The number of UFO-related conspiracy theories is dizzying and too numerous for us to explore each one. Aliens have been linked to everything from the JFK assassination to cattle mutilations (extraterrestrials perform bizarre, bloodless surgeries on livestock, generally taking, for some arcane purpose, their eyes, tongues, and anal cavities). The point is that none of these assertions can ever be settled: there is no evidence the government can produce that will satisfy UFO buffs, and UFO researchers have no evidence to prove any of their claims definitively to a skeptical public. The CIA and the FBI have both supplied documents that outline their full involvement in the alien question, they argue. In 2013, the British government declassified files on its own UFO unit, which was shuttered in 2009 (a report recommended that move because the unit “is consuming increasing resources but produces no valuable defence output”).

The CIA concludes its website’s capsule history of the subject on a bit of a resigned note: “Like the JFK assassination conspiracy theories, the UFO issue probably will not go away soon, no matter what the Agency does or says. The belief that we are not alone in the universe is too emotionally appealing and the distrust of our government is too pervasive to make the issue amenable to traditional scientific studies of rational explanation and evidence.”

Richard Dolan, the UFO researcher, is concerned with what he calls falsifiability. Accepting the claims of someone like Goode feels more like religious faith to him, and it makes him nervous. Dolan, who’s also a self-styled historian, laid out his own theories in dozens of articles: that the national security state is concerned about “real objects with extraordinary capabilities,” as he put it in a 2002 piece, and that there’s also evidence that the UFOs, as described by witnesses, do things that human technology isn’t capable of doing. He and other more traditional ufologists try to back up their claims with declassified government memos, eyewitness photos of purported UFOs, interviews with ex-military personnel: much of it more closely echoes traditional scholarship, although the results are eclectic.

“I do think some of these self-described whistleblowers aren’t particularly credible,” Dolan said, rather grimly, standing in a hallway of the hotel in Summerlin and making no particular effort to keep his voice down. “Believing such stories without genuine evidence takes us down a dangerous road within an already treacherous field,” Dolan wrote in a Facebook post in 2017, one “that is constantly in the crosshairs of a skeptical establishment.” His fear of foul play—government infiltration meant to discredit and confuse the UFO disclosure movement—is grounded in the past. “In US history, we’re replete with provocateurs and disinformation coming from US government channels.”

Dolan isn’t being paranoid entirely without reason. He points to Cass Sunstein, who worked in the White House under President Obama. In a 2008 paper, “Conspiracy Theories,” Sunstein and coauthor Adrian Vermeule suggest that “false conspiracy theories” about the government should be countered with “cognitive infiltration”: paid agents who plant correct information among antigovernment and conspiratorial groups. There’s no evidence that the idea was ever executed, but the proposition was enough to make various “truth communities” very nervous.

Dolan’s suspicions echo those of earlier UFO researchers. In his 1991 book Revelations: Alien Contact and Human Deception, famed UFO researcher and computer scientist Jacques Vallée wrote that he had come to believe many UFO events were hoaxes, engineered sometimes by delusional private citizens and sometimes by government agencies with bigger aims in mind. “This bears emphasizing,” he wrote. “Some UFO sightings are covert experiments in the manipulation of the belief systems of the public. And some cases simply did not happen. The stories about them, numerous rumors of crashed saucers and burned aliens, were not so much the result of delusions as the product of deception: rumors deliberately planted in the eager minds of gullible believers to hide more real facts about which it was felt that the public and the scientific community had no ‘need to know.’”

The idea that some UFO sightings are fabricated to draw people away from the real truth still holds some sway. Lorin Cutts is another UFO researcher I’ve come to know, someone who believes in the existence of alien beings even as he doubts and detests almost every facet of modern UFO theorizing. He takes a complex middle ground on the UFO issue, siding with neither Dolan nor Goode. “Extra-terrestrials almost certainly exist,” he told me in an email exchange. “What they have to do with the phenomenon of UFOs is questionable and largely a cultural and mythological construct—I don’t believe that we can know for certain right now.”

I think any serious student of the UFO subject would do well to put these alleged whistleblowers, secret space program aficionados and the click-bait vultures that promote them to one side. Sure, people will always listen and be entertained by them, but let’s call it what it is—ufotainment. I’m always amused when people hold up one whistleblower as credible, simply because of apparently corroborating stories, whilst the next is deemed laughable. Almost none of them have provided any credible evidence as to what they are supposedly revealing. In that respect they are all even. The fact that two or more stories may apparently corroborate one another is not corroboration of anything. How easy would it be for individuals—or the intelligence community—to fabricate such a set up?

