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We Are Not Alone: Phillip Maciak on His Summer Obsessing Over UFO Videos
In June 2021, I became obsessed with a video of an unidentified flying object, or what’s now called an “unidentified aerial phenomenon.” The video, which circulated first from a Twitter account called @Today_China and was later picked up and elaborately
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Doubting Shakespeare’s Identity Isn’t a Conspiracy Theory
The Shakespeare authorship question—the theory that William Shakespeare might not have written the works published under his name—is the most horrible, vexed, unspeakable subject in the history of English literature. Among Shakespeare scholars, even the phrase “Shakespeare authorship question” elicits
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On QAnon and the Toxic Longing to Be Part of Something As a Mom
At first, Rebecca Pfeiffer (known on Instagram as Bec @luvbecstyle) seems like a momfluencer type familiar to many. She is a thin white woman with long, beachy waves. On December 3, 2021, Bec posted a photo of herself in a
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Nefarious Intentions and Persecuted Victims: On the Rise of …
On 30 March 2014, I received an email from one “Alan Tarica.” He had been reading my work on the psychology of conspiracy theories and decided to send me a link to his detailed website uncovering patterns of a vast
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How US Intelligence Agencies Hid Their Most Shameful Experiments
Although proponents of secret science like to focus on examples in which it has benefited society, insiders from the very beginning of the Cold War worried that the best minds would not be drawn to work that they could not
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Revisiting the Infamous Hill Case in an Era of (More) UFO News and Government Secrets
“Skepticism is a healthy thing, especially when you get involved with whirling saucers that defy the laws of aerodynamics,” wrote John G. Fuller in the October 2, 1965, entry of “Trade Winds,” his regular column for The Saturday Review. “But
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