)

Harvard Medical School psychiatrist John Edward Mack spent many years engaging with people who claimed to have been abducted by extraterrestrials, in the process becoming a pioneer in his field. Not surprisingly, he attracted resistance from the scientific community—less because of his work than because, over time, he came to the startling and highly controversial conclusion that a number of alleged abductees were telling the truth. Mack’s research may be little remembered by his profession at large, but his warmth, humanity, and faith continue to inspire hope in a small community that gathers annually in Rhode Island. They prefer the term “experiencer” to “abductee,” and in this Vanity Fair feature Ralph Blumenthal interweaves their stories with Mack’s.

Once again, for me, the fascination of this piece lies in the stories of these everyday folks. To some degree, it doesn’t matter what they actually experienced. What counts, as Mack understood, is they have experienced something, and that something left a profound mark on their lives. In seeking to apply rigor and structure to the stories he was collecting, Mack plowed a hard path with poise and compassion. As this piece eloquently shows, his work was not in vain.

“Nothing in my nearly 40 years of familiarity with psychiatry prepared me,” Mack later wrote in his 1994 best-seller, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens. He had always assumed that anyone claiming to have been abducted by aliens was crazy, along with those who took them seriously. But here were people—students, homemakers, secretaries, writers, businesspeople, computer technicians, musicians, psychologists, a prison guard, an acupuncturist, a social worker, a gas-station attendant—reporting experiences that Mack could not begin to fathom, things, he reflected, that by all notions of reality “simply could not be.”

One Man’s Quest to Investigate the Mysterious “Wow!” Signal (Keith Cooper, Supercluster, August 2022)

I have long been fascinated with the so-called Wow signal, received in 1977 by Ohio University’s Big Ear radio telescope, which was then being used to search for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. The tale of the signal makes for a great story in itself, but Keith Cooper’s piece sees that as merely a starting point. His narrative finds a central character in a man named Robert Gray: While the scientific community, including SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), gradually lowered the Wow signal to the status of “interesting curio,” Gray remained convinced that there was more to uncover.

Gray’s tenacity and belief in the face of mounting opposition is remarkable. Struggling for funding, unsuccessfully attempting to enlist help, and bartering for much-needed time on a limited number of radio telescopes, the frustrations he must have experienced make the twists in his story all the more poignant. Just when his enthusiasm began to wane, his work seemingly at a dead end, an exoplanet scientist reached out to Gray with a fresh idea, breathing new life into the man’s relentless quest. There is no neat, satisfying definitive end to this tale, but perhaps therein lies the true glory of Gray’s work. In the face of uncertainty, he carried on until the very end.

Nobody knows what the Wow signal was. We do know that it was not a regular astrophysical object, such as a galaxy or a pulsar. Curious the frequency that it was detected at, 1,420 MHz, is the frequency emitted by neutral hydrogen atoms in space, but it is also the frequency that scientists hunting for alien life listen to. Their reasoning is that aliens will supposedly know that astronomers will already be listening to that frequency in their studies of galactic hydrogen and so should easily detect their signal – or so the theory goes. Yet there was no message attached to the signal. It was just a burst of raw radio energy.

If SETI had a mythology, then the Wow signal would be its number one myth. And while it has never been forgotten by the public, the academic side of SETI has, by and large, dismissed it, quite possibly because it hasn’t been seen to repeat, and therefore cannot be verified—the golden rule of a successful SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) detection.

How Harry Reid, a Terrorist Interrogator and the Singer from Blink-182 Took UFOs Mainstream (Bryan Bender, Politico, May 2021)

Celebrities who have copped to believing in UFOs are numerous enough to populate a listicle. Politicians? Not so much. Yet, the U.S. Congress’ House Oversight Committee has announced plans for a hearing regarding UAP reports, and if you trace the conversation  back a few years, you’ll find that this shift is at least partly thanks to the protagonists in this story: former U.S. senator Harry Reid and Tom DeLonge, a founding member of pop-punk band Blink 182.

There’s a lot to digest here. It’s a wonderful example of hidden history: a small group of like-minded individuals working behind the scenes to advance their cause, with potentially wide-ranging repercussions. That history would be far less engaging, however, were it not for Tom DeLonge’s gregarious personality and indefatigable belief in alien visitors. His company, To The Stars, devotes considerable time and money to researching UAPs and extraterrestrial matters in general; Bryan Bender’s feature tells the story of how the singer managed to recruit experts and politicians to his cause.

Hanging on DeLonge’s wall was what might be considered the medals he’s collected in his struggle: a display case filled with dozens of commemorative coins from his meetings with generals, aerospace contractors and secret government agencies. They trace his visits to the CIA, to the U.S. Navy, to the “advanced development programs” division at Lockheed Martin’s famously secretive “Skunk Works” in Southern California, where some of the world’s most advanced spy planes were designed.

Chris Wheatley is a writer and journalist based in Oxford, U.K. He has too many guitars, too many records, and not enough cats.

Editor: Peter Rubin
Copy Editor: Krista Stevens

Logan’s success at events like this—she now features at many—turns on her ability to shrink the distance between her past and present selves. She needs the people in this auditorium to believe that the woman on the projector screen is the same one who now anticipates their fears of woke indoctrination. She needs them to trust that when she talks about subjects like the “little puppet” Volodymyr Zelensky, or how COVID vaccines are a form of “genocide by government,” or how President Joe Biden’s administration has been “participating in the trafficking of kids,” it is with the precise rigor and dispassion she once displayed on the front lines of America’s wars.

Logan, who is 52, is still, after all, a war correspondent. That is how she sees it. The fighting may not be in Afghanistan or Iraq, and she may not be winning Emmys for her coverage anymore, but in her mind this is her most crucial assignment yet, uncovering this “war against humanity.” And she must be getting close to the real story, because the American media have tried to silence her from all sides.

It’s admirable for Skalski to be so unbothered by the criticism. Still, I press on. She, more than anyone, embodies the feds to the locals of Tuolumne County. Why, in her view, had the area been so ready to forgive the man rescued from the scene of the crime? “I think what people were surprised at was that it was a local person. Not even so much that it was a hunter, but that it was a local person,” she says. “We all knew how dry it was out there, so they’re like, ‘Why would you do that?’ I don’t know — that could’ve been a disappointment to find out it was somebody local as opposed to somebody coming from a city out there.”

Of all the explanations, Skalski’s rings most true. We say we tell stories to understand the world, but the ones we choose to believe often fit into our existing understanding of it. A local kid should’ve known better than to start a fire on the hot, dry afternoon of Aug. 17, 2013. A terrible accident with untold costs was too simple an explanation. And so, many other stories began to be told.

Within 24 hours, Tiffany, or as she was being referred to at the time, “Tennessee nurse,” was trending on every social media platform. That night, she was featured on the conspiracy theory internet show Infowars. New videos about Tiffany were being posted to YouTube every 19 minutes, according to Paola Pascual-Ferrá, an associate professor of communication at Baltimore’s Loyola University Maryland, who was tracking the spread in real time. And Tiffany was going global: Most of the videos and posts about her were coming from outside the U.S., Pascual-Ferrá said. 

The posts weren’t just replays of Tiffany’s fall. The conspiracy theories were evolving quickly with what seemed like the whole world contributing to an investigation where the conclusion had already been determined. For the thousands of people posting about Tiffany, she didn’t just faint. She was dead. And a fake death certificate started making the rounds. 

Meanwhile, the phone in CHI Memorial’s Covid unit rang off the hook. News outlets and conspiracy theorists alike, they all wanted to talk to Tiffany. 

“Imagine being in high-stress situations, emotions are already high, and then the phone never stops ringing?” Tiffany says. “It’s enough to make you crazy.”

“American Family Needing Help,” blared the title of the GiveSendGo account established by one of the Munn daughters in the summer of 2022. The web page included a lengthy elucidation by Tom of how he had tried to instill in his children his deep commitment to the Constitution, often focusing on the First Amendment. He wrote that the 2020 election results had left him doubting the process. Following what he termed “a frustrating display of political maneuvering, to obstruct the verification of the vote,” Tom “felt compelled to let my voice be heard and obligated to demonstrate to my children, the vital importance of doing so.” He described a Gestapo-like raid by armor-clad federal agents on his peaceful home. He said that his family had lost friends and now struggled to find work. 

Tom’s synopsis of the family’s legal predicament was misleading at best. “Having no other ‘real’ recourse, we accepted the ‘plea deal’ offered by the prosecution,” he wrote. In truth, each of the Munns were provided free legal counsel from the federal public defender’s office. The children, beginning with Josh, eventually indicated their willingness to plead guilty. Though Tom and Dawn waited ten months to acknowledge their guilt, they offered no legal challenge to their indictment at any point. 

When the GiveSendGo page went live, Tom lamented that the Munns lacked the means to travel to Washington for their sentencing hearing in October, and as a result, “we are greatly fearing being held in contempt of court,” he wrote. This appeal, which raised the Munns more than $33,000 in donations, evoked a familiar trope, that of a patriotic and Trump-loving American family suffering under the bootheel of a deeply partisan criminal justice system. 

By Lisa Bubert

The first novel I ever wrote had a mystery at its heart: a disappearance. It was never explained. It didn’t involve any kind of crime. The disappeared never reappeared. The mystery just … was. It was a storyline I was deeply committed to — and one that, as you may imagine, did not lead to a publishing contract.

Unsolved mysteries manage to be as irresistible as they are frustrating, stoking our imagination even while they tease our need for resolution. Faced with a story that refuses to tie everything into a neat bow, we chew on potential explanations until we find the one we like best — the one that satisfies all our biases, the one that allows us to bask in the knowledge that we (and only we) know what actually happened. A lack of answers may be maddening, but it also allows us to rewrite stories to our satisfaction.

As it turns out, not everyone feels that way. People reading my book maintained that the mystery simply couldn’t go unresolved, that there must be a why to the strange thing that had occurred. Was suspending disbelief suddenly something our brains couldn’t handle? Was it so impossible to believe that in this year of our Lord 2022, a mystery could persist?

In their minds, yes. After all, we have science. We have constant surveillance. We leave a digital self-portrait everywhere we go now, a mosaic sketched from location pings and security cameras and the constant tracking of our personal data. Infidelity in your family is no longer just a whispered theory; a DNA test proves it. So, in fiction especially, writing a story with an unsolved mystery often depends on a contrivance, some convenient loss of modern technology. (A character’s laptop died! A power surge took out the router! Someone threw their phone in the ocean!) Cause and effect skew, leaving the reader with a sinking feeling that things are happening because the writer needed them to happen that way — and nothing leaches the enjoyment from reading like awareness of the deus lurking in the machina.