In a way, the suspicions felt by Cutts—an apparently levelheaded person—reveal the profound and continuing legacy of the US government’s tactics of disinformation. COINTELPRO was, after all, a disinformation campaign created by the FBI to disrupt and discredit American activist groups. The fact that UFO researchers—and Pizzagaters, and every other conspiracy community—are so paranoid about plants and saboteurs in their ranks shows just how well that program worked to destabilize many different kinds of dialogue and research.

So what will bring all of this arguing and debating and finger-pointing to an end? UFO researchers call it “disclosure,” the time when the world’s governments will finally reveal everything they know about UFOs, extraterrestrials, and alien technology. It is a day that they yearn for and urgently seek: their talk about it echoes the language of end-times preachers who describe a coming climactic battle, a grand revelation, a final decisive moment when humanity will be divided into the drowned and the saved.

John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, has been a vocal advocate for disclosure. When he served as Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, he told CNN, he asked the president to disclose “some information about some of these things, and in particular, some information about what was going on at Area 51.” Asked if he believes in aliens, he responded, “There are a lot of planets out there. The American people can handle the truth.”

Podesta promised that if he became Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff, he would renew his efforts to declassify government records on Area 51. And even Clinton herself signaled a willingness to entertain disclosure, telling one radio interviewer, “I want to open the files as much as we can.” When she was asked if she believed in UFOs, she responded, “I don’t know. I want to see what the information shows.” But, she added, “There’s enough stories out there that I don’t think everybody is just sitting in their kitchen making them up.” Coming from a careful, centrist politician, Clinton’s position signals just how far alien belief has gained acceptability.

Beyond the campy, Bigfootish novelty of aliens and UFOs, even the most amateur and outlandish researchers pose questions that are important and relevant—about government secrecy and wasteful military spending, and about the real challenges of compelling transparency when it comes to things like defense programs and military innovations.

Sometimes, out of nowhere, we have had stunning and serious proof that the government continued to investigate UFOs and has seen some things it can’t quite explain. In December 2017, the New York Times published a story revealing that from 2007 to 2012 (at least), the Department of Defense carefully buried a secret, $22-million-a-year program in the budget called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. It was devoted to investigating sightings of unidentified aircraft, created at the behest of Nevada Democrat Harry Reid, the former Senate majority leader. A Pentagon spokesperson insisted to the Times that the program ended entirely in 2012, while a former administrator, Luis Elizondo, claimed that it continued in partnership with officials from the navy and the CIA. (Elizondo went on to work for Tom DeLonge, a guitarist with the band Blink-182 who became a UFO activist.)

Together with its story, the Times ran a remarkable video, released by the Defense Department in response to a FOIA request: a 2004 encounter between two navy fighter jets and a whitish object, one that was moving very, very fast. “Look at that thing!” one pilot exclaimed. “It’s rotating.” Intriguingly, the Times report claimed that a Las Vegas warehouse was storing a collection of “metal alloys and other materials” that were said to be recovered from “unidentified aerial phenomena.” As part of the program, the paper added, “Researchers also studied people who said they had experienced physical effects from encounters with the objects and examined them for any physiological changes.”

The idea that the government was storing alien alloys in a Vegas warehouse was, well, mind-boggling. “Someone explain to me the alien alloys before I fucking explode,” Tom Ley at the sports website Deadspin wrote, speaking for a lot of people. Strangely, though, the Times story didn’t make a big splash in the UFO world, likely because it revealed what UFO researchers would have said they already knew. Instead, there was a sort of quiet satisfaction, a sense that here, at last, disclosure was perhaps upon us. (For Dolan and a few other researchers, there was also skepticism. He specifically charged that the paper has “a history of cooperation with the U.S.-military intelligence community,” which is a reasonable point. He suspected that the government, feeling unable to ignore this particular UFO story any longer, cooperated with the Times as “an exercise in damage control.”)

The Times story did uncover some potential lines of inquiry about questionable government spending. Most of the program’s funding went to just one contractor: Bigelow Airspace, founded by Robert Bigelow, a friend of Reid’s, which was supposedly keeping watch over the alien alloys. And it confirmed that the government was, until very recently, interested in investigating craft sightings, viewing it as an urgent national security priority.

“This is about science and national security,” Reid tweeted in response to the Times story. “If America doesn’t take the lead in answering these questions, others will.”

