and it sort of unmasks him as the stiff, uncaring individual. he loved his family and loved his grandchildren, and who doesn't love their own family and grandchildren? >> will visitors to the library and people online be able to see some of these new koda color home movies? >> yes. we have the koda color film, all seven of them, on our youtube channel in a play list, and then you can watch them any time we've got a little computer -- think it is an ipad or some little device in our museum that you push a button and you can watch the films in our museum. >> well, it's been a pleasure speaking with lynn smith, audiovisual archivist at the herbert hoover presidential museum in west branch, iowa. thanks so much. >> thank you, bill. sunday night on "q & a" adam founder and ceo of "open the

books" on how taxpayers' dollars are spent and the need for government transparency. >> veterans affairs we audited their checkbook for the last four years. last summer we found during a period where up to 1,000 sick veterans died while waiting to see a doctor that the va spent $20 million on a high-end art portfolio. it was 27-foot christmas trees, priced like cars, $21,000. it was sculptures priced like five-bedroom homes. it was two sculptures for $700,000 procured by a va center that serves blind veterans. it was a cubed rock skel p tour all in with landscaping for $1.2 million. this is the type of waste that's in our government sunday night at 8:00 eastern on c-span's "q & a." on lectures in history, emory university professor felix

harcourt teaches a class on how conspiracy theories about ufos shaped american culture. he begins in the late 1940s and describes how public opinion about extra terrestrials changed over time. this class is about one hour and 50 minutes. >> let's start with a question i'm sure nobody will have any problem having their answer recorded for television. show of hands, how many people believe alien life exists? pretty decent number of people. i'm going to throw in there as well. i think so, stephen hawking thinks so. in a giant universe there's a distinct probability that somewhere alien life has evolved and, you know, probably looks pretty different from us, but it might be out there.

slightly different question. how many of us believe that aliens have visited earth? sergio, the only man with the strength of his convictions. i appreciate that. so here is a question. is the idea that aliens have visited earth in and of itself a conspiracy theory? sergio? >> i don't believe so. >> no. why not? >> well, i mean if you take into consideration the fact that we're trying to go to mars, we would technically be alien life there. so the fact that another life form, say, that has become intelligent enough to do space travel, visits another planet isn't really a conspiracy theory. >> seems fair. >> i guess it depends on how you define the scope of a conspiracy theory, because it takes an entire species more or less collaborating together to land themselves on another plan.

so there's an entire race working together considered a conspiracy? i wouldn't really think so. >> that seems reasonable. it seems a little odd to indict the entire planet of wherever for wanting to come and visit. even if we are going to say arguably, maybe we could consider it a conspiracy theory, it is a conspiracy of aliens in and of themselves, right? which is not what we tend to talk about when we talk about ufo conspiracy theories, alien conspiracy theories. those are theories that contain an element of human complicitly, usually government complicitly. these ideas there are not only aliens visiting earth but that the state is in some way involved with those visits is a really prominent conspiracy theory. it is not really one conspiracy,

it is a multitude of conspiracy theories. like the kennedy conspiracy that we were talking about last week, to just stand here and name every ufo conspiracy theory would take much longer than we have in this class. so, tragically, we will not be talking about the fact that nasa is hiding the existence of the planet nabir. tragically, we will not be talking about the fact we are in secret contact with andromeda and part of a vast intergalactic war. tragically, we will not be talking about the fact that the earth is hollow and is filled with interstellar beings who may or may not have been allied with the nazis in world war ii, depending on who you ask. i see a couple of kind of smiles at those ideas, which is understandable. but these are really dideas tha

people fiercely and fully believe in. we should be clear before we dig into it too much, as bridge i think brown makes clear in the reeding you did for today, not everybody that believes in ufos believes in ufo conspiracy theories. even amongst those who believe in ufo conspiracy theories there's a wide variation. we keep coming back to this idea of a fringe conspiracism and that's evident in these ufo conspiracy theories, but it is worth thinking about. that these ufo conspiracy theories are widely treated as something laughable. in fact, serious discussion of them is really an effective cultural taboo. we've talked about the labelling of something as conspiracy, as a distancing measure.