Thankfully, in real life, unsolved mysteries still abound. Whatever happened to Amelia Earhart? What’s up with spontaneous human combustion? Who the heck was D.B. Cooper? Will anyone ever publish my book? (The world may never know!) From paranormal thrillers to fog-shrouded disasters to pedestrian oddities, let the modern mysteries chronicled herein bedevil your otherwise logical mind.

What Really Happened to Malaysia’s Missing Airplane (William Langewiesche, The Atlantic, July 2019)

The question of what happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 has long been a source of fascination for me. Is it because I still have trauma from that one time we hit turbulence on a flight back from Las Vegas and I was convinced we were all headed for a certain death so I cried to my mother and told her I loved her and then decided that the boy I’d just started seeing would have ended up being my husband if I’ve only had a bit more time? Maybe. (Though I did have more time and he did end up being my husband.) But it’s also because of the same paradox that Langewiesche tugs at in this meticulously reported piece: In a time when it’s nearly impossible for even one person to completely disappear, how is it that a plane full of 239 people could blink off of air traffic radar unnoticed, never to be seen again? The answer — and Langewiesche does propose one, satisfying and unsatisfying in equal measure — is long, complicated, and involves a necessary amount of conspiracy.

The mystery surrounding MH370 has been a focus of continued investigation and a source of sometimes feverish public speculation. The loss devastated families on four continents. The idea that a sophisticated machine, with its modern instruments and redundant communications, could simply vanish seems beyond the realm of possibility. It is hard to permanently delete an email, and living off the grid is nearly unachievable even when the attempt is deliberate. A Boeing 777 is meant to be electronically accessible at all times. The disappearance of the airplane has provoked a host of theories. Many are preposterous. All are given life by the fact that, in this age, commercial airplanes don’t just vanish.

We Two Made One (Hilton Als, The New Yorker, November 2000)

When writing, we’re always challenged to consider external conflicts that are pushing up against internal conflicts and vice versa. But sometimes truth is stranger than fiction — and the call really is coming from inside the house. This story of identical twins June and Jennifer Gibbons, who would only communicate with each other, hits all the high notes of the deeply weird. Known as “The Silent Twins,” the pair led a strange and reserved existence from the beginning, which was exacerbated by the racist trauma and ostracization they experienced from being the only Black children in their Welsh community. (Hello, external conflicts!) As time went on, the two began to have trouble discerning themselves from each other. “You are Jennifer, you are me,” Jennifer would tell June. June later said, “One day, she [Jennifer] would wake up and be me, and one day I would wake up and be her.” I’d always heard people talk about the phenomenon like it was almost paranormal; however, upon reading Als’ essay, I was surprised to find that the story was less one of mystery and more one of self-preservation under untenable circumstances. The real mystery (or perhaps not, if we choose to look) is why so many storytellers are more willing to see this as a story of the unexplained rather one of oppression.

For most of their lives together, they refused to speak to anyone but each other — a refusal that led to their emotional exile, their institutionalization, and, eventually, to the misguided appropriation of their story by activists and theorists who used it to pose questions about the nature of identity and the strange birthright that twins are forced to bear.

The Exorcisms of Latoya Ammons (Marisa Kwiatkowski, Indianapolis Star, January 2014)

Imagine The Exorcist, but set it in 2010s Gary, Indiana, and add the Department of Child Services. Latoya Ammons’ three children are fatigued, bruised, and frequently missing school. Child abuse? No. Demons? Perhaps. What sounds like a plot perfect for the silver screen unfolds in a daily issue of the Indianapolis Star — a ghost story that comes with receipts. Reported with over 800 pages of official records and interviews with case managers, police officers, psychologists, and a priest, this piece is so fantastical it can hardly be believed — and yet there is so much official documentation that even the strongest of skeptics would have a hard time dismissing it.

According to Washington’s original DCS report — an account corroborated by Walker, the nurse — the 9-year-old had a “weird grin” and walked backward up a wall to the ceiling. He then flipped over Campbell, landing on his feet. He never let go of his grandmother’s hand.

“He walked up the wall, flipped over her and stood there,” Walker told The Star. “There’s no way he could’ve done that.”

Later, police asked Washington whether the boy had run up the wall, as though performing an acrobatic trick.

No, Washington told them. She said the boy “glided backward on the floor, wall, and ceiling,” according to a police report.

Who Shot Walker Daugherty? (Wes Ferguson, Texas Monthly, October 2021)

A classic Texas whodunnit, set against the backdrop of West Texas canyon country: Big game hunters clash with a Mexican drug cartel. Or was it a practical joke? Or a hoax for political and financial gain? Who shot first depends on who you ask; as Wes Ferguson describes it, “the question of who shot Walker Daugherty still feels like a political Rorschach test.” Of all the things Texas Monthly does well, true crime might be its strongest suit. Much of that lineage is due to the legendary Skip Hollandsworth, who has turned out more excellent investigative pieces than I can count. But Ferguson is no slouch himself — and this piece, which brings true crime to his usual outdoor beat, proves the tradition is in good hands.

They were nodding off when they were awakened by a frightening noise. The locked side door of the RV was rattling loudly. It sounded as if someone wanted in. Tinker Bell barked. Edwin jumped out of bed and grabbed his gun. “Who is it?” he later recalled asking. “Hey! I got a gun in here. Go away.”

The door handle shook again. He heard a man’s voice outside the RV: “All we want is the motor home.” The demand, he noted, was delivered in clear, unaccented English. Tinker Bell was growling loudly in Carol’s arms, and she didn’t hear the voice. But to Edwin, the man sounded sinister, terrible. “It was just like the devil was on the other side of that door,” he said later. Then he heard the door rattling again. He shot a single round through it.

The Ghostly Radio Station That No One Claims to Run (Zaria Gorvett, BBC Future, July 2020)

If you’re into Cold War history, espionage thrillers, secret Russian conspiracies, or all three, this story is absolute catnip. Apparently, a shortwave radio station that can be heard around the world has been broadcasting since the 1980s, and nobody knows who is running it — nor does anyone claim to own it. The station mostly broadcasts a long drone interrupted occasionally by a foghorn sound; once or twice a week, voices read out random phrases in Russian. (Russia says it’s not theirs, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ .) There are many theories as to what’s behind the station, my favorite being the chilling “dead hand” theory, which states that the station is an automatic system scanning the airwaves for signs of life in the event of a nuclear detonation. If no signs of life are detected in the country of origin controlling the station, a retaliative attack is automatically triggered. Mutually assured destruction, shortwave style. Whatever it is, I’d love to read some spy fiction about it. Solved or not, the story practically writes itself.

Once or twice a week, a man or woman will read out some words in Russian, such as “dinghy” or “farming specialist”. And that’s it. Anyone, anywhere in the world can listen in, simply by tuning a radio to the frequency 4625 kHz.

It’s so enigmatic, it’s as if it was designed with conspiracy theorists in mind. Today the station has an online following numbering in the tens of thousands, who know it affectionately as “the Buzzer”. It joins two similar mystery stations, “the Pip” and the “Squeaky Wheel”. As their fans readily admit themselves, they have absolutely no idea what they are listening to.

***

Lisa Bubert is a writer and librarian based in Nashville, Tennessee. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Texas Highways, Washington Square Review, and more.

***

Editor: Peter Rubin

Copy Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

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Leah Sottile | Longreads | July 2019 | 25 minutes (6,186 words)

Part 2 of 5 of Bundyville: The Remnant, season two of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads and OPB. 

I.

Bill Keebler dumps a sugar packet into his coffee and calmly explains that the government is after him. They’re always watching him — constantly surveilling his every move, he says. He’s even at risk here, inside a Denny’s attached to a Flying J truck stop, about a half hour outside Salt Lake City.

He’s also pretty sure that Bundyville producer Ryan Haas and I are federal agents, posing as journalists. “I’m gonna be honest with you, it wouldn’t surprise me if both of you pulled out a badge,” he says. 

Just after 4 p.m. on a frigid February day, Keebler, 60, shuffles toward the back corner table we’d staked out for the interview.  He’s about a half hour late, uttering his deepest apologies for getting the time wrong. He’s never late, he says. 

Keebler is a raspy-voiced Southerner with skin that looks brittle from working in the sun all his life as a horse wrangler, ranch hand, hunting outfitter, and construction worker. At Denny’s he’s wearing a sandstone-colored canvas work jacket, and his hair sprouts from underneath a khaki Oath Keepers hat, which covers a shiny bald spot on the top of his head. He smokes a lot. Drinks a lot of coffee.

Keep the characters of Bundyville: The Remnant straight with this character list.

On the phone a few days before, I told him that I’d read the court documents for his case and was surprised by what I saw. I wanted to hear his version of what happened in June 2016 on the day three years before when Keebler believed he was detonating a bomb at a building owned by the Bureau of Land Management, only to find that the bomb was a fake given to him by undercover FBI agents embedded in his militia group.

The bombing itself was shocking. But the part that surprised me at the time was that, despite having pleaded guilty, serving 25 months in jail, and being released on probation, most of his case was still under federal protective order. Keebler’s attorney told me he’s not allowed to say why. I’m at the Denny’s hoping Keebler might be willing to tell me anyway.

In reading about what happened that day in the desert with the bomb, I learned — through the few court documents available — that Keebler was close friends with LaVoy Finicum. He’s the rancher who was a leader at the Malheur occupation, in Oregon, and was shot and killed by authorities after fleeing from a traffic stop.

But before we can talk about that, we’ve got to calm him down. He nudges his head in the direction of a young waiter, walking in a loop around by our table. Under his breath, Keebler says, “We’re being watched.” 

“Right now?” I ask. 

“Yeah.” 

“By who?” 

“A fed or an informant,” Keebler says. 

Haas asks if he means the Denny’s server, who’s walking by to see if we need any refills on coffee. That’s the guy, Keebler says.

If there’s so much at risk, why meet us? Why tell your story?

“Because if I don’t it’s going to die with me,” he says. “I’ve been on borrowed time for years.” He says he survived cancer, a massive heart attack, and “four heart procedures, looking at a fifth.” That’s not to mention the other stuff — things much harder to believe but that Keebler swears up and down are real, like the federally organized hits on him by the gang MS-13 while he was behind bars.

