Scroll down or click here to read Michel's article "An Assassin in the Hand is Not Worth Two in the Bush," about the July 2024 Assassination attempt on Donald Trump by Thomas Matthew Crooks.
How I Survived the Alien Probe
(And managed not to lose my mind)
(Paranoid Planet, Episode 9.1B, Chapter 2)
In late December 2023, I saw a strange set of lights in the sky whist driving with my family from Montreal, Canada, down to West Palm Beach, Florida. What I witnessed was unusual and very hard to describe. It looked like a set of sparkling, orangey-blue jellyfish slowly “swimming” in an arc across the night sky—first ascending, then hovering sideways, and then gently descending—like a languid sea creature—until it disappeared over the tree line. I believe there were two of these objects, but there may have been a third, fainter and harder to see in the distance.
The best analogy I could muster at the time was of something I had seen many times as a child while playing near the lake at our cottage, after dipping the end of a twig in some pine sap and then tossing it into water, which made the floating twig zip forward like a tiny torpedo, leaving an orange-blue streak in its wake. My teenage daughter also witnessed the strange sighting and was as confused and beguiled as I was. I made a mental note of the time and location of our sighting in order to check the internet later to see if anyone else saw these lights. For the next couple hours, I experienced a not-unfamiliar surge of terrified curiosity, a feeling I had not felt in many years, eliciting flashbacks of my earlier days as a conspiracy chaser, and of my youthful interest in the mysteries of space exploration.
If you are a regular listener of this podcast [or a reader of this blog], you already know that I am a cynic regarding conspiracy claims and the paranormal, and that I enjoy parsing the difference between verifiable facts, unfalsifiable claims, and outlandish gossip. But I wasn’t always this skeptical, and my transformation from conspiracy-seeker to whimsical skeptic happened gradually, like the slow peeling away of an onion’s outer layers—the outermost of which was my short-lived belief in 9/11 conspiracy theories, followed by the powers of secret societies and the more esoteric elements of my evangelical Christian upbringing (like Satanic ritual abuse, end-of-the-world prophecies, and young Earth creationism), and, lying more deeply, my long-standing obsession with Kennedy assassination myths. But sitting even deeper sat my childhood fascination with the UFO phenomenon, with its sensational tales of alien visitations, blood-curdling abductions, and evil government cover-ups that influenced my media consumption and daydreams well into my late teens, when more Earthbound mysteries pulled me away from alien lore.
My final conspiracy obsession: The 9/11 "Inside Job"
I don’t remember what first instilled this fascination in me, but it started very early. My father, a deeply religious and pragmatic man, had no time for such nonsense as flying saucers, but his love of astronomy profoundly marked me from a young age. His reading pile was always filled with books and magazines about space exploration, he frequently took us to book fairs and the planetarium, and many of my Christmas and birthday gifts were astronomy-related. My mother also fed this interest, though perhaps with less direct intent, by taking me to movies that fed the more imaginative side of my outer-space quandaries—movies like Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back, Battle Beyond the Stars, The Black Hole, and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. She also bought my brother and I some pulpy French-language youth magazines—probably to get us to read more—which contained stories about the Loch Ness monster and strange objects in the sky.
And we shouldn’t ignore my most favorite childhood pastime—watching TV—which fed me a solid diet of space opera every Saturday morning, with French and English translations of Japanese cartoons like Goldorak [a.k.a., Goldrake and UFO Robot Grendizer], Albator [Captain Harlock], G Force: Battle of the Planets [Gatchaman], The Mysterious Cities of Gold, Ulysses 31, and my ultimate favorite, Capitaine Flam [Captain Future], as well as the kitschy British marionette sci-fi universe of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, with shows like Thunderbirds, Stingray, and Captain Scarlett.
But it wasn’t only kid shows that showcased futuristic spaceships and alien monsters. The late Seventies prime-time airwaves were saturated with live-action sci-fi like Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rodgers In the 25thCentury, reruns of the original Star Trek series and its many cheap knockoffs, as well as UFO and Space: 1999, two more Anderson productions that featured hostile mind-controlling aliens harvesting human organs, shapeshifting creatures, and a dislocated Moon base sent hurtling through space by a terrible nuclear accident. And although I can’t find any internet reference to it, I do seem to remember watching a Saturday morning marionette version of the more adult-themed UFO series. Or is that memory an alien implant? I’m still not sure.