alien conspiracy theories are possibly one of the most evident examples of the distancing of conspiracist believe from acceptable discourse. and yet at the same time even as they're treated as laughable, as riseable, they're some of the most widely believed conspiracy theories. if we go back to the '60s, gallop polls find 95% of americans had heard of ufos, 46% believed that they were real. 1973, 57% believe that ufos are real. by the '90s, 71% believe the government is at least hiding information about ufos. they may or may not be real, but there's definitely more going on there than the government is

letting us know. those numbers remain relatively stable. a 2015 ipsos poll showed that 56% believed that ufos are real, 45% believe that aliens actually landed and visited earth on top of that. to put that in context, 56% believe ufos are real, in that same survey 57% said that the big bang theory was real. this is very much a widely held belief that is very mainstream, at least the idea that something is going on with ufos. even if we narrow it in to a specific example like roswell, a majority of americans will

repeatedly say that they are at the very least unsure whether or not a flying saucer crashed in roswell, new mexico. so we have this odd disconnect, right, between this very, very mainstream idea, this majority idea, and yet the way that it is treated within our political and cultural discourse. it is also not an idea that's new at all. the idea that weird lights or objects in the sky is something to be concerned about is nothing new. but then if you are a serf in 13th century europe, what are you going to think that floating lights in the sky might be? is it going to be aliens? >> witches.

>> witches? >> omens of doom. >> omens of doom. any other guesses? >> god. >> god, right. god, devils, witches, omens. overwhelmingly a supernatural explanation. it is not really until we start to see that kind of enlightenment rationalism sur pla plant these ideas that we move to explanations for these phenomenon. even then we need to be careful about drawing too wide a divide between those two. as we're going to see, the two ideas, the supernatural and the scientific, are going to remain pretty thoroughly intertwined. mathieu? >> we've got 11% of people here who think furkss are re -- ufosl

but don't think aliens have visited work. where is the boundary there? unidentified according to who? there are a lot of things i can't identify in the sky but i assume somebody can. >> this is true, this is true. yeah, the ipsos polls, the wording isn't great. the way that the ipsos poll explains that is not that there's an 11% difference between those who believe ufos are an extraterrestrial phenomenon, what gets commonly referred to as the extraterrestrial hypothesis that ufos are real and alien-related. the difference is 56% believe ufos are real, 11% fewer believe that some of those ufos have landed and we've had contact with the aliens. that's the differential that's playing out there. the differential between

something else going on, right, is that 56 going up to 71% from the '90s, the idea that there is something going on with this question. and that idea that there is something going on has a long history. this concern over extraterrestrial contact has a long history. if we go back to 1835, the new york newspaper "the sun" garners major attention in reporting that an astronomer has found life on the moon, life in the shape of a series of humanoid bat people. turns out, unsurprisingly, that it is a hoax. i'm sorry to disappoint anybody who is hoping that bat people are really living on the moon, but it points us to the ideas that are already percolating around in the 19th century.

that gets really evident in the late 19th century. in 1891 when thomas blott alleges that a man from mars appeared in the kitchen of his rural home and fully endorsed late 19th century democratic socialist utopianism, which was nice for thomas blott to hear since he was already a believer in such things, or in 1896-1897 where you see a series of unexplained airships seen in the skies over the west coast. there's a really interesting variety of stories that come out about these airships. some of them claim that they see humanoid beings inside pedaling to make it go, which if that is a spaceship that is a lot of

pedaling. some allegedly call out to the airship as it goes over and the airship calls back down to say that they are from mars. all right. even in the 19th century people are very fixated on the idea of life from mars. but there's these ideas, right? there is this long history, this long concern about contact with extraterrestrial life, and extraterrestrial life visiting us here on earth. but when we talk about modern ufo conspiracism, what we're really talking about is the post-world war ii era. these conspiracies paint an alternative history of america from the cold war to the present. what we might call ethno

socialologies of extra terrestrial conspiracy that reflect extraterrestrial concern about agency, about state power, about disempowerment and depersonalization, about ideas of expertise and authority, and especially of ideas of scepticism about expertise and authority and about narratives of progress, whether social or scientific. that modern ufo phenomenon really gets kickstarted after world war ii in 1947 by this gentleman, kenneth arnold. people had seen -- pilots had seen unidentified phenomena during world war ii. they get commonly referred to as fu fighters, which is actually where the band name comes from. but it is not until kenneth