So I assure him: I’m not a fed. Google me. And I tell him he’s in control of what he says. If I ask something he doesn’t want to answer, something he thinks might get him in trouble, he doesn’t need to respond. He agrees, and for three hours, Bill Keebler gives his side of what happened leading up to that day in the desert with the bomb — a version of the story in which he is the hero, the government is the enemy, and where America is so rapidly nearing its demise, he can almost taste it. 

***

In the three years since the Bundys mobilized a force to take over the Malheur National Wildlife refuge in Oregon, the world has morphed in ways I couldn’t have imagined. For one thing, Donald Trump became the president of the United States. He has increased his attacks on media, stepping up from calling the very newspapers I write for “fake news,” to neglecting to hold the Saudi Arabian government accountable for putting into motion the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

In June 2019, Trump — in a meeting at the G20 Summit — laughed with Russian president Vladimir Putin about journalists. “Get rid of them,” he said. “Fake news is a great term, isn’t it? You don’t have this problem in Russia. We have that problem.” And Putin responded: “Yes, yes. We have it, too. It’s the same.” They both laughed. 

Oft-cited research collected by the Southern Poverty Law Center has shown that since 1996, anti-government activity surged when Democratic presidents were in office. Militia groups that claimed to see proof of tyranny thrived in the 1990s — specifically when Vicki Weaver and her teenage son were killed during a standoff with federal agents at Ruby Ridge in 1992, and when the feds stormed into the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, in 1993. 

In President Obama, the anti-government movement saw the embodiment of tyranny: someone upon whom they could project their worst fears. They called him a socialist globalist Muslim who, after ascending to the highest seat of power, would bring Sharia law upon the people. There was no proof or evidence to support this. But that didn’t matter to them.

Under Trump, suddenly, anti-government groups are pro-government. Nearly everything about Trump’s rhetoric — from questioning Obama’s nationality, to draining the swamp of elites, to building a border wall, to pushing for anti-Muslim legislation, to zealous nationalism — is lifted from the anti-government handbook.

“It blows my mind. The Patriot militia movement, anti-government movement — however you want to refer to them — under Obama was so concerned about tyranny and executive power … and yet they’ve been some of the most vocal advocates for Trump unilaterally grabbing and exerting executive branch power,” said Sam Jackson, an assistant professor in the College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security, and Cybersecurity at the University at Albany-SUNY. Jackson researches the militia movement — he wrote his dissertation on the Oath Keepers. 

“If Obama had talked about declaring a national emergency … they would have been up in arms in a heartbeat,” he said.

So what gives? How do the anti-government go pro-government? 

“It makes it really hard to take them at their word,” Jackson told me. “It really makes it seem like all of that was just rhetoric that they deployed in pursuit of other goals that perhaps they perceived would be less popular amongst the American public — whether that’s Islamophobia or anti-immigration or whatever else they’re really interested in. It seems like perhaps now they’re willing to talk about these other things more blatantly than they were in the past.” 

***

Bill Keebler tells us he was born in Mississippi and grew up in Georgia the descendant of a long line of military veterans. During the Cold War in the early 1980s, Keebler says he enlisted in the Army and served in Aschaffenburg, Germany. There, he says, he was on the frontlines of the fight against communism. And it was also during this time — he claims — that he placed third in the 1984 World Championships in Kung Fu.

It’s clear that he’s not the guy he used to be — or at least that the person I’m seeing before me at Denny’s isn’t the fighter he is in his head. Keebler claims that, after winning that championship, he created his own style of martial arts, called “Jung Shin Wu Kung Fu” before a “board of masters,” but the Bundyville team wasn’t able to confirm this.

After years of working on farms and ranches, Keebler found himself in Utah — far, far from home — where he worked as a hunting outfitter, trained horses, and says he became a member of the Utah Oath Keepers. Around Tooele County, Utah, he was so well-known as an ardent prepper and varmint hunter that the Salt Lake Tribune ran a story on his coyote hunting skills. In one scene in the story, Keebler crouches in underbrush and wears camouflage that’s been drenched in coyote-urine scent. 

In 2011, he was running a hunting outfitting business called Critter Gitter Outfitters and often posted photos on social media of his excursions into the wild. In one, a muscled, tanned Keebler poses with a baby deer he’d rescued. 

Keebler spends a lot of time on the internet — has for years. Online, Keebler makes lots of dad jokes and even more jokes where a woman’s demise is the punchline. In one video he shared on his Facebook page, a blond woman in a white robe pleads with her husband until he hands her the keys of a black SUV with an oversize bow on the hood. When she starts the car, it explodes, the man smiles, and the words Merry Christmas, Bitch fill the screen. 

By 2013, Facebook had become a place for Keebler to vent about Obama — “I call him O-bummer,” he told me during one phone call — where he openly shared his belief in an encyclopedic number of conspiracy theories. “FEMA camps are everywhere, Muslims and illegals are taking over, Obama is the biggest Traitor this country has ever known, No Jobs, 16 trillion in [debt] and no relief in sight,” he wrote one February morning. “Anyone protesting Obama is assassinated and turned into a monster by our own media.”

None of this is true — his sources are websites that are notorious for generating fake content. His words dipped in and out of coherence, in and out of overt racism. “Our jobs have all gone over seas to other country’s as they get Fat off our money and we send them aid, weapons and anything else they desire for free. Jets, food what ever they want because we OWE it to them somehow,” he wrote in one such post. “I have been patient, tolerant and offended too much for any more. I am an American, have lived as I will die as my ancestors did, As A FREE MAN. I speak fucking English and you can press 1 and kiss my ass ya muslim, communist Jackasses! If this offends you then I have succeeded in my intentions.” 

He signed off on another post: “Stay safe, armed to the teeth, prepared and with God. Bill Keebler.”

Later that month, he wrote that “Someday SOON chit is gonna happen and this country will l;iterally EXPLODE, and when it does it will be a very messy situation… soon BOOM, we will explode. Hope you are prepared.”

By spring 2014, Keebler seemed to have a new personality altogether. He wrote near-constantly about what to do when SHTF (prepper-speak for “shit hits the fan”). He signed his posts “th3hunt3r.” He breathed in false information about the Bureau of Land Management killing endangered species and exhaled posts about the hypocrisy of not letting Cliven Bundy graze his cattle. 

Much has been written about the algorithms employed by sites like YouTube, which keeps users on the site — generating more and more advertising dollars — by directing them toward more extreme content. Reporters and analysts often reflect on how this affects young people. But the algorithmic drive toward extreme content has taken hold with a much older generation, too, with guys like Keebler. Online, they can fantasize about who they’ll be when the end finally comes. They water their ignorance and hatred at an online trough with others who think just like them.

In April 2014, Keebler sprung into action after seeing a video on Facebook of a confrontation between Bureau of Land Management agents and protesters who’d assembled at the Bundys’ side — that video I mentioned way back at the beginning of this story, of Ammon Bundy being tased in the midst of a chaotic confrontation. Keebler loaded up his camper and drove several hours south to Bunkerville, Nevada, where he says he set up a mess hall and provided supplies.

“Well, I made it to the ranch, all is well, getting settled in, been intersting so far, and I aint shot no one, YET! lol” he wrote on his Facebook page on April 10 after he arrived. 

Once there, Keebler solicited money online to help pay for supplies. He claims he kept hot tempers under control. 

“I stopped some people wanted to shoot people,” he says to me at the truck stop. “One of them got mad about it and put a gun in my face. He wanted to start the war. … He said, ‘I’m gonna fire a shot just to get it started.’ … Things were that close. Volatile.”

Keebler also takes credit for ejecting Jerad and Amanda Miller — who would go on to murder two police officers in Las Vegas and die in the midst of a shoot-out with officers inside a Walmart. He claims that if it wasn’t for him, Bundy Ranch would have been a bloodbath. Less than a year later — according to Keebler’s defense attorney’s presentencing memo — an undercover FBI agent was embedded in Keebler’s own militia and then began to regularly talk about stepping into action, about blowing up federal agents and federal properties, and scouting a mosque as a potential target alongside Keebler. 

And yet, Keebler never kicked that guy out. 

II.

After the militias assisted in preventing the BLM from seizing the Bundy family’s cattle, Keebler left feeling excited about the movement. He lived on Bundy Ranch for about two weeks. “To me it was one of the biggest events in this country … short of the Boston Tea Party,” he says. “It was a wake-up call.”

“After the standoff and everything, we had momentum,” he says, offering his mug to the waiter for a refill. “It started because Cliven Bundy, but we started a movement that had the potential to be tenfold what it was.”

When he came back home to Utah, he quit the Oath Keepers. He proudly recounts a story about trading heated words at Bunkerville with the group’s founder, Stewart Rhodes. Keebler claims he asked whether Rhodes would accept “radical Islamic Muslims” into the group; Rhodes said the Oath Keepers doesn’t discriminate. Back at home, he started his own militia: Patriots Defense Force (PDF). 

At the height of its membership, PDF had just seven members including Keebler. They held “field training exercises” where they’d shoot targets. They’d talk about raising “backyard meat rabbits” and chickens, and living off-grid. Mostly, they were a bunch of preppers. 

But before PDF was even formed — even had a name — the FBI began to monitor him, according to court documents submitted by Keebler’s defense team. They began immediately upon his return home from Bundy Ranch. The Bureau eventually embedded three confidential informants in his militia and three undercover agents, including two men who went by the names Brad Miller and Jake Davis. Miller and Davis  — people Keebler believed to be other God-loving Patriots — were sworn into PDF in May 2015. Excluding Keebler, the FBI agents, and informants, there were — at most — three members of PDF. 

According to the defense, one informant was paid $60,000 for his undercover work inside the militia. The stories the FBI agents gave to Keebler must have seemed like he found a gold mine: Davis told stories of his expertise in hand-to-hand combat; Miller positioned himself as an expert in mining and explosives. Another FBI agent played the part of a successful business guy interested in funding a militia.

Unlike all the other times Keebler imagined the government conspiring to snoop on him, this time they actually were — but he was so focused on the “deep state” that he didn’t seem to notice what was happening right in front of his face. 

As the FBI surveilled Keebler, he frequently spoke about martial law. “Under marshal [sic] law, Mr. Keebler expected the federal government to turn against the people…” His attorney wrote in his sentencing memo, “He envisioned house-to-house gun confiscations and the government putting ‘undesirable’ and ‘unsalvageable’ people in FEMA camps.”

By fall 2015, Keebler was meeting with LaVoy Finicum. Finicum, too, had been excited by what he had encountered at Bundy Ranch: a group of citizens who believed in Cliven Bundy’s conspiracy theories about the federal government coming to get him. 

