Anatomy of a UFO Hoax
Lies, Damned Lies, and Declassified Reports
A week ago, I was pointed to an article claiming evidence of UFOs from the 1960s.
Conspiracies like these are dime-a-dozen, though this one is a rather lurid example of its genre; it claims that the US shot down a UFO with a nuclear test launch, with the subsequent coverup leading to the assassinations of both JFK and Marilyn Monroe (no, really). By itself, it wouldn’t be making any splash, and since UFOs aren’t one of my fields of interest, I wouldn’t be covering it.
The difference is that this one got promoted by Harald Malmgren, an old hand in US economic policy who advised several presidents and commands a great deal of prestige. Malmgren is not only cited as a source (via tweets) in the article, but he endorsed it, adding that the author, Geoff Cruickshank, “has done an excellent job of explaining the significance of the test.” This has dramatically increased the article’s reach and perceived credibility, which is how I ended up with it.
This piqued my interest. Either this would be interesting evidence of UFOs (unlikely) or I’d have fodder for a shorter article while I’m occupied with a longer piece.
A Brief Summary
In 1962, the US conducted Operation Dominic, a series of nuclear tests around Johnston Island in the south Pacific, including both underwater and high-altitude detonations. One of these shots, codenamed Bluegill 3 Prime, detonated a sub-megaton nuclear device 48km above the earth in order to study the effects of radiation and EMP in the upper stratosphere.
According to Cruickshank (a prominent UFO theorist, formerly the anonymous reddit poster u/harry_is_white_hot) these events were being tracked by a UFO in close proximity, whose flaming descent was captured on high-speed camera. Afterwards, the military recovered the UFO debris, vanished the deck logs from the recovering ship, and censored some—but not all—of the footage.
He goes on to claim that JFK learned about this and was planning to reveal it to the world, which led to both his assassination and the ‘murder’ of Marilyn Monroe, who apparently learned about it over pillow talk.
Cruickshank’s claims are numerous and wide-ranging, but for the purposes of this review, I’ll focus on just three which form the foundation of the article. Showing these three to be false is sufficient to reject the rest, as I will show.
I will also be making frequent reference to Cruickshank’s notes, which include the sources he mostly leaves out of the article itself, and present a subtly different version of events than the published item.
Let’s break these down in detail.
The 1962 Blue Gill 3 Prime high-altitude nuclear test footage shows signs of disparate edits, with one video (Kettle 2) showing a sanitation mark (supposedly censoring the footage), and another (Kettle 1) showing an object tumbling out of the fireball and the camera operator shifting to track it.
This is used to claim that, since the operator instinctively focused on a different object than the fireball, losing critical data on the early microseconds of fireball formation, we must treat the object as anomalous and attention-grabbing, and not as ordinary debris.
The USNS Point Barrow, which was on standby near ground zero but did not have any specific duties during the blast, is missing deck logs from the operation and reported radiation exposure among its crew far in excess of expectation. Deck logs from other ships indicate the discovery of ‘anomalous’ debris.
This is used to claim that the Point Barrow was involved in retrieval activities which recovered unspecified parts of the downed UFO, and that the deck logs were destroyed, stolen, or otherwise removed from archives in order to keep it secret.
Experienced scientists such as Conrad Longmire (a Los Alamos physicist who analyzed the Bluegill and Starfish detonations and developed an accepted theory of high-altitude EMP phenomena based on them) and Charles Grace (author of a textbook on nuclear detonations) explain that EMP generated from nuclear detonations can pierce shielding and damage electronics inside of aircraft.
This is used to claim that the EMP from the blast could have damaged a UFO, despite these UFOs supposedly having “smooth, seamless designs without openings.”
Point 1: Goodness Gracious Great Balls of Fire
Let’s take a look at the footage: the censored Kettle 2 clips run from 49:00 to 50:40, the low-contrast Kettle 1 clip from 50:47 to 51:43, and the high-contrast Kettle 1 clip from 51:45 to 53:30.
The object Cruickshank discusses is visible in both of the Kettle 1 videos, right at the beginning, dropping out of the center of the fireball and falling directly down. The Kettle 2 videos, in contrast, sport a white triangle covering the lower part of the screen.
This does beg the question: if the government was covering up evidence of a UFO crash, why would they censor some of the footage and leave the rest untouched?