arnold's sighting in late june of 1947 of what he describes to newspapers as flying discs, what is widely reported as flying saucers, that the modern ufo phenomenon begins. it spreads very, very quickly. over the july 4th holiday that year thousands of men and women contact authorities to report more than 850 sightings of ufos. that's never been paralleled since. there's never been such a frenzy of ufo sightings as there was over independence holiday in 1947, although sightings remain fairly common through to the early 1950s. you get pictures like this from

new jersey from 1952, alleging, you know, a sighting of an unidentified flying object. unsurprisingly, you see a variety of efforts to try to explain this phenomenon. two of the most influential voices in that process are frank scully and donald kaho. scully was a writer for "variety" magazine who publishes in 1950 where he really focuses in on the story of flying saucers that crash in the american southwest. where did that crash take place? >> roswell. >> not roswell, but thank you for falling into the trap. in fact, scully says that they crashed in aztec, new mexico.

neither scully nor kaho ever mention roswell. i'm going to talk a little bit later about why that is. scully says saucers crash in aztec, and not only did skaauce crash, scully says, but bodies are found. three to four-foot tall alien beings, really cementing the modern idea of the little green men comes out of scully's books. he also claims that the saucers come not from mars but from venus. the 1950s are really kind of a key time in a mars/venus battle over where these flying saucers come from. scully loses popularity after 1952 because "true" magazine

publishes and extensive article debunking his entire book, pointing out the fact most of -- or really all of scully's sources are professional con men, and really just spending page after page making fun of scully for believing the con men and even making fun of how terrible frank scully's writing is. it is a really mean article. it destroys cully's credibility. but scully's ideas are going to have a really long shelf life, and actually just in recent years there's been an uptick in people trying to attract some of the roswell tourism away over to aztec and publishing new books saying that scully was right and saucers really did crash in aztec, new mexico.

a little bit more kind of credible, at least at the time than scully, is donald kaho, a retired officer from the marine corps, who writes three very popular books, the flying saucers are real, which is released in 1950. "flying saucers from outerspace" which comes out in 1953, and "the flying saucer conspiracy" in 1955. kaho reports conversations and interviews he has purportedly had with air force officers, and specifically air force intelligence officers, to try to substantiate his warning that, first of all, ufos are real and military pilots are encountering them on a semi-regular basis. second of all, he thinks there's a very good chance that the aliens have set up a mothership

in or bit bit of earth and the are coming from that mothership rather than all the way from another planet and, thirdly, that these ufos are most likely from mars. all right. he's not a venus fan, he's back on the mars train. what's interesting about kehoe is that he does see a conspiracy. he does see a conspiracy by the military to cover up the reality that earth is being visited by these flying saucers, but he doesn't blame them for doing so. for keho, what he calls the silence group is acting out of a desire to protect national security and a desire to prevent public hysteria.

while he doesn't agree, he sees it as not notorious. that's an idea he is going to change significantly over the '60s and especially coming out of the '70s into the '80s. but easy at the same time to see the impact of writers like keyhoe who see a conspiracy of silence but not necessarily a nefarious conspiracy of silence. in 1952, that same year that "true" magazine is debunking scully, "life" magazine leads with a big front cover splash of marilyn monroe and the headline, "there is a case for interplanetary sources" and

"life" comes down hard in that issue to say they think something probably is going on with ufos. less concerned with kind of credibility, but no less influential in putting these ideas into the american consciousness is the glut of alien-invasion films in the 1950s. of course, the classic "invasion of the body snatchers," but also "invasion of the saucermen," "invaders from mars," "killers from space," "earth versus the flying saucers," and more. there's a couple of interesting elements to be brought out from these films, not the least of which is a lot of them deal with aliens either taking control of humans' minds or of replacing them entirely with look-alikes.

given that these are coming out mid to late '50s, what other fears have we been talking about that that kind of coincides with? marissa? >> like communism. >> yeah, certainly communist infiltration. yeah, carolyn? >> brainwashing of korean pows. >> brainwashing, good. this is very much playing on two simultaneous fears bubbling up in the 1950s, not just that the communists are infiltrating but that the communists are infiltrating through this kind of mind-control ideas and pairing that with this fear of extraterrestrial threat as well. it really is an extraterrestrial threat. these films overwhelmingly buy in to a donald keyhoe-style view of what's happening.

