Talk:UFO conspiracy theories

Along with problems related to dubious sourcing, this article contains a lot of content that has nothing to do with conspiracy theories per se. Simply listing alleged UFO sightings and assuming an underlying conspiracy is inappropriate WP:OR. I'm beginning to remove such off-topic content, along with material attached to non-WP:FRIND sources. JoJo Anthrax (talk) 18:13, 9 February 2023 (UTC)

: A lot of dubious sourcing remains in this article. The writing is quite good, but is it reasonable or appropriate for an encyclopedia article to depend so heavily on pro-conspiracy organizations/authors as sources for conspiracy theories? Perhaps this article should include only notable UFO-related conspiracies directly covered by WP:FRIND sources. Reasonable minds might, of course, disagree about that, so please share your opinions here. I might also take this issue/question to FTN. JoJo Anthrax (talk) 15:59, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

::I don’t think we need to be laundry listing every single claim made by Ufologist types to get the point across on what a ufo conspiracy theory is. I also concur that the article should shy away from overtly fixating on the simple belief in UFOs as alien in origin- the actual meat and potatoes is the belief that “the government” is actively hovering it up. Paragon Deku (talk) 01:42, 16 May 2023 (UTC)

It's nearly two years later, and the situation has only gotten worse. It's one thing to populate this article with massive amounts of content that has nothing to do with "UFO conspiracies," but it's another thing to present such content in promotional, non-encyclopedic tones. At some point soon I'm going to take a hatchet to this page. JoJo Anthrax (talk) 16:06, 26 January 2025 (UTC)

:I'm probably the main person adding content to the article, so this is on probably on me. I certainly don't mean include a promotional tone at all, greatly welcome improvements that polish the language. I have a long term plan for the article, which likely involves splitting it into a series of sub-articles across the chronology. While it's in active development, it's best to keep it here, but we could split the "laundry list" chronology to a single sub-article for now. Obviously, we want an end product where this article only summarizes the subarticles, doesn't go into a full history like the present article does. It's easier for my workflow if we let the extended chronology live here for now, but I'm flexible! :) Take a peek at Roswell Incident, which went from a similar "messy prewrite too much info" state when it was under active development to becoming a FA (with great help from @Rjjiii and their hatchet). I'm not here to PROMOTE the CTs we're discussing, any more than I'm here to promote the various new religious movements I document. Feoffer (talk) 16:56, 26 January 2025 (UTC)

::{{tq|it's best to keep it here... It's easier for my workflow if we let the extended chronology live here for now, but I'm flexible!}} Isn't what you describe the primary purpose of Sandboxes? Going forward please consider using your sandbox(es), rather than material in article space, as prequels for your "long term plans." JoJo Anthrax (talk) 17:26, 26 January 2025 (UTC)

:::Sure, I could sandboxify, but it is a wiki and I sure could use help. If someone else wants to write a "good" version of the article , I'd be happy to fork off the extended chronology. The main reason I haven't forked already? What would we replace it with? The article has always been [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=UFO_conspiracy_theories&oldid=1050639519 messy]. Feoffer (talk) 17:55, 26 January 2025 (UTC)

::::Thanks for the ping. I don't know if I'll have much time to work on this article, but here are my 2 cents: The sources in a lot of places are too narrow in scope for this article, which is such a broad topic. The Michael Barkun book is excellent, so maybe work from there? He covers the United States up to a certain point, so the article also needs sources that cover other countries and sources from after that point. In 2024, several major newspapers did a kind of overview/retrospective of UFO conspiracy theories in response to New Jersey drone reports. Once you have some reliable, secondary sources with a broad scope, then you can use the sources to decide whether a topic needs paragraphs, sentences, just a wikilink, or no mention at all. On a related note, the article needs a default method of citing pages (WP:CITEVAR). It doesn't matter what it is, but currently it looks like it uses the citation methods from subarticles, which are all slightly different. Page numbers are in full citations, short citations, and {{tl|rp}} superscripts. In addition to allowing content to be trimmed, I think this might also expand or change the coverage of some topics. For example, there is a lot of coverage about Ray Palmer that is cited to sources about Ray Palmer. Once you start looking at broader scope sources, it'll allow the article to cover things like the impact of the letter columns in his publications, where people formed pre-internet networks for discussing fringe ideas like the Shaver Mystery and UFOs. Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 19:47, 26 January 2025 (UTC)

:::::+! -- thanks for your ALWAYS-AMAZING advice. In American football, you're who I turn to to get the ball over the finish line into the endzone!

