Impossible Owls: Essays

by Brian Phillips

Stats are hard to come by for obvious reasons, but the number of people who say they’ve been abducted runs at least to many thousands. And yet no indisputable photographic evidence, in an era when nearly everyone carries a camera? No multiple-eyewitness accounts that aren’t at least somewhat slippery? Nothing undismissable picked up by, say, news satellites, by Google Earth? At a moment when it sometimes seems the planet is encased in a shell of surveillance? In a sense, the conspiracy-theory aspect of the UFO phenomenon, the but that’s just what they’d want you to think! side of it, was inevitable, because something had to reconcile the certainty of experiencers with the lack of ironclad evidence. The only way to do that was to suggest that the real evidence had been suppressed—that it was too important, too civilization upending, for the government not to hush it up. That way the lack of evidence could become its own kind of negative