Saucers, Spooks and Kooks: UFO Disinformation in the Age of Aquarius

by Adam Gorightly

From flying saucer crashes to underground alien bases, a number of modern mythologies have come into being since the advent of the UFO era in the 1940s. But how much of these myths is real, versus being the invention of either government agencies or deluded conspiracy theorists? Saucers, Spooks and Kooks provides an eye-opening survey of the history behind these stories, and the individuals promoting them.

Genres: Conspiracy Theories, History, Nonfiction

314 pages, Paperback

Published February 3, 2021

About the author

American author focussing on pananormal topics and conspiracy theories.

Gorightly has proclaimed himself to be a "crackpot historian" articles of him have been published in several underground magazines.

Reviews

[Bill Weaver]

At least this book has an index, which sets it apart to a degree from being nothing more than a UFO gossip column, entertaining and salacious. I admit at times I wanted greater distinction between the obvious hoaxes and the less obvious. Google some of the stuff in here and you’ll find some adequate debunking already on the Internet that the author mostly skips over or fails to mention. Whether this is intentional or merely out of carelessness I can’t say with any certainty. Gorightly does not always draw any lines around the true/false distinction, but drops hints here and there like breadcrumbs. It is impossible to tell whether these crumbs of sarcasm lead further into the labyrinth or to the exit doors. Another way of putting it is to say there is a lot of conjecture amidst all this disinformation. Mysterious postcards about birds, perhaps from the terribly mysterious “Aviary” - I am again surprised that no one mentions Henry Kissinger burning the owl in effigy at Bohemian Grove. People go missing who may never have existed (p. 190), and forged government documents reference fictional locations from Michael Crichton. (p. 249) The phone company manages “to switch a number over” in weeks when “usually it takes months”. (p. 237) In perhaps the most titillating episode since Antonio Villas Boas was kidnapped by sex-starved aliens, it is suggested that even romantic relationships, including at least one marriage, may have been part of some psy-op to derail key players in the research into cattle mutilations. (p. 210) This UFO researcher spent his last days “as a clerk at a Dollar General Store in Tulsa, Oklahoma”, (p. 211) but may have gotten off easy, what with Project Moondust and JFK, Danny Casolaro and the Octopus lurking just offstage. The timeline jumps around quite a bit from one chapter to the next and even within chapters. Overall it feels a bit like a rambling tale told by a conspiracy buff in the hotel lounge at the UFO convention. How much is real and how much is just insider hearsay? Like any good gossip column, the author does drop quite a few names and if you are looking for a high level overview of the UFO makers and shakers on the scene through the 80s, 90s and into the new millennium, you can find that here. If you are looking for penetrating analysis or thoughtful consideration as to what’s going on in ‘reality’, I would set aside such high hopes - as he makes clear in his conclusion, Gorightly is a fairly 'tuned-out' aficionado of Robert Anton Wilson, so the most you are going to get here is a description of various 'reality tunnels'.

[Joe]

Putting this with its clear precursors - Project Beta and Mirage Men - as "game skepticism", my favorite genre of UFO writing. The people here are so often as interesting as their stories, and while many are zany and comic, there are some crushingly sad casualties along the way.

[Nate Thomas]

Absolutely fun rollicking romp through the chapel perilous. Gorightly explores the weird underworld of UFO investigators, credulous nuts, and the shady spooks and kooks who feed them mind bending disinformation. A veritable whose who of UFO subculture from the 1960s to present day.

[NOLA Bert]

The Mythology of UFOs

In Saucers, Spooks, and Kooks, Adam Gorightly surveys the UFO scene in the USA, especially the heydey of the 70s and 80s. To a relative newcomer like myself, I found it hard to keep track of everyone. But now I feel like I know the major players. As a cognitive psychologist, what struck me the most is how far confirmation bias can take you. I tend to think of UFOlogy as folklore. I wonder if some of the major players viewed it similarly and were excited to add to the active mythology of UFOs and flying saucers.

I got here by way of Jeff Shanks’s videos about the Shaver Mystery and The Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean. I had no idea that UFOs, flying saucers, and reptilian aliens connected to pulp fantasy (Robert E. Howard and Kull of Atlantis) and science fiction magazines (Ray Palmer and Amazing Stories). I like Shanks’s idea about why the Shaver Mystery took off, that the participatory mythology of it appealed to so many people. Just like UFOs.

One of the questions that came to mind while reading the book and it’s one that Gorightly ponders as well—why would the military or three letter government agencies spend so much money and resources to lead ufo researchers astray? The only thing that made sense is that fear of Soviet infiltration of the USA UFO scene may be the justification for all the spent resources. Although at what cost? Suspicion about government coverups is now de rigueur. Not even the release of video and files by the Trump administration is having much effect on bolstering trust in the government. It’s almost like espionage from US enemies succeeded in fomenting dissent and distrust in general.

My biggest complaint about the book is the multitude of short chapters that jump around from person to person and conspiracy to conspiracy. To someone with only a passing knowledge of the UFO scene (about as much as a fan of the *X-Files* knows), it was hard to follow.

Requisite first-hand UFO story. Around 2019, my wife and I were walking home from going out to eat. It was a clear, calm summer night. We were almost to our house when we saw a glowing red light floating just high enough to clear the trees. I remember exclaiming, “What the hell is that!” There was nothing else visible but the light—no shape or structure discernible with the light. It made absolutely no sound (and there was no wind—the night was calm). The light passed directly over us and continued northwest until it moved out of view. We assumed it was a drone because it was small and the light was heading in the direction of a house where the kids in the family raced RC cars down the street. I should have followed the light, but didn’t. The mystery is still that the light had no apparent body or structure that was discernible despite it being a calm, clear night and it wasn’t that high up. And I’m unaware of any drones in 2019 that were completely silent. This light made no sound whatsoever. We haven’t seen it since then.