:::::To be honest, I have always avoided this page "like the plague" using it as the dumping ground for content I wanted to get rid of but didn't think I could delete outright. But now that the building blocks like a GA-ed Flying Saucers articel and a FA-ed Roswell, maybe it's time to look at this old 'fixer-upper' of an article.

:::::You know me and my historian background, I lead with secondary sources as close to the event and then buttress with 21st century. Perhaps I should take a more "top-down" approach". In any case, so happy to have your feedback! :) Feoffer (talk) 19:56, 26 January 2025 (UTC)

::::::@Feoffer, I've cleaned up all the short citation errors that were still remaining in a few recent edits and am done editing the article. I see {{tl|rp}} page numbers used in recent edits. Only the full citations in UFO_conspiracy_theories#Bibliography have links from shortened footnotes. If those are converted to full citations (with or without rp page numbers), then you can just delete that section. The citations listed under UFO_conspiracy_theories#Further reading are not linked or used in any way by the inline citations right now. Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 01:30, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

(Edit conflict)

Roswell just passed FA not long ago and flying saucers just passed GA this week, so I'm finally turning my eye to this, the current 'umbrella article'. Per comments above, I should have been using Talk way more, so it was clearer.

AS I say above, I think I can show conclusively I'm not here to PROMOTE these theories by my work on Roswell incident and Travis Walton incident, plus similar "histories of novel religions" articles.

• I've added FRINGE and TONE tags to alert readers that the article does have problems, shame on me for not having done so earlier.
• The overview section doesn't even cite sources. I would greatly welcome someone nuking it and writing a good overview instead. The current overview is jsut a quick summary of the 'chronology'. edit added sources, but invite for improvment stands, the lede and overview need a rewrite.
• I get it -- the current chronology is way way way too much. It's just such a pain to "divide" and "re-divide" a multi-decade narrative into sub-articles before knowing what the final article series is going to look like (cf. Joseph Smith or L. Ron Hubbard).
• The chronology's sourcing is basically "go look in the subarticle and trust me, it's in there" that's not good, and obviously needs to be fixed.
• There's basically no skeptical voice thoughout the entire article. It is title UFO conspiracy theories, so the title does a lot of work for us, but per above, there's so much work still to be done to create an article that cannot be mistaken for one PROMOTEing the topic that needs to be debunked.
• Refs are a mess (again, my own doing)
• In the extended chronology, whereever we end up putting it and over how many articles, what elements merit inclusion? At minimum, if we have an entire article dedicated a UFO conspiracy topic, that topic ought to be available somewhere in the "macropedia" extended narrative.
• Obviously, citations are a mess, but the article has always been messy.
• Anything that can be done to inject skeptical counterpoints in the article would be greatly appreciated. Ultimately, we want an article that gives a quick NPOV overview to allow readers to understand and dismiss the CTs.
• I haven't even begun to look at the lede -- please improve it as anyone sees fit!
• Per Rjjiii feedback above, add sourcing on Palmer material
• Per Rjjiii feedback above, refocus narratvie on Barkun

Feoffer (talk) 17:46, 26 January 2025 (UTC)

:*Removed lopsided list of proponents in lede, put them into their own section. We should get a similar list for the Mainstream views. Feoffer (talk) 18:01, 27 January 2025 (UTC)

:*Please be on the lookout for a public domain image of Donald Keyhoe post-1945 or so. Feoffer (talk) 11:41, 29 January 2025 (UTC){{done}}

