Disposable Lit Reviews

What we do get, first, is a recap and extension of Imbrogno’s previous coverage of the Hudson Valley UFO sightings of the ’80’s and early ’90’s (Imbrogno wrote Night Siegewith Hynek about that series of sightings). Amidst all of the case studies presented, two salient facts emerge:

1) In recent decades, UFOs have mostly changed from saucer-shaped to triangular or boomerang-shaped.

2) The only way to describe the size of an aerial object is to compare it to a football field.

In describing lost-time and abduction experiences, Imbrogno and Horrigan (and from the authorial voice, it appears that Horrigan did most of the actual writing) stray dangerously close to having a valid point. They note that, while common themes present themselves in most abduction cases (big-headed aliens, medical procedures, talk of advanced extraterrestrial civilizations and warnings about environmental catastrophe), the details rarely jibe between one account and another. Not only that, but the information that the aliens pass on to the abductees about coming crises and revelations, and the abductee’s central role in them, never come to pass.

There are many stories of people who claim to be in contact with some type of extraterrestrial intelligence. Some of these people channel information and actually preach to groups about “the true nature of the universe.” It’s strange that no two stories of these contacts are the same. If you get a number of these contactees in a room and let them talk for a while, they will all start arguing with each other about who is right. We feel that no contactees have any real idea about who is in contact with them. (p.81-82, emphasis added)

Imbrogno and Horrigan get that close, but shy away from explicitly stating that the UFO experience is inherently deceptive — i.e., that whatever it is, it deliberately presents itself as being something that it’s not. Instead, after the admission above that contactees are not a good source for objective information about what has contacted them, they immediately dive back into accepting what contactees and “confidential sources” tell them, filling out several chapters with the familiary themes of downed saucers, decades-long technological exchange programs, underground bases, and conspiracy within the U.S. government. (I always love it when someone refers to “The Government” as a single entity in these conspiracy theories, as if the entire organization were all one homogenous bureaucracy. I wonder, is the Department of Housing and Urban Development in on “The Truth”? The Park Service? The Coast Guard?)

The back cover proclaims that

[t]his book presents an overwhelming body of evidence that adds up to a terrifying, undeniable truth: that our own government has allowed aliens to abduct and experiment on U.S. citizens in exchange for technological secrets.

Unfortunately, for “overwhelming evidence” they substitute a summary of the long, hackneyed tale of alien contact fed to them by an anonymous covert source “who is very dependable, and we feel we should consider [his account] as fact” (p.172). Unfortunately, they choose to ignore the very observation about the disharmony of contactee reports which they earlier made, i.e., that everyone has the details different, and their source is no different. (If you’re wondering what his novel variations are, he leaves out Groom Lake and Dulce, makes a big deal about the Philadelphia Experiment, and characterizes us as being caught between extraterrestrial and “interdimensional” aliens. The Nordics, alas, are nowhere to be found.)

The problem here, as with almost every UFO book of the last couple decades, is that our stalwart researchers are more than willing to substitute supposition, assumption, and wishful thinking in order to come up with their own picture of the UFO phenomenon — and, like every other supposed solution, it has to ignore all of that contradictory evidence. In thirty years, no one has ever gone beyond John Keel and Brad Steiger, who realized that the whole phenomenon is contradictory, deceitful, capricious, and deliberately chaotic, the modern analogue to the archetype of the Trickster God. (I’m speaking of the old-school Steiger, not the more recent “touchy-feely-NewAgey” Steiger.) That proved too maddeningly inconclusive to almost everyone since, who insists on focusing on patently nonsensical claims of human-alien crossbreeding and extraterrestrial involvement in the invention of the microwave oven.

Imbrogno and Horrigan’s account is best when they describe the facts of their own fieldwork — magnetometer examinations of the misnamed “colonial root cellars” of rural New York, or spelunking in the remains of mines which were very obviously used for decades after their “official” closure. But the accounts of their fieldwork is marred by their credulity and lack of critical thinking when they try to explain what they find. As long as the researchers of the field keep grasping for the clean, easy, Sci-Fi Channel answer, any possible solution to the UFO enigma will stay as distant as it ever was, and skeptics will be justified in their dismissiveness toward the entire phenomenon.

Nathan Shumate