Here’s my impression of the material across the chapters:

Chapters 1-3: Interesting and strange cultural phenomena and players in the scene. I blame Jeff Shanks for sending me down this path.

Chapters 4-5: The duping of Paul Bennewitz by Bill Moore and Richard Doty.

Chapters 6-7: Richard Doty’s disinformation campaign continues. Would the Air Force spend so much money to dupe a couple of UFOlogists?

Chapters 8-13: promised videos of extra-terrestrials from the government never materializes. Majestic 12 documents—an elaborate forgery? Was the whole point to make UFOs and the people who study them viewed as complete kooks? Weren”t they always considered fringe?

Chapters 14-19: UFOs get mixed up in military investigations of psychic phenomena: the Stargate Project.

Chapters 20-27: UFOlogists fight among themselves.

Chapters 28-34: super-kooks Tal Lavesque, Bill Cooper, & Bob Lazar. Lavesque with his ex-wife, Mary Martin, published The Hollow Hassle, a zine dedicated to the Shaver Mystery and inner Earth conspiracies. Also, Billy Goodman and Art Bell’s radio shows get a chapter.

Chapters 35-38: the Dulce Base War connection to Richard Shaver and the Shaver Mystery. Christa Tilton and the Bennewitz Papers. And we get the sad endings of several in the UFOlogy scene: Bennewitz, Tom Adams, & Tilton.

Chapters 39-45: more sad endings of ufologists, Phil Schneider and Ron Rummel. Project SERPO and the exchange program with Zeta-Reticuli gets leaked—Doty is suspected. There is the suggestion that all the UFO disinformation is really a ploy to thwart Soviet KGB agents who were infiltrating the ufology scene.

Chapters 46-47 & an afterword: the more recent UFOlogy scene replays the past. The afterword emphasizes how easy it is to go down the conspiracy rabbit hole.

[Frobisher Smith]

Excellent book. Details the players and misbehavers in the UFOlogy and Cattle Mutilation research scenes for over about five decades. This is the story of how much of what we call "UFO lore" today originated not from black ops whistleblowers describing real events, but purely from the imaginations of Air Force and CIA intelligence officers, and how they got these tall tales into circulation as "disclosures" believed by many to be true.

Adam Gorightly writes from lengthy experience within the conspiracy, esoterica, and paranormal research scenes (an overlapping grouping to be sure), and deflates many of the more sensational ideas of underground extraterrestrial-staffed military bases and sci-fi laser battles, while very much pointing to real evidence of counter-intelligence operations against potential Russian assets, top secret medical and technological experimentation on American citizens and their cattle, and the possible assassination of investigative journalist Danny Casolaro. It's a very clear-headed and quite interesting book, I enjoyed it a lot.

[Zach Copley]

Help! I'm still trapped in Chapel Perilous.

[Jules]

Redactare - TBC

[Marisa Duarte]

In years to come sincere educators will want to teach young ones how to be 'conspiracy literate,' so they don't get fleeced into yet another con if not politician's grab-bag. The field of ufology is replete with a combination of disinformation, lore, scifi fantasy, psychological delusion, fraud and flim-flam artists, counterintelligence operations, and business and government opportunities. Gorightly is a long-time member of a conspiracy skeptics group that uses satire and journalistic investigation techniques to surface the threads of sub-cultures that thrive in such information wormholes, places where truth has less cash value and just a bit of social value: use sparingly. To really appreciate this book its important to have some background in the sacred cows (no pun intended) of American UFO culture since the 1940s, as well as an appreciation for how the essence of American identity is constructed on a belief in transcendence and the right to attain transcendence in any damn way a person chooses, whether through religion, spacecraft, hallucinogenics, or gun-toting dark skies paranoia. In the final chapters, Gorightly is setting us up to perceive how the latest crop (no pun intended) of UAP disclosures and media reveals happening through Congress and non-mainstream online news magazines are a repeat of old patterns. The questions remain: what big tech and aerospace corporations stand to profit from these revelations? What do foreign intelligence operations stand to gain? What major creeps and predators get off from operating in this space of acceptable deception? Gorightly is a fan of 'reality tunnels' so if you are the type who needs the bulleted list and summaries, you may feel a bit like you are being turned upside down in the discourse, but if you are comfortable with irony and the absurd, welcome to this dressing down of quite-a-few alien mindworms.

[Canyon Ryan]

What an excellent and fun book. This is my favorite kind of book - it engages with the conspiracy content skeptically but respectably, doesn't hold book on calling out the *kookiness of spookiness. The title is perfect, the chapters are a great length, and the book has a really appreciable flow that knits all of the content together. I especially loved the chapters on the MJ-12 chain, Phil Schneider (who I was amazed by as a young teen exploring YouTube and UFO websites on my grandmas computer), and the Roswell Wreckage. It was also a book where the Afterword tied things together while being very personal and genuine. Very great book that I will recommend to fellow nerds!

[Ramona Cantaragiu]

I sometimes wonder why I buy certain books. I have no idea what I was expecting from this book, probably a more in-depth exploration of the ways in which people fabricate stories about UFOs, definitely not a list of all UFO sightings and minute details about each one of them. Boring as fuck.

[George Kanakaris]

Anyone who knows Gorightly even a little knows what to expect : a sarcastic look at this phenomenon through the eyes of a Robert Anton Wilson follower.
One comment regarding the content, though: a chapter on cattle mutilation and no mention of Christopher O'Brien?

[Joni Mars]

Hands down one of the best books I've ever read. For ufological, conspiracy and paranormal research, mandatory reading. Unlike many similar books, it was well-written and an easy, quick read like a good novel but full of well-cited, novel information. Easily made it into my favorites list.