and widespread than anything I had anticipated when I began this project. The spectacular growth of American conspiracism after the first publication of this book eventually convinced me that an expanded edition was necessary, although the four new chapters, 11 through 14, provide only a glimpse into some of the new dimensions in conspiracist thinking. In short, the new sections should be regarded as representative snapshots rather than encyclopedic surveys. The sheer volume of talk and activity about plots and cabals might otherwise have turned each chapter into a full-blown volume of its own.
The 9/11 attacks were surely one catalyst of these developments. Another was the election of Barack Obama, the first African-American president. While conspiracy theories have almost always been woven around chief executives, including Bill Clinton and both Bushes, the Obama theories stand out for their number, their variety, and their spread into the general society, particularly in the case of the so-called “birther” theories that for a while became part of the wider political conversation.
The influence of the Internet, which I discussed in the conclusion to the first edition, has if anything been magnified, and has played a significant role in recent conspiracy-linked violence, including potential and actual activities by militias and so-called lone wolves. The year 2012 turned out to be a year much loved by conspiracists, even more freighted with apocalyptic expectations than the year 2000. There were, first of all, international events that were believed to be the focus of plots, notably the London Olympics, although they passed peacefully. And the year itself possessed a special quality to many through the wide diffusion of beliefs that the ancient Mayan calendar supposedly gave it apocalyptic significance. This was yet another example of a phenomenon mentioned in the original conclusions about the capacity of modern communications to insert what once would have been fringe beliefs into the cultural mainstream.
I am grateful to Kevin A. Whitesides for sharing material about the Mayan-calendar phenomenon. Special thanks as well go to Christopher Graveline, who took time out of a busy schedule to read and comment on sections of chapter 13.
A note on Internet sources: Book and periodical sources cited in the first edition can presumably still be found. Unfortunately, that is not necessarily true of Internet citations. The websites cited here have had uneven lifespans. Many are still “alive,” but others may have disappeared and their contents with them. All remain in the notes and bibliography, however, as indications of the sources I used.
Michael Barkun
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