Finicum, after seeing Cliven Bundy successfully get away with shirking his grazing costs,  had recently violated the terms of his own BLM grazing permit — accruing fines for grazing his cattle out of season. Finicum spoke to Keebler about fortifying his property in case of a situation like Bundy Ranch — or maybe even Ruby Ridge or Waco.

“At the Bundy’s we got there after the fact. If we knew it was coming, we could be there prepared,” Keebler says. Finicum was expecting the same. He’d stopped paying his grazing fees after going to Bundy Ranch and assumed the BLM would come get him, too. “We were going to stop them from taking the cattle,” he says. “Now I don’t mean ambush assault and kill and shoot. None of that crap.” 

Keebler walks Haas and I through the plan: When the BLM came in, apparently the group planned to dig out the road the agents came in on with a backhoe — making it impossible for them to leave. Miller pushed for the group to instead explode the road, he says. Keebler said that was crazy, and the two traded words over it. 

The group, without Finicum, drove toward Mt. Trumbull, where the government says Keebler got his first view of a building owned by the BLM — the remote property that, months later, he aimed to destroy with a bomb. 

Over the course of our interview, Keebler mentioned several arguments with Miller. But he always let him stay. 

If he was so extreme, such a loose cannon, I had to wonder, why keep him?

Because Miller, Keebler says, paid for gas to go to Arizona to meet with Finicum, and Keebler alleges, even to Washington State for a secret ceremony in which he was inducted into a Coalition of Western States militia by Washington state representative Matt Shea.

According to Keebler and his attorneys, federal agents were basically bankrolling his militia. And the way Keebler sees it, those same federal agents forced him to blow up a government building. 

“The FBI covered Mr. Keebler’s expenses on many similar trips. The FBI also made repeated and timely donations to … keep it (and Mr. Keebler) afloat,” defense attorneys wrote. “In the end, Mr. Keebler did exactly what he was induced to do: he picked a target and ‘went on the offense.’”

“They were hell-bent determined to do something, and I guess I kind of let it get in my head,” Keebler says. “Maybe if we did something to kind of let them know that it’s kind of like a warning signal.”

***

Central to the Patriot movement are many, many theories about people its members believe are involved in a vast conspiracy against the American people. In my reporting, the most common names that came up in Patriot conspiracies (aside from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama) were BLM agent Dan Love, who led the Bunkerville round-up at Bundy Ranch in 2014, and Greg Bretzing, who was the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Oregon office during the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. 

After the events at Malheur, Bretzing retired from the FBI, and he now works in security, safety, and corporate affairs for a private company that builds barges and railroad cars. “So, are you plotting a conspiracy with Dan Love against the Patriot movement?” I ask him one morning last winter, sitting in his office.

Bretzing laughs. “No, no. I do know Dan Love.” 

Bretzing worked for the FBI for 22 years, for much of that time on terrorism cases, both international and domestic. I want to know how the FBI views and defines international extremist groups differently than domestic ones. The biggest difference, according to Bretzing, is the law.

“There’s clear statutes against violent acts for political purposes or to overthrow a government,” he tells me. The FBI has squads devoted to domestic terrorism — but Bretzing said membership in any group isn’t what will get the feds on your trail. 

“Anybody’s political beliefs, religious beliefs, First Amendment rights — none of that is an issue,” he says. “You can be a member of any group you want to be, and it can be a pro anything or an anti anything group. That’s fine. It’s when those groups then take steps to commit violent acts or to break the law or to defraud — that is when the FBI or other law enforcement starts to look at them.”

Someone has to break the law — or look like they’re going to break the law — to get the attention of the FBI. Bretzing is clear: The FBI does not go on fishing expeditions of people it doesn’t like. 

I tell Bretzing about the Keebler case; it didn’t ring a bell. But when I tell him more about it, he says it reminds him of a notorious 2010 case in Portland involving the would-be “Christmas tree bomber.” In that case, a young man named Mohamed Mohamud believed he was detonating a bomb that would have caused large-scale fatalities of civilians attending the city’s annual Christmas tree lighting ceremony in the center of the city. 

When Mohamud attempted, twice, to ignite the bomb — which was provided by an undercover agent — it didn’t go off. He was arrested immediately. Mohamud’s attorney argued his client was entrapped. Prosecutors argued the violent religious extremist ideology was already in place; they were preventing him from acting on it. He was convicted in 2013 for attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction and sent to prison for 30 years.

“Having undercover agents inside is important to both effectively gather the evidence and to ensure that nothing violent actually does take place,” Bretzing tells me. “If you look at the tapes on Mohamed Mohamud, many, many, many times the undercover agents say, ‘We don’t have to do this. This is not something that has to be done, we can put it off … Are you sure you want to do this?’ Constantly ensuring that this is something that the individual is pushing, not the government. But the reason it’s important to have an agent inside is if an agent wasn’t there with this individual, then [they would] be taking these steps on their own.

“The public would rightfully be unhappy if then a violent act occurs and we didn’t do all we could do to stop it,” he says. 

But, how can law enforcement agencies be so sure people will go on to commit acts of violence? And what’s the right way to go after domestic terrorists? 

I ask Karen Greenberg, the director of Fordham Law School’s Center on National Security these questions. For years, she’s been examining cases that show an intersection of national security, policy, human rights, and civil liberties issues. 

Greenberg is extremely cautious of creating overarching laws that target domestic terrorists. “Washington is looking for is a domestic terrorism statute — that will be a federal one, which we don’t have. We have one for international terrorism, and it’s quite broad in its application,” she tells me. “Part of the reason is they want to be able to have greater surveillance powers.”

To apply that to domestic terrorism cases, she feels, is “a very dangerous road.” 

I call up Michael German to get his perspective. He’s a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice now, but in the 1990s, he was an undercover FBI agent inside militia groups in Southern California and the Pacific Northwest. I want to get a sense from someone who’s been undercover why the feds might home in on a guy like Keebler. 

German says that in the years after 9/11, successive attorneys general amended guidelines that gave the feds greater flexibility. They were allowed to open investigations into people they might not have bothered with in previous years. They might look into a guy like Keebler even if they weren’t sure he was committing any crimes. That sounds like the opposite of what Bretzing told me, I say. 

“It sounds like from what you’re telling me after 2002 and after 2008 it became maybe a little bit more permissive to go on fishing expeditions of people that you don’t ideologically agree with,” I say to him.

“Right,” he says. FBI agents want to believe they don’t do that, “but clearly evidence shows the opposite.” German rattles off a list of cases and explains to me, “There was a case in Southern California where an FBI informant eventually got sideways with the FBI and came forward acknowledging that he had been directed to probably target Muslim communities in Southern California.” The agent “used listening devices to record people’s conversation when there was no suggestion they were actually involved in any kind of criminal activity,” he says. “So the difference is now that’s allowed.” 

German says the FBI doesn’t need an indicator of criminal activity anymore in order to watch a person. All they had to show was that an individual needed to be watched because they fit into the parameters of an established FBI’s mission to stop terrorism. That is, maybe they could commit a terroristic act someday in the future. 

“They have continued using that tactic and initially it was mostly used against Muslims but has broadened out because it’s a successful tactic as far as the FBI is concerned,” he says. “My concern with that is you’re targeting the lowest-hanging fruit.”

“I know from my own investigations that there are actually people out there plotting serious attacks who have obtained weapons, who have recruited people who have violent pasts, who are willing to commit violent crimes,” German adds. “Why we’re focusing on people who were so incapable and using the resources of the government to improve their capability of doing harm, rather than focusing on people who are engaging in violence, it’s hard for me to understand that that’s a legitimate use of government resources.”

For years, Greenberg has kept a close eye on international terror cases unfolding in U.S. courts, often with elements that feel similar to Keebler’s: A person believed to be associated with al-Qaeda is surrounded by informants and undercover agents, and the person of interest is given a bomb to ignite in the name of an international terror group. 

“So the FBI’s defense on this, and it’s worth thinking about, is ‘Look, I could have been al-Qaeda. I could have been an al-Qaeda operative trained and on-message. … If I could get him to do it, don’t you think an al-Qaeda guy could have gotten him to do it?’ And it works with a jury. It works. Because they say to the jury, ‘Would you have said yes to this guy?’”

III.

In February 2016, one month after Finicum was shot by authorities after fleeing the traffic stop in Oregon, the members of Patriots Defense Force met at a Carl’s Jr. near Keebler’s home. One way this meeting had been viewed was as a planning session for the group’s next steps — ones that could have potentially led to violence.

Put another way, entirely: Keebler’s defense attorney framed this as a meeting at a fast food restaurant with two FBI agents — one of whom taunted him as a coward and pushed him toward action — and a government informant.

According to court documents, at that meeting Miller mocked Keebler, saying that the Patriots and PDF were just a group of “Facebook fuckin’ Nazis” who have a lot to say on the internet, but never take action in real life. 

Keebler, in response, suggested the group do some reconnaissance of potential targets in Salt Lake City. Miller — who, don’t forget, was there as an undercover FBI agent — suggested targeting Muslims. According to his attorney, Keebler told Miller he didn’t know how to find any. Miller then offered to google a mosque, and the group drove there in two cars. 

Keebler says that once outside the mosque, agents asked him why he wouldn’t bomb it. Keebler claims he pointed to the buildings around it. “I said, ‘I’ll tell you why you can’t. You see that big-ass building behind you over your left shoulder?’” he recalls. “I said, ‘That’s one reason you can’t. You’re never getting out of this place. Second: Look at the terrain.’ 

“People were walking around coming in and outside, and started playing basketball. And I said, ‘You see that? Those are kids. There’s women and children playing basketball and shit.’ Like, y’all have lost it.” 

So, the group moved on. The caravan drove past an FBI building and a Bureau of Land Management office. Miller suggested that they send a mail bomb to it, or use a truck bomb to blow it up. Keebler, again, resisted — and the recon mission ended.

Around this point, even Davis, the other undercover agent, was unsure about the tactics he and Miller were using with Keebler. In text messages presented in court by Keebler’s defense, Davis wrote to his handler, Steve Daniels: “So I was thinking on the drive home. I hope we didn’t open Pandora’s box in a way by taking [Keebler] to a mosque he might not have found on his own. With the case winding down on our end I am worried about our liability if he happens to go back sometime on his own.” 