the threat is purely extraterrestrial, it is not human. in fact, most of these films, rather than the state being complicit or suspect, government agents, particularly military agents, are the heroes. they're the ones saving us from this extraterrestrial threat. so you have -- yeah, evelyn? >> what is the thought behind the motives of the aliens to, like, be a threat, like to attack us? like is there a thought of, like, why they're doing that? >> yeah, kind of the why of the conspiracy attack? there isn't really a single unifying idea in the '50s, other than domination, right. the plan is always to conquer the world. why they want to conquer the world is open for interpretation. is it because their own planet is dying?

is it because they want to kind of make us into slaves? there's a pretty wide latitude there but, yeah, good question. so we see this kind of keyhoe-style opposite of paranoia at work to some extent. remember our word for opposite of paranoia? no? >> security? >> yeah, but not quite. security is kind of the middle line. hope? >> indifference? >> yeah, not quite. no? what do you call it when a conspiracy is acting for your good, not against you? anybody remember that? no? not paranoia but pronoia. this is very much an example of pro-noid conspiracy thinking.

that's evident in another kind of thread of extraterrestrial phenomena that emerges in the '50s, which is an increasing number of people who claim that not only have they seen ufos but that they have been contacted by aliens. this is really kicked off by a man called george adamsky. he's the first contactee to publish a book length account of his experience in 1953. adamski contradicts virtually everything that has come before him. he says that they're not from mars, they're from venus. if scully is right about them being from venus, he's wrong about them being short. he says they're about 5'6", they're humanoid and they're very beautiful.

adamski also says that they're not a threat. he says the coming was friendly. now, adamski is going to lose kind of popular support in the '60s after he claims that he will be leaving any day now for an interplanetary conference on saturn and somehow never quite makes his appointment for that. but his ideas, his narrative that there are these friendly visitors has very much caught on. throughout the 1950s you see this series of encounters with extraterrestrial beings who have seemingly come to warn humanity about our war-like nature, to warn us that nuclear weapons will destroy us all. a have you pure distillation of common cold war fears at the

time. cold war fears also bear no small resemblance to the 1951 film "the day the earth stood still," which is basically the exact same plot adamski recounts two years later, but nobody really picks adamski off on this at the time. so there's still this pro-noia at work in the early '50s. this idea that, yes, the government might be lying to us but they're doing it for our own good or, yes, aliens are visiting but they're doing it for our own good. that increasingly is going to take a darker turn as we move out of the '50s into the '60s, and you start to see not least the government's motives and its methods become much darker in hiding the truth. that's especially going to become symbolized by the idea of

the "men in black." the "men in black" is an idea that is really kind of more or less put into play by an author called gray barker. gray barker is an interesting guy. barker makes a pretty good living publishing books about supposedly true ufo encounters, but to friends privately calls flying saucers a bucket of -- so very much capitalizing on this trend. but he's going to more or less launch this idea of the men in black in his 1956 book, "they knew too much about flying saucers," a book that's based on the experiences of a factory clerk from connecticut, a man called albert bender, who claimed that three men in black

suits had approached him and intimidated him into not telling the truth about his alien encounter. now, obviously bender had not been that silenced given that he, a, was able to tell gray barker about it and, b, publish his own book about it in 1962 in which he explains that it is not the martians or the venutians. in fact, he had been taken to a ride in a flying saucer to the south pole by grizzly, monster-like aliens from the planet casak, wherever that may be. despite the -- let's be generous and say scepticism with which we might greet albert bender's story, the idea that government agents and these sinister men in

black are working to hide true information really gaining popularity and it really takes off going through the '60s and '70s. and there's an interesting phenomenon going on with just the men in black themselves in that quite often they're characterized as all together human agents of the state, but at the same time they're given many inhuman or unearthly characteristics, characteristics that very often ally the difference between the scientific and supernatural explanations we've been talking about. quite often, almost demonic powers are ascribed to the men in black. walking as though they are not of this earth. not blinking. unnatural powers of persuasion. even up to and including the

