Corey Goode was barely in grade school when he was classified as “an anomaly.”

“Apparently, I was identified as being on the intuitive empath spectrum,” he told a rapt audience one hot summer morning in 2017. “They thought that would be useful,” he said, referring to the people who would become his secret government handlers. “And they can enhance it through genetic manipulation.”

Goode claims that he was soon placed in alternative classes. His parents, he says, gave permission for that. But what they didn’t know was that he’d been tapped to take part in a military program: Every morning he’d wait outside with his lunchbox to be picked up by a white van, which would drive him out to Carswell Air Force Base in Texas, a little ways northwest of Fort Worth. From there, they’d go through a back gate, across two runways, through another security gate and into a motor pool hangar, down a cargo elevator into a secret underground facility, where nine to fifteen other children would be waiting.

The training ran the gamut, Goode claims: “Sensory deprivation, VR stimulation, pharmaceutical enhancement, trauma bonding. They would subject you usually in VR to trauma along with your team and force you to bond with them or with an adult.” Beyond that, the children were trained in use of traditional firearms, hand-to-hand combat “similar to judo,” map reading, radio protocols, and, of course, “acclimation to non-terrestrials”—that is, aliens.

According to Goode, the non-terrestrial beings started showing up at trainings early on. “Most of us had weird memories or dreams,” Goode says, prior dreams of pirate ships coming to pick the children up and taking them away to a strange place. “It turns out we were being introduced before the program to non-terrestrials.” In the VR simulations, Goode says, they would see gray aliens, sitting quietly at a table.

“There were also hybrid children present at Carswell,” he adds, meaning part-human, part-alien. At night, he would be taken to meet with “cells,” as he puts it, of ninety to one hundred twenty other children, to continue their training in dark, closed indoor malls.

At the end of all this, in around 1986, Goode says he was drafted into the Secret Space Program, a purported hidden government entity doing clandestine research and fighting secret wars with extraterrestrials in outer space. He was not yet seventeen. Specifically, he claims to have been part of a Navy program called Solar Warden, which since merged with another program whose name he doesn’t know. The duties of the recruits were both heady and mundane, he says: “Protecting the solar system, going to other solar systems to do surveillance and recon.” The mission of the research vessel where he was stationed “was similar to the Men in Black program. Except they”—meaning the other enlisted Solar Warden officers—“were doing mainly interrogation of these beings—finding out who they were and why they were here.”

The work was urgent, given that non-terrestrials are all around us, and some of them are quite unfriendly. “They’re working in high-rise buildings, blending in with us.” The military was routinely arresting them, Goode says. His own missions involved lots of contact with alien races, some of them hostile. “They didn’t care about human life at all.”

There’s plenty more to Goode’s story, but a little of this goes a long way. Corey Goode’s self-stated biography is an obvious mash-up of pop culture alien lore that many of us have been primed to recognize. In some ways, it is a classic hero’s journey, set on a galactic scale: a child is plucked from home as special; as a man he sets out to save the galaxy. Goode has told his account at many places, but I heard it at the annual meeting of the Mutual UFO Network, known as MUFON. It is the oldest UFO research group in the United States, active since 1969, and it presents itself as a scientific organization, seeking hard evidence of the UFO phenomenon and pursuing that evidence wherever it might lead.

Most of the year, state MUFON chapters investigate tips of UFO sightings, hundreds of which pour into their email and voicemail each month. But on a blazing summer day in Summerlin, a wealthy suburb in northwest Las Vegas, the MUFON members were all together, and things were tense.

Outside, there was the kind of dry desert heat and intense klieg-light sun that gave our surroundings a sense of the surreal. Speakers took the stage one after another in the dim, ice-cold ballroom of a casino resort hung with bulbous chandeliers and lined with the same carpet I’d seen at every conspiracy conference I had been to that year. (Sometimes I felt as though I’d been sitting in the same ballroom for months, with different people cycling through it yelling dubious facts at me.) When I walked outside for a lunch break, I marched through the heat, past a gasping fountain and into the casino, through a light haze of cigarette smoke and down a pulsating, blinking, whirring row of slot machines.

MUFON often feels like a family reunion. But people were unusually on edge, because earlier another well-respected speaker, Richard Dolan, called Corey Goode a liar and quite possibly a plant. “I’m not accusing anybody of anything,” Dolan said delicately at the start of his talk, in the manner of someone about to accuse someone of something. “But it’s absolutely a fact of US history that there’s been government interference in many organizations. Many of you have heard of COINTELPRO. And that goes on to this day.”

