Mind Games: Neuroscience Explains Why UFO Stories Are Hard To Accept And Why Secrecy Works

Written by Justin Scott Snead - 1 May 2022

• Three recent developments indicate that sections of the U.S government are perhaps not quite yet ready to tell the public, and maybe even politicians, the truth about UFOs. 

• But why are the masses and even intellectuals not clamoring to pursue more answers?

• The answer may be found in neuroscience.

• A strategy of concealment that worked so well for decades is helped by how our brains are wired to accept cover stories and reject complex or incomplete stories. 

Photo by Hal Gatewood on Unsplash

In mid-February of this year, Ezra Klein interviewed the celebrated Canadian writer Margaret Atwood for his New York Times podcast, and he asked her about UFOs:  

“One of the questions I always wondered about for myself, as somebody who works in news in a particular period of human history, is, what are the things that when this era is looked back on, the question would be, why did people not take that more seriously?

…what was your view of the spate of U.F.O. news coming out of particularly the U.S. government over the last year that got a ton of attention, then everybody just sort of moved on after a report came out saying, we didn’t know what to make of any of this?”

Klein takes this topic seriously. 

From his perch at The New York Times, he has done more than most mainstream journalists to elevate the issue (by writing one of the few serious UFO op-eds in the newspaper’s history; by interviewing Diana Pasulka Walsh on his podcast; by continuing to ask questions).

When Klein asserts that the public and body politic is not taking UFOs seriously, he’s describing something real. 

Atwood’s response to his question helps explain why we aren't taking it seriously: 

“Well, I think that report says it all. We don’t know what to make of any of this. And if you then don’t have more of the story, of course, it’s going to move on because if the story is, we don’t know, there’s not much to add to that. We don’t know.

Oh, and now it’s Tuesday, and we still don’t know. And Thursday, we also don’t know on Thursday.

So it isn’t a story if it ends with, we don’t know, and there’s nothing else to add. It’s, again, the nature of the stories. If there is no next chapter, what can you say? We still don’t know.”

This exchange between a mainstream journalist and writer (familiar with narratives and intricacies) explains so much about why widespread awareness of UFO evidence and acceptance of their otherworldly origins has proved so elusive.

It also helps us understand why the community of UFO researchers and activists behave as we do in the face of this elusiveness. When it comes to UFOs, everyone is seeking a story that makes sense. We’re always grasping, exasperating with our inability to identify one.   

Klein’s first question of the interview makes a deep point about how people interact with the UFO phenomenon: “why do human beings think in stories?” 

There are various answers, and each stretches back to the evolution of the human brain. 

Stories are the process by which humans explain what has happened and what could happen in the future. Atwood explains that:

“Once we had a language that included a past and a present and the future, once we could think about what had happened and transfer information to people about what might therefore happen, we were going to be telling stories.”

Since the natural world seldom gives us the full picture, storytelling helps us piece together, correlate available fragments, and make useful predictions or speculations. This aided survival because it allowed us (in Atwood’s words) “to teach people so they didn’t have to do it by trial and error.”  

Stories also help us battle against enemies. Atwood is not only a master storyteller, she has spent decades studying how human organizations, authoritarian regimes, in particular, have used stories and language to construct false knowledge and enforce desired beliefs and behaviors. She says:

“Other animals go in for camouflage and deception, but we were able to go in for camouflage and deception using words …we [deceive] more elaborately, and we do it with stories.” 

The fact that the human mind is geared for story construction helps us understand so much about the predicaments of anyone who has tried to understand UFOs, past and present.

The UFO phenomenon is a nebulous mystery crying out to be told in full. The very few of us who have gathered enough clues and data find ourselves obsessed with uncovering the full story, often to the point of over-speculation.  

More importantly, the tendency of the human mind to disregard stories that are incomplete or don’t make sense explains why the vast majority of the public, when faced with the topic of UFOs, don’t think about them at all.

This is also why gate holders within governments, as possessors of key pieces of the story, are well-positioned to maintain this status quo for a long time. 

Your Brain on UFO Stories

Stories are collections of events arranged from the beginning, middle, to end, and which contain useful meaning. A story forms a mental map of reality that we use to navigate our lives, and our brains make them up every day.

Stories help us make sense of the world. 

Robert Burton is a neurologist and novelist who writes about the primacy of stories not just in our everyday lives but also in the practice of science. In an essay on this topic he writes:

“When we use data of the physical world to explain phenomena that cannot be reduced to physical facts, or when we extend incomplete data to draw general conclusions, we are telling stories.”

The brain’s evolution has integrated storytelling with its dopamine reward system for pattern recognition.