Cruickshank does have an answer: to all appearances, the mark was added in 1998 during the process of declassifying the footage. He claims that this inconsistency lies in how the Kettle 1 and Kettle 2 footage were controlled by different labs with differing opinions on classification standards, such that some was censored and some was not.
This is not an implausible explanation, but it’s also not very compelling. Cruickshank doesn’t demonstrate or point to any sources confirming that the two pieces were under the control of different labs (or even that they were governed by original controller (ORCON) protocol) but instead just asserts it.
If you find it unnecessary to focus on such small details, keep reading; you’ll find that it’s crucial when dealing with Cruickshank.
Microsecond Reaction Speed
In his notes, Cruickshank says (emphasis mine)
The fact that this is an unexpected event is demonstrated by the EG&G camera operator moves the camera focus away from the nuclear fireball momentarily to search for the tumbling object. In doing this, the operator has lost vital data of the first microseconds of fireball growth, which was the entire reason for filming it.
That would be compelling! But there’s a problem in the paragraph above. Try to spot it for yourself before reading further.
Cruickshank bases this claim on the camera operator shifting away from the fireball, which “lost vital data of the first microseconds of fireball growth.” In other words, Cruickshank would have us believe that this entire span of footage, over which the camera starts centered on the fireball, drifts away to track the anomaly, and then recenters, happens in the course of a few microseconds.
Now, that time span actually makes sense. I haven’t been able to find, in Cruickshank’s notes or in any of his sources, a solid description of what cameras were used, how fast they were running, or how long these clips lasted in real time, but the planning report does mention the use of Rapatronic cameras for capturing still photographs at nanosecond intervals, and another site claims that, as far back as the Trinity test over a decade earlier, nuclear detonations were filmed using cameras with a 0.0000001-second resolution (10 million fps).
So Cruickshank’s claim that this footage was captured over just a few microseconds is actually completely plausible.
What is not plausible is that a human operator would have reacted to a sub-millisecond event. No, not even “instinctively” as Cruickshank claims.
For reference, contemporary studies of human vision indicate that basic object recognition can occur with exposure times of as little as 13 milliseconds (13,000 microseconds).
I invite you to watch the footage (at 50:45 and 51:44) for yourself, and note that the falling object is visible for less than 2 seconds after being slowed down. The operator’s ‘search’ begins after that, and lasts for most of the footage. In order for the operator to have noticed the falling object at all, we would need to believe that this high-speed camera studying the formation of a nuclear fireball was capturing at no more than 100x speed at the very most. This is, based on what I’ve been able to learn about nuclear photography, laughably slow, and is incompatible with Cruickshank’s own invocation of microseconds as the relevant unit of time.
Compared to light and super high-speed cameras, the human nervous system is dreadfully, painfully slow.
At the plausible speeds, speeds which Cruickshank himself claims in his notes, we should expect the entire filmed event to be over before the operator could even begin to register it, never mind having enough time to recognize a separate object, decide to track it, and then return to focusing on the original fireball.
Cruickshank’s claim also assumes that the drift in this footage, where the camera begins centered on the blast and then moves away, is unusual, a failure on the part of the operator which can only be explained by deliberate action under extraordinary circumstances.
If this were true, then we should expect to not see similar drift in clips from other blasts.
And yet, that’s exactly what we find.
Take, for example, the high-contrast footage of the Kingfish blast at 1:04:43 and 1:05:50, or the Checkmate blast at 1:07:35, or the unlabeled blast at 19:28. If letting the camera drift like this constitutes a serious failure that demands an unusual explanation, then we should assume that a lot more blasts were shooting down UFOs!
Given what we’ve already established about reaction times and the likely duration of the footage, it’s much more likely that this is just shake, either from the blast or regular turbulence. This should not surprise us: taking super high-speed video of a nuclear blast from a moving plane is not the most stable situation in the world, and we should expect some interference.
I will also note here that, if this were a crashing UFO, the direct downward trajectory from the center of the fireball implies that the craft was directly below the nuclear device at the moment of the blast. I must confess, I’ve never piloted a UFO or spied on a nuclear test, but this seems like unusual stupidity on the part of any aliens. Maybe they really wanted a closer look.
Point 2: Fire Upon the Deep
The next big claim involves the USNS Point Barrow, one of 70-some ships involved in Operation Dominic.
