Up Up, Down Down

by Cheston Knapp

  I would struggle to articulate this for years to come, but it was through these nightly chats that I first intuited a fundamental datum of my spiritual whatever: my experiences of profundity would likely be more literary than literal. The sudden eclipse of small concerns, the sweeping eradication of ephemera, the ecstasy of insight—these would be the product, most often, of language. For me language, in one form or another, would be the catalyst and coefficient of the spirit. Looking back, I sense that this was obvious to the others, who even then were up on their Luther, but for me it landed with the freshness of an epiphany. And that it serves as the soil out of which this realization grew has made it hard for me not to understand this house and my time in it as an allegory, like something from The Pilgrim’s Progress. An allegory for what, exactly, remains forever on the tip of my tongue, but our little community encouraged me in this in everything down to its name. Christians love them a ponderous handle and our program was no different. It was called, simply, Cornerstone. Was because it no longer exists. And all irony aside, I was surprised to discover how much it disturbed me, when I learned recently that Cornerstone had been pulled. Its total absence on the organization’s website suggested an erasure of a deeper and more metaphorical sort. Which is of course to say that it suggested an absence or erasure in me.

  * * *

  In 1974, having finished a degree in library science, Keith was working as a clerk for the Portland public school system. That’s where several books about UFOs came across his desk. “It turns out that 1973 was a huge year. Lots of activity,” he said. “So in ’74 the publishers were responding to the public’s interest.” He took the books home and started reading. “Unfortunately for me, I kept reading.”

  We’d met at his home, in part so he could give me a tour of his library. The shelves that lined his entire basement held over fifteen hundred books. The lion’s share were about UFOs, but almost all of them covered one of many topics that fall under the organizational golf umbrella of the paranormal. Telepathy, ghosts, out-of-body experiences, clairvoyance, etc. By his reckoning, fewer than thirty people in the world could rival his collection. (Of those thirty, it was my guess that somewhere in the ballpark of zero had been at the MUFON meeting.)

  “I’m not an experiencer-type person. For me it’s all up here,” he continued. “I want to figure it all out from a rational point of view.”

  According to Keith, upwards of ninety-five percent of UFO sightings can be explained away by simple scientific means, but those that tease and tantalize him are the remaining five percent. The truly mysterious ones. The ones he feels mainstream science throws out with the bathwater.

  “They’ve shipped us to the intellectual ghetto,” he said.

  He writes on his website, “UFOs have not been proved beyond a reasonable scientific doubt to exist. The scientific establishment must engage in serious, long-term study of UFOs to prove this one way or the other. Sadly, the scientific establishment has decided to be intellectually dishonest and avoid this study.” Keith is delighted to point out that there’s a rich history of such scientific disregard, of discoveries or breakthroughs that, when first presented, were overlooked by the scientific community of their time, and remained so in some cases for as long as a century. That, in this way, scientific truth can hang on human (read: flawed) consensus as much as the work itself.

  Official scientific studies have been done, though. The most famous is probably Project Blue Book, which was run by the air force. But they’ve all ended badly, and none worse than Blue Book, which in over twenty years rolled through director after director. With each bringing a different degree of interest and commitment, rigor varied—to say the least. And in 1969, after receiving the results of a review led by a nuclear physicist named Edward Condon, the government closed it down. The Condon Report, which ran over fourteen hundred pages, concluded, once and for all: “Nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge . . . Further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified in the expectation that science will be advanced thereby.”

  The government’s investigation is, of course, shrouded in controversy—the UFO phenomenon, according to Keith & co., is bound by a slipknot of the paranormal and government’s involvement. That equivocating “probably” screams out to them. The study’s methodology begs many questions, is fodder for doubt.

  “If you read the Condon Report closely,” Keith said, “you discover that it contradicts many of Project Blue Book’s own findings, set out in special report number fourteen.”

  Regardless of the counterarguments against it, the Condon Report sounded a death knell for official government participation in researching UFOs and therewith shattered UFOlogists’ hope for mainstream scientific acceptance and legitimacy. Since then, all serious study of UFOs has been driven underground, and is pursued only by maverick scientists, who in so doing risk societal stigma and even their careers.

  What knowledge there is about UFOs, then, is a mixed bag of accurate information, misinformation, and what Keith & co. call disinformation, which is false information spread by the government and other powerful organizations, like Hollywood, to deliberately mislead. Things get a little tricky here, because in order to be more readily believed, disinformation is spun out of partially true and patently false information. Take the Men in Black franchise, for example, which has its roots in the actual reported appearances of such mysterious men at or just after supposed sightings. The idea here is that as long as the public associates these stories with fiction, with make-believe—and note the sinister overtones of that phrase—there’s less of a chance that they’ll take them seriously. In the eyes of the government, in other words, these phenomena are acceptable as objects of entertainment, but not of serious study. It’s also common knowledge among UFOlogists that the government employs debunkers. Debunking itself has roots in a 1953 study commissioned by the CIA, the Robertson Panel, which concluded that a public relations campaign should be undertaken to “debunk” UFOs in order to reduce public interest in them.