Because moving through the world is so complicated, and available data to help us is often woefully incomplete, our brains have evolved to seek patterns that help us connect the dots of any given situation. Burton explains that the brain “quickly detects entire shapes from fragments of the total picture and provides you with a powerful sense…of familiarity and ‘rightness’ of a correlation.”

Finding patterns is pleasurable. When our brain forms a story, the beginning, middle, and end click into place, cause and effect are correlated, meaning is revealed, and we get a big shot of dopamine. 

Conversely, when presented with an incomplete story, or a story that does not help us make sense of the world, our brains reject or ignore it. Not useful. Move on. Sometimes there is even an emotional response akin to disgust. 

UFO stories are like this.

All UFO stories are incomplete, missing the critical mass of data that allows us to form a pattern. While one day in the future UFO stories might help us make sense of the world, or even the deep nature of reality, as of right now they absolutely do not.

UFO researcher Jacques Vallee’s key insight from studying the phenomenon for many decades is that UFO stories don’t make any sense. He calls them absurd. The absurdist narrative is an extremely niche literary genre. Most people don’t care for it.    

Take a typical UFO sighting. Air Force pilot spots a UFO. He chases it. It disappears. There is no beginning to this story - we don’t know where the craft came from. There is no end to the story - we don’t know where it went. All we have is some disjointed action in the middle.

There are none of the other narrative elements important to a story. The most important characters and their motivations are blank. There is no theme. What does the event mean? What even really happened? Nobody has any idea. It’s a non-story.       

That is not to say that people are prone to disbelieve the pilot’s story.

According to a Pew poll from the summer of 2021, 51% of U.S. adults believe that “UFOs reported by people in the military are evidence of intelligent life outside Earth.”

That’s a lot of people.

Modern presidents have a very hard time getting 51% of the public to approve of their job performance. In his four years as U.S president, Donald Trump never got more than 46% of the public to agree he was doing a good job, and yet look at what he was able to get them to do.

He got over 74 million people to vote for him, and then he got many thousands to help him attempt to overturn that election, a portion of whom broke the law in the process and are going to jail. Politicians are extremely skilled at telling clear, piercing stories that convey a simple call to action.

Active belief motivates people to not only take action but to incorporate the belief into their worldview and even their identity. Except for a small minority of the public, UFO stories, if they are believed at all, lead to passive belief. Burton explains why shapeless, contentless stories fail to move people to action:

“Not being able to pigeonhole an event or idea makes it much more difficult for the brain to label and store it as a discrete memory. Neat and tidy promotes learning; loose ends lead to the ‘yes, but’ of indecision and inability to draw a precise conclusion.” 

This is a problem that anyone pushing for UFO disclosure will have to solve. But there is a bigger problem. The “yes, but” of UFO stories makes it easy for government actors to block the full and true UFO story from being told.

It is a plot hole large enough to fly a Skyhook balloon through. 

Your Brain On Cover Stories

Let’s tell a slightly different version of our average simple UFO story, which lacks many elements to make it a full story.

Air Force pilot spots a UFO. He chases it. It disappears. He lands and is told he was actually chasing a weather balloon. 

This story has a beginning, middle, and end. It contains a clear message: it is easy to fool the eye. Also, silly people see UFOs everywhere, but they are only misidentifying conventional objects. 

Of course, in the late 1940s, this became the official Pentagon spin on the wider UFO story. The public was assured that UFO sightings resulted from hallucinations, hoaxes, or misidentification. The call to action was to take no action at all. Nothing to worry about.

In his 1950 book reporting on UFO cases, Donald Keyhoe describes a chilling encounter in the Pentagon that demonstrates why cover stories are so effective. Keyhoe had spent months investigating UFO encounters, several of which had garnered high public interest. One of them was from January 1948, when an Air Force pilot named Thomas F. Mantell was killed in a crash that resulted from a high altitude pursuit of what was then called a flying saucer. 

The story started when Kentucky state police called local Godman Air Force Base asking why they were getting calls from residents about a craft "circular, about 250 to 300 feet in diameter," flying at high speed over their towns.

The flight tower checked. There were no flights in the area, and it was later learned that there were no balloon launches either.

Soon base operations officers were in the tower looking at the UFO through high-powered binoculars. They were unable to identify it.

Next, the flight tower dispatched Mantell and two other pilots to approach the object and get a better look. Mantell got the closest. From the cockpit of his P-51, he radioed back to the tower, "I've sighted the thing. It looks metallic and it's tremendous in size. . . . Now it's starting to climb."      

