Summerguide 2014 | view this story as a .pdf

Why are Mainers reporting more space invaders than anywhere but Arizona?

by Colin S. Sargent

Even if we were to discount the famous Allagash Abduction of 1976, in which four men on a wilderness canoeing trip were beamed up to the mother ship (the quartet passed polygraph tests following a hypnotic retrieval of their suppressed memories in 1989), Maine’s reported 700 UFO sightings in the last 50 years put us right up there with Arizona as the most saucer-spotting state. Nowadays, though, you don’t have to make it onto Unsolved Mysteries to get the word out. All you have to do is post online on a site like the National UFO Reporting Center (nuforc.org), and you can post an entry like the most recent one we saw, dateline June 3, 2014, in Phillips. “Red then green flashing object, saw it for about 60 seconds; then it disappeared.” NUFORC has curated a glowing report of past UFO sightings as well, allowing you to see a history of Maine’s glimpses into the Unknown. Over 75 percent of the reported sightings are from 2000 or more recently, as Internet access has become widespread.

Our brains are evolved and trained to recognize patterns–so well that we often see them when they aren’t there. Why? Our survival was likely better enhanced by false positives than false negatives when spotting food or a predator was a life-or-death issue. It doesn’t matter if you occasionally spot something odd in the stars, so long as you manage to get all the blueberries. But missing the berries might mean you go hungry later, even if you’re secure in your cold, hard appraisal of the night sky. Fast-forward to today, we’ve been reinforced to see UFOs in arrangements of light. If we didn’t see patterns that weren’t there, Rorschach tests would just look like inkblots to everyone.

What UFO spotters resolve these false positives into, however, might feed into a world view that would allow for something as world-changing as alien contact to be kept secret by some combination of government or secret interest. People have always seen UFOs–perhaps we called them auguries or gods in an earlier age, but now that Jules Verne, Sputnik, and Apollo have flown within our orbit, now we see the aliens in the sky instead of the signals of Roman numina.

But why are we seeing so many of these patterns in Maine per capita? Maine suffers less from light pollution than many other states–there are more patterns to see. In addition to that, Mainers share a healthy skepticism that leads to the suspicion that we’re not getting the full story from those who claim to lead us from far away (that is, the Military Industrial Complex). That was reinforced by American government propaganda efforts to explicitly not debunk UFO theories–finding it useful for those who might have actually seen a Department of Defense device to simply be called crackpots by the rest of the population. In a clear night sky, an almost invisible cloud can refract and literally change the perceived direction of the navigation lights of a P-3 or other large aircraft (Brunswick Naval Air Station was one of the busiest sites for maritime patrol aircraft during the Cold War and had a population over 10,000 in 1994, making it one of Maine’s cities). More patrol aircraft per capita than any other state means more spotting, and former spotters and skywatchers form the nucleus of a sighting and posting subculture that that continues to confirm and affirm the sightings online, even now that the base is closed down.

There are still more theories that relate specifically to Mainers, one of them involving Allen’s Coffee Brandy. Maine is one sweet place, after all.