I have removed a lot of material that either has nothing to do with "UFO conspiracies," is not notable, is not encyclopedic, and/or is not cited to any WP:FRIND sources...and yet there is so much more similar material that should be removed. I hope to keep hacking through this article, but damn it's an exhausting and vaguely depressing task. If I prove to be in a WP:1AM situation here, so be it, I will happily bow out. But until then I remind everyone that this is an ENCYCLOPEDIA, not a popular magazine for the {{tq|extended narrative}} presentation (and certainly not the promotion) of books/articles/claims by dubious ufologists like Clark, Hynek, et alia that haven't been covered to any significant extent by sources outside the pro-UFO bubble. I note also that (1) the policy WP:NOT, especially its subsection WP:NOTEVERYTHING, applies, and (2) article space should not be used as a sort of draft table; that's the purpose of WP:SANDBOX. JoJo Anthrax (talk) 04:09, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

:So, I certainly appreciate why you look at the current article, see it as unacceptable, and feel the impulse to immediately hatchet out anything's not currently up to snuff. It's as if the pieces of a car a laid out on the lawn, but it's not easy to see how they all fit together from the article's present state. The article's content needs to be 100% WP:FRIND, and it isn't yet. Hatcheting for now is a valid response, but I think much of the material that's deleted could eventually come back in using only sources like Barkun, Gulyas, Peebles, and other FAC-quality sources. To sanity check, I sourced the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO_conspiracy_theories#Timeline timeline] to those three sources, to confirm the basic skeleton of the article is attested by scholars.

:To go into specific content [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=UFO_conspiracy_theories&diff=1272979547&oldid=1272909520 that's been deleted] (as much for myself as anyone)

:

:* Sagan's Demon Haunted World talks about the UFO conspiracy at length. I added in response to your concerns above about POV -- I selected a common quote from it that denies the reality of UFOs all together, but we could used a different quote. Given enough time, we can find a source about Sagan and the UFO Conspiracy Theory and use its verbiage.

:* "I Remember Lemuria" is covered at length in Barkun's Ch 7 "Armageddon Below" and Peebles similarly covers it p.4-6. I see why you cut it, I haven't had time to source that section yet, but it is infinitely sourceable.

:* The Maury Island hoax is covered by Gulyas and by Peebles. It's the first appearance of 'men in black' which will later become a Hollywood blockbuster franchise.

:* Keyhoe's mic cut is discussed at length by Peebles: "Millions of people thought the Air Force had (literally) "silenced" Keyhoe. Keyhoe emerged as the winner of the Armstrong Theater battle. Believers would point to it as an example of "silencing." To the public at large, CBS's cutting off of the audio gave Keyhoe's appearance an impact much greater than anything he said."

:* The Twin Falls hoax alleged government capture of a disc. Later influenced CT like Kenn Thomas. Restore if FRIND sourcing substantiates.

:* Winchell isn't covered by the good sources -- I seem to recall Ruppelt covering this aspect, but probably not important, certainly not worthy of a dedicated section

:* Pentacle memorandum isn't something I'm particularly familiar with, currently cited only to Vallee which isn't acceptable. Even if we did cover it, we would do so when Vallee went public about the claim and talk about the impact, not put it in 1967

:* The Holloman landing alleges that the government had a secret meeting with ETs and later, a secret treaty. 100% conspiracy-related, but better sourcing needed before restoration, no doubt.

:

:Looking forward: I'm not sure Alternative 3 merits the space it does, needs more justification for inclusion. George C. Andrews needs work. Phil Schneider is obviously very problematic at the moment and needs to be rehabbed or chopped. More in a bit. Feoffer (talk) 18:27, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

:{{tq|vaguely depressing task}}

:This phrasing surprises me. This is a very difficult topic and it's not in a very good state right now. That's exciting, not depressing! New readers come to us to make sense of all this nonsense, and we get to help them understand it. Readers of Roswell incident no longer see a dry and terse denial, they get to actually watch how the story grew over time, over the decades, from mere mylar-like foil to hoaxed alien autopsy footage, until it became the legend that it is today. We have a long way to go, but fortunately people like Barkun have already done the heavy lifting for us, showing how, say, Dulce Base is just the latest iteration of stories begun by a schizophrenic welder in the mid 1940s. Feoffer (talk) 18:36, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