Goode’s not holding his breath. “True disclosure can only come from the people,” he told his MUFON audience. “If we sit back and wait for someone to walk to a podium and make an announcement, I think we’re just going to keep waiting.” A core part of Goode’s message has always been that disclosure is nearly upon us. He and other UFO researchers have long claimed that shows like Star Trek are part of Hollywood trying to soften us up for the big reveal (Hollywood is, of course, in on the whole thing). “Recently Hollywood has decided we’re ready, because they’ve made us ready,” Goode told his audience six months before the Times story appeared. “But people finding out about crimes against humanity is really going to flip a lot of people out.”

Next to the lecture hall where the talks took place, there was a big room filled with tables and merchandise: DVDs, books, and a set of lumpy handmade alien pendants and figurines. In the next room, a UFO art show with creatively shaped interpretations of planets kept me occupied for far too long.

As I walked among the misshapen ceramic aliens and chatted with the vendors, I felt genuinely glad to be at MUFON after weeks spent in the more stressful company of Nazis and Pizzagaters and Sandy Hook truthers. It occurred to me that UFO lore might represent conspiracy culture at its best: our interest in the hidden, the unknown, the ineffable, the magic of what’s hidden and yet to be revealed. “The UFO mystery holds a mirror to our own fantasies,” Vallée once wrote. “It expresses our secret longings for a wisdom that might come down from the stars in new, improved, easy to-use packaging, to reveal the secrets of life and tell us, at long last, who we are.”

Except that the world of UFO researchers is not quite so innocent or depoliticized since they too believe they’re being watched, surveilled, and deceived by the government. We know that the government does do this to targeted groups, but I was bothered by the suspicions of the UFO enthusiasts as I slowly drifted into hypothermia in that air-conditioned ballroom. I kept thinking rather persistently about Black Lives Matter, a group that has been met with forceful government repression, and about the Native activists at Standing Rock, who were subject to real surveillance and infiltration: recall the firm Energy Transfer Partners, which retained the company TigerSwan to surveil activists with drones and actual spies, who in turn fed their information to local and federal law enforcement.

There is—at the risk of being unkind—something indulgent and self-absorbed about a group of people engaged in a voluntary recreational subculture declaring that they are government targets. COINTELPRO aimed at wrecking the lives, families, and psyches of activists. It takes a profound level of self-importance to claim without evidence that the feds are after you.

Along with self-absorption, MUFON’s leadership has also demonstrated some abhorrent racial politics, right in step with the Trump era. In May 2017, John Ventre, the state MUFON director for Pennsylvania and Delaware, was furious about a Netflix show called Dear White People—about a group of black college students navigating the often racially obtuse world of Ivy League universities—writing on Facebook, “I don’t find this funny. The last thing blacks want is for white males to organize and that’s not too far away!” Ventre went on to fulminate that white males are an “absolute target of the government” with “illegal affirmative action,” as well as a target of the media, since there are interracial couples on television and because white men are “portrayed as incompetent.”

Ventre concluded by inferring that black people are genetically predisposed to violence (“Google serotonin by race”) and also stupid: “Everything in this world was created by Europeans and Americans,” he wrote, incorrectly. “F’ing blacks didn’t even have a calendar, a wheel or a numbering system until the Brits showed up.”

The reaction was widespread outrage by UFO researchers and demands for Ventre’s ouster. But Jan Harzan, the organization’s director, responded defensively, writing in a now-deleted post, “Who is worse, the person posting, or the haters hating? If you need further evidence of this just watch the nightly news where depending on which channel you watch people line up behind one side of an issue, or the other, and then begin yelling at each other.” Harzan also added, “Finally, it is okay to disagree with others, but let’s challenge ourselves to dialogue with that person to first understand their rationale for the opinion they are stating, and then begin a discussion with them on the subject. For only through dialogue and discussion do we advance as a civilization.”

If that was a reference to Ventre’s posts, it sounded like a challenge to consider his opinion that the “f’ing blacks” didn’t have wheels until Europeans showed up to help them out. There’s being insular, and then there’s being toxically out of touch and willing to tolerate absurdly hateful commentary from your leadership.

