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Preface to the First Edition

In the summer of 1994, less than a year before he blew up the Oklahoma City federal building, Timothy McVeigh visited Area 51, the secret installation north of Las Vegas, Nevada, where legend has it that the U.S. government keeps captured UFOs. McVeigh apparently made the visit to protest restrictions on public access to the base, but he also had had a long-standing fascination with flying saucers and tales of alien life forms. On death row he watched the film Contact, a story of a scientist contacted by aliens, six times in two days. McVeigh was also said to have been a regular listener to the shortwave-radio broadcasts of Milton William Cooper, an Arizona-based conspiracy theorist who first emerged in UFO circles in the 1980s and later acquired a large audience among antigovernment activists. A friend of Cooper’s claims that McVeigh visited Cooper shortly before the Oklahoma City bombing. The substance of their conversation is unknown.¹

While McVeigh’s interests may seem merely the peculiarities of an individual whose true motives remain difficult to fathom, the connection he made between antigovernment politics and UFOs was not unique. Throughout the 1990s, right-wing conspiracy theories increasingly came together with beliefs about visiting creatures from outer space. We do not know whether McVeigh himself was affected by these speculations, but it is clear that his interests were shared by others.

Similar hybrids emerged after the terrorist attacks on New York and Arlington, Virginia, in September 2001. They mingled the prophecies of Nostradamus, UFOs, and theories about the Illuminati in strange and unpredictable ways. These were not combinations I would have expected to find. Like most people, I had assumed that those with a right-wing, antigovernment agenda were altogether different from believers in UFOs. But the first inkling I had that such boundaries might be crossed had come some years before the 2001 attacks, as I was reading through the extremist literature that served as a basis for my book Religion and the Racist Right. While much of this literature was predictable, with its diatribes against Jews and blacks, there were unexpected intrusions of material that, though certainly not considered mainstream, was neither racist nor antigovernment. It dealt with such matters as processed foods (which the writers condemned), garlic (whose medicinal attributes they touted), and environmental pollution (which they wished to eliminate). Indeed, this was material that would not have been out of place in leftist or New Age publications. Consequently, when I found right-wing conspiracism emerging in UFO circles, it suggested that the odd juxtapositions I had found earlier might be part of a larger pattern in which seemingly discrete beliefs cohabited.

Despite the many references to UFOs, this is not a book about flying saucers. I do not know whether they exist or, if they do, where they come from; and I do not address either of those questions. What this work does concern is the fusion of right-wing conspiracy theories with UFO motifs. This is a study of how certain dissimilar ideas have migrated from one underground subculture to another.

Many readers may regard both sets of ideas as bizarre and may question whether this is terrain worth exploring. I have addressed such skepticism in earlier books on millennialism—belief in the imminent perfection of human existence—and my response here is the same: it makes little sense to exclude ideas from examination merely because they are not considered respectable. Failing to analyze them will not keep some people from believing them, and history is littered with intellectually disreputable ideas that have had devastating effects—for example, the scientific acceptance of racial differences in the nineteenth century. Failure to examine them did not cause them to disappear. My examination of certain odd beliefs does not signify my acceptance of them.²

The convergence of conspiracy theories with UFO beliefs is worth examining for two reasons. First, it has brought conspiracism to a large new audience. UFO writers have long been suspicious of the U.S. government, which they believe has suppressed crucial evidence of an alien presence on Earth, but in the early years they did not, by and large, embrace strong political positions. That began to change in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with the first appearance in UFO circles of references to right-wing conspiracism. Over the next decade, such borrowing accelerated and, as a result, brought right-wing conspiracism to people who otherwise would not have been aware of it.

Second, this combination provides a striking example of a new and growing form of millennialism, which I call improvisational millennialism. Unlike earlier forms, which elaborated themes from individual religious or secular traditions, improvisational millennialism is wildly eclectic. Its undisciplined borrowings from unrelated sources allow its proponents to build novel systems of belief.

Mapping fringe ideas is a difficult undertaking. Familiar intellectual landmarks are unavailable, and the inhabitants of these territories tend to speak languages difficult for outsiders to penetrate. Some of these ideas have begun to filter into mainstream popular culture, a process I describe in chapter 15. But their origins lie in obscure and barely visible subcultures—millenarian religion, occultism, and radical politics among them.

As to the subculture of UFO speculation itself, I occasionally refer to it as ufology, borrowing a term from UFO writers, though I employ it in a narrower sense. The ufology literature ranges widely, from conventional scientific investigation to fringe conspiracism. Because my concern is with the latter, the reader should be aware that I use ufology to apply only to the ideas of this minority within the larger community of UFO believers.

In citing sources, I have limited citations to the ends of paragraphs. In each note, sources are listed in the order they are utilized in the accompanying paragraph. When Internet sources are cited, the dates in parentheses at the end of the citation refer to the dates I viewed the pages.

In the course of this research, I have incurred many institutional and intellectual debts. If they cannot be fully repaid, they can at least be gratefully acknowledged. My own institution, the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, provided a timely research leave, as well as support through the Appleby-Mosher Fund. A number of libraries and repositories generously provided access to their materials. I am particularly appreciative of the courtesies extended to me by the George Arents Research Library at Syracuse University; the Alternative Press collection at the Wisconsin State Historical Society; the American Religions collection at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Library; the Millennium Archive at the Van Pelt Library of the University of Pennsylvania; the Anti-Defamation League; and the Library of Congress.

I had the opportunity of presenting preliminary versions of some of the ideas in this book before audiences of colleagues, which gave me the chance both to shape inchoate ideas and to modify them in light of the listeners’ comments. Much of the material on the Illuminati in chapter 3 was first presented at a conference titled “Millenarianism and Revolution,” organized by Richard H. Popkin at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at UCLA in 1998. The examination of “inner earth” ideas in chapter 7 was facilitated by an invitation from Mary N. MacDonald to participate in a 2000 lecture series called “Experiences of Place and the History of Religions,” at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University. An opportunity to discuss the role of nativism in conspiracy theory was afforded when Richard Landes asked me to deliver the keynote address at the 1999 International Conference on Millennialism at Boston University. In similar fashion, I was able to develop ideas about the movement of fringe ideas into the mainstream at a conference, “American Apocalypse: Beyond the Fringe and Back to the Center,” held in 1999 at the University of Pennsylvania to mark the opening of the Millennium Archive collected by Ted Daniels.

Many individuals have graciously given their time to read manuscripts, provide materials, answer queries, and otherwise be of assistance. They have also saved me from numerous errors of omission and commission, and I am responsible for any that remain. Joscelyn Godwin, at neighboring Colgate University, shared his knowledge of esotericism, as Chip Berlet did his equally formidable command of American conspiracism. Vance Pollock responded patiently to numerous queries about William Dudley Pelley. Brad Whitsel, of Pennsylvania State University, Fayette, was an important source of “inner earth” material. Sue Lewis and Candy Brooks provided valuable assistance in manuscript preparation. I am also grateful to Matthew Kalman, Philip Lamy, Mark Pitcavage, Jeffrey Kaplan, and Charles Strozier. And, of course, my debt to Janet, my wife, for her unfailing love and support is beyond measure.