Colin Dickey - The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession with the Unexplained

GHOSTLAND

History operates behind our backs.

STE PHEN ERIC BRONNER

June 1996, and the United States was on edge. A year after Timothy McVeigh had bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, the country watched anxiously as a standoff between the FBI and a militia group unfolded in Jordan, Montana. The Montana Freemen had declared themselves a sovereign township outside the reach of US law, had stopped paying taxes, and had embarked on a massive scheme of counterfeiting and bank fraud. When the FBI attempted to arrest them in March, they grabbed their weapons, and the Feds, eager to avoid the bloodshed that ended similar standoffs at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas, settled in for a long siege. During the second month, news broke that another MontananTed Kaczynski, the Unabomberhad been caught and charged with a series of bombings hed carried out over the course of seventeen years. Then on June 14, the same day that the last of the Montana Freemen surrendered peacefully to authorities, police in Long Island, New York, arrested yet another group of dangerous men, revealing a plot far stranger than anything the country had yet seen.

Martin Thompson, the head of Rackets for the Suffolk Countys District Attorneys office, had been leading an investigation into illegal gun sales when he first learned of the plan. Listening to a wiretap of two suspects, John J. Ford and Joe Mazzuchelli, he suddenly found them talking about something very different than guns.

Once they find this stuff on, lets say in Tonys car, front seat, Ford is heard saying on the tape, only to be cut off by Mazzuchelli, who chimes in, Nasty bastard glowing in the dark. Ford adds, With this isotope, hell start glowing in twenty-four hours. Thompson and his team had stumbled on a deeply bizarre assassination plot, one involving stolen radium, a forest fire, and a UFO cover-up.

In addition to stockpiling a large cache of weapons, John J. Ford was the president of the Long Island branch of the Mutual UFO Network, or MUFON, a collection of UFO enthusiasts who investigated sightings in an attempt to finally prove that extraterrestrials existed and had visited Earth. MUFON members are not, by nature, violent: most see their job as simply gathering evidence, as objectively and dispassionately as possible, in hopes that eventually therell be a documented, undeniable sighting of some kind.

But Ford was not like the typical UFO researcher. He claimed he had been recruited by the CIA when he was eighteen, and had routinely participated in clandestine operations against the Soviet Union. The KGB, he claimed, had tried and failed five times to kill him, and theyd given him the nickname the Fox, due to his wily nature. But by the mid-1990s, things had taken a turn for Ford: he injured himself on the job and had to retire, and his mother died, an event that, friends said, affected him deeply. And then there was the forest fire.

The blaze that swept through Long Islands Pine Barrens in 1995 was large enough that the smoke was visible from Manhattan, some seventy-five miles away, ultimately scorching seven thousand acres. Over time, Ford became convinced that the fire was, in fact, caused by a UFO crash, and that the Suffolk County Board was involved in a large-scale cover-up. He felt that the only way to get answers was by taking control of the government himself, and he began conspiring with Mazzuchelli and another man, Edward Zabo, to kill three county officials using stolen radium. Zabo, deeply in debt, agreed to provide the radium that Mazzuchelli, himself an ex-con, would plant in the mens homes. At a press conference the day of the arrest, Suffolk County district attorney James M. Catterson stood before Fords extensive collection of weapons spread out before the podium and explained that when hed first heard of the plot, the idea that someone would attempt to introduce radioactive material into someones food or someones living area at first seemed so bizarre that theres a human tendency to discount it. It didnt take very long to realize that this was some of our worst nightmares come true.

The past few years have revealed to us that such fringe beliefs and conspiracy theories are becoming more prevalent, and theyre becoming more consequential. Belief in fringe topics like Atlantis, or cryptids (Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and other associated hidden animals), or UFOs, or ancient aliens has risen drastically in the last few years. For several years Chapman University has surveyed Americans fears and irrational beliefs, including beliefs about aliens, cryptids, and lost civilizations. In some cases, the numbers have been steadily creeping upward: belief in Bigfoot has moved from 11 percent in 2015 to 21 percent in 2018. The belief that aliens have visited Earth during modern times went from 18 percent to 26 percent in 2016 and then rose to 35 percent in 2018; the belief that aliens have visited Earth in the distant past, meanwhile, has more than doubled from 20 percent in 2015 to 41 percent in 2018. And the belief that Ancient Civilizations Such as Atlantis Existed likewise shot up from 39 percent in 2016 to 57 percent in 2018.

We are, in other words, experiencing a time of resurgence of fringe beliefs, when ideas mostly dismissed by science are being embraced and are spreading throughout popular culture. Alongside a rise in conspiracy theories about vaccines, water fluoridation, and chemtrails, and political conspiracies from the Illuminati to