In Cruickshank’s narrative, the Point Barrow was the ship which investigated and recovered the remains of the UFO from the Kettle 1 footage: in the course of this operation, the crew of the Point Barrow were exposed to quantities of radiation far in excess of expectation, and the ship’s deck logs went missing even as logs from other ships noted ‘anomalous’ wreckage being recovered.
This section of the article seems to be quite well-evidenced: Cruickshank links to and screenshots the deck logs for other ships involved in the operation, some in the article itself and far more in his notes. However, once you start fact-checking, it goes up in smoke.
Captain’s Log
First, Cruickshank claims explicitly in both the article and his notes that the deck logs from other ships, specifically the USS Safeguard on the date of Bluegill test (Friday, October 26th 1962), reported ‘anomalous’ debris.
However, I actually followed that source and read the deck logs, and found nothing of the sort. Neither the deck logs linked in the article (belonging to the USS Safeguard) nor the other logs linked in his notes, belonging to the USS John S. McCain and the USS Engage, describe any debris as ‘anomalous’, on the 26th or any day after.
‘But what about the deck logs Cruickshank covers in red lines and shows in the article?’ I hear you ask. Well, note that Cruickshank doesn’t even claim they report the ‘anomalous’ debris. In the associated caption, he notes that these are all instances in which the deck logs of the Safeguard mention the Point Barrow, with which they performed additional retrieval operations on Monday, October 29th. These do exist! But all they show is that… these two ships were together on that date. Which was not in question. Frankly, if the Point Barrow had uncovered something anomalous, I’d expect it to also be recorded by the Safeguard!
In fact, Cruickshank’s screenshots contain every single time the Point Barrow is mentioned throughout the whole document… and there’s nothing here. He just circles and underlines random things, like the starting location and the empty 0800 box, for no reason at all.
It certainly looks very impressive when you’re just scrolling through, but there’s no substance or actual support for the argument.
So there’s no indication, in Cruickshank’s stated sources, that there was any anomalous debris.
High Exposure
While Cruickshank never links or even mentions the report by name in the article, his main source for the following is the declassified Operation Dominic report, produced in 1983 by the Kaman Tempo group (pdf1, pdf2). It is from this report that he furnishes various images, including the screenshot below (p.262) in which the crew of the Point Barrow report abnormally high exposure.
Quite the conundrum! That is, unless you read the paragraph immediately following, or if you read the first three pages of the report, where the good folks of Kaman Tempo give their answer (emphasis mine):
Evidence exists that many of the badges worn by personnel during DOMINIC were defectively sealed and recorded density changes due to moisture, light, and heat in addition to nuclear radiation. A 1979-1980 reevaluation of 1,349 DOMINIC I film badges showed that 45 percent exhibited some damage related to light, heat, and age due to defective wax seals. Environmental damage was observed on 98 percent of the badges, which had a developed density equivalent of over 0.4 R (gamma). (p.3)
A Joint Task Force 8 (JTP 8) letter of 26 February 1963 (Reference C.1.3) stated that near the end of the operation (when certain film lots were being processed) it was observed that higher-than-expected exposure readings were being obtained. An immediate check of the rosters revealed that individuals who had worn the badges could hardly have received such exposures, since they had not participated in any operation that would have subjected them to such an exposure. A subsequent analysis of the film indicated that the film pack suffered deterioration due to environmental conditions. This deterioration was sufficient to cause an erroneous reading of the film. Careful examination of the film base fog revealed the pattern observed to be characteristic of that associated with environmental damage such as heat, light, and humidity, and not that of ionizing radiation. The wax dip was suspected of being inadequate, rendering the film packet vulnerable to seal failure with resultant water damage. Thus, a minor amount of deterioration in the film packet was sufficient to produce a greater film emulsion fog resulting in an erroneous radiation exposure indication by the film. (p.262)
Yes, it’s our old friend, measurement error!
Nor did this error only affect the Point Barrow. The report points out numerous other ships which also reported anomalously high doses of radiation among their crews. These include the USS Loyalty and USS Inflict… which spent the entirety of Operation Dominic stationed almost two thousand kilometers away, off the coast of Kauai.
This is no longer the story of one ship among dozens whose radiation exposure is at odds with their known activities: it is the story of a requisition failure which screwed up measurements across an entire operation. I will also note here that, despite many of these readings not being reliable, the servicemen still had the elevated readings preserved on their Navy service records, no doubt to the VA’s consternation.
