by D W Pasulka
technology that could potential y help humans in significant
ways, through either bio- or aerial technologies. I had made
it clear that I wasn’t going there to ascertain the truth of the
2 0 | A M E R IC A N C O SM IC
event. I was going there to document the belief in extrater-
restrial intelligence and the alleged artifacts.
Tyler had told James and me to wear sturdy leather boots
to protect our legs from rattlesnakes. The weather would be
extreme— the sun would be hot and we might get sunburned,
yet the wind chill required us to wear winter jackets. When
we arrived at our destination and took off the blindfolds,
I looked around and laughed at our appearance. James and
I looked ridiculous in puffy jackets, tall leather boots, and
cowboy hats. Tyler, though, was dressed stylishly in a jean
jacket and short boots. He explained that his body tempera-
ture was natural y very warm.
After we had recovered from the trip and sipped some
water, Tyler configured two metal detectors and showed
us a map of where the craft had landed. He said that, when
the crash occurred in 1947, the government had taken the
craft, hidden it away in a secret place, and disguised the
area with tin cans and debris to prevent others from finding
any remaining artifacts. In fact, looking around, the area
was covered over with tons of tin cans. The cans were
rusty and most of them had disintegrated into a powdery
rubble that resembled compost. He further explained that
our metal detectors were special and had been configured
to identify the artifacts. He paused and surveyed the area.
It was a beautiful day with few clouds. The wind whistled
past us, and all was silent except for its sound. We stood
and looked around. There were tumbleweeds, rocks, and
the rust- colored cans strewn as far as I could see. The
landscape was eerie yet beautiful. I was drawn to one place
in particular, as it looked familiar to me. It was a small
mesa. Tyler noticed that I had looked in that direction
several times.
T H E I N V I S I B L E T Y L E R D . | 2 1
“Do you recognize that area?”
“What?” I wasn’t sure where he was going with the
question. He knew I’d never been there.
“This scene was probably recreated in the first episode of
the last season of The X- Files,” he said.
James and I stood there looking at him, incredulous.
“Yes,” he continued. “Someone from their production
team had either been here or knew someone who had. It
makes me wonder if they had an insider on their team.”
What was already a weird occasion just got weirder. I let
Tyler’s statement sink in slowly. He had just said that the
supposed site of a real extraterrestrial craft crash landing,
where I currently stood, was featured in the opening epi-
sode of the last season of The X- Files. I silently scoffed. His
statement sounded more ridiculous than James and I looked
at that moment. I looked at the mesa again. It did look like
the scene from the television show.
It took a moment as my thoughts sped through sev-
eral different steps and scenarios in an attempt to process
Tyler’s statement. It was data, and I felt that I shouldn’t re-
ject it outright. It was then that I felt the click of realization.
This was not so surprising after al . Of course this place was
mythologized in one of the most popular television shows
in history. Of course it would be taken up, interpreted, and
spun, and then projected to millions, perhaps even billions,
of people through the various screens of television, film,
computer, and phone. It was only now that I felt the momen-
tousness of the occasion. My belief in the objective truth of
this site didn’t matter. It had already become true for millions
of people, through media. Tyler and James were right. This
place was a big deal. I was standing on ground zero of the
new religion.
2 2 | A M E R IC A N C O SM IC
C O D E S O F S I L E N C E ,
T H E I N V I S I B L E S , A N D
T H E I N V I TAT I O N TO T H E S I T E
Throughout the day, James and I took opportunities to com-
pare notes. Was Tyler setting us up? If so, for what reason?
Were we pawns in a covert plot to disseminate disinforma-
tion? The answers to these questions didn’t matter to me.
They didn’t matter because I wasn’t there to determine the
truth behind the artifacts, but to observe the formation of
belief in the artifacts and to track the various directions
this belief took. In the history of religions, there are always
artifacts: the Ark of the Covenant, Noah’s Ark, the Shroud
of Turin. The artifacts are important to believers, and they
are controversial for nonbelievers. They spawn religious
communities and, ironical y, fictional portrayals. If we were
there as pawns of a disinformation campaign, I thought, this
revealed that powerful interest groups were still heavily in-
volved in the creation of UFO/ extraterrestrial belief— a fact
that has already been well established.1 I was open to that
possibility and would not have been at all surprised if it were
true now.