In another message, Davis wrote to Daniels: “I’m all for pushing him, but we can’t sound more radical to him.” Davis expressed concern that it seemed like he and Miller would be leading the recon mission: “To me, that’s what it sounds like we are doing,” he texted. 

In another text, Davis noted that pushing Keebler was “grinding” on him. “I wanted to push [Keebler] outside his comfort zone to take his temperature, not lead him to something,” he wrote. “I am not down with giving him all the ideas like when [Miller] told him that we would have to mail a bomb to the BLM office … or drive a car bomb up to it. We can’t be putting crazy ideas into a crazy guy’s head.”

Daniels said he’d listen to the recordings. “I haven’t got the mail bomb stuff. (Yikes),” he wrote. 

If it sounds like Bill Keebler was pushed to an act of domestic terrorism by the government itself, that’s certainly what defense intimated during court proceedings. And I tried to get the government’s side of this — filing a FOIA request for the full context of these text messages. But after half a year of waiting for those documents, I still haven’t gotten a response. So I’m stuck with what Keebler tells me, sipping his coffee as he worries our waiter is watching him.

After 26 months of surveilling Keebler, he was handed an improvised explosive device by one of those undercover officers — the same one who said he had an explosives background — and a detonator. Together with the agents, they made the long drive from Keebler’s Utah home, several hours south in the rough desert of Northern Arizona, to an empty BLM building. 

Arguably, along the way, Keebler had plenty of opportunities to say stop, turn around, let’s not do this, I can’t. But he didn’t. And when the bomb was placed at the building near Mt. Trumbull by the undercover agent — near where the Bundy’s ancestors once tried to make a home — Keebler’s finger was the only one on the button. 

Court documents show differing views on what Keebler was willing to do if people were inside the building. In sworn testimony, Daniels told the court that Keebler and Miller discussed what to do if BLM officers were inside, and Keebler “made a comment of: ‘fuck ‘em.’”

He hit the button three times. An explosion went off, but Keebler was too far away to see that his “bomb” was actually a fake, and the sound he heard was a concussion grenade deployed by the FBI. His lawyer called his intent to destroy the place a “serious property crime.” The government called it a bombing. 

***

I ask Keebler what the federal government, ideally, would look like to him. After Bundy Ranch, what did he decide he’d like to see change? 

He says not only does he want the federal government to stay out of the business of individual states, he wants it to be purged of the people he believes are ruining the country. The “deep state,” he says. 

“Everybody knows they’ve outlawed prayer in school,” he says. “You can’t do the Pledge of Allegiance in our schools, but now we got Muslims praying in the hallways in our schools and in our classrooms, and teachers are now making kids dress up like Muslims. And —”

“Where is this happening?” I stop him.

“A number of places. Yeah. They have taken over whole cities. 

“They want to stop prayer, they want to stop all the American stuff. The Boy Scouts and everything. Make it Islam. They’re out there on the streets right now with hundreds of them bowing, they’ve shut down whole roads, and the cops are standing over them making sure nobody interrupts them. Are you serious? It’s what Bradley tanks are for. You get about 50 rednecks with four-wheel-drive pickups and we’ll end that problem.” 

Keebler is advocating for something that sounds like intimidation at best, and slaughtering Muslims in the streets of America at the worst. And it’s all informed by his conspiratorial worldview. Maybe this is the kind of talk that brought the FBI to him.

“They have their own cops now,” he says. They’re arresting Christians, he says, and I’m shaking my head at him. It’s on the internet, he says. “You need to do your homework.”

“Do you think the federal government is involved in that?” Haas, my producer, asks. 

None of this is based in fact, but that doesn’t matter to Keebler. “I know damn well they are,” he says defiantly.

It should be no shock at this point to tell you that Keebler is an ardent Donald Trump supporter. He loves him. 

“Obama’s not even a black. He’s not African American, he’s Muslim — Kenya or some shit,” Keebler says. “The agreement that they put him in as the president is that he would make way for more Muslims to be up again in the United States. That’s what’s actually come out recently.”

“But who says that?” I press him.

“One of the news — some reporter somewhere,” he says. 

“Soros is financing a lot of it,” Keebler says, calmly, like this is a normal thing to believe and I’m thinking, again, about how people can pick ideas like these up from Trump now. 

It seems like this is what happens when conspiracies become the language the powerful use to communicate to disenfranchised people aching for a target — an explanation and a reason — for their discontent.

“A lot of this is about the New World Order. Look at the pedophilia going on right now. …  It’s all over the internet.” Keebler looks from Haas to me and back again, shocked at our ignorance. 

“I can’t believe y’all don’t know none of this stuff,” he says.

But what would be the point of “knowing” something that isn’t real? 

****

Before we leave Keebler, I ask him about the bylaws of Patriots Defense Force — which were presented as evidence against him in his case. 

I was particularly drawn to the “alert levels” that spell out how members should react in various stages of emergencies. In the worst-case scenario — a level 5 or “black” situation — the bylaws tell militia members to prepare for the absolute worst: “Get gear, family and haul ass to pre-arranged rendezvous point, or bunker down,” it reads. “THE BALLOON HAS GONE UP!”

“What is the shit hits the fan scenario?” I ask.

“During the Obama administration,” he says, “if he calls martial law I’m not gonna wait till he comes to my town. It’s too late. That would have been a shit hit the fan.” 

“So what’s the difference now?”

“I think if Trump declares martial law, it would be in a more controlled manner. He’s not coming after Patriots. He’s not coming after militia,” he says. 

“Do you mean he’s not coming after white people?” I ask.

“No. No, see there you go pushing the racist bullshit,” he says, despite the fact that, for two hours, he’s been talking about Muslims in the most hateful terms I’ve ever heard in an in-person conversation.

“What do you think happens if the Democrats impeach Trump or some kind of charges are brought?” he asks us. “What do you think happens? It’s over. All bets are off,” says Keebler.

“What does that mean?” Haas asks him. 

“All bets are off,” he smiles. “Take that for what it’s worth. People are wanting retaliation. They want revenge, they want payback for a lot of things. This abortion crap. What happened to LaVoy. What is happening to our children. What has happened to our streets. What is happening in our schools. People want retribution.”

***

Bill Keebler says he’s never even heard of Panaca, Nevada. Never heard of a Jones, or a Cluff or another bomb in the desert the summer he tried to bomb the BLM building. I’ve learned tons about the Patriots from talking to him, but nothing more about Panaca.  

We spend the next week driving through the mountains, through deserts, through towns built by polygamists and pioneers. I see the appeal of life out here. Of disappearing into the wild and forgetting about the rest of the world.  

But no matter how many times I use my job as an excuse to disappear into parts of the West I wouldn’t otherwise go to, I always end up feeling a sense of relief when I’m back, sitting in traffic in a city again. 

I’m thinking of Keebler the next day, at the TSA checkpoint inside McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas. Where people say goodbye to their family members and start to weave through a long, snaking line, there’s a man who looks as rumpled as Keebler — but isn’t white — seated with three police officers standing around him. 

It’s a busy Sunday, there are people and kids waiting in line, watching this scene. Things seem calm, albeit weird. And then the man raises his voice. I’m close enough to hear him yell something about the Constitution, about liberty. And the officers stand him up and restrain his wrists behind his back, then lead him away. The line slithers on.

But something’s different. At the front of the line a TSA agent barks orders: Stand side by side. Walk slowly. As we progress two by two, a thick black dog led by a Homeland Security agent sniffs everyone in a circle. I hear the guy being led away shout something about “We, the People.”

The orders continue. Show your ID. Put it away. Shoes off? No, shoes on. Take out your laptops. Use two bins for all your stuff. Stop. Walk. Wait. 

It’s a language we all seem to speak in a dialect that’s always changing, for reasons we don’t know — but what we understand is that this language doesn’t include the words that guy was saying. Or, what he is now likely still saying somewhere else in this airport, in a secret place or room we also know, but don’t really.

I think about Keebler, how I could see him in that same situation here, and how he’s been called a terrorist, and yet still, there’s all these things we don’t know about the government’s role in his story. His case is sealed tight. Why are they keeping it so opaque?

I’m still not convinced a guy like Keebler really could carry out an elaborate bomb plot without ample help. But even so, there’s one thing in court documents that I kept coming back to: that in the hours after Keebler believed he detonated a bomb, as he drove back to Utah, amped up on what he’d just done, he offered a declaration. According to the government, Keebler said after the bombing, “This isn’t about LaVoy, it’s what he stood for.” 

In Panaca, police reports said Jones mentioned LaVoy Finicum in the same breath as his bomb. And now here, with Keebler, there he is again. 

All these years later, the ghost of LaVoy Finicum continues to push the Patriot movement forward. And yet all this time I’ve been reporting on this movement, I know so little about him. He was the guy who was killed by police, who no one heard hide nor hair of before Bundy Ranch. But what did he actually believe and why is it so persuasive? 

I can understand how people who have questions, who never get answers, form their own explanations. How out here in the West, so far from where the decisions are made about how this society works, people can’t figure out how to access the information they need. Everything about Keebler’s case feels Orwellian. He’s a racist, and it’s easy to write him off. But I see now how writing him off means patrolling what he thinks, and that policing certain thoughts — no matter how gross — means a denial of certain rights. 

At the airport, I don’t ask questions about which of my liberties are being violated when I go through the security line. I don’t scream and shout about the Constitution when I’m loading my laptop into the bin. Or when I take off my shoes. Or when I put my hands above my head in a machine that seems to suggest it can see through me for things maybe even I don’t know are there.

Up next, Chapter 3: The Widow’s Tale

***

Leah Sottile is a freelance journalist based in Portland, Oregon. Her work has appeared in theWashington Post, Playboy, California Sunday Magazine, Outside, The Atlantic and Vice.

Editors: Mike Dang and Kelly Stout
Illustrator: Zoë van Dijk
Fact checker: Matt Giles
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Special thanks to everyone at Oregon Public Broadcasting.

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

Rebecca McCarthy | Longreads | April 2019 | 17 minutes (4,461 words)

On March 13, 2019, a twenty-four year old construction worker named Anthony Comello drove to Staten Island and backed his pickup into a Cadillac owned by the head of the Gambino crime family, Frank Cali. When Cali came to the door, Comello shot him. Comello was arrested a few days later in Brick, New Jersey, and upon his appearance in court, it became clear that he was a believer in the confusing and ever-shifting conspiracy theory, QAnon — whose adherents believe President Trump is locked in a mortal battle with a “deep state,” which they contend is running child sex trafficking rings (among other things). A photo from the arraignment shows that Comello had written the letter “Q” on his hand, along with “MAGA FOREVER” and “United We Stand.”

