Like the song says, I’m not the revolutionary kind. My father was a microbiologist, and my mom is retired from a long career in education. I love the way they brought us up, the values, to coin a phrase, that they taught us — in particular, a vast respect for intellectual freedom, especially the freedom to be flat-out wrong. So I was all too willing to put this tenet — there’s no such thing as a UFO, and you investigators are a bunch of morons — to a thorough, supple and fair examination. I didn’t expect that professional UFO investigators would return the favor. But I did believe that if I could just get one of them to think twice, to feel the hook in his cheek, I’d have done my duty as offspring and skeptic.

Even if I did succeed in adding a tincture of rationality to their brains, they'd still call themselves "ufologists." That title’s central absurdity cannot be escaped. Being a professional UFO investigator is like being a professional phrenologist. I mean, who’s licensing the schools? How do you do a double-blind test, or repeat conditions, or even true your instruments? Of course, this is all blather and nonsense to the ufologist. It merely "muddies the waters."

The investigators, Robert and Ben, showed up at my apartment one night in sand-colored flak jackets. I was ready. I had rehearsed my story, and had determined what the key phrases would be. I replaced the psychedelic artwork on the walls with family photos. The UFO pictures were on the coffee table.

My bet was that they would help me deceive them. "What did the object look like?" asked Robert. "Was its apparent size that of a basketball? A small car? Did it flutter, spin, blink, pulsate, or glow? Did it absorb or emit anything?" Finally, at his behest, I began to draw a picture. I feigned difficulty in depicting the way the lights were arranged. "Like this?" he asked, taking the pen from my hand and adding some beams of light. "Um, yeah," I said.

My UFO at Work

Every question they posed would make no sense at all in a world where I had not seen an actual otherworldly craft; not once did they ever ask, "Did you in fact launch a cheap plastic UFO and take pictures of it, or do you think somebody else did?" The questions revolved around the usual clichés: Did my car radio get weird on me? Were there dogs in the area, and did they act up?

That’s what frustrated me the most: that this was not a dialogue between worldviews, but a monkey trial, whose outcome had been determined before they had even arrived. Or at least it would have been, had I bothered to defend some basic scientific principles. Instead, I wanted to see how far we could take this, not because I got any particular joy out of sneering at the dumb ol’ yokels, but out of a sheer dispassionate interest in people so thoroughly different from me. That may be a bit self-flattering. But as the interview went on and my story got weaker and more inconsistent, I was amazed at their unwavering will to believe. Finally, disillusioned and all lied out, I gave them my photo negatives (never to return from their "lab in Texas" again — good thing I’m not paranoid), shook hands, and went home with a great party story under my belt.

I wasn’t that upset when the pictures disappeared from their site without explanation or retraction. Months later I even went to one of their meetings with the real photographic evidence in hand — clear shots of the craft in the cold, unblinking light of my apartment — ready to show them what actually happened. Robert was the keynote speaker that night. After his speech, I let the crowd thin out before approaching him. He looked at me, and his eyes shifted slightly as he approached. A smile came to his face, and I responded in kind. But he brushed quickly past to greet some fellow traveler near the refreshments, and I realized that once again I had completely misread that smile.

Note: You can still read the original report that piqued their interest and the wholly unprompted (really!) corroborative report of some friends who happened to be out that night.