I can also say with great confidence that Cruickshank’s behavior here is deceptive and not merely careless, because paragraph discussing of the Inflict and Loyalty immediately precedes the one Cruickshank screenshots. Note how it begins with ‘a similar instance was…’. A similar instance to what? To other ships with defective materials giving anomalously high exposure readings!
In other words, Cruickshank selectively grabbed a section of text and tried to make a claim with it, even though his source text was literally sandwiched between evidence that disproves his claim, which was also the entire point of the report!
Now, the quick among you might think to protest: ‘the report itself is part of the coverup! They made up this lame excuse about water damage to cover up the radiation exposure!’ This is a line of argument which I consider extremely weak. It’s not a good look, as the kids say, to heavily depend on a source and then to selectively claim the inconvenient sections alone are unreliable. And trust me, Cruickshank is heavily dependent on this source. It’s the only document that indicates anything might have happened with the Point Barrow, and though his notes also reference deck logs from the John S. McCain, Engage, and Safeguard, only the Safeguard’s deck logs even mention the Point Barrow, and then only four times across two pages!
That’s not to say it’s impossible to use a source while acknowledging its weaknesses and biases—learning how to do this is a core part of historical research—but if you’re going to do that, you need to elaborate a very well reasoned model of which parts are unreliable and why, and you need to temper your confidence accordingly.
Cruickshank doesn’t merely fail in this, he doesn’t even try. He never, not in the article nor in his personal notes, mentions the Kaman Tempo group’s actual findings. He doesn’t even make a conspiratorial excuse to dismiss the contrary evidence. He just pretends it doesn’t exist, and leaves his readers in the dark.
To be clear, there were many personnel involved in Operation Dominic who did experience greatly elevated radioactivity exposure, as would be expected from an operation in which you’re detonating nuclear bombs and trying to film them. Several groups were allotted considerably higher expected irradiation thresholds, including Air Force personnel in flight and the crew of the USS Sioux, which ventured into the radioactive pool created by Swordfish (the only underwater detonation studied in Operation Dominic). But the crew of the Point Barrow is not one such group.
Nor is it some great mystery that the Kaman Tempo group failed to locate the Point Barrow’s logs: Cruickshank makes a big song and dance about how “this lack of documentation raises serious questions” but the mundane explanation—that these records simply got lost in the shuffle somewhere—is far from implausible. I can’t speak for the Washington Navy Yard archives, which the Kaman Tempo group sourced for their archival data, but many military archives are infamously underfunded and disorganized. Moreover, deck logs simply aren’t high-value documents. They’re potentially sensitive documents, since they record the location, bearing, and general activity of ships performing classified operations, but the vast majority of them are never read after filing. Failure to locate 1 out of 70 deck logs from a classified operation 20 years earlier is simply not a grounds for a conspiracy, especially since we’ve already established that the Point Barrow did not report uniquely anomalous exposures, and thus does not stand out from the pack.
If you doubt this, go to your nearest military archive, tell the archivist how one 20-year-old missing deck log is a sign of a coverup, and write me a ten-page report about how you were laughed out of the room.
Digression: Background on the Report
In his notes, Cruickshank claims the Operation Dominic report was commissioned because of high rates of cancer among service members present for Operation Fishbowl. As best as I can tell, this is incorrect, and his citation for this directs to a section on the Port Barrow, with no mention of cancer. I find it most likely that he is either lying or was just careless when reading page 5 of the report, which notes that servicemen present for the Smoky shot of Operation Plumbbob (I swear to God these names are real) in 1958 reported abnormally high rates of leukemia, causing a panic among veterans, a headache for the VA, and thus the DOD authorized a more extensive review of all past atmospheric nuclear testing, which began in 1978. This report on Operation Dominic, created by the Kaman Tempo group, was commissioned as part of that process.
Point 3: Technobabble
In the course of making the claims addressed above, Cruickshank sprinkles in what appears to be rigorous, scientific discussion of X-rays, EMPs, diamagnetic bubbles, and how these phenomena could disrupt the functioning of a UFO and cause it to crash.
Starting today, this article is my go-to example of not merely bad, but abusive science communication, the invocation of science not to illuminate or educate but to impress and intimidate.