The story ends with Mantell flying to 20,000. Since his jet was not equipped with oxygen, it is assumed that he passed out, resulting in the crash that killed him. 

In January 1948, this was a good story. Mantell was an experienced pilot who flew in World War II and had a reputation for being skilled and level-headed. He was the first service member killed in a flying saucer incident.

Coincidently or not, two weeks after his death the Air Force launched the military’s first official office responsible for investigating UFO sightings, which would be in operation for the next twenty-two years at the Air Technical Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

They spent a lot of time investigating the Mantell case, and their first report coded the object he pursued as unidentified. Captain Edward Ruppelt, who later took over the office, wrote that in 1948 “everybody at ATIC was convinced that the object Mantell was after was a spaceship.”   

Keyhoe spent much of 1949 investigating the Mantell case and others like it. Just before going to print, he requested an interview with a press liaison officer to get the Pentagon's official word on the case. He sat down with a wartime-decorated intelligence officer named Major Jerry Boggs: 

“Boggs looked to be in his twenties, younger than I expected… with a quietly alert face…. [He] gave me a curiously searching look… all through our talk, I had the strong feeling that he was on his guard. … Major Boggs looked me squarely in the eye. “‘Captain Mantell was chasing the planet Venus.’” 

Keyhoe could not believe it. Not only was Venus not in Mantell’s line of sight, but the chase also occurred in the middle of the afternoon when Venus would not have been visible. Nor could Mantell have mistaken a pinprick of light, no matter how bright, as a “metallic” object “tremendous in size.” Keyhoe raised these contradictions and asked:

“‘Is that the official Air Force answer?’

And then the response:

“‘Yes it is,’ Boggs said. His eyes never left my face… ‘There’s no other possible answer,’ he said. ‘Mantell was chasing Venus.’” 

The best storytellers believe what they are saying. They have a dogged, stubborn, shameless insistence on the reality of their story. 

It wasn’t long before the Air Force stubbornly, shamelessly changed their story.

It was not Venus, but a Skyhook balloon, which at the time was a classified project related to atomic blast detection.

This one stuck. It was also a good story.

Poor Captain Mantell had read too many flying saucer reports in the newspapers. He got carried away, and over-excited. Neither he nor anyone in the Godman tower would have known about the classified balloon.  

Burton uses neuroscience to explain why we can be such suckers for false stories. He writes:

“Because we are compelled to make stories, we are often compelled to take incomplete stories and run with them.”

When presented with an easily understandable story that feels plausible, in Burton’s words, “we earn a dopamine ‘reward’ every time it helps us understand something in our world—even if that explanation is incomplete or wrong.” 

Another key reason these cover stories have been so effective is that the government is usually able to conceal any evidence that would help the true and more complex story eclipse the cover story. The Mantell cover story would collapse if any hard evidence he was not chasing a balloon were to surface in the press. Keyhoe, being a good journalist, tried to unearth that evidence:    

“Had Mantell told Godman Tower more than the Air Force admitted? I went back to the Pentagon and asked for a full transcript of the flight leader’s radio messages.

I got a quick turn-down. The reports, I was told, were still classified as secret. Requests for pictures of the P-51 wreckage, and for a report on the condition of Mantell’s body, also drew a blank. I had heard that some photographs were taken of the Godman Field saucer from outside the tower. But the Air Force denied knowledge of any such pictures.”  

All they have to do is subtract out the key pieces of the full story that make it impossible for a listener to complete the pattern. Without those pieces, our brains push us in the direction of the next available option - the cover story.  

As early as the year Mantell died, the Pentagon had settled on a policy of explaining away UFO sightings with these cover stories. But they still were telling the public that between 20% to 40% of sightings were genuinely unexplainable.

By 1953 the military and intelligence agencies jointly began applying a new storytelling approach. Field agents who received UFO reports were directed to tell the public only about the cases that had been solved: the balloons - so many balloons, the hoaxes, and the hallucinating witnesses.

Meanwhile, new secrecy and classification laws made it illegal for government agents, including private airline pilots, to talk about sightings. Many genuine, unexplained UFOs were never formally reported.  

For seven decades this clampdown has kept the public from suspecting that there might be a bigger, more interesting story to be told. 

A Different Story? 

With a bit of brain psychology and a lot of secrecy, our government has kept public awareness of UFOs from breaking open.

Today, many in the UFO community hope that era is over. But is it?  

The ridiculous cover stories seem to be gone. But maybe one of the lessons our gatekeepers within the U.S. government have learned in telling them for 70 years is that, because of how our brains are wired, the cover stories are not necessary to maintain the cover. All they have to do is continue to limit the release of evidence, and continue to not comment.