Jesus’s presence and message were given many
different interpretations by early Christians, and they
didn’t all agree. In fact, they often vehemently disagreed
with one another. Almost four hundred years after Jesus
was killed by the Roman government, that very govern-
ment decreed Christianity to be a state religion, and they
put their might behind one interpretation and deemed
it universal. Other interpretations became heretical, and
those who advocated for them were sometimes punished
with ridicule— or worse.
T H E I N V I S I B L E T Y L E R D . | 2 3
In this respect, the UFO/ extraterrestrial belief system
was no different: its message had been managed. However,
I was curious to observe how the site and the artifacts in-
formed and influenced the belief systems of my research
partners, two scientists who were at the top of their games,
the pinnacle of their careers. Each had a reputation built on
revolutionary innovation and discoveries that pushed the
boundaries of the possible. Their technologies were cultural
game changers— there was no other way to put it. My quest
was to understand how their beliefs informed the creation
of their technologies and contributed to a larger UFO myth
and narrative.
James and Tyler believed they had evidence, not just
faith, to support their belief in the extraterrestrial source of
the artifacts and the authenticity of the crash site. Prior to this
trip, Tyler had given James an analysis of some of the parts.
James knew what he was looking at, and, according to him,
if this analysis actual y corresponded to the makeup of the
artifacts, then they were one of two things: they were some-
thing t
hat someone paid millions, if not billions, of dol ars to
fabricate or “something” made them somewhere other than
on Earth with technologies we did not understand.
At one point during the day James looked at me and
asked, “Why would someone do that? Spend millions of
dol ars to create these parts, and then just throw them here
in the desert in hope that we would find it? It just doesn’t
make sense.”
James’s track record as a scientist was impeccable, and in
part my quest was motivated by the desire to understand the
connections between his belief and his skil s. He is one of the
leading scientists in the world, and he had the instruments
and the technical skill to determine whether the artifacts
2 4 | A M E R IC A N C O SM IC
were genuinely anomalous. He was eager to locate some of
them, if any remained.
How he and I came to travel to the site was an odd story.
A few months prior to our trip, I had organized a small con-
ference, to which Tyler had not been invited, on the phe-
nomenon. The smal , closed meeting was unique because it
brought together ufologists and scientists with scholars of the
humanities, all of whom studied the phenomenon. The goal
of the conference was to compare notes and learn new things
from people whose fields were different from our own. We
assumed that the things we would learn would include new
data. The most important lesson we learned, however, was
that the codes of conduct that govern academic scholarship
are very different from the codes that govern the behavior of
those who study the phenomenon in an official capacity. This
realization was eye- opening for me and would determine the
scope— and limits— of my research.
The code of conduct for academics demands transpar-
ency. We reveal our sources as a matter of practice and ethics.
It is an ethical imperative that guides our work. I found out
that the code of conduct for half of the conference attendees
was exactly the opposite, and for very good reasons. Scientist-
ufologists are vetted extensively before their employment in
the field and, once hired, take oaths to keep their sources
secret. The code of confidentiality extends throughout the
communities of people associated with the government who
work in specific areas of space research and particularly in
the field concerned with unidentified aerial objects. The one
thing that you are not allowed to discuss, if you are employed
in this capacity, is the very thing you study. They maintain
their silence for important reasons, one of which is national
security. Due to our different codes of ethics, the interface
T H E I N V I S I B L E T Y L E R D . | 2 5
between the academics and the other researchers at the con-
ference was fraught with tension. I learned that I needed to
take my new research partners’ ethical codes seriously and
respect their silences and their confidentialities. If I didn’t,
I could get some people in a lot of trouble. This realization
hit home when, at the conference, I witnessed a breach in the
code of silence.
During one of the sessions an attendee stood up and in-
terrupted a speaker. In the closed academic meetings in which
I had participated, this was not typical behavior. Members of
the audience, including me, were shocked. The usual protocol
dictated that attendees wait until a speaker is finished and
then ask questions. I touched the attendee on the shoulder
and asked him to wait. He refused, politely. The professor
tried to continue, but the attendee lost his polite demeanor
and loudly proclaimed that the professor who was speaking
had no authority to report his findings. The two men began
to vehemently disagree with one another. Dismayed at the
noncollegial nature of the interchange, I quickly called for a
coffee break while the two continued to argue. As attendees
filed out the door for coffee, the two men moved toward me.