Take, for example, thermo-mechanical spallation, a phenomenon by which high x-ray exposure can cause the mechanical components of a craft to quickly heat and crack; or a Systems-Generated Electromagnetic Pulse (SGEMP), the phenomenon in which gamma and x-rays interfere with electronic equipment; or a diamagnetic bubble formed around the fireball, which could have ‘added instability to the unidentified object.’
All of these are real concepts and findings related to these nuclear tests, but Cruickshank deploys them as causal explanations for the UFO’s crash.
Apparent non-human craft, which were often termed as UFOs, are often described as having smooth, seamless designs without openings, which are believed to protect them from electromagnetic pulses (EMP).
I find this absolutely hilarious. Cruickshank lives in a strange parallel world in which we somehow know enough about the design and capabilities of UFOs to understand what would and wouldn’t cause one to crash.
You know what else might cause a flying object caught in a nuclear fireball to fail? Being caught in a nuclear fireball.
This becomes less funny when Cruickshank attempts to use the credibility of real scientists and twist their work to support his claims. For example, immediately following the passage quoted above:
However, experts like Dr. Conrad Longmire and Charles S. Grace have explained that certain types of EMPs, known as System-Generated Electromagnetic Pulses (SGEMP), can penetrate this shielding and potentially damage the electronics inside.
Read these two passages back to back. What did you take away from them? What do they communicate?
When I read them, I assumed that these two scientists were talking about UFOs, or at least about EMP shielding for aircraft. I wondered whether they were actually experts, and how Cruickshank dug them up.
Well, it happens that these are real, credentialed people. Conrad Longmire was a theoretical physicist at Los Alamos whose analysis of the Bluegill data led to our modern understanding of high-altitude EMPs from nuclear devices. Charles Grace was the author of a 1993 textbook, Nuclear Weapons: Principles, Effects, and Survivability.
So, how come these expert voices have come to believe that SGEMPs can penetrate UFO shielding?
Well, they haven’t.
There’s no source in the article, but Cruickshank’s notes do have citations for both Longmire and Grace. The former is a paper, EMP On Honolulu from the Starfish Event, which has nothing to say about UFOs, aircraft, or even the subject of shielding against EMP. It’s entirely about the effects of one of these nuclear tests on the Honolulu electrical system.
The citation for Grace, meanwhile, points to page 101 of his textbook, which is out of print and, as best as I can tell, is nowhere available electronically. Luckily, my local library has a copy, and I will be checking it out as soon as I’m back home. Check back by the 10th of January for an update.
EDIT JAN 12: I successfully located a copy of Nuclear Weapons: Principles, Effects, and Survivability, by Charles S. Grace, and now present, to my knowledge, the only online copy of the relevant pages.
Unlike the reference to Longmire, this one does, in fact, have to do with shielding from SG-EMP, and does specifically note that a thin metallic surface with no perforations would protect its internals from EMP.
This does nothing to further Cruickshank’s argument; he claims that UFOs ‘are described’ as having smooth surfaces without apertures which we could interpret as EMP shielding… but such a global shield would not block a SG-EMP… which proves what exactly? That UFOs aren’t magically immune to damage from being inside a nuclear blast? I don’t think anyone assumed otherwise.
/EDIT
This combines with diagrams depicting spallation and diamagnetic bubbles, which do not serve to educate the reader but to overwhelm them and give a sense that the author possesses advanced knowledge. Despite this veneer, the article discusses these phenomena in only the shallowest terms. It is deceptively constructed to give the reader the impression that real, credentialed scientists support Cruickshank’s interpretations, even as the sources which Cruickshank directly cites contradict him.
I find this all the more ghoulish because most of the scholars quoted here are unable to give account from the grave. Longmire and Dr. Palmer Dyal (who studied of diamagnetic bubbles) are deceased, and I have been unable to locate any information on Charles Grace beside his textbook authorship. Only one of these scientists, Dr. Byron Ristvet (who studied spallation), is alive, and he’s actually a much larger figure in Cruickshank’s notes. He was one of the reviewers responsible for the declassified footage, and presumably knows more about why the sanitation mark is present, but Ristvet refused to answer any questions on this subject due to its classified nature. I halfway suspect Cruickshank dug up some random comment of Ristvet’s on spallation in order to keep his name in the story somehow.
