American Cosmic

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

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  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.

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  “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.

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  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.

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  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

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  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

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  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

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  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

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  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