A mob boss, a cadillac, a murder, a town called Brick, New Jersey — all of those things make sense when itemized and grouped together. In 2019 it’s not even that surprising that a member of QAnon was involved. But, barring new information, what is surprising is the simplicity of the actual motive — Comello wanted to date Cali’s niece and Cali disapproved.

“Life is so much more random than we would like it to be,” Anna Merlan told me over the phone, when we were talking about Cali’s murder. “Everything is so much weirder and less meaningful than we would like it to be and I constantly see people that I talk to grappling with that idea — that maybe there isn’t a grand narrative under the surface animating everything.”

Merlan’s new book, Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power, which was released by Metropolitan Books on April 16, traces that frantic search for meaning from anti-vaccination activists to 9/11 truthers. (Read an excerpt on Longreads.) The United States, Merlan points out, has an unusual preoccupation with conspiracy theories

*

Rebecca McCarthy: So you started working on the book after taking a conspiracy cruise, is that correct?

Anna Merlan: I took a conspiracy cruise in January 2016 and wrote about it for Jezebel and at the time I was like, “Oh, it’s really interesting how the Trump campaign is reviving and energizing all these conspiracy communities. What’re they gonna do when he loses, where is that gonna go?” And then that is not what happened. So I mean some of the impulse for the book came out of the understanding that I didn’t actually know as much about this country as I thought did. And I didn’t really know what was animating people or motivating people as well as I thought I did and I thought that I should probably take some time to try to understand that.

You cover pretty thoroughly in the beginning of the book the fact that conspiracy theory contains this sort of magical thinking that appeals to people when things are going really badly. Magic exists as contractual agreement and it’s more comforting than religion, because you can say certain words and get a result. I mean the chapter with Pizzagate [a conspiracy theory that claims John Podesta’s emails, obtained by Wikileaks, were full of coded messages pointing to a child sex trafficking ring run out of a pizza parlor in Washington D.C.] is very striking, I wasn’t aware they believe that only the NYPD can investigate Pizzagate? It’s like a Die Hard movie — the government can’t help us, just the NYPD.

I think conspiracy theories broadly offer people a narrative that is sometimes more streamlined than what is going on in reality and pretty often identifies an enemy that you can be mad at. Which is sometimes very helpful for processing events that are going on in your life or in the country or in the world. One thing that happened a lot within conspiracy communities that I was talking to was this belief that people were out there by themselves trying to investigate this great wrongdoing or that only a small group of people really cared. I saw a lot of conspiracy communities that got kind of torn apart by internal controversies and rivalries and accusations of being a plant and a shill and a government agent. It was really interesting to me that it was so difficult for people to pull together to find a common goal and, in some ways, this faith in the NYPD as the last honest agency was like representative of that.

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Right yeah, because their “enemies” just keep growing. Like Marina Abramovic is involved and then Father John Misty and Guy Fieri. Did you see that evolve even as you were reporting on the book, the way these conspiracy theories were shifting?

I mean it’s like every time you check a message board or check back in with somebody there’s like a new theory or a new enthusiasm and it really is reflective of the ways that the internet sort of allows these communities to keep moving and keep reforming and keep coalescing against these things.

It’s very sad, especially because if you read something like Jane Mayer’s Dark Money — that is essentially a conspiracy theory come to life. You don’t really need the Illuminati when you have all these scammy nonprofits run by billionaires. But it just seems like there’s this vast, misdirected energy towards rooting out these imagined evils rather than the ones that are very apparent in a dry, bureaucratic way.

I think in some ways this is reflective of a lot of people’s feeling that they can’t actually impact the systems that govern their lives, whether it’s politics or the financial system. So instead, whether folks realize it or not, they’re directing their energy towards this other thing that maybe feels more achievable or more — how do I put this — like a larger and more meaningful and more dramatic version of the battle that’s a little more fun to be engaged in. Although they would not say it’s fun, obviously.

Did you see people moving away from conspiracy thinking or has it just been an ever increasing cycle at this point?

No, I would say that I more see people shifting their enthusiasms. One of the only people that I can like really see taking a sharply different direction is David Seaman, who was a big Pizzagate promoter. Basically, David — as I understand it from his Youtube videos and checking in on him from time to time — he felt very attacked by the community that he felt like he was trying to help. And ultimately was like, fuck this, I’m just gonna focus on Bitcoin.

[Laughter]

But then found himself totally unable to stop sort of weighing back in on Pizzagate and QAnon related stuff and sending out these really, really wild email blasts to subscribers. One of them said something like, “You guys have hearts of stone and stone over [your] vaginas.” It was super wild. I’m gonna find it cause it made me laugh so much. Generally, I don’t know what it looks like when people stop believing in a conspiracy theory because they sort of just vanish or move onto something else. [Merlan finds the email] Oh, he said “cemented over vaginas,” I’m sorry. “Some of you folks have cemented over vaginas and hearts of stone, because what the actual fuck, where is the compassion. Soulless fake Christian trash some of you are, circled around your Golden Calf: QAnon. It makes me want to vomit, as I actually did do a number of times last night.”

Oh my god.

Just to be clear! Just to be clear, this is like his email blast.

Wait, so it’s directed at people who move towards QAnon?

Oh yeah, he got really mad about QAnon stuff. There’s this interesting division within people who were into Pizzagate and were really into QAnon — a lot of Pizzagate people came to see QAnon as a distraction. Again, there are all these conspiracy communities just riven with these, you know, what seem to us like really insane controversies and what to them feel like very urgent moral and tactical questions about how to take down the evil doers.

Right yeah, and they have different methods of going about that. On the other end of the spectrum you touch on the #Resistance Twitter personalities like Eric Garland [who wrote a fairly incoherent and now infamous “Game Theory” Twitter thread] towards the end of the book. What’s your take on that now that the Russia Investigation has been anticlimactic, to say the least?

So, first of all when I was writing that chapter I had to be very careful to question my own beliefs because of course I’m writing it before the Mueller report came out and I’m thinking, “Surely there’s something there — twelve Russian nationals have been indicted, we have these emails between Donald Trump Jr. and this Kremlin connected lawyer.” So I had to very careful to only write what I actually knew and try not to get out over my skis too much. I mean my main take is that, now that the Barr summary is out and the Mueller report isn’t, all of the Russiagate-centric media is sort of focused on, “Maybe there’s a new cover-up, maybe the Barr Report is covering up what’s actually in the Mueller report and you know, this is an outrage, this is an infringement of democracy.”

I think once the Mueller report inevitably comes out and is still not the smoking gun that they hope for it will move onto something else. We can see it sort of spiraling further and further away from reality, you know? I think it was the Atlantic that wrote about just what a cottage industry [Russiagate has] become and that’s very true. I’m very curious to see how they revise their narratives because all of the Russiagate people, you know — Eric Garland, Seth Abramson, Louise Mensch — have all relied on this idea that they have deep sourcing in the federal government and that they are making ironclad predictions. So now that none of them have come true, you know…it’s kind of like the day after the world doesn’t end in a messianic cult. When you have been telling your followers that the world is going end in 2012, what do you say the day after the world does not end?

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I was speaking to Jenny Odell recently who’s been reading a lot about cults — she wrote that piece about the drop shipping operation run by the cult that bought Newsweek? She was talking about how in certain cults it’s really just about the community, so even after the leader falls apart and the world doesn’t, they all just still meet up at diners and hang out. It seems like it’s become like a sort of social club in America — which conspiracy theory do you identify with.

Yeah, definitely, cause we’re all in the pool, right? Most people in America believe in one conspiracy to some extent, but the far end of the pool — there all these studies about it [that] show that some people who really buy into very deep conspiracy theories do it out of a desire to feel special. And I would suggest that is maybe part of what’s animating something like the slight uptick we’re seeing in Flat Earthers? Is this desire to show that you really do reject all knowable authority and that you are really all the way out there, questioning literally everything.

What’re the political aims of the Flat Earthers? I mean that one has always seemed sort of harmless to me cause they’re just like, disputing geology essentially.

So, I would say first of all Flat Earth is a much more fringe group than the amount of media attention it gets is reflective of. I have been a lot of places where there are a lot of conspiracy theorists, I’ve only met a Flat Earther in real life once. I would say though that my understanding of the Flat Earth phenomenon — Kelly Weill at the Daily Beast has written about this a lot — my understanding is that what they’re saying essentially is that it’s a government cover up that is hiding the existence of God. There’s a belief that beyond the ice shelf there is [sighing], you know, the heavenly realms or whatever, but I don’t think it’s a super political conspiracy theory it’s just sort of a more general, “No one can be trusted especially not the godless NASA scientists.”

It’s sort of romantic in a weird way.

Yeah! I also belong to a couple Flat Earth groups on Facebook and they’re so full of trolling now, it really is a bewildering world where you’re like, “Wait — how many people actually mean this and how many people are just arguing this point to entertain themselves.”

Especially because teens seem so adept at infiltrating those communities and shitposting in them now.

Oh yeah. Yeah, there’s a lot of shitposting.

One of the saddest chapters is about the healthcare conspiracy theories and anti-vaxxers and the way that’s been normalized. And you can see that rising logically out of a country that really doesn’t provide adequate or affordable healthcare, but that must have been difficult to go and see this anti-vaxxer convention.

I mean I have sort of an interesting relationship with the anti-vax world because I’ve written about it for so long that they know to get mad at me personally. Andrew Wakefield knows who I am and when I show up at things he’ll say things like, “Oh, back to write another mean article about us again, ey?” The last time, when I was at Conscious Life, I ran into his PR person — this woman Donna — who after a brief exchange said, you know, “I’m never going to answer another question from you and I’m gonna deny that we’ve ever spoken.” Which I was tape recording, so that wasn’t like, her best method. Especially with the case of anti-vaxx stuff I am very sympathetic to the people buying the products because they’re just worried parents. I am much less sympathetic to the people selling the products. But I think that anti-vax sentiments definitely come out of a super understandable desire to protect our children and if you really don’t know what a reasonable source of medical information is then, yeah, you’re gonna feel really fearful.

That seems to be the uniting thing between most of these conspiracy theories is that they really take off once people find a way to make a ton of money off of them.

Yeah and it’s hard to tell — people always want to talk to me about the question of motivation; who really believes this and who’s just in it to make a buck and I don’t know that the division is always [that] clear. You know sometimes people are their own best customers. But not always and it can be really hard to tell who believes what.