With these three points dispatched, I feel comfortable dismissing the rest of the article out of hand. The entire premise that this was an UFO shoot-down was based on:
The footage showing unusual phenomena, not just debris.
The Point Barrow being unusual with regard to the missing deck logs and excess radiation exposure.
The borrowed expertise of other scientists to justify exotic explanations for an aircraft being vulnerable to a nuclear fireball.
Without this foundation, all the rest blows away in the wind. But this does bring us to two more relevant questions:
Why would Malmgren promote this?
How can we avoid being deceived like this in the future?
Credible Sources
This whole review kicked off with Harald Malmgren, a prestigious and highly decorated scholar and government advisor, openly promoting this article and its conclusions.
This is not an isolated case with Malmgren. A little scrolling through his timeline shows many recent instances where he openly claims to have secret knowledge of UFOs, and asserts outright that alien technology is in the hands of both private entities and governments across the world. He claims to have been briefed and sworn to secrecy about ‘otherworld technologies’ by high-ranking CIA officers, and that he received a report from Los Alamos that a UFO was shot down at the same time as JFK. This is not new territory for him.
He provides no evidence for any of this, and all his claims bottom out at ‘an important person I knew told me so 60 years ago’, which is not very compelling. But his past offices and accomplishments—which are genuine and very impressive even from a Wikipedia skim—are enough to convince people that he is a very serious source with access to a great deal of secret knowledge.
And yet as I’ve shown, the article which he so credulously promoted is riddled with errors and outright dishonesty, invalidating the very foundation of these claims.
How can we square this very respected public figure with the evidence that he has attached himself to and promoted such low-quality work?
Quite easily, in my view
The Halo Effect is a known cognitive bias. Do not assume that just because someone is impressive and capable in one field that they are necessarily capable across the board.
Intelligence, competence, prestige etc. do not make one immune to deception, motivated reasoning, or carelessness. A momentary lapse of diligence suffices for capable and credentialed experts to make considerable errors, or fail to notice the errors in others’ work.
Kooky beliefs, including belief in UFOs, are not limited to the lay public. Erik Hoel has the full story about how the AATIP program, supposedly a government initiative to investigate UFOs, was just Senate majority leader Harry Reid giving millions of dollars to friends of his to study not just UFOs, but ghosts, werewolves, and dino-beavers. In other words, the usual methods of government corruption and misspending on personal projects, disguised as a serious defense program, which media breathlessly reported on as if it was real for clicks. All because a senior politician was into UFOs.
All of this connects to a very odd phenomenon I notice in news like this. The very same people who tend to fall for UFO hoaxes are reflexively skeptical about the ordinary processes of government. They understand government is full of inefficiency and corruption, and their default response whenever an official says something which seems fishy is ‘they’re lying, like always.’
But take a government advisor, a spook, or someone similar out of the normal process of government, and suddenly they’re ironclad. They were director of such-and-such agency for a decade, they have star-studded credentials from Harvard and Oxford, they must be a credible source. Why would a former intelligence agent lie?
For all the normal reasons human beings lie—or just as often, self-delude. For all the same reasons your friends and relatives (you can think of a few at the drop of a hat, I’m sure), despite being perfectly normal and intelligent people, seem to utterly suspend their reason and good sense when certain topics come up. For greed, for vanity, for attention, for a lark, or just because they want it to be true.
If someone close to you—someone with an elite university degree or a high-ranking government post—came out about believing in werewolves, you’d know better than to think ‘well they’re very intelligent and capable, they must have a good reason to believe in werewolves’. That would be ridiculous, because you know from firsthand experience that they’re still mortal, still human. But the same person at a distance, on top of a media pedestal, looks unassailable, simply because of their presentation.
I don’t know Malmgren personally, and so I can’t give a conclusive answer to this question. But I expect some combination of the foregoing is sufficient. It doesn’t help that Malmgren came up in, and is looking back now, on one of the most tense and genuinely conspiratorial periods in American history. Once it becomes important for you to spot secrets, cover-ups, and conspiracies, it must be quite difficult to stop seeing them.
Anatomy of a UFO Hoax
And now the time has come. For all you reading at home, how can you avoid falling for things like this without having to do ~20 hours of research over Christmas break?
The first step is to understand how Cruickshank, as a good example of the upscale conspiracy theorist, deceives and manipulates.