idea that when they appear an odor of sulfur also appears. this very, very literal call-back to folk lore about demonic appearance. the fact that that diggsaltradiy they also appear in numbers of three also heavily rooted in kind of mystical supernatural texts. it is not just accounts of human action that take a darker turn as we move into the '60s. increasingly, narratives of alien contact are going to turn away from friendly warning about war into abduction and experimentation. that really starts with a couple of from new hampshire, betty and barnie hill, who claim to have been abducted in 1961, although

their story doesn't really receive wide publicity until 1965. the hills' abduction is really going to set the template for all of the abduction narratives that come after. looking at the spread of abduction conspiracism is interesting, especially if we compare it to kennedy conspiracy. like kennedy conspiracy it is very much a grassroots endeavor. it is not somebody sitting behind their desk saying, this is what you all need to believe is the truth about what's going on. it is all of these people going out and trying to uncover the truth themselves. the difference being that in terms of abduction conspiracy they're not detectives. they're not going out looking for evidence, right. they're not turning themselves

into experts on bullet trajectories. they themselves are the evidence. their own abduction experience proves the truth of their conspiracy. spencer? >> do you feel that these people are trying to uncover the truth or just trying to get like book deals? i feel like everyone is just -- like i could make up a story and turn it into a public affair and get a lot of publicity from it, and like, i don't know, do you have an idea what their motives, if they were really trying to uncover the truth or get money or what? >> i mean i think it's -- it is really too complex of a question to have a single answer to, right, not least because while there are certainly these criticisms labeled -- leveled against abductees or experiences, as they prefer to be called, while there are these accusations that they're just trying to profit, that they're trying to cash in and sell

books, on the other hand as bridget brown points us to, a lot of these people that come forward and say they've been abducted it is a socially devastating phenomenon. they're going to get cut off from groups of friends, they're going to be ostracized, they risk being fired from work. so you can benefit from this, but you are really going to have to benefit from within the world of ufo abduction conspiracies. mathieu? >> really the question is the kind of paranoid style from hofstetter doesn't seem to be enough to explain these first-person encounters. it is unlike anything we have seen in any other conspiracies. so we need another kind of framework to understand, you know. it could be profit motive or it could be mental illness, something that came up in the reading. is there kind of a third prong to that? kind of a different schema

through which we can approach these people? >> outside of they're either crazy or trying to make money? >> yeah. >> i mean the third prong would be that they've been abducted by aliens i suppose. the problem is we're never really going to know for sure what their motivations are in this, but you're right. it is this fundamental difference between earlier conspiracism we are talked about where people are bearing the burden of this conspiracy themselves, it is their own direct experience. pearl harbor conspiracists aren't saying they flew the planes at pearl harbor. kennedy conspiracists aren't the ones saying they took the shot. i shouldn't say that, some of them have said they took the shot. this is different.

they're saying they were abducted. >> i think some could be lack of verifyable. when you claim you were abducted by aliens, there's no factual ground point. in the kennedy assassination, you have x, y, z, that's undispu undisputed. kennedy was shot. >> unless it is someone who says he's still alive. >> there were some of those. but in saying it is your own experience, nobody can really deny that. >> yeah. and that is at the root of why this -- why ufo conspiracy can become so expensive. we have talked about, the fact that in terms of abduction evidence, that evidence is by definition personal. it is by definition subjective. once we move away from the kind

of objective veracity of physical evidence, what do we get to? what have we been talking about the last couple of classes? >> distrust -- >> yeah, but this kind of wider issue. we talked about it with ted thompson. >> crisis of knowing that we can't ever know that it happened or that it didn't happen, so we're kind of left with however we feel like interpreting the things that we personally were able to experience. >> good. mary, you want to jump on that? >> this sounds a lot like religion. why are we so quick to discount ufos when we base everything on this word of god and these personal experiences that people in power have had? >> okay. so to the extent that we talk about kind of mystical, angelic visitations, why do we accept those but discount ufo visitations? that's a good question. some people combine the two. some people say that ufos are