UFO culture is an unsettling yet embedded part of us, the type of conspiracy road that has become so well trodden we pound it under our feet without noticing that we walk on it every day. Although broad discussion of UFOs has been eclipsed in the general culture by fresher, shinier conspiratorial ideas—birtherism, false flags, pedophile rings—a remarkably high number of Americans believe in the existence of extraterrestrial life. The poll numbers can vary wildly and frustratingly. In 1997, a CNN/Time poll showed that a whopping 80 percent of the adult population believed the government was hiding “knowledge of the existence of extraterrestrial life forms.” In 2015, a YouGov survey found that 54 percent of the adult population believed that alien life exists, while 30 percent were convinced, in their words, that “extra-terrestrial intelligent life has already contacted us but the government has covered it up.” According to the Chapman University Survey of American Fears that same year, 42.6 percent of respondents thought the government was concealing what it knows about alien encounters. The Chapman survey noted that more Americans believe in UFOs than believe in natural selection or that the earth is 4.5 billion years old.

The belief is strong, but, as with so many research communities, it’s not uniform or unaffected by controversy. In the last few years the UFO world has been afflicted by the kinds of conspiratorial cracks that have appeared throughout American culture: Who can be trusted? What is true? What constitutes an acceptable standard of proof? Who is a spy, a plant, an agent? Is the government engaged in covert actions to disrupt communities it deems dangerous?

Dolan has been a respected UFO researcher for a long time, which means the same thing here that it means in a lot of conspiracy subcultures: you might not know who he is, but he’s indisputably a giant in his field. At MUFON he had the look of a man who’d recently come into good fortune but didn’t quite have the time to enjoy it. He recently became engaged to a beautiful woman named Tracy; he was wearing a nice suit and had freshly cut salt-and-pepper curls. As I watched, though, Dolan was visibly irritated, lobbing verbal bombs at an audience full of his fellow UFO researchers.

He is far from the first of his kind to suggest that the government has planted misleading information to throw the field into chaos. And MUFON itself is frequently accused of pursuing and promoting pseudo-science. The Center for Skeptical Inquiry wrote in 2013 that local MUFON chapters were following “decidedly unscientific” avenues of inquiry, scheduling “talks on alien abduction, conspiracy theories, human-ET hybrids, hypnotic regression, and repressed memories.”

But MUFON does maintain a public commitment to science, at least, which is why some of the most dedicated members stayed away in 2017, why a few resigned in protest, and why a wave of newcomers came in their place. The year’s conference wasn’t particularly scientific—it was dedicated to the Secret Space Program, the supposedly hidden government agency Goode claims took over much of his early life. One last thing about that: Goode says that when his space military service came to an end, he returned to Earth, where his government handlers performed an “age regression.” He awoke as a child again, in his bedroom at home, with his mother unaware that he’d ever been gone.

“There are a few very conservative people who want to just talk about the nuts and bolts of the crafts,” MUFON’s executive director Jan Harzan told me, referring to spacecraft. “But this is what people are interested in: the whistleblowers. They want to know what’s really going on.” The whistleblowers, as Harzan and others call them, are the men in the UFO world, Goode among them, who make colorful and eye-popping claims about the roles they played in the government’s secret space programs. The week’s other notable speaker was Andrew Basiago, who said that he went on a series of missions to Mars with a young Barack Obama, then known, he says, as Barry Soetoro. (That is also the name birthers sometimes claim Obama used as a “foreign student” in college.) The story of how he got to Mars is even better: the “chrononauts,” as he called his group, were transported via a very high-tech elevator that’s located in El Segundo, California, and operated by the CIA.

“Yes, Obama was involved,” Basiago said in his talk, impatiently. “His service was no more distinguished than mine or any others.” He asked, rhetorically, why he would choose to make up such an outlandish fact. (It did seem like a good question.)

In conspiracy subcultures, “whistleblowing” is a common phenomenon. For every government plot and dark scheme, someone will eventually show up claiming to have been part of it. That happened during the 1980s Satanic panic, it began to occur in Pizzagate, and in the mid-2000s the newest crop arrived in the UFO world, when Basiago started talking of his travels with the then-president (he seems to have first claimed that he journeyed to Mars with Obama in a talk in Hawaii in 2011). In 2014, Goode appeared on the scene. A year later, the two of them were joined by another man, Randy Kramer, who claims to be a former marine who served on Mars for seventeen years and on a secret spaceship for three more.

