The COVID-19 pandemic seems to have brought with it a renewed interest in UFOs in this country. UFO sightings surged early in 2020, and interest in UFO research has recently been further bolstered by the government. Last year, Canada released of 20 years of UFO documentation and began sharing related information with the American government; elected officials from several parties have encouraged further work on the matter. According to Canadian UFO researcher Chris Rutkowski, although sightings decreased as lockdowns dragged on, UFO subcultures have enjoyed a swell of public interest.
Fascination with UFOs is often entirely benign, even positive. It can be driven by some of our better angels, particularly curiosity, discovery, and wonder. As scholar Michael Barkun has pointed out, though, UFO-related cultures can also contain the “seeds of conspiracist thinking.” When curiosity is stymied, discovery derailed, and wonder denied, UFO interests can easily be twisted into conspiratorial fantasy and outright scientific rejectionism. Much of UFO culture is immersed in the murky waters of suspicion and paranoia, where an anything-goes ethos encourages engaging with heterodox sources and adjacent stigmatized subjects. It's not a coincidence that rising engagement with UFO culture in Canada has corresponded with the spread of so-called theories that, according to polling data released last June, now have millions of Canadians thinking conspiratorially.
Conspiracy theories are, it seems, like potato chips: you can’t have just one. Two of the most prominent figures in the development of UFO culture in Canada illustrate how easily the conspiracism that often accompanies UFO fascination can be exploited: Henry McKay, an Agincourt-based electrician and UFO researcher who also promoted fringe topics such as paranormal and psychic research, fell into the type of conspiratorial thought that more malevolent figures in the community, like the infamous neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel, sought to prey on