angelic visitors. some people, for scholars tend to say they're coming from the same kind of place, right. that the people who are saying that they were abducted now are the people who would have said that they were visited by angels several hundred years ago. devin? >> well, one troubling thing is the numbers you brought up earlier. like the 1947 spike after kenneth arnold when 850 people came forward with alien stories, i mean the likelihood that these trends of them all of a sudden being from venus, all of a sudden being from mars follow verifyable truth, especially when you can't follow it up with any physical evidence, i think is somewhat problematic. >> yeah, certainly. it is inscribed into the name, right, asthma t mathew pointed before. they're literally called

unidentified flying objects. the problem is all of these conspiracies are trying to inscribe them with meaning, are trying to identify something that is by definition unidentified. so we do reach that same kind of point of crisis of knowing, as we've been talking about, that crisis, that rumsfeldian mantra we were talking about on tuesday, that there were these known knowns, these unknown knowns, and those unknown unknowns, the things you don't know that you don't know. that's what's going to allow ufo conspiracy to be so expansive, because once you move away from the strictures of any physical evidence, pretty much anything is going to get into play, and pretty much anything is going to come into play. but still, the fact that there is this wide latitude of where

these conspiracies could go, the fact that they tend to track within these trends would seem to suggest something to us about how they're being shaped by the historical context. for example, these abduction narratives, the fact that as they are refined and revised over the following years by authors like whitley streeber, that they become ever more focused on medical experimentation and increasingly focused on graphic and explicit sexual violation. scholars like brown draw a direct link between the kind of evolution of these abduction narratives and changing anxieties over sexual and reproductive sociologies and

technologies. the fact that these abduction narratives start around the time that new forms of contraception are coming into play, around the time that new forms of sexual liberation are coming into play, the fact that increasingly these abduction narratives focus on reproductive experimentation after the rowe v. wade decision in the '70s and especially in line with the culture war over abortion in the '80s. >> do you think like there's a separation between people who, like, look into this as a sort of, like -- or as a conspiracy, like an interest versus the issue of how it relates to religion and the fact that it almost has like a basis in science, and, like, like studying it, like

extraterrestrials are here to study us, they're not here to like -- i don't know, like save us or take us back to their planet or something like that, but they're here to, like, in this case, like, study reproductive, like, systems of humans or, like, take over your brain or something like that. like is that kind of like the opposite -- like to me it seems like kind of the opposite side of religion, because, like -- >> okay. >> -- people who look at this kind of can say that there's a basis of scientific evidence or scientific -- maybe not evidence, but, like, theory behind it? >> that there is a rational motive behind why? >> instead of just, like, an -- like an angel flying through the air, like this is a machine made by beings who have the intelligence to make a machine are coming with, like, a motive to, like, learn about humans? >> uh-huh, certainly, although you could make a fairly good argument that although they're supernatural angels or divine

providence would usually have had a rational reason behind why they were coming into play as well. evelyn? >> my thought about the relationship between the belief in aliens and religion is i think that it has to do with the need to believe in something bigger than yourself and bigger than, like, what we have going on here on earth. i think that a lot of people who become religious after something bad has happened is because they're looking for reassurance or they are needing to believe that, like, everything happens for a reason. i think that you can apply that logic to the belief in aliens, that like things that are happening or that people think are happening are because something else exists. >> and that phrase there, "everything happens for a reason," we've talked about before as one of these kind of founding mantras of conspiracism, that everything happens within a conspiracy for a reason, that it is part of a plan. in kind of a divine providential

version of that, it is happening because of god's plan. in, you know, an enlightenment rationalist view of that, it is happening because of a human or in this case extraterrestrial agency, that there is a plan, that there is something happening. >> i still think there's a difference there because in terms of, like, god's plan, that is completely centered around humans and, like -- yeah, and, like, earth and if you're looking at extraterrestrials you're recognizing there is another planet with a population of other beings and, like, other life and other realities besides just human reality. i feel like the idea of god, like, in god's plan has to do with only the human reality. so, like, that would bring in different kind of -- like response to like something happening, either looking to god

or looking to aliens would be two different narratives. >> matthew? >> yeah, i think though, you know, alien conspiracies are similar to only like a very particular type of religion. like, you know, most religious people i think are similar to the way most of us think or said that we thought, aliens might be out there somewhere passed where we can see, and for religion the past where we can see has to be after death, not outside the range of our telescopes. the alien krconspiracies we tald about are more to premillennialists we talked about, to where it extends into where we can, or where we ought to see if this conspiracy wasn't muddying the water or obscuring things. >> as we hopefully will get to -- we'll see -- there are people who make an explicit connection there as well.