  Cutting through the blubber-like buildup, unraveling the truth from all the lies, can take years and years of intense investigation. Years of believing that your study, all your patient effort and sustained concern, will end in some meaningful insight or discovery, a Eureka moment.

  When I asked Keith how he thought things would change if UFOlogy were granted the merit badge of science, he still landed on a note of skepticism, of uncertainty.

  “I don’t think rationality is ultimately up to the task of giving us a full understanding of the UFO or paranormal phenomena. But we’re very far from knowing that. I can tell you what, though, it’s amazing what you won’t know if you don’t ask.”

  * * *

  The sky watch run by Keith’s friend Randy was scheduled to meet at 4:00 p.m. in Nansen Summit Park, located on the small, flattened top of a dormant shield volcano in Lake Oswego, Oregon. It’s less a park than a scenic viewpoint, really. I’d read enough by then not to be surprised by much of anything relating to UFOs, including the fact that we were to meet during the day.

  I was the first to arrive. The park has one bench and I stood on it and took in the view. I could see almost all of Portland, out to the Cascade and Coast mountain ranges in either direction. The sky felt high up and was quite blue and seemed to go on forever. Only a little haze hung out around the mountains. Keith had told me to bring a camera, so I’d toted along my wallet-size point-and-shoot.

  Going in, I didn’t know what to expect from the sky watch. Would I see something? Something like what Arnold had seen in his plane? Something spectacular and conclusive? And more to the point: Would I believe it if I did? And if not, why? “Some persons,” William James writes, “never are, and possibly never under any circumstances could be, converted.”

  I sat down on the bench and scanned the sky and, sure enough, there was something hovering out to the west. I literally sat on the edge of my seat. Squinted.
A bubble rose in my chest. I got my camera out and switched it on and made small adjustments to my position in an attempt to bring the object into sharper relief. The object grew larger in the sky, drew closer. The bubble further rose. Before I could take the shot, though, the thrill of the moment passed. I burped. It was just a helicopter.

  Keith arrived with his camera hung around his neck, his hand out to support its two-foot telephoto lens. He had a camera bag slung from his shoulder and wore a vest and a sunhat. He looked like he was ready for a safari or, I don’t know, a dinner theater adaptation of Jumanji.

  “You the only one here?” he asked when he made it to the top.

  “Yeah,” I said, sheepishly tucking my camera back in my bag.

  “A couple months ago there were almost thirty of us.” Keith had talked about this, how people flow through organizations like MUFON, how public interest comes and goes. He seemed accustomed to the ups and downs and didn’t dwell on the absence of other stratosphere hunters. He got going about how Randy had a psychic connection to UFOs. They seemed to materialize whenever he was around. And it was only a matter of time before more people figured that out. Although hopefully not the wrong people, if I caught his drift.

  “Here he comes.” Keith nodded toward a middle-aged man wearing a black T-shirt. On it was a squiggly lined representation of the Eiffel Tower, done in silver, and was that glitter?

  “Where is everyone?” Randy asked.

  “Looks like it’ll just be the three of us,” Keith said, and made the introductions.

  I told them about my experience with the helicopter and they laughed.

  “Don’t worry,” Randy said. “Last time we were out here we got blimped.”

  Randy hails from Tennessee and has a lacquerous southern accent. UFOs were a relatively new fascination of his. A few years back he’d had a close encounter: while out on a routine walk around the neighborhood, a UFO had buzzed him. He wasn’t as shaken as you might assume, though—he’s got a storied history with all things mystical and occult. He talked for a while about something called a kundalini experience and the fire snake that sits coiled at the bottom of his spine and the opening of his third eye—all of which well predated his study of UFOs. And he’s seen auras since he was a young boy. “I saw a red one around my nephew,” he said, but broke off in the middle of that thought and hoisted his bazooka lens to the sky and, according to an unknowable logic, fired off a scad of shots. Keith followed suit. Their shutters sounded like automatic weapons built for Lilliputians. What was happening? Was this my moment? What did they see? They stopped before I could zero in on what they were shooting and Randy resumed as though nothing had happened: “And he turned out to be a pretty famous artist.”

  “Hold up a sec. Whoa,” I said. “What was that all about?”

  Randy explained that he doesn’t actually see many of the UFOs he captures on his camera. They’re either too small for the naked eye or too fast. In order to observe them he relies on a deeper mode of vision, one that, when pressed, he couldn’t get too specific about. In practice, though, his methodology involves “banging away at the sky” with his camera and then checking out later what he’d caught. But although I knew this, I was still never able to accustom myself to the abruptness with which the conversation would break and the bazooka lenses would be hoisted skyward. I always got swept up into the dialectic of excitement and disappointment, a bummer of a seesaw to find yourself on.