As I neared my tweens, I began staying up past midnight on weekends to watch old reruns of The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, and science fiction films with more mature content, like The Blob, The Day The Earth Stood Still, War of the Worlds, Moonraker, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Planet of the Apes, Outland, Logan’s Run, Invasion: UFO, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Martian Chronicles, and the utterly disturbing Zardoz. All things considered, it would not be a great exaggeration to say that, although my parents fed me and clothed me, I was actually raised by George Lucas, Stephen Spielberg, Gene Roddenberry, Gerry Anderson, and a couple hundred Japanese animators and French voice actors.
But one of the most important influences on my childhood imagination was no doubt Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which hit theaters when I was only five years old, and which I mostly knew through picture books, magazine articles, paranormal reporting, and children’s toys—including my View-Master stereoscope—and didn’t actually watch it until I was 11. With its strange storyline featuring disappeared ships and war planes, alien home invaders, abducted children, parents losing their marbles, mystical space music, and creatures who looked like deformed burn victims, Close Encounters did not only mesmerize me, it deeply terrified me.
Of course, it didn’t help that I had recently pressured my mom to put up a wallpaper mural in my bedroom: a fifteen foot-wide still of an Earthrise seen from the Moon, and which helped me experience a horrific nightmare—still vivid some 40 years later—of a spacecraft flying into my bedroom and a dozen tiny aliens vivisecting my paralyzed body.
It was around this time that the NBC miniseries “V” first aired, the story of a peaceful humanoid alien species who come to Earth seeking our help to survive a famine on their home planet, but who are in reality disguised reptilian carnivores bent on harvesting humans as food. The scene in which the invaders reveal their true nature so freaked me out that I had to turn the TV off and go hide in my room. Mind you, that didn’t stop me from watching all the other episodes.
By the time I hit my mid-teens, alien shows and movies had lost much of their popular punch, and I had turned my attentions to more mundane interests like rock music, video games, and young ladies. But the UFO bug had burrowed deeply, and it didn’t take much for me to be drawn to new tropes of the conspiracy genre, including the Satanic panic that hit its peak in the mid-Eighties. I had, after all, been a Dungeons and Dragons player and was now beginning to take interest in the very artists whose music was being blamed for hiding secret backwards Satanic messages.
TV journalist Geraldo Rivera.
His widely viewed (and wildly incorrect) TV documentary "Exposing Satan's Underground" first aired on NBC on October 22, 1988.
And then I saw my first real UFO at the age of sixteen while riding in a car with one of my high-school buddies—or what I thought was a flying object. A bright circle in an otherwise overcast afternoon sky, the circle was the size of a dime held at arm’s length until it suddenly disappeared as if it were absorbing itself (if that makes any sense). Though my friend didn’t see it and I found it more odd than alarming, I remained uncertain for several decades about what I had seen. It was only recently, during the time I was preparing this essay, that I had another similar experience, which turned out to be a temporary tunnel of swirling grey cloud through which the sun broke through for no more than a couple seconds.
And that’s when I experienced another powerful feeling I’ve had over the years, the feeling of satisfaction that comes from finally figuring out a mystery that turned out to be far less mysterious than once assumed once I obtained enough information to understand it. I had had this feeling when I realized that the Pentagon had really been struck by a Boeing 757 and not a missile; when I found out that the so-called Magic Bullet Theory of JFK’s murder was a fabrication of conspiracy theorists, not of the Warren Commission; when I realized that I had been watching a Chinese lantern, not a slow-moving spaceship during a late night campfire sky watch; and when I saw my first lenticular and hole punch clouds, two weather phenomena that are often mistaken for alien spacecraft.
Night Sky Lanterns (a.k.a., Chinese paper lanterns) floating upwards in the evening sky.
It's hard to say when I finally gave up believing in alien spaceships. My interest in science fiction never abated, and TV shows like The X-Files and reboots of V and Battlestar Galactica remained highly captivating right through my adult years, as well as films like Fire In The Sky, Dark City, The Astronaut’s Wife, Super 8, Signs, Edge of Tomorrow, Oblivion, Arrival, District 9, and the whole Alien franchise. But they also increasingly seemed to be harder to take seriously. The 1997 film Contact, based on a novel by astronomer Carl Sagan, made me realize that if an alien race really wanted to study humans, that piloted spacecraft would probably be the least useful method available. The 2002 TV miniseries Taken, written by Les Bohem but produced by Steven Spielberg, was so sentimentally religious—with a prepubescent Dakota Fanning playing the part of an alien-human hybrid messiah—that the entire UFO culture struck me more as a New Age religious movement than any kind of scientific inquiry.