From snippets of their conversation I understood that they
had both been aware of a research study that was apparently
not public, but secret. Each had taken an oath to not reveal
the findings from the study, but none of us in the audience
knew anything about it. During the break I spoke to sev-
eral attendees and none of the academics understood what
had happened. They were so unaware of the code of silence
that the others had to observe— it was so far removed from
their own fields and ethical codes— that the small spat may
as well not even have happened. For me, it was just the begin-
ning of an education about the lives of people who study the
2 6 | A M E R IC A N C O SM IC
phenomenon from the inside, the invisibles—people whose
names are washed from the internet on a regular basis. Their
merits and accomplishments are never to be known. They
are, literal y, removed from history as if they never existed.
On the day after I got back from the conference, I re-
ceived a phone call from Tyler. Now that I had begun to un-
derstand a little more about the phenomenon, he would like
to take me to a special place in New Mexico where I might
understand a little more about the phenomenon’s physical
nature. The timing of his invitation was odd, and I wondered
if he was somehow aware of what happened at the confer-
ence. I was suspicious of him. I told him that I would go to
the place in New Mexico if I could take my research partner,
James. Tyler said no. He explained that he needed to ob-
tain special permission to take me, and that it was out of the
question to take another person. I understood. However,
I was not going to go without another person, and James,
a scientist who studies the phenomenon, was my choice.
Plus, James was an academic, and therefore I understood his
framework— transparency— and he understood mine. In a
sense, James was familiar and I trusted him. I emailed him
and asked if he would go if Tyler consented.
James’s reply was instant: “Hel , yes.”
We both waited for Tyler to change his mind.
After a few days, I received a note from Tyler. He had
warmed to the idea of having James on the adventure. When
I told James, he was elated. In the back of my mind I had
known that Tyler would want James to go on the trip, because
if anyone in the world could analyze a piece of alleged alien
crash debris and determine anything about it, it would be
him. I knew that Tyler would research James, and he would
come to this conclusion. I didn’t know it at the time, but Tyler
T H E I N V I S I B L E T Y L E R D . | 2 7
was on a quest to understand the nature of the artifacts, and
I was a part of that quest.
M E E T I N G T Y L E R : V I RT UA L LY
I’d put off meeting Tyler even though acquaintances had told
me that he wanted to meet me. He was what I call a “meta-
experiencer.” When I started my research in
January 2012,
I thought that the people I would interview and learn about
would be experiencers, people who believed they either saw
unidentified aerial phenomena or had contact, in some way,
with their inhabitants. I quickly learned that experiencers
attracted people other than just those like me who were in-
terested in learning about their experiences and beliefs. They
also attracted scientists. The scientists were interested in what
the experiencers saw and how they saw it, and often applied
this information to their own work. I coined the term “meta-
experiencers” to describe this group of scientists. I cautiously
observed them, noting that most were reticent to admit they
believed in the reality of UFOs, but they readily scooped data
from the primary experiencers. Tyler was one such person,
an employee in the space industry.
I was suspicious of Tyler because he was different
from most of the other meta- experiencers. For one thing,
he was very wealthy. I’d heard that he traveled in a private
jet. He drove an expensive sports car. He was rumored
to be an MMA, or mixed martial arts, fighter, and to have
competed in several publicized fights. Yet it wasn’t his wealth
or his hobbies that caused me to be suspicious. It was his
affiliations. There were other rumors that he had worked for
several government agencies. I avoided him because of these
2 8 | A M E R IC A N C O SM IC
rumors. I knew from previous scholars’ work that when one
scratched the surface of the topic of UFO events, eventual y
one would find that governments were also interested in the
topic, and one might cross paths with agents.2 The thought
of government agents wanting to meet me was disturbing,
mostly because of what I’d seen on television, which, granted,
was based on stereotypes. I was happy, however, to carry on a
correspondence over email, but even that was different from
the typical email correspondence.
My first communication from Tyler that was not part
of an email thread directed to several recipients was a text
message. It was the longest text message I had ever re-
ceived, full of information about how he came to study the
phenomenon. He sent videos of where he worked in New
Mexico, Florida, and other places. He also sent videos of his
conversations with friends. These were very odd. His friends