there is -- there are those who make an explicit linkage between this evangelical premillennial dispensationallism an folding this agents in as satan in those kind of prophecies. these are interesting questions and big questions that unfortunately i don't think we will be able to answer today. but that relationship between extraterrestrial visitation and supernatural religious visitation is intimately intertwined, and these supernatural elements, these other worldly elements are key parts of these abduction narratives, these alien narratives. but it is not just religious narratives that are playing into this as well, right. these narratives have strong elements of native american

captivity narratives from the 17th, 18th centuries. fears of white colonists, particularly of white female colonists being abducted and he held captive by native americans. in terms of their sexual content, the almost pornographic detail that these abduction narratives go into, there's a significant depth owed to the anti-catholic escaped nun narratives of the 19th and early 20th centuries, some of which we saw advertised in those klan newspapers we were all looking at. so there's a lot of different elements coming into this. not just sexual anxiety as well, anxieties about race. the fact that the first abducted couple is an interracial couple is not unrelated.

the fact that one of the major fears in the '60s as interracial marriage is ruled legal by the supreme court, the fact that this -- these fears of misogyny are very present even as alien abduction stories present new fears of interspecies sex, those are not unrelated elements. and you have this kind of really interesting conflation that brown points to between the kind of individual body of the abductee of the experiencer and of the national body of the citizenry as a whole who is being violated by this conspiracy. and it is increasingly a conspiracy. it is something in which the government is complicit in.

it is also worth talking just very briefly related to that question of race, there's a really odd kind of eugenecist element that plays into alien abduction theories coming out there the '70s, '80s and '90s as well. while there's a kind of huge thing of alien races that gets constructed, there's three key races, species, whatever you want to call them, one of which is the pleidians, who are described as benevolent and loving and beautiful and highly evolved and spiritual. anybody want to guess what the pleidians are meant to look like? >> caucasians. >> any specific kind of caucasians? >> blond, blue eyed.

>> they are incredibly aryan. in fact, they're commonly referred to as tall nordices. nordic itself being a tern of eugenecist taxonomy coming out of the early 20th century as opposed to the lower class southern europeans who can't be counted on being as racially superior as the nordices. you see the short gray as the kind of equivalent of southern europeans to some extent in this tarks taxonomy. the short gray, whose description owes a debt to the little green men, to the movie also of the '50s, to frank scully explanations, but whose popular appearance culture is really cemented by betty and barny hill again. not only do they set the template for the abduction narrative, they set the idea of

what the big headed gray alien with the big eyes looks like and really cements that within the popular consciousness. the other big kind of grouping of alien species within these taxonomies are old friends, the r reptilians, or to give them their ufo conspiracy name the draconians who are these tall lizard people who are probably hiding amongst us, plotting to take over the earth at any time. anybody remember the english conspiracist we talked about who was particularly focused in on these reptilians? anna? >> i don't remember that, but i did read something recently. >> okay. >> that popped up, saying that

someone had seen justin bieber turning into his reptilian form a few weeks ago. >> excellent. >> he is a secret giant lizard. >> that he is also one of them? >> yes. which i had never heard before. >> very talented for a lizard. >> the lizard people are everywhere, mathew, we can't discount this, especially if you ask david ike, the english c conspiracist we talked about on our first day of class who is a thorough advocate that the lizard people are the queen, the president, virtually everybody in high office. anybody remember what ike thinks that they do? how do they survive? >> they drink the blood of blond people basically? >> yes, they drink blood. they don't just drink blood, they drink the blood of blue eyed, blond haired children,

these aryan children. so, again, they are a specific racial threat, and containing these kind of deep elements of anti-semitic blood libel myths as well. sergio? >> i was going to ask is there a -- i don't know if it is a conspiracy theory, but a theory on -- since they're described as draconians feeding on aryan-like children, would it also be that they were feeding on -- >> pleidian children? >> pleidian children or -- >> well, now we're getting into the deep weeds. depending on who you ask, the pleidians and the draconians may be working together in conjunction with the secret rulers of the state. on the other hand, they may be engaged in a secret millennial-long war. on the other hand, we may be the