There’s a mix of strategies here, a combination of straightforward lies, obfuscation, motte-and-bailey, selective presentation, and misusing the appearance of science and rigor.
With the Safeguard’s deck logs, for example, there’s a combination of lies and obfuscation: he makes a claim about them, and even presents a link, but he’s hoping that a) almost no readers will follow the link, and b) that those who do follow it will give up when they see pages and pages of dense, grainy, penmanship. Very, very few readers will actually sit down to read through them and realize that, no, there’s no mention of anomalous debris.
If the evidence was actually there and Cruickshank wanted people to see it, his best bet would be to take a picture, embed it in his article, and draw a big red arrow toward the relevant section. He appears to do this, such as in the screenshots that follow mention of the deck logs:
And these are deck logs from the Safeguard! But they don’t actually show the smoking gun. He just highlights every mention of the Point Barrow, and then starts highlighting at random to make it seem like there’s something going on here.
This is an example of selective presentation, which dovetails with a variation on the motte-and-bailey. He’ll use evidence that proves a trivial part of his claim (the motte), and just imply that it also shows another, extraordinary claim (the bailey). For example, he can show that the Safeguard and Point Barrow were involved in a recovery operation together, and then imply that this also shows the Point Barrow recovered anomalous debris.
Mind, the connection between the motte and the bailey doesn’t have to be very strong at all. Consider a section of the article, in which he covers late-night talk show comments by the frontman of Blink-182 (no, really), and then states:
The 2022 release of JFK assassination files offers an intriguing possibility.
It suggests that two Soviet double agents, stationed at the United Nations headquarters in 1962, may have served as back-channel communicators between President John F. Kennedy and Premier Nikita Khrushchev.
This connection could relate to the alleged shootdown event referenced by [Blink-182 frontman] Tom DeLonge.
To be clear, we began with ‘we now know the identities of the Soviet agents who provided back-channel communication between Kennedy and Kruschev’, a very defensible but utterly irrelevant claim, since the existence of these back-channels has been obvious for ages and the identities of these agents are immaterial, and ended with ‘this means the Blink-182 frontman was right about the US and USSR collaborating to shoot down UFOs with nuclear weapons while keeping the world distracted with the Cuban Missile Crisis.’
If I submitted this to my academic writing class, I’d get a book thrown at my head. There’s no connection here, no support, but Cruickshank states it, does a little song and dance about the immense implications, and moves on, depending on his target audience to only be half-paying attention, half-engrossed in daydreams about celebrities and UFOs.
He’s also fond of phrases like
The level of expertise and precision involved in this operation underscores the significance of what was recorded.
which sound very humble, very deferential to the work of experts, but are totally laughable if you stop and register them. The amount of effort and expertise involved does not imply that they found something significant, especially because Cruickshank’s own telling makes the shoot-down accidental.
On top of all this, there’s the abuse of scientific rigor, or at least its appearance. We already saw how he misuses and mis-cites actual scientists in order to make it seem like his ideas are backed by research and expert opinion. Beyond that, he also appropriates the form of scientific endeavor. This is especially clear in his notes, where he tries to treat his ideas as hypotheses and slathers his claims in footnotes and citations. But the same methods of obfuscation are at work here, not to mention sillier behaviors like citing the same source repeatedly (once overall, once on a specific page, once on the following page, and so on) in order to make it look like he has more sources than he actually does.
More seriously, he totally fails to apply scientific thinking. He talks about his hypotheses, but he never lays out the null hypothesis, never discusses how the contested evidence might support his ideas better. He never admits that there is a coherent alternative, and so frees himself from the burden of arguing against it.
This isn’t rigorous, it’s utter garbage that falls down at the first hurdle.
Here, then, is the recipe.
Take some dense, official documents nobody will read.
Make a combination of trivial claims which are supported by evidence and extraordinary claims which aren’t.
Present the former with copious footnotes and highlighted screenshots, but build your argument on the latter, and smudge them together.
Ignore evidence to the contrary even if it massively outweighs your supporting evidence.
Call your ideas ‘hypotheses’ and slather on a bunch of footnotes without once defining your null.
Don’t think too hard about the actual implications of your claims; your target audience won’t either.
When necessary, just lie.
Altogether, conspiracy theorists of Cruickshank’s ilk are quite sophisticated when manipulating their audiences: they don’t just use one method, but several overlapping ones, designed to give themselves the appearance of rigorous, systematic investigators, while making the process of verifying their claims obtuse and tedious.