Like Sean David Morton, who’s part of the Redemption Theorists — they believe that everyone has a secret bank account that they can access if they commit the right type of tax fraud, is that correct?

They wouldn’t describe it as tax fraud, but yeah. Redemption Theory is this idea that has changed forms a lot of times, but fundamentally it is this belief that with the right set of legal maneuvers you can either gain access to a secret bank account that the government is holding in your name or you can get out of the more onerous aspects of being a federal citizen like paying taxes. Sean David Morton is actually a really good example of someone where everything that he has sold to other people he’s also done himself which ultimately resulted in him and his wife going to prison. So you know, it would be hard for me to say exactly what Sean David Morton believes in his heart of hearts, but I do know that he went to prison.

His parents were very involved in the John Birch Society, which has been like this huge driving force behind these very creepy strains of conservatism for a hundred years basically and if you grow up in something like that…

I think that Sean David Morton is in some ways a really sort of classic example of this overlap that I don’t think a lot of people are aware of, which is between right wing conspiracy theorism, new age thought, and natural healing ideas. He really embodies all of those things and my experience is that a lot of those things are more commonly found together than you might think? So finding out about his family history was really interesting for me.

You grew up in New Mexico, right? In Santa Fe?

I did, yeah.

I was just out there — it does seem like everytime you meet someone out there it turns out they’re like, Oppenheimer’s grandchild or something, you know everyone has this insane backstory. Was that helpful, while you were doing your research?

New Mexico is definitely the site of both real government secrecy and government conspiracy theories — like whatever happened at Roswell, the Los Alamos National Labs, and it’s also the site of like a lot of woo woo New Age thinking. That is not the overwhelming culture there, you know I feel like when we focus on that we tend to forget that there are a lot of Native American people there who don’t buy into that shit, but I would definitely say that my upbringing and my background exposed me to a lot of people with alternative belief systems when I was pretty young and Santa Fe was still somewhat weird. And I have never had a huge amount of trouble talking to those people and I’ve never thought that I am better than somebody that holds an alternative belief system, which is very helpful when you’re trying to get people to talk to you. You know, people can really sense condescension and falsehood and if you’re quietly judging them and they will shut down.

You write about how conspiracy theories tend to afflict, if that’s the right word, people who feel particularly vulnerable or who have been actually persecuted. And conspiracy theories among Black Americans are particularly upsetting, because there’s a lot of truth to them, like the Great Mississippi Flood, where you write about the levees being blown up and displacing thousands of people.

There is this school of journalism around conspiracy theories that is really snarky and is basically like, what I call the “Look at This Crazy Asshole” school of writing about conspiracy theories. I always say that we can actually replace that with a more culturally confident reading of conspiracy theories where we actually understand what they do for some people. And that is especially true in the case of Black Americans. There are really specific conspiracy theories in the Black community that tend to be strongly informed by real historical events.

The only reason why I found out about the conspiracy theory that the levees were deliberately blown up during Katrina is because my brother lives in New Orleans and mentioned that this was something that he commonly heard. Which led me to all this reading about why that is a conspiracy. It is because, as you say, this literally happened during the Great Flood in 1927. This decision was made to dynamite the levees thirteen miles below the city in order to flood a less populated region, hoping that it would save the city proper. It did that, [but] it also destroyed a number of people’s homes, it killed a number of people, we don’t know how many still, and it triggered one of the greatest mass migrations in American history. So the fact that during Hurricane Betsy in the 1960’s and again during Hurricane Katrina [in 2005], this idea that the levees were blown up on purpose would recur is not some crazy thing, it doesn’t come out of nowhere, it comes out of a deep historical trauma. It’s really a deeply upsetting event that’s going to echo through generations.

The same thing is true with things like the Tuskegee experiment — a lot of men had syphilis for a long time when they could’ve been treated by the government because the government wanted to track the progression of the disease instead. So when you hear about people, particularly in the Black community who have a distrust of medical authorities, it’s not a crazy thing, it’s not something you can easily talk people out of. It is a strong belief that is based in a survival instinct.

You quote Michael Harriot who says, “The weird thing about being black is that some of it is true and some of it is not. But none of it is crazy.”

He and I had a really interesting conversation where I was amazed at how much shit I hadn’t heard about, you know? A lot of sort of conspiracy theories are so specifically culture-bound and then you know the ones that we hear about in the broader culture tend to be the ones that White Americans are talking about, because we always reflect the anxieties and priorities of white Americans in media — whether they are real anxieties or invented ones.

Right, yeah, I guess conspiracy reporters tend to be white guys who are really into 4Chan conspiracies.

I mean I don’t think it’s surprising that a lot of conspiracy reporters are focused on internet stuff and the way that the internet works, both because it’s extremely important and because it is the milieu that they are comfortable in. And a lot of people who report on conspiracies are men and I would argue that influences what they notice and also the experiences they have in these worlds. You know, my experience of interviewing people and talking to people are informed by being Jewish and being a woman and that changes the way that people treat me. So I see different aspects of the people that I’m talking to. I think most women reporters have the experience of realizing that maybe someone is talking to you because they mistake your professional interest for personal interest.

Yeah, that one guy [at a Neo-Nazi rally in Kentucky] who says “I know you’re a Jew and all, but you’re a beautiful woman.”

That was…oh man. I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t know how to react.

I don’t think there is a good way to react to that honestly.

Yeah I just stood there, I was like, ‘Well, that happened.’

You touch on this at the end, the idea that the only way we’re going to rid ourselves of this unusual preoccupation with conspiracy theories is if the country becomes a fairer place, could you expand on that?

I’ve said this a lot, but I think conspiracy theories are the symptom, they’re not the disease. I often think that conspiracy theorists are — you know if we take that cliche that all cynics are frustrated romantics, I think that in some way conspiracy theorists are frustrated participants in the American Experiment. So, when we get to a point where that experiment works better for everyone we have less conspiratorial thinking and the conspiratorial thinking that we do have has less impact on the public discourse as a whole. Because we’re never going to get rid of conspiracy theories, we’re a country that has a super vibrant free press and free communication and that’s a great thing and it also means that there will always be some level of suspicion and distrust and misinformation. The question is really how do we build a stable enough society that it doesn’t keep derailing us, the way that it repeatedly has in the last three years.

Do you think that has to do with the fact that there’s no longer a workable finance model for news? Like because of the decline of local papers people don’t see a reporter who they know, so they think that reporters are all one monolithic group?

I think that there’s so many different things going on. As we talked about, there’s a really opaque financial system, there’s a really opaque political system, there has been this decreased trust in news — but that is a less organic phenomenon I would argue. It’s more something that has been driven by organizations like Fox News and now the president. I wrote about this, that the desire to destabilize people’s trust in the news media is political, it has a political end — which is to make sure that if somebody is writing about your misdeeds that news outlet is seen as untrustworthy. I don’t even think it’s necessarily about knowing reporters better. The Capital Gazette shooting was perpetrated by someone who had really direct grudges against the people who worked at that newspaper and was just finally motivated by, I would argue, this poisonous environment to act on his murderous impulses. So I would say the demonization of the press is in some ways the least natural outgrowth of what’s been going on.

The book ends on a very grim note before the epilogue, with Trump saying, “The press, the public doesn’t believe you people anymore. Now maybe I had something to do with that. I don’t know. But they don’t believe you.”

I think a lot of things that Trump does are incredibly hamfisted and ineffective, but we can definitely say that Fake News rhetoric has certainly worked. Anybody who has been out talking to people in the last few years can tell you — yeah, the number of people calling us Fake News, the number of people saying that they don’t trust anyone? Even people who are not necessarily on the far right, you know? I got into an argument with a Buddhist teacher. Who wrote a blog post about something I had reported on and said “Well, you know I don’t know how much this is true.” And I was like, “You don’t actually get to just make that claim without evidence,” and he said “Well I don’t trust anyone. I don’t trust any news organizations.” That’s not a good thing, that’s not actually something to be proud of — that is a symptom of something that’s deeply wrong in our country.

If you’re interested in what Merlan has to say on the Politics of UFOs, you can read about that here.

* * *

Rebecca McCarthy is a freelance writer and a bookseller based in Philadelphia. She’s written for The Awl, The Outline, Medium, and others. 

Editor: Dana Snitzky

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Anna Merlan| Adapted from Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power| Metropolitan Books | April 2019 | 11 minutes (2,579 words)

Corey Goode was barely in grade school when he was classified as “an anomaly.”

“Apparently, I was identified as being on the intuitive empath spectrum,” he told a rapt audience one hot summer morning in 2017. Goode claims that he was soon placed in alternative classes. His parents, he says, gave permission for that. But what they didn’t know was that he’d been tapped to take part in a military program: Every morning he’d wait outside with his lunchbox to be picked up by a white van, which would drive him to Carswell Air Force Base, in Texas. From there, they’d go through a back gate, across two runways, through another security gate, and into a motor pool hangar, down a cargo elevator into a secret underground facility where nine to 15 other children would be waiting.

Some time around 1986, Goode says, he was drafted into the Secret Space Program, a purported hidden government entity doing clandestine research and fighting secret wars with extraterrestrials in outer space. He was not yet 17. Goode says that when his space military service came to an end, he returned to Earth, where his government handlers performed an “age regression.” He awoke as a child again, in his bedroom at home, with his mother unaware that he’d ever been gone.

There’s plenty more to Goode’s story, but a little of this goes a long way. Goode has told his account at many places, but I heard it at the annual meeting of the Mutual UFO Network, known as MUFON. It is the oldest UFO research group in the United States, active since 1969, and it presents itself as a scientific organization seeking hard evidence of the UFO phenomenon and pursuing that evidence wherever it might lead.

Most of the year, state MUFON chapters investigate tips of UFO sightings, hundreds of which pour into their email and voicemail each month. But on a blazing summer day in Summerlin, a wealthy suburb of northwest Las Vegas, the MUFON members were all together, and things were tense. Earlier, another well-respected speaker, Richard Dolan, called Goode a liar and quite possibly a plant. “I’m not accusing anybody of anything,” Dolan said delicately at the start of his talk, in the manner of someone about to accuse someone of something. “But it’s absolutely a fact of U.S. history that there’s been government interference in many organizations. Many of you have heard of COINTELPRO. And that goes on to this day.”