A few books by aviation journalist and UFO skeptic Philip Klass taught me that the mythical UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, was nothing more than a series of misunderstandings and that UFO abduction stories were littered with misguided assumptions, disprovable claims, and intentional hoaxes, and that it was doubtful whether any of them could be believed based on the evidence they claimed to offer. And a book by Smithsonian aviation historian Curtis Peebles taught me that nothing in the history of aviation, including declassified secret military projects, gives credence to any claim that alien technology was ever recovered by any human civilization.
Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird
I’ve grown even more skeptical over the past few years. Many sober-minded skeptics and space scientists have publicly admitted that though they disbelieve in alien visitors, they believe that sentient beings exist on other planets. That may be true, but there is still little more evidence of that being true than that E.T. is living in your toolshed, eating Reese’s Pieces and trying to phone home. It’s not an unpleasant idea, and astronomers are discovering more exoplanets each day. But just because there are more rocks floating about in our galaxy, it doesn’t add any weight to the fact that we have never been able to explain the emergence of life from non-life, and even less to replicate it. It seems to me therefore that any belief in the existence of alien life, no matter how remote and different from our own, is no more supported than all of the UFO stories I once found convincing. And as a person who’s been bamboozled more times than he ought to have, I have decided to guard my beliefs against the undue influence of Hollywood scripts and peddlers of thrilling nonsense. You may consider me too cynical, but the real thought crime would be to continue believing in something that has so far produced no more than the world’s largest game of Chinese whispers.
As for the flying orange jellyfish I witnessed last winter, it took me little more than five minutes searching the internet to discover that the unidentified flying objects that had crossed my path were actually part of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy USSF-52 rocket, which launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 8:07pm on December 28, 2023, containing a U.S. Space Force orbital vehicle. More specifically, my sighting had been of the burning propellant coming out of the rocket’s two reusable Falcon 9 side-booster engines, which can now be remotely piloted back to land safely on Earth—a technological wonder I did not know at the time was even possible.
SpaceX Falcon 9 side-booster engines returning to Earth
The third object I perceived that night may have been another booster, or the rocket itself, or maybe one of its disposable parts. Or an alien spaceship sending us some cryptic warning about our future. I guess we’ll never know for sure…
The alien Kllaatu and his robot enforcer Gort
The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951)
* * *
An Assassin in the Hand is Not Worth Two in the Bush:
Why conspiracy theories gain more traction than facts
(A condensed version of this article, commissioned by the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy, was published in the Epoch Times on August 8, 2024.)
Former President Trump shouts "Fight!" after being grazed by an assassin's bullet
On July 13, 2024, former U.S. President Donald Trump was grazed by an assassin’s bullet during an open-air rally in rural Pennsylvania, leaving three people injured and two others dead, including the slain shooter. The FBI was reasonably quick to identify the gunman as Thomas Matthew Crooks, an intelligent but emotionally strained and friendless young man with an affinity for firearms. Investigators have so far been hesitant to ascribe a clear motive to Crooks’ actions. This has encouraged pundits on each side of the electoral fence to fill the knowledge gap with whatever assumptions best help them demonize their opponents. In a context of politically-charged uncertainty, it was neither astounding nor unprecedented for sensationalist conspiracy theories involving some kind of deceptive false flag attack to proliferate in the media.
Thomas Matthew Crooks
The shooter’s profile, however, is reminiscent of umpteen lone-wolf offenders who perpetrated assassination attempts, vehicular attacks, and school, mall, and place of worship shootings over the past few decades. More often than not, these are troubled single young males with emotional, social, and economic anxieties, who feel alienated, powerless and ridiculed, and who choose to transmogrify their feelings of shame and despair into shocking attacks against whatever accessible victims can be blamed for their inner distress. Their targets are often symbolic, not personal, chosen for their representative value, proximity, vulnerability, and the size of media attention the act will likely elicit. Their choice of target need not make any sense to anyone but the attacker himself. Most lone offenders seek to reverse their feelings of meaninglessness by projecting their loveless self-image onto others. Such acts are often imitative of other lone offenders and influenced by cult films, an unhealthy consumption of social media, fringe political ideologies, or conspiracy thinking. Though they lose their lives in the process, such attackers win by becoming a national headline and historical icon. A case in point: sixty years after the death of President Kennedy, is anyone not familiar with the name Lee Harvey Oswald? Though millions continue to debate Oswald’s possible motive (or the existence and variety of a massive conspiracy to set him up), no one seems particularly keen to consider that the man may simply have wanted to have the world talk about him. And yet we have, for over six decades. Quod erat demonstrandum.