Among earlier generations of UFO whistleblowers, the most famous was Bob Lazar, who maintained that he worked as a scientist at a subsidiary facility of Area 51 called S-4. His task was to “reverse-engineer” alien spaceships to figure out how they worked. But the new whistleblowers are in a league of their own, having apparently been to reaches of space that humans have never touched before, having had repeated and direct interaction with aliens, and, if I understand Basiago’s assertions correctly, having been chased around by dinosaurs on Mars. (I admit to leaving his lecture early due to a sudden inexplicable headache.)

Author and lecturer Michael Salla—he studies “exopolitics,” which is, basically, the all-too-human politics around extraterrestrial life—has written about Goode, Kramer, and Basiago and promoted their accounts, Goode’s in particular. Salla believes that many of the world’s governments are engaged in a long-range, ongoing, and large-scale UFO cover-up, and the debate over extraterrestrials is a source of tension and intrigue thrumming beneath international politics. Salla has stuck with Goode no matter how far-out his claims have become: in 2017, according to Goode, US Special Forces began arresting members of a “Satanic pedophile group,” all of whom were government officials in the United States and European Union. It was a clear echo of Pizzagate, and, more to the point, you’d think those arrests would be newsworthy. But Salla doesn’t seem bothered by the fact that there’s no evidence: no names, no mug shots, no press release from the Justice Department.

Goode has an unusual skill—the ability to make outlandish claims but to weave them together with common and popular UFO positions. Among the more fantastical threads that he manages to pull in: the engineers who work on secret space technologies are part of “secret societies and occult rituals”; and Goode maintains contact (through his organization the Sphere-Being Alliance) with benevolent aliens called Blue Avians, who have chosen him to “deliver important messages to humanity.” But he also peddles the more traditional beliefs: the government isn’t just hiding what it knows about aliens and UFOs, but also the advanced technologies that aliens have revealed to humans. Those include “healing and anti-aging technologies” and “zero-point energy” or free energy, which some UFO researchers believe has been secretly available since Nikola Tesla’s time. And some basic conspiracist tropes are in the mix, too. There’s “lots of human and child trafficking going on with these corporate types,” Goode says. “I won’t go into it because it’s very disturbing.”

Chase Kloetzke, MUFON’s deputy director of investigations, calls Goode’s more extravagant claims “extraordinary.” She adds: “Our mindset at MUFON has always been that extraordinary claims require extraordinary investigation and fact-finding.” But she’s willing to cut Goode quite a bit of slack. “The type of information he’s bringing forward, it’s difficult to do that,” she explains. “Not so much because he’s made it all up, but because of the secrecy and the technology that’s tucked away.” Her embrace of Goode, who has a popular television show on the New Age network Gaia, might have something to do with the fact that he commands some of the most intense applause I’ve ever heard.

MUFON conference-goers were, at least the year I was there, mostly older and overwhelmingly white; every one of the speakers was also white, and all but one was male. (I spotted two middle-aged Japanese men in the audience as well as one black woman, who seemed to be there with her husband; she spent the weekend crocheting with ferocious concentration). Several men were in baseball caps that identified them as Vietnam vets, and I overheard some poignant conversations: “It was hovering,” one old gentleman said to another. Nearby, a woman to her companion: “I grew up knowing we’re not supposed to talk about these things…” Throughout the conference, I was treated to the charming and unexpected sight of old ladies with haloes of snowy hair carefully taking notes while they listened to presentations about Nazis flying experimental spacecraft over DC.

But the whiteness and maleness and elderliness of the room was misleading, because alien belief is a profoundly ingrained part of American life across the country, one that cuts across lines of race, class, and age: we all seem to enjoy thinking about aliens. Our enthusiasm is to some extent most likely rooted in the fact that pivotal events in the received history of purported human-UFO contact happened here. Alongside the doubts about JFK’s assassination, the oldest, most stable conspiratorial idea in the United States is that the government has concealed what it knows. It’s not just Americans, of course: the intensity, depth, and breadth of the conversation about aliens throughout the world says something profound about human hopes, about our desire to not be alone in the universe, and our wish for some wise and mysterious force out there in the farthest reaches of space that is ready to show us the way. UFO enthusiasm coexists with a certain degree of New Age spirituality: there’s a sense that extraterrestrials don’t just exist, but that they will someday reveal to us both those miraculous technologies and a better way to live, a higher state of being.

The most successful UFO speakers know how to align their message with those sentiments, blending just enough uplift into an otherwise unsettling narrative. Goode talks up the benign aliens along with the hostile kind. The good ones, he said, strive rather selflessly to teach us all to live better lives. “Since the 1950s, non-terrestrials have had a consistent message,” he told the quiet, reverent MUFON crowd. “They tell us we need to raise our consciousness, become more spiritual, and demand the release of suppressed technologies.”

