Ugh. Where to begin.
I guess with the book that began it all.
I found this book while investigating its author, Debbie Ziegelmeyer, a member of MUFON's board of directors (see the post below this one). I'd never heard of this conspiracy theory before, and there were plenty of similar recommended books ALSO about UFOs underwater, or USOs (a term I'd also never heard before). Clearly, there was some sort of established culture here to catch up on, a divining canon on USOs that I was woefully out-of-step with. I wanted to step into the temple. I wanted to be invited into the inner sanctum of their beliefs, only to look around at the carvings on the walls, arch an eyebrow, and say aloud, "what in the goddamn fuck is going on around here?" And then I'd zip my ceremonial garbs once more and leave. Maybe I'd even take a few ancient relics with me.
It's a lot more complicated than that.
First off, I had a hunch this intersected with Atlantian bullshit, and therefore I had a hunch this was likely some racist bullshit. I'll dip into Atlantis on a much longer post, eventually, when I work up the strength. The gist is that it's colonialist, racist bullshit that undermines the intelligence of people of color when it comes to the construction and maintenance of their own cultures and structures. A lot of alien conspiracies will do this, too: surely, the Egyptians didn't know how to stack rocks into a pyramidal shape, so "beings" must have crawled up from the sea or came from space and showed them how to order their enslaved peoples to do this. "Underwater Submersible Objects" smacks of secret society/ancient aliens bullshit, smacks of Atlantian bullshit. And, on a preliminary glance, a lot of the Amazon dot com titles mention Atlantis in their blurbs.
Case open, case shut.
I really wanted to read Ziegelmeyer's book, but unfortunately there's no digital version available, and the paperback version runs a high price of $24.99. Okay, I thought. I have other options. In fact, I have hundreds of options to peruse. There's no end to the options when it comes to Amazon's selection of books on USOs.
Well, fuck. If the History Channel talked about this shit twice, of course I gotta see it. Let's boot up UFO Files, season 2, episode 12: Deep Sea UFOs. Let me head out to get stoned real fast.
I'm back.
Where are we. PICTURE
Oh, yeah.
The crux of the arguments have to do with sea exploration. How much of the sea have we actually explored? Could we feasibly hide a UFO in a water? A ufo that goes "into or out of the water" says the guy.... how broad. LOST CITY OF ATLANTIS A SECRET BASE FOR UFOS within first five minutes wtf.... Nova Scotia "government uso document" .... holy shit I love this intro. Santa Catalina channel. UFOS are Real 1979 documentary. Preston Dennett author of UFOs over California. trademark feature is to emerge and break apart? "deploy" little guys. "Invisible Residents" first USO book. "The Navy isn't talking about what it's finding" the myths proliferate because there's the excuse that if it's underwater, it can't be seen, so it can only be speculated about. Built on apocrophyl evidence Christopher Columbus "alien encounter" in his journal? Is this true and what are they actually possibly writing about waterufo.net I was smoking in the school zone, convinced I would slip on every razor-thin leaf littering the cracked-up sidewalk chunks.
Next up: journey with me through the delightful territories of indie publisher FLYING DISK PRESS, a press run by a single man operating a blogspot site with such high outputs and such unbelievable graphic design sensibilities, I can't tell if most of the books are written by AI. Only time will tell.
I worry, always, when an organization requires exorbitant amounts of cash to stay afloat when they seemingly have very little public presence or output. The articles, user tools, and other productions of MUFON mostly exist behind the membership paywall, which is a huge disappointment to this curious researcher. I would've liked to have access to their "Last 20 Reports" feature, which makes public the last 20 reports filed with their agency. I suppose, when I have a job, I could make an account and pay the pitiful and odd $6.89/month subscription fee, then cancel after my month of galavanting through their member-only services is done. The other steps in their membership ladder are quite steep: their most basic yearly plan, which doesn't even include a physical copy of their journal, costs $59.88/year, while "researcher" status costs $399.88/year.
They made a point of including a pretty long diatribe at the end of their "join now!" page about financial transparency. Because they're a non-profit, all their financial records are public record, and they encouraged interested parties to dig in.
On a cursory glance, i have a hard time telling who these people are politically aligned with. Not to say they lack ideals, but it's clearly an organization that earns its "network" title; as a conglomeration of hundreds of members spanning various political, idealogical, geological, and experiential backgrounds (though, as you won't be surprised to know, the vast majority of their ERT base is caucasian), I'm sure there are certain risks in news articles than slant too hard one way or the other. And the non-profit is dependant on ERT funding. Some of these folks pay hundreds of dollars a month to be investigators. There's a July 2024 article outlining Trump's curiosity about aliens as heard on a podcast with none other than Logan Paul; this researcher fails to glean much insight from it, however, other than this pretty dazzling quote: "Trump pondered the possibility of alien life, citing the vastness of the universe with its numerous planets. He questioned, “Why wouldn’t there be something, somebody?” Later in the article, they go on to include opinions from Barack Obama and Bill Clinton from bit late-night spots. You know, just to round it out.