Two MUFON investigators resigned in the wake of Ventre’s comments; one of them, James Clarkson, called them a last straw in his increasing disaffection with the group and said Harzan’s lack of response made remaining in the organization “morally unacceptable.” Both Clarkson and the other investigator who left, Rich Hoffman, also expressed unease that MUFON had been infiltrated at a high level by what Clarkson called “mysterious people.” They were specifically referring to a Washington State New Age teacher named J. Z. Knight, who has been called a “cult leader” and who claims to channel a supernatural entity named Ramtha, a “35,000-year-old warrior spirit.” Knight is a member of MUFON’s Inner Circle, an advisory board open to anyone who’s donated more than $5,000 to the organization.

In the end, the stakes in any MUFON controversy are questionable. The UFO world is concerned with its own dramas, villains, and celebrities, and these do not often leak out beyond that world, barring genuinely newsworthy developments. UFO researchers pull data points from the wider society when it suits them, and entirely retreat otherwise, and seem largely incapable of doing harm: its adherents do not harass people, and the questions they raise about official secrecy are truly interesting. The call for the government to simply and directly tell everything it knows is of value to us all, and there is something both sad and a little heroic about the UFO-curious as they devotedly await the truth.

Take Gary McKinnon, who, in 2002, got tired of waiting. Someone was going to force the government to come clean, he decided, and that someone would evidently have to be him. A Scottish-born man with Asperger’s syndrome, McKinnon did what seemed reasonable to him at the time: he hacked into army, navy, air force, and NASA computers to rummage through their files. He also left a note on a military website reading, “Your security is crap.” On another, he referred to himself by the name Solo and refered to 9/11 conspiracy theories, writing, “US foreign policy is akin to Government-sponsored terrorism these days.… It was not a mistake that there was a huge security stand down on September 11 last year.… I am SOLO. I will continue to disrupt at the highest levels.”

At the MUFON conference years later, McKinnon delivered a talk via Skype from his home in London in which he told the crowd dryly, “It was an extreme act, I can see that now.” He believed that the US authorities were covering up critical information not just about alien contact, but about “free energy” and other alien technologies that could make human life immeasurably better. He was vividly aware of what Britons call “fuel poverty,” where thousands of people die each bitter winter because they can’t afford heating fuel. Free energy, he thought, would directly alleviate suffering and save lives.

The government saw it differently, saying McKinnon had deleted critical files, caused $566,000 in damage, and shut down for three days a computer network that served the military in Washington. He was indicted for computer fraud in November 2002.

At first, the government tried carrot over stick, saying that if he voluntarily came to the United States to face charges, he would get “six months community service,” he told the MUFON crowd. “That turned out to be an inaccurate estimate.” McKinnon learned that he was more likely to face seventy years. “I lost my career in IT due to this,” he said. “I got my forklift license and got a job in a local luggage warehouse. Lost that job due to publicity, lost the room I rented, lost my girlfriend of twelve years. I was feeling pretty crappy, to understate it hugely.”

In 2005, McKinnon managed to get a job with the London branch of an American company called—of all things—Electronic Data Systems. He completed one day at work, then returned home to find what he calls “three gigantic men” who identified themselves as the Scotland Yard extradition squad. McKinnon told the British journalist Jon Ronson that the charges terrified him due to the brutality of American jails, where he feared he would be raped.

The British courts granted an order for McKinnon’s extradition in July 2006, but he and his family fought it. In 2008, his lawyers announced that he’d been medically assessed and formally diagnosed with Asperger’s. “Nobody likes being diagnosed of any kind of syndrome, but it did explain a lot,” he said to the MUFON audience. “It’s a medical condition. People tend to have a hyper-inflated sense of truth and justice.”

In 2012, after an exhausting game of extradition tennis, then–home secretary Theresa May announced that the extradition request would be blocked. “Mr. McKinnon is accused of serious crimes,” she told the House of Commons. “But there is also no doubt that he is seriously ill.… He has Asperger’s syndrome, and suffers from depressive illness. Mr. McKinnon’s extradition would give rise to such a high risk of him ending his life that a decision to extradite would be incompatible with Mr. McKinnon’s human rights.” The Obama administration was “disappointed” with the decision but would respect it. McKinnon would still be arrested and brought to trial if he ever stepped foot in the U.S.

Years later, peering through a webcam into a country he can never visit, McKinnon knew how it all sounded. “To many people it seemed like a mad idea, but to me it seemed like a noble cause,” he said. “It was very easy—I wish it hadn’t been so easy.”

In the end, McKinnon was still frustrated that it was even necessary, in his eyes, to do what he did. “Secrets are never good in any relationship,” he told the MUFON crowd, and I caught myself nodding. “But secrets kept from both the people and the state by forces unknown are the worst kind of secrets.”