Backyard Photographs of Lee Harvey Oswald, posing with the rifle and revolver he used to shoot at U.S. Army General Edwin Walker, President John F. Kennedy, Texas Governor John Connally, and Dallas policeman J.D. Tippit.
Available data suggests that Thomas Matthew Crooks was not unlike Lee Oswald or any one of a hundred other disgruntled lone attackers. Crooks suffered of social isolation, enjoyed gunplay, studied the tactics of at least two other shooters (Ethan Crumbley and Lee Harvey Oswald), planned out his attack in advance, and appeared willing to die in a blaze of gunfire and media attention. Though not particularly politicized, Crooks appears to have had an interest in the movements of several public officials, not just Mr. Trump’s. His choice to attack Mr. Trump appears to have been determined by several factors that included the former President’s widespread popularity, the proximity of the July 13 venue, and the greater accessibility of his target in an open-air environment. Time will tell whether Crooks’ motive differed largely from what his profile tells us, but it is reasonable to conclude that this crime was, at least partly, caused by a widespread sociological phenomenon throughout America and Western society in general—that of young male disaffection—and not the result of a criminal hit-job or a conspiracy of self-serving elites. It may in fact be more appropriate to liken Crooks to Travis Bickle, the misanthropic vigilante from Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, than to Raymond Shaw, the mind-controlled assassin of John Frankenheimer’s Manchurian Candidate.
A scene from Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976)
starring Robert DeNiro as Travis Bickle
A scene from John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate (1963)
starring Laurence Harvey as Raymond Shaw
But violence perpetrated by socially alienated loners is hard to prevent, leaving most onlookers confused and feeling powerless. Sociological explanations can also be quite complex, without offering us clear solutions, or specific culprits to blame, leaving everyone partly responsible. They are therefore not the sorts of explanations most people find meaningful and uplifting. Nor will the major media wish to alienate their target audiences with complicated social-scientific analyses by long-winded academics and finger-wagging social critics. Hence, in an inverted reflection of the many leftist “JFK buffs” who continue to claim that Lee Harvey Oswald was not Kennedy’s murderer, pro-Trump conservatives are less likely to accept that a young, employed, and intelligent registered Republican with a commitment to the second amendment could be the wilful author of such a crime. To paraphrase Star Wars’ Obi-Wan Kenobi, “these aren’t the droids they’re looking for”.
Indeed, it may be more uplifting for them not to delve too deeply into the shooter’s personal life, Mr. Trump’s fiery rhetoric, or the rampant availability of firearms, and to focus their blame on mental illness, the speeches of Democrats, the incompetence or malevolence of law enforcement officials, or some nefarious “deep state” plot. Similarly, few on the left will stop to seriously consider whether decades of affirmative action programs, disappearing well-paying technical jobs, risk-averse education programs, helicopter parenting, and the demonization of “toxic” white maleness have so thoroughly alienated a large portion of the country’s young male working-class that violence seem to many of them the only way to express their individuality.
Timothy McVeigh, The Oklahoma City bomber
Like all political and religious ideologies, conspiracy theories (CTs) compel us to simplify a very complex reality into an understandable narrative. They serve as a sort of myth factory that churns out empowering stories that can emerge, evolve, and die out quickly to meet the emotional and cognitive needs of powerless, frustrated, and suspicious individuals. They help us explain why troubling and catastrophic events happen without the sloppy complexities of academic accounts. They help us divide the world into clear categories of “good” and “evil”. They give us a sense of purpose and permit us to justify our actions in the pursuit of that purpose. Most importantly, they allow us to claim the moral high ground in our life story. When unexplained or unsavory events cause us to experience confusion, guilt, shame, or cognitive dissonance, conspiracy theories can help us validate our feelings of frustration and victimhood, give us a clear antagonist to blame, and encourage us to stay the course. But because CT’s are by nature speculative, born of a mixture of known evidence (often taken out of context), assumptions, introspection, rumours, and hoaxes, it can be very difficult for their proponents to distinguish fact from fiction. If the theory offers a more satisfying explanation of reality than those offered by dispassionate experts, they will continue to shape the worldview of those whose emotional needs depend on them being true. In short, CTs are empowering and self-affirming narratives, but they are also a dangerous buck-passing device that produces self-delusion and social conflict.
Right-wing "Capitol Attack", Washington DC, January 6, 2021
From powerful secret societies to immigrant fifth columns, Satanic pedophiles, mind control programs and false flag operations, conspiracy beliefs have always found fertile ground in American public discourse, and not just on the political fringes. Unjustified fear is the fertilizer in which they take root. Stereotyped enemies and mistrust of epistemic authorities (i.e., of the legal system, government inquiries, the mass media, academic researchers, etc.) are the water and nutriments that make them grow.