The Director of National Intelligence’s UAP Report from June 2021 unarguably signals a shift in the U.S. government’s approach to UFO transparency. It strongly implies that craft of unknown origin, observed by the military since 2004, exhibit breakthrough aerospace capabilities.

But all of the evidence to support this implication is meticulously stripped out of the public report. The classified version that Congress got to read did have some of that evidence, but when it was released to the public all evidence was redacted. Even the various shapes of the objects were redacted.

Why would shapes be classified?

The words themselves, probably posted on the wall of my daughter’s preschool classroom, do not reveal sources and methods.

But they would tell a story.

What if one of those redacted shapes is “circular,” the same shape those people in Kentucky saw over their towns on that day in 1948 when Captain Mantell died?

What if a government report written in 2021 said we have current evidence of an unexplainable craft, and it is shaped like a flying saucer. People would begin to connect those dots. 

In fact, thanks to Jeremy Corbell, (if what he has been told is accurate) we may know (if correct) one of those shapes. Corbell interviewed a Naval Operations Specialist who was on the USS Nimitz during the 2004 “Tic Tac” encounter. He describes watching a clear video of a craft that was not Tic-Tac shaped but a traditional flat-bottomed, domed saucer, which banked on a tight angle and accelerated out of sight. This video (if it exists) has never been released.   

In April 2020, the Department of Defense (DoD) did release and authenticate three Navy videos that had been circulating online and in the news. The FILR1 video is from the Nimitz case.

Those videos - and the fact that they were government-certified - told a powerful story, which spurred the public and Congress (at least publicly) to ask for more details. 

In 2021, Corbell released additional Navy videos that had been provided to him. These were from June 2019 when a UFO swarm descended on the USS Omaha off the coast of San Diego, not far from where the Nimitz encountered its UFO in 2004.

One video shows a spherical craft submerging into the ocean. The others are of a radar screen and deck footage that depict the swarm. Together, these videos tell a powerful story that in particular speaks to the trans-medium (air and water) capabilities of these craft.  

At the time, Corbell took to social media to goad DoD into officially certifying the videos just as it had done for the videos of earlier encounters.

This was important because having official DoD comment and evidence about the 2019 swarm would help tell the complete story of what happened. DoD declined to do so, and to this day has refused to acknowledge them.

What’s worse, there are signs of another secrecy clampdown that might even claw back the already-released videos out of the public record. Chris Mellon sounded the alarm in a March 2022 op-ed: 

“[DOD] issued new classification guidelines last year that classify as ‘Secret’ the sorts of videos (e.g., Gimbal, Go Fast and FLIR1) that DOD has acknowledged were unclassified — not declassified — when they were released in 2017. This new blanket of secrecy is apparent from the DOD briefing guide on last year’s unclassified UAP report, which states: ‘Except for its existence, and the mission/purpose, virtually everything else about the UAPTF is classified, per the signed Security Classification Guide.’” 

No evidence. No story. No public awareness. 

One last example. A FOIA request forced the release of an internal Navy memo about UFOs written by the Director of Naval Intelligence on June 16, 2020. It was posted on The Black Vault last month.

This memo was written one day before Senator Rubio inserted a clause into the Intelligence Authorization Act for 2021 which publicly outed the UFO or (as it’s officially known) Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) Task Force by name as being under the control of the Office of Naval Intelligence, and also mandated that the 2021 UAP report be compiled.

The memo was written for the Secretary of the Navy, and it no doubt tells the full story of what the Navy knew about UAP and why Congress was asking about it.

The memo runs for 15 pages, longer than the 2021 UAP Report. Every word of it is redacted. 

Intelligence agents for the U.S. government are not learning on the job how to redact files and employ vague jargon in UFO reports. They’ve had a lot of practice, and they know exactly what they are doing.

The decades-old strategy is to withhold enough of the key pieces of the story until, as Ezra Klien put it, everybody just sort of moves on.

More transparency is needed to move the ball forward.

Unless bold moves are made by Congress and the Executive Branch, the status quo might continue for a lot longer than many of us are prepared to admit.

But if further political action is not taken, what will it take to change? Who will tell the story?

If the government refuses to go public, will the media get a hold of the evidence and be brave enough to try and explain it?

Or will the UFOs themselves ever make the story plain for all to see?

Lastly, will witnesses and those advocating for truth within government grow impatient and take matters into their own hands?

Until then, this mystery is the greatest story never told.

Many things in life will never make sense.

Religion and art condition humans to live with the numerous mysteries of being alive. UFOs just might be one of those mysteries that we have to learn to live with.  

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