Honestly, I had MUFON pinned to the "hucksters" catagory of this site. But the more I look into this organization, it seems that they're nuetral-minded people (politically) with their sights set on any sort of evidence that could be of use to them, no matter how small or large the news they're breaking seems to be. Their intention seems to be solely to research UFOs, UAPs, and ETs. Beyond that, anyone can join and participate in the research, conduct their own research, and bring their findings to the proverbial table. It's an organization, ultimately: the alignments of individual members may or may not be suspect, but the organization itself has admirable and even-handed intentions, as far as I can tell. I'm an amateur researcher, however, so take my half-baked conclusions with a grain of salt. I'm not endorsing MUFON by any means, but their presence in a witness statement ought not to be discounted. Rather, I'd conduct investigations on a case-by-case basis on the members of MUFON present in the statement.
And some of the stuff they're doing is legitimately fascinating. Project Aquarius is their digital library project, which seems from the outside to be quite extensive, despite having a pretty goofy-looking interface:
Unfortunately, nearly all of this stuff is behind their membership paywall, but the News Clippings Gallery is free for the general public to browse, and--I gotta be honest, man, I was enticed to pay my way into the rest of the library through the interesting stuff filed there. There's hundreds of news clippings, cataloged by century and smaller year divisions. It's a work in progress, clearly and humbly, and maybe even by a single curator.
I was charmed by it, especially the older clippings (some as old at the 1600s!), and there's a lot to look through. I wish it didn't come with such a high price tag--unfortunately, the Project Aquarius databases are only available with the top-tier membership level of "Researcher" at $399.88/year.
Which brings me to efficiency--I'm not an expert by any means. I'm still learning a lot about coding through the maintenance of my measley site. When discussing my qualms and hang-ups about MUFON with Kitsch, I bothered opening up the elements inspector on my browser, because I noticed that the nav ribbon had a weird problem:
Notice how it's kinda wearing the header like a hat and that "public policy" button kinda just. Hangs there. Like a loose tooth. I'm guessing the "Information Technology" portion of their '22 IRS filing, amounting to $29,203, is dedicated mostly to web hosting, and maybe paying the guy who keeps their hodgepodge site together.
(And, about that navbar--it looks like in their CSS, they have a value assigned for border-bottom, but not border-top? Not sure if that would fix the aesthetic issue though. The "Public Policy" pull-down menu you see hanging there is a result of their navbar being sized relative to your browsing window. I work on a Mac and when I took the screenshot, my window was full-size, which means they just have too many options in their navbar--may I suggest a pull-down menu, or a sidebar? I can't imagine what this site looks like on mobile. I didn't check)
I'm not accusing these people of mismanaging their funds, but I do think that their technology funds could be better allocated. Maybe most of that is dedicated to hosting the immense number of files in the Project Aquarius library, but a couple thousand (or tens of thousands of their nearly $600,000 yearly revenue, which I'm sure has increased since 2022) more thrown to the way of presentating the materials and members of this organization could go a long way in making them appear more credible. I have a feeling this is going to be a common challenge I run into, the more I look into these orgs: UFOlogists and other alien-enjoyers typically tend to care about getting the information out there, and generally don't know how to manage or present it to those outside their communities once they have the information. This is likely because, for so long, the only folks who will listen are those within the community. A preaching-to-the-choir type situation. If your readers and listeners already believe you, what's the point in dressing up the information with the appearance of general credibility? Also, open up that damn library. It's not the folks who have memberships who're going to need convinced by that data the most, ya dig?
I also should say: I began diving into the backgrounds of MUFON's board of directors, and it seems that a lot of them are quacks of some variety. We have the stock-standard conspiracy theorists that intersect with racism, such as the USO/Atlantist theorists--though this did yield me some pretty good material in terms of a publsher I have my eye on for another "Hucksters" write-up. Their board of directors is made up of many, many former government workers, though I can't sus out their political alignments across the board. It seems that at least one of them is a liberatarian lobbyist of some kind (it was funny seeing "UAP awareness" on her list of lobbying "wins."). Others range from former "security" CEOs to professional divers to special olympians. Feel free to do your own digging on any dirt amongst their board or ERTs. I'd be happy to hear about anything you discover. I only stopped this task because of the election results. After November 6, looking up people's lives and making determinations about their relative moralities and trustworthiness no longer seemed as fun.
I guess my last point: MUFON is an organization founded upon the idea of elevating, recording, cataloging, and preserving personal experiences. Its primary functionality does not depend on scientific data, and never has, and never will. It serves its collective purpose well. But if you're looking for hard, peer-reviewed facts and empirical evidence about the far-off stars, MUFON is not the place to be.
On a lighter end note, if you want to browse their site at all, may I suggest my favorite newsclipping, regarding a sighting of aerial orbs in 1600s Russia?
Next up on the docket for this page: I hope to debrief you all on the UNDERWATER UFO THEORIES. See you starside.