Internet trolls, foreign spy networks, and shameless propagandists carry part of the blame for the rapid spread of malicious disinformation whenever lone offenders make headlines. But speculative conspiracy claims would not gain so much traction were it not for a widespread culture of victimhood that currently thrives on both sides of the political fence, one that favours grievance over dialogue, digging up past hurts over building bridges, demonizing opponents over building consensus, and seeing mass deceptions instead of our common humanity. The object of each community’s nightmares may differ (e.g., gun control versus abortion bans), but the rhetoric of both sides follow a similar paranoid blueprint that leaves no room for respectful disagreement or pragmatic compromise.
Left-wing anti-Israel protest, Oakland, CA, spring 2024
The July 13 assassination attempt on Donald Trump, like other recent public shootings, occurred against a background of culture war and political alarmism, prompting a significant section of the right-leaning electorate to perceive it not as the work of a lone, pro-gun sociopath with conservative leanings (as the evidence shows) but as part of a long series of liberal plots to flush them out of power. In this more empowering narrative, Trump’s MAGA followers are the vanguard of civilization holding back the “woke” barbarian hordes, not alarmist scaremongers whose angry rhetoric is prodding unstable young men to lash out. Charlottesville, the 2021 Capitol attacks, the failed violent overthrow of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and other recent outbursts of right-wing violence should give conservative politicians and pundits reason to temper their tone. Likewise, those on the political left who proclaim that a victory for Trump is “the end of democracy” or paint apocalyptic Handmaid’s Tale-like scenarios where LGBT people are ritually lynched and pregnant women are reduced to breeders would do well to temper their dreadful portents. Doing so would no doubt make it easier to pursue their mutual desire to improve life and work conditions for the average citizen. Sadly, explanatory power and ideology, not hard evidence and healthy skepticism, hold more sway in shaping public perception, and so I remain cynical of any significant change taking place in the near future, even with fresh leadership.
"Unite the right" white supremacist protest, Charlottesville VA, 2017
A Handsmaid's Tale-inspired pro-abortion protest, 2017
In a country whose political institutions were designed to foster bipartisan decision-making but is now torn between self-righteous factions who equate compromise with cultural suicide, it is little surprise that the entire political class of the most powerful nation in the world frequently finds itself the target of contempt and ridicule, including among its traditional allies. If the quality of American political rhetoric fails to rise above the paranoid cattiness of middle-school drama queens, where sober and respectful debate keeps giving way to paranoid accusations, Americans of all political stripes should be prepared to perpetually fail to elect leaders they can admire, and instead to suffer the ones they deserve.
M.J. Gagné, July 2024.
Documents related to this episode: *
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Columbia Pictures, 1977). Dir. by Stephen Spielberg. Feat. Richard Dreyfus, Melinda Dillon, François Truffault, and Bob Balaban.
Real Body Cams: A New Perspective on Policing (2024) https://www.realbodycams.com/
Michel Jacques Gagné: "Why conspiracy theories are more popular than facts." Epoch Times, August 7, 2024. (Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy).
Kingston A. George: "The Big Sur 'UFO': An Identified Flying Object." Skeptical Inquirer, vol. 17. Winter 1997.
Brian Dunning: "The Day the UFO Deactivated the Nukes" (Malmstrom Air Force Base UFO), Skeptoid, Episode 842, July 26, 2022.
Diana Tumminia, Ed.: Alien Worlds: Social and Religious Dimensions of Extraterrestrial Contact. Syracuse U P, 2007.
Philip J. Klass: UFO Abductions: A Dangerous Game. Prometheus Books, 1988.
Philip J. Klass: The Real Roswell Crashed-Saucer Coverup. Prometheus Books, 1997.
Curtis Peebles: Watch the Skies!: A Chronicle of the Flying Saucer Myth. Smithsonian, 1994.
SpaceX: "Replay! SpaceX Falcon Heavy launches secretive X-37B space plane, nails landings in Florida," Videos From Space, Streamed live on Dec 28, 2023, YouTube,
Hannah Hageman: "Wreck's Identification 95 Years After Ship's Disappearance Puts Theories To Rest," (SS Cotopaxi wreck recovered), NPR, February 9, 2020.
The Making of Close Encouters of the Third Kind (Columbia Pictures, 2001) dir. by Laurent Bouzereau. Feat. Steven Spielberg, Richard Dreyfus, Joe Alves, et al.
* All copyrighted video and audio clips are used for educational purposes only under "fair use" regulations.
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