The alien world wasn’t always that exalted. Alien mythology was born, as many people know, in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, when something … crashed. That summer had already been a strange one: Across the Southwest, people had reported sightings of strange flying disks. Then one morning a ranch foreman named William “Mac” Brazel, working close to Roswell, found something bizarre while walking the property. It was what Kathryn Olmsted in Real Enemies describes as “a pile of sticks, tinfoil thick paper, and smoky-gray rubber, all stuck together with scotch tape.”

Brazel called Roswell’s sheriff, George Wilcox, who sent out two deputies and then phoned the Roswell Army Air Force Base, wondering if it was something of theirs. Then something very strange happened, in a way that has echoed for decades. The base’s public information officer announced that a “flying disc” had been recovered. By the next day, the story had changed: the region’s commanding general reported that what had actually been recovered was a “high altitude weather balloon.”

Public interest in the story quickly faded. But a full three decades later, in 1978, alien researchers started to suspect there had been a cover-up at Roswell and began interviewing dozens of people who claimed to have seen the object crash or had some involvement in the ensuing Air Force statement. In 1980, the first conspiracy book on the crash, The Roswell Incident, posited that what had actually been recovered on that ranch was an alien spaceship that had been monitoring the US military’s atomic research. The authors, who’d previously written a tome on the Bermuda Triangle, claimed that the alien craft had been downed after it was struck by lightning, and that the government concealed the accident so it could study alien technology. (To make things stranger, one of them said at a 1989 MUFON conference that he was a paid agent for the government, assigned to spread ridiculous alien stories on purpose, to create uncertainty and spread disinformation, keeping people away from the truth.)

Around 1991, Glenn Dennis, a new self-proclaimed eyewitness, came forward, saying that he had worked at a Roswell funeral home at the time, and that the military had requested “child-sized caskets” for tiny alien bodies. He also added that he had met a nurse who was present at an autopsy of the downed dead aliens. It’s unclear why the military would go through the formality of burying the aliens in teeny tiny caskets, but Dennis’s version of the story took off, transforming into the Roswell story as we all commonly know it, the one where the military has little gray bodies stacked knee-high in a freezer. In later years, popular imagination moved the location of the little gray bodies, iced over like mysterious pearlescent fish sticks, to Area 51.

In 1994, a genuine conspiracy came to light: an Air Force report commissioned by the federal General Accounting Office revealed that the downed balloon was probably debris from a top-secret surveillance program known as Project MOGUL, which sought to record audio evidence of Soviet atomic tests. And in 1997, a second report found a possible explanation for the witnesses who reported seeing alien bodies pulled from the wreckage: the crash-test dummies routinely dropped during other military test operations involving high-altitude balloons. Most mainstream news sources presented the reports as evidence that there were definitively no UFOs and nothing strange about the matter whatsoever. “No bodies. No bulbous heads,” wrote William J. Broad of the New York Times News Service in 1997. “No secret autopsies. No spaceship. No crash. No extraterrestrials or alien artifacts of any sort. And most emphatically of all, no Government cover-up.”

But the 1994 report did provide proof that the Air Force had lied about a top-secret program, blaming a weather balloon and a rancher’s distorting eyes, which fed certainty among UFO researchers that there were other cover-ups yet to be discovered. Similarly, the CIA fueled distrust by only officially acknowledging the existence of Area 51 as late as 2013, after taking eight years to respond to a FOIA request on the development there of the U-2 spy plane.

For UFO researchers, such belated admissions confirmed their belief in the legitimacy of supposedly top-secret documents that had surfaced in 1987, which revealed the existence of a program called Operation Majestic-12 (MJ-12). According to the documents, MJ-12 was formed by President Harry Truman in 1947 to recover an alien spacecraft, examine it, and conceal the whole thing from an unsuspecting public. When the FBI received copies of the MJ-12 report, the agency quickly deemed it bogus. But some UFO enthusiasts still insist MJ-12 is real, covered up just as Project MOGUL was before it.

Thus the history of UFOs is a perfect illustration of the way in which genuine government secrecy feeds citizen paranoia. The disclosure of hidden Air Force programs made just about anything seem possible, and over the next few decades, it was joined by wave after wave of revelations, some of them real and some imagined, until the field of ufology became a morass of competing claims and high suspicion that everyone is a government agent and no one is to be trusted.