Ever since I was a little kid, I have enjoyed UFOs. They mix space, futurism, and mystery in a way that lets my imagination wander.

I never really considered if they were real. I always assumed they were in the realm of imagination because I had never seen one. My main exposure to the idea of UFOs was through movies and tabloid papers.

In elementary school a friend told me a UFO had landed in his backyard. He said it shined a light through his window. He was pulled off his bed through the window into the ship outside. He seemed to really believe this happened. It was an amazing story but I was skeptical. It didn’t seem like he could fit through the small window in his room and his backyard didn’t look big enough to facilitate a UFO landing.

Many years later I was studying for a Masters of Fine Art. Inspired by that experience, I created a performance piece where I proclaimed I had been abducted by aliens. I showed photographs and highlighted UFOs that were difficult to see in the background. I told everyone the more I looked through my photographs, the more UFOs I was finding. I showed pictures of scars on my body that I claimed were from an abduction. I recorded a video of me sleeping. Some of the tape was missing and my body changed position instantaneously. This evidence was all fabricated but I stuck to the claim it was all true. The point of this performance was that given the same information, people could have beliefs and positions that didn’t align.

The performance was really tense. People seemed to be genuinely disturbed. Not because they believed me, but because they didn’t and felt frustrated.

In 2017, The New York Times published an article that drew a lot of attention to UFOs. Three videos were released with the article showing unidentified flying objects captured by Navy pilots. I’m not going to go into all the details, but this article ended up adding a lot of credibility to the idea of UFOs being ‘real’.

From this point on, when I refer to UFOs in this article, I am specifically referring to intelligently controlled alien craft. There is some ambiguity with this term because UFOs are real. Anything flying in the air that is unidentified is a UFO, but what most people are interested in with UFOs is the idea that they might be otherworldly craft.

My interest in this topic grew significantly after I had been exposed to this article and these videos. It got me thinking some big thoughts. If aliens were here, could we somehow cure energy problems? Could we make travel instantaneous? Could this be a new technology that revolutionizes our physical world? I wanted to design UFO interfaces. I had all sorts of really amazing ideas.

Those optimistic thoughts actually primed me to accept some ‘conspiratorial thinking’. What if there were people who had this technology already? What were they doing with it? Were they holding it back for governmental or economic reasons? Everything I knew came into question.

Over the next few years, the UFO story expanded and many ‘whistleblowers’ came out to tell their version of what was going on. They often had amazing stories but rarely with any actual evidence. Plausible explanations (1, 2, 3) were found by skeptics and debunkers for those three Navy videos. Critical details of the story also ended up being untrue or at the very least unclear.

Even though I had solid counterevidence, I still thought about this topic a lot. One day my wife pointed out to me that it all seemed like bullshit to her. It was then that I realized I had been sucked into a conspiracy. The evidence I was building all this hope on was poor. Just like the point of my art show, I suddenly saw the alternate reality with the same evidence. This topic was wasting my time and I had false hope that something interesting would become of it.

I started noticing conspiratorial thinking in many other aspects of my life and society in general. I noticed how unproductive it is, how it pulls energy away from impactful things, and gives your mind unsolvable problems to obsess over. I felt really disappointed in myself for not seeing this sooner.

Despite being disenchanted with the UFO story, I continue to follow the UFO topic closely because I am fascinated with how our minds can be pulled into rabbit holes. I want to stay aware of the techniques (intentional or not) that are most effective in generating gaps that allow conspiratorial thoughts. I want to avoid conspiratorial thinking in my own life and help others who might be falling into a hole themselves.

UFOs are perfect fodder for conspiratorial thoughts because by nature a UFO is unidentified or difficult to identify. Every successful piece of UFO evidence lives in the ‘low information zone’ which makes it difficult to have a conclusive understanding of what it is. If your default bias is to believe aliens are flying UFOs in our airspace, every video you see is supportive of your belief because it can’t be proven wrong. If your default bias is that UFOs are primarily satellites, balloons, birds, planets and classified military systems you can try to explain away most evidence but you rarely can prove it because the evidence resides in the ’low information zone’.

If aliens are here, they certainly haven’t shown themselves in an obvious way. There are literally billions of high quality cameras pointed in every direction at every time. At the same time, all the ‘good’ evidence of UFOs is always blurry, lacking metadata, or visually confusing. Why is the best evidence ‘bad’ when we have so much technology and capability of capturing ‘good’ evidence?

The reason is, clear evidence is more easily identified. The things it shows are often mundane objects or more obviously a hoax. You can try to explain this away with conspiratorial theories (UFOs can avoid detection, they can delete the files on your phone, they are only seen when they want to be seen), but it is more likely that the evidence is poor for a simpler reason: as soon as something is identifiable, it ends up being mundane.

You may hear people in the government, the military, or ‘insiders’ who claim there is evidence of UFOs, but you haven’t seen it (because it’s classified or restricted). I can’t obviously prove that the evidence they have seen is poor, but I can prove that people are routinely convinced by poor evidence.

If you only have a passing interest in UFOs, I can assure you, don’t worry about it. I’ll be here, listening to everything on the topic. If something comes up that’s actually interesting or convincing, I’ll let you know.

During the pandemic I was in conversations with people on Twitter about UFOs somewhat often. I remember an older man ended a conversation along the lines of ‘I’ve been paying attention to this topic for 40 years, it’s always the same thing, disclosure is always around the corner.’ I responded back and suggested it might be different this time. The evidence was coming from the government and people who worked in the government. He responded, ‘It’s all bullshit, it’s such a waste. I’m done. Forever.’ Then he blocked me.