  “We’re gonna ask to see a UFO here today,” Randy said, more than once. He sounded a lot like charismatic preachers I’d heard, petitioning God for some minor miracle.

  “I’m sick of the round ones,” Keith said. “I want to see a triangle.”

  I asked them what their families thought of their interest in UFOs, of the sky watches and the MUFON meetings, of all the books and conferences.

  “Just a weirdo thing Dad’s into,” Keith said.

  “Mine just thinks I’m delusional,” Randy echoed.

  After an hour and a half without seeing anything promising on his camera’s miniscreen, Randy suggested we go back to his place to check out some recent photos, including ones that Keith hadn’t seen yet. His house was a ten-minute drive from the park and when we arrived, Randy had us take off our shoes before we headed upstairs to his office. His house smelled of stale potpourri and I wondered whether Randy had left all the lights off by accident or if maybe I’d missed something and it was significant somehow. Keith and I took our spots on a small couch in the dark office and Randy booted up his computer. We then watched as he scrolled through thousands and thousands of pictures of the sky. As thumbnails, they looked like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle from hell. But when they were resized to fit the screen, you could see little flaws in each image. Randy would then use a magnifying feature to make the flaw larger and larger. In some you could make out a semicircular shape surrounded by explosions of color or light. Some had distinctly nipple-like excrescences about their centers. Others still were little more than smudges of color, like a rainbow imprecisely remembered. For the next twenty minutes or so, Randy continued to show us strange picture after strange picture. And when he said he wanted to show me “the armada,” Keith practically cooed. It was on another flash drive, though, and he had to dig through a plastic bag full of them to find it. He finally did and pulled up a picture of eleven black circles in front of a wall of clouds. Through the series he had captured the unbelievable movement of these circles. The pictures were literally incredible. Some appeared to hover as though stationary, while others skipped around to different parts of the sky, as though part of some four-dimensional game of Whac-A-Mole.

  I looked over at Keith, who said, matter-of-factly and without taking his eyes off the screen, “Out of this world.”

  And yet as I left Randy’s house and made my way home, I couldn’t shake my uncertainty, my doubt. I’d been shown something, something compelling, but what had that really been? The pictures opened a new line of questioning in me. What happens to a digital camera’s sensor when you fire off fifty-some-odd shots while swiftly arcing the lens across the sky? Couldn’t that account for the smudges? The flaws? The nipple-like excrescences? Weren’t Randy and Keith placing quite a bit of faith in their cameras? And wasn’t there a deeper irony or antinomy at work here? Weren’t they on a fool’s errand, trying to prove the existence of something suprascientific through science’s offspring, that is, technology? Could it be that what I’d witnessed in Randy’s small office was a textbook example of confirmation bias? That is, were they seeing exactly what they wanted to see? Or was the problem mine? Was I, as I’d worried in college, classed among James’s unconvertible?

  * * *

  It’s sort of like this: on Martha’s Vineyard, I fished. A surprise, considering I hadn’t been a keen or avid angler growing up. I’d never been able to manage the inlander’s embrace of eddying rivers and boggy lakes. Their humid musk and the mysterious moss that lurks electric green alongshore, the sinister chirr of dragonflies and the neon whine of outboard motors: these were charms I was, and perhaps still am, too fussy to appreciate. Yet stand me up to my hammies in ocean chop or on craggy rocks seaside and hand me a ten-foot pole and I’m as happy as a clam in heat. The two-handed casting action was a lot like throwing a lacrosse ball, which I was skilled at then, and following the weighted tackle along its parabolic flight until it plooped far off and silently into the water satisfied a desire I didn’t know existed inside me. There were days I woke before the sky to head up to the rocks at West Chop, and evenings after work that I’d drive out to the Chappy surf. I’d typically go alone, but every so often another house member would join me. I remember one evening in Menemsha with Grace in particular: she sat on the beach while I fished and we discussed Plato’s ladder of love. Later we got clam chowder and watched on as the horizon drank the sun under.

  The fish I caught that summer numbered precisely zero. No striper, no mackerel, and not a single blue. No bonito. I tried new lures; tried bai
t; tried lighter sinkers, then heavier ones, then lighter again. Still nothing. The internet existed in 2002, but I’m not sure the house had a connection and, regardless, those two and a half months yield no memories of my being online, where I might’ve gone to find out where and what fish were running. Instead I did things the old-fashioned way: I eavesdropped on the conversations I heard on my visits to Dick’s Bait & Tackle. Glum poacher that I knew myself to be, I was too ashamed to ask outright, and so I seemed forever doomed to remain a step behind the fish. And while I once caught Chris’s right thumb, the closest I came to landing an actual fish was a July afternoon at West Chop. There were a few of us out there, but no one was having any luck. After an hour or so, one of my comrades called it quits.