Although broad discussion of UFOs has been eclipsed in the general culture by fresher, shinier conspiratorial ideas — birtherism, false flags, pedophile rings — a remarkably high number of Americans believe in the existence of extraterrestrial life. The poll numbers can vary wildly and frustratingly. In 1997, a CNN/Time poll showed that a whopping 80 percent of the adult population believed the government was hiding “knowledge of the existence of extraterrestrial life-forms.” In 2015, a YouGov survey found that 54 percent of the adult population believed that alien life exists, while 30 percent were convinced, in the poll’s words, that “extra-terrestrial intelligent life has already contacted us but the government has covered it up.” According to the Chapman University Survey of American Fears that same year, 42.6 percent of respondents thought the government was concealing what it knows about alien encounters. The Chapman survey noted that more Americans believe in UFOs than believe in natural selection or that the earth is 4.5 billion years old.

The belief is strong, but, as with so many research communities, it’s not uniform or unaffected by controversy. In the past few years the UFO world has been afflicted by the kinds of conspiratorial cracks that have appeared throughout American culture: Who can be trusted? What is true? What constitutes an acceptable standard of proof? Who is a spy, a plant, an agent? Is the government engaged in covert actions to disrupt communities it deems dangerous?

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Dolan has been a respected UFO researcher for a long time, which means the same thing here that it means in a lot of conspiracy subcultures: You might not know who he is, but he’s indisputably a giant in his field. He is far from the first of his kind to suggest that the government has planted misleading information to throw the field into chaos. And MUFON itself is frequently accused of pursuing and promoting pseudoscience. The Center for Skeptical Inquiry wrote in 2013 that local MUFON chapters were following “decidedly unscientific” avenues of inquiry, scheduling “talks on alien abduction, conspiracy theories, human-ET hybrids, hypnotic regression, and repressed memories.”

“There are a few very conservative people who want to just talk about the nuts and bolts of the crafts,” Jan Harzan, MUFON’s executive director, told me, referring to spacecraft. “But this is what people are interested in: the whistleblowers. They want to know what’s really going on.” The whistleblowers, as Harzan and others call them, are the men in the UFO world, Goode among them, who make colorful and eye-popping claims about the roles they played in the government’s secret space programs.

In conspiracy subcultures, “whistleblowing” is a common phenomenon. For every government plot and dark scheme, someone will eventually show up claiming to have been part of it. That happened during the 1980s Satanic panic; it began to occur with Pizzagate; and in the mid-2000s the newest crop arrived in the UFO world, when a man named Andrew Basiago claimed to have gone on a series of missions to Mars with a young Barack Obama. In 2014, Goode appeared on the scene. A year later, the two whistleblowers were joined by another man, Randy Kramer, who claims to be a former marine who served on Mars for 17 years and on a secret spaceship for three more.

Among earlier generations of UFO whistleblowers, the most famous was Bob Lazar, who maintained that he worked as a scientist at a subsidiary facility of Area 51 called S-4. His task was to “reverse-engineer” alien spaceships to figure out how they worked. But the new whistleblowers are in a league of their own, having apparently been to reaches of space that humans have never touched before, having had repeated and direct interaction with aliens, and, if I understand Basiago’s assertions correctly, having been chased around by dinosaurs on Mars. (I admit to leaving his lecture early due to a sudden, inexplicable headache.)

Goode has an unusual skill — the ability to make outlandish claims but to weave them together with common and popular UFO positions. Among the more fantastical threads that he manages to pull in: The engineers who work on secret space technologies are part of “secret societies and occult rituals.” But he also peddles the more traditional beliefs: The government isn’t just hiding what it knows about aliens and UFOs, but also about the advanced technologies that aliens have revealed to humans. Those include “healing and anti-aging technologies” and “zero-point energy,” or free energy.

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Next to the lecture hall where the talks took place, there was a big room filled with tables and merchandise. As I walked among the misshapen ceramic aliens and chatted with the vendors, it occurred to me that UFO lore might represent conspiracy culture at its best: our interest in the hidden, the unknown, the ineffable, the magic of what’s yet to be revealed. “The UFO mystery holds a mirror to our own fantasies,” famed UFO researcher and computer scientist Jacques Vallée once wrote. “It expresses our secret longings for a wisdom that might come down from the stars in new, improved, easy to-use packaging, to reveal the secrets of life and tell us, at long last, who we are.”

The alien world wasn’t always that exalted. Alien mythology was born, as many people know, in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, when something … crashed. One summer morning a ranch foreman working close to Roswell found something bizarre while walking the property. It was what Kathryn Olmsted in Real Enemies describes as “a pile of sticks, tinfoil thick paper, and smoky-gray rubber, all stuck together with scotch tape.”

The foreman called Roswell’s sheriff, who sent out two deputies, then phoned the Roswell Army Air Force Base, wondering if it was something of theirs. The base’s public information officer announced that a “flying disc” had been recovered. But by the next day, the story had changed: The region’s commanding general reported that what had actually been recovered was a “high altitude weather balloon.”

Public interest in the story faded. But by the late 1970s, alien researchers started to suspect there had been a cover-up at Roswell. Around 1991, Glenn Dennis, a self-proclaimed eyewitness, came forward, saying that he had worked at a Roswell funeral home at the time and that the military had requested “child-sized caskets” for tiny alien bodies. Dennis’s version of the story took off, transforming the Roswell story as we all commonly know it. In later years, popular imagination moved the location of the little gray bodies, iced over like mysterious pearlescent fish sticks, to Area 51.

In 1994, a genuine conspiracy came to light: An Air Force report commissioned by the federal General Accounting Office revealed that the downed balloon was probably debris from a top secret surveillance program known as Project MOGUL, which sought to record audio evidence of Soviet atomic tests. And in 1997, a second report found a possible explanation for the witnesses who reported seeing alien bodies pulled from the wreckage: The crash-test dummies routinely dropped during other military test operations involving high-altitude balloons.

Most mainstream news sources presented the reports as evidence that there were definitively no UFOs. “No bodies. No bulbous heads,” wrote William J. Broad of the New York Times News Service in 1997. “No secret autopsies. No spaceship. No crash. No extraterrestrials or alien artifacts of any sort. And most emphatically of all, no Government cover-up.”

But the 1994 report did provide proof that the Air Force had lied about a top secret program, which fed certainty among UFO researchers that there were other cover-ups yet to be discovered. The history of UFOs is a perfect illustration of the way in which genuine government secrecy feeds citizen paranoia. The disclosure of hidden Air Force programs made just about anything seem possible, and over the next few decades, it was joined by wave after wave of revelations, some of them real and some imagined, until the field of ufology became a morass of competing claims and high suspicion that everyone is a government agent and no one is to be trusted.

The number of UFO-related conspiracy theories is dizzying and too numerous for us to explore each one. Aliens have been linked to everything from the JFK assassination to cattle mutilations, and none of these assertions can ever be settled: There is no evidence the government can produce that will satisfy UFO buffs, and UFO researchers have no evidence to prove any of their claims definitively to a skeptical public.

The CIA concludes its website’s capsule history of the subject on a bit of a resigned note: “Like the JFK assassination conspiracy theories, the UFO issue probably will not go away soon, no matter what the Agency does or says. The belief that we are not alone in the universe is too emotionally appealing and the distrust of our government is too pervasive to make the issue amenable to traditional scientific studies of rational explanation and evidence.”

Nonetheless, Richard Dolan, the UFO researcher, and other more traditional ufologists do try to back up their claims with declassified government memos, eyewitness photos of purported UFOs, interviews with ex-military personnel: Much of it more closely echoes traditional scholarship, although the results are eclectic. Dolan is concerned with what he calls falsifiability. Accepting the claims of someone like Goode makes him nervous. “I do think some of these self-described whistleblowers aren’t particularly credible,” Dolan said, rather grimly, standing in a hallway of the hotel in Summerlin and making no particular effort to keep his voice down. “Believing such stories without genuine evidence takes us down a dangerous road within an already treacherous field,” Dolan wrote in a Facebook post in 2017, one “that is constantly in the crosshairs of a skeptical establishment.” His fear of foul play — government infiltration meant to discredit and confuse the UFO disclosure movement — is grounded in the past. “In U.S. history, we’re replete with provocateurs and disinformation coming from U.S. government channels.”

Dolan’s suspicions echo those of earlier UFO researchers. In his 1991 book Revelations: Alien Contact and Human Deception, Vallée, the famous ufologist, wrote that he had come to believe many UFO events were hoaxes, engineered sometimes by delusional private citizens and sometimes by government agencies with bigger aims in mind.

Lorin Cutts is another UFO researcher I’ve come to know, someone who believes in the existence of alien beings even as he doubts and detests almost every facet of modern UFO theorizing. He takes a complex middle ground on the UFO issue, somewhere between Dolan and Goode. “Extraterrestrials almost certainly exist,” he told me in an email exchange. “What they have to do with the phenomenon of UFOs is questionable and largely a cultural and mythological construct — I don’t believe that we can know for certain right now.”

In a way, the suspicions felt by Cutts reveal the profound and continuing legacy of the US government’s tactics of disinformation. COINTELPRO was, after all, a disinformation campaign created by the FBI to disrupt and discredit American activist groups. The fact that UFO researchers — and Pizzagaters, and every other conspiracy community — are so paranoid about plants and saboteurs in their ranks shows just how well that program worked to destabilize many different kinds of dialogue and research.

So what will bring all of this arguing and debating and finger-pointing to an end? UFO researchers call it “disclosure,” the time when the world’s governments will finally reveal everything they know about UFOs, extraterrestrials, and alien technology. It is a day that they yearn for and urgently seek: Their talk about it echoes the language of end-times preachers who describe a coming climactic battle, a grand revelation, a final decisive moment when humanity will be divided into the drowned and the saved.

John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, has been a vocal advocate for disclosure. When he served as Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, he recently told CNN, he asked the president to disclose “some information about some of these things, and in particular, some information about what was going on at Area 51.” Asked if he believes in aliens, he responded, “There are a lot of planets out there. The American people can handle the truth.”

Hillary Clinton herself signaled a willingness to entertain disclosure, telling one radio interviewer, “I want to open the files as much as we can.” When asked if she believed in UFOs, she responded, “I don’t know. I want to see what the information shows.” But, she added, “There’s enough stories out there that I don’t think everybody is just sitting in their kitchen making them up.”

A core part of Goode’s message has always been that disclosure is nearly upon us. However, Goode believes that “true disclosure can only come from the people,” as he told his MUFON audience. “If we sit back and wait for someone to walk to a podium and make an announcement, I think we’re just going to keep waiting.”

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From the book Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power by Anna Merlan, published by Metropolitan Books. Copyright © 2019 by Anna Merlan.

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