descendants of the pleidians. on the other hand, the reptilians may have traveled back in time to create us to create a food source for themselves, which is to say virtually any answer is possible to your question because as we've established, right, with this crisis, with this divorce from physical evidence virtually any conspiracy theory is possible. those conspiracy theories are increasingly going to make the government complicit. an excellent example of that is roswell. allegedly flying saucer crashes in roswell in july 1947, right on trend with our other ufo sightings. because it is surrounded by this wealth of other ufo sightings and because the air force pretty

quickly declares the wreckage that's found in roswell to be that of a weather balloon, the media moves on. there are hundreds more ufo sightings to report on. it is not until the boom in ufo conspiracism coming out of the late 1970s that roswell really regains attention in conspiracist circles. we talked about this a little on tuesday. why might we see a boom in conspiracism, and in particular anti-government conspiracism in the late '70s? >> you have watergate and then you have the revelation of co-intel, chaos, all of these things coming out, the church committee. it is like a lot of operations that the public didn't know about that are now in the public. >> uh-huh, good. right, you've got watergate, we've got the church committee, all of these revelation also of

cia misdeeds, lending even more credence to the idea of secret medical experimentation going on. and there is a very kind of explicit linkage being made in the late '70s between this post-watergate era and a boom in alien conspiracism and particularly abduction conspiracism. you see the establishment of citizens against ufo secrecy in 1977, an organization dedicated to yieusing freedom of informat act requests to get the government to reveal the truth about ufos, which is almost beautifully naive, right, the fact that you think the government is planning this huge conspiracy but that because the law is on your side you can still get them to reveal those secrets. it is a really nice sentiment i always find. but not only does citizens

against ufo secrecy come along, but a nuclear physicist turned ufologist called stanton freedman rediscovered roswell. we don't want to draw kind of overly simplistic links between this post-watergate national concern and this boom in roswell conspiracism, but sometimes the researchers themselves make that sub text text. stanton freedman explicitly says roswell is a cosmic watergate. other rival researchers like don schmitt describe the kennedy assassination as a formative experience and compare the government statements on roswell to the warren commission report. in neither case can this official document be trusted.

philip corso, who writes the really popular "the day after roswell" is a firm advocate of the two oswald theory also of the kennedy assassination, and goes further than that to say that the entire cold war was really just a cover to help develop anti-alien defense mechanisms. you see this flood of roswell literature through the '80s, through the '90s, that says, yes, the government covered it up and they didn't do it for our own good. donald keyhoe was wrong. instead, it is a litany of misinformation and misdeeds. no longer is the air force this benign body trying to protect the public from national hysteria. now president truman sets up magic 12 in 1947 as a special

government body to cover up the truth about ufos, presumably also in charge of those men in black. and this reaches such a crisis point that in 1994 the air force actually releases a report about roswell, 1,000 pages long. you can still find this as i pulled it off for today on the do d website. this is still very easily publicly available. the air force says, okay, actually we did lie to you about it being a weather balloon. in actual fact, it is the wreckage from project mogul, which was a top secret project to try to detect long-range soviet nuclear experiments.

so that's good, right? that comes out, all of the roswell conspiracy theories say, brilliant, now it is cleared up, now we can move on? no, it doesn't tend to work that way. the government coming out and saying, we've been lying to you for almost 50 years but now we're telling you the truth doesn't convince a lot of these conspiracy theorists, in much the same way that the pearl harbor inquiry just spurs more conspiracy theories, in much the same way that the warren commission just spurs more conspiracy theories, the air force's roswell report just spurs more conspiracy theories. it is not helped by the cia coming out in 1997 and saying, we've also been lying to you and we lied to you about the ufo sightings. you did see stuff, but it was top secret military planes and we couldn't tell you. sorry, but ufos still aren't real, which didn't have exactly the same impact, saying that you've been lying for years is

not going to build public trust that your a now telling the truth. so over this kind of course of the '80s and '90s as this roswell conspiracism specifically develops and this abduction conspiracism develops, you see it move not into mainstream acceptance but mainstream recognition. nobody came to class today never having heard of roswell. nobody came to class today having never seen a picture of a short, gray alien with a big head and big eyes.