:@JoJo Anthrax, do you have insights into how we should cover the 2017-Present material? It's entirely out of my area of interest, which is limited to 20th century history. The current text calls out for a good refutation. Given enough time, I'll find that content, but if you happen to know what sources should be used to refute Elizondo-Grusch, it'd be a timesaver. Feoffer (talk) 02:46, 1 February 2025 (UTC)

:: The problem with chasing recent events is that not enough time has passed for independent sources to analyze and contextualize each individual claim and propose how it fits within the long historical narrative of ufology. Rather that looking for refutation, I think you should be looking for context, i.e. how mainstream academia have treated ufological conspiratorial beliefs. For example [https://jcom.sissa.it/article/pubid/JCOM_2308_2024_A02/?trk=public_post_comment-text this] is a pretty good indication how the claims of Grusch et al are seen: {{tq|Our focus in this study is on the claim that there has been a government coverup of alien visitation to Earth, a claim that is broadly considered untrue by the majority of the scientific community [Routledge et al., 2017; Swami et al., 2011]. Misinformation has been recently described as information that opposes the best currently available expert information [Vraga & Bode, 2020], and the dominant expert narrative today is that such a conspiratorial government coverup is not true. }} - LuckyLouie (talk) 20:24, 4 February 2025 (UTC)

:::Added to the article! Thanks for the assist! Feoffer (talk) 07:33, 5 February 2025 (UTC)

:::: One detail: "non-human" is a term pushed by contemporary fringe promoters Elizondo, Grusch, etc. A few news outlets have used it when covering these promoters, but WP should not consider this the defacto mainstream term for ET. Paranormal promoters have a tradition of rebranding words to make old concepts sound new and scientific, and this is also a hallmark of pseudoscience. Consequently the term should always be used in quotes or qualified ("what he calls/refers to as "non-human") to indicate it is a buzzword used by a subculture rather than a mainstream expert term. - LuckyLouie (talk) 17:56, 5 February 2025 (UTC)

:::::Excellent catch. Feoffer (talk) 23:17, 5 February 2025 (UTC)

:::::: 1990s. Gulyas on claims of companion UFO trailing Hale Bopp, enabled by Art Bell, influencing Heaven's Gate suicides: [https://books.google.com/books?id=afcEDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA132&dq=ufo+conspiracy+art+bell+hale+bopp&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjh59Wfq7SLAxWjw_ACHZrQKVoQ6AF6BAgEEAM#v=onepage&q=ufo%20conspiracy%20art%20bell%20hale%20bopp&f=false]. - LuckyLouie (talk) 15:04, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

:::::::added! Feoffer (talk) 05:33, 10 February 2025 (UTC)

The section "Notable proponents" is headed by an info box that warns, "This section may present fringe theories, without giving appropriate weight to the mainstream view."

In fact, the section only presents the names of proponents and doesn't present even a single theory, fringe or otherwise. I suggest removal of the info box. Pete.pereira (talk) 07:36, 28 April 2025 (UTC)

:{{done}} I had added that notice to my own writing as a disclaimer when the text was new and under development. . I took it down per your suggestion. Feoffer (talk) 13:09, 28 April 2025 (UTC)

[https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&scisbd=1&as_sdt=0%2C22&q=ufo+conspiracy&btnG=#d=gs_qabs&t=1745846134189&u=%23p%3DMPmVOMtqGgwJ This recent article] in Nature (journal) may be useful. - LuckyLouie (talk) 13:18, 28 April 2025 (UTC)

:Thanks! I actually had been needing to go looking for a source just like this to cover stuff from that angle! Thanks for the shortcut. Feoffer (talk) 15:40, 28 April 2025 (UTC)