How to (not) fall for it
First, check the source and publication. Cruickshank is a long-standing UFO theorist, and the site that published this horrendous little article, the Liberation Times, is a UFO rag that publishes absolutely nothing else.
Second, note every time the author makes an extraordinary claim: if strong evidence for such a claim is not immediately forthcoming, that is a strong sign that the evidence is weak or non-existent.
If some source is provided, follow it. Pay careful attention to what it actually says, as opposed to what the author claims it says. These are often different, sometimes complete opposites.
If the source is dense, technical, or otherwise would require implausible amounts of time/effort to understand well enough, this is probably a failure of the author. This isn’t always the case—many scientific papers, for example, are both dense and technical enough that a lay person or even an academic in another field would have difficulty understanding it—but the author must provide grounds for their argument.
Third, pay close attention to the links between parts of the argument: do the pieces of evidence provided actually show that the claim is correct? Are they truly relevant, or is the author blurring between topics that just seem related?
Fourth, make sure counterarguments are addressed: it’s not enough for the evidence to plausibly fit one interpretation: the author must also demonstrate why it doesn’t fit competing interpretations, or doesn’t fit them as well. If the author never lays out or even considers the possibility of other interpretations, run for the hills.
Fifth, watch out for implied claims: beyond what the author says explicitly, there will also be implicit assumptions. If a claim at first appears rock solid but actually has no substance, it’s often because the implied claims were unsupported but unexamined.
If you follow these principles, this should be enough to keep from being fooled by the majority of scammers and liars online.
Now, you may protest that this process involves a great deal of effort. And I would agree. That’s the point. Cruickshank and his ilk depend on people not putting in effort. If you want to avoid being deceived—and I certainly hope you do—it is necessary to put in effort. There is no shortcut, except to avoid truth-claims at all. Curiosity without rigor is just naiveté.
You may still protest: you’re not here to engage in a holy quest for the truth, you just wanted to be entertained by UFOs.
If this is the case, I’ll note that you have access to more literary, musical, and cinematic entertainment than you could consume in a thousand lifetimes. The first duty of any news, journalism, research, or whatever else Cruickshank’s article might claim to be, is to the truth, and it is the duty of every reader to uphold that standard. If you don’t have the time, energy, or desire to apply appropriate rigor to your entertainment—if you treat it as you would treat fiction—then just cut out the middle man and read fiction. Entertainment neither requires nor justifies spreading lies.
But I Want Aliens To Be Real
Me too.
They’re out there, somewhere, I’m sure. The universe is too big for us to be alone. But there’s just no good reason to assume they’d already be here, even if they were interested in us and were benevolent enough not to launch an asteroid in our general direction.
The first radio signal leaves Earth in 1897, 128 years ago now. If an alien civilization pointed a receiver in our direction, picked up that very first signal, and immediately sped towards us at the speed of light… they’d have to be within 70 light years of us to arrive within the decade.
There are fewer than 1000 star systems within 70 light years of earth. We’ve gotten a damn close look at all of them. None show signs of intelligent life. We’ve been shining radio signals into the wild aether of space for decades now, practically screaming about ourselves. We’ve never gotten anything similar back.
I’m sure they’re out there, somewhere. But one of the biggest questions the astrophysics community has these days is why space is so quiet—why we haven’t found evidence of a single other intelligent species, never mind a spacefaring one. Chances are, they’re just too far away for their signals to have reached us. The other possibilities are depressing or terrifying.
I concur with Erik Hoel that UFOs are a soft-sci-fi genre: Gene Roddenberry, not Greg Egan. It’s all the mystique of space, brought down to a comfortable, human scale: spaceships and government conspiracies, instead of Dyson spheres and nano-swarms. There’s the patina of science, but the structure of a fantasy.
If you want aliens to be real, there is research towards that end. Hoel links an article by Centauri Dreams, which covers several recent papers searching for Dyson sphere candidates. I have to emphasize how tenuous this is: out of 5 million stars studied, seven have infrared characteristics which might indicate a kind of artificial construct that we suppose advanced civilizations might build.
There’s no slam dunk here. Frankly, I finish writing this with a feeling of disappointment and emptiness. But it’s honest, and it’s a good deal more serious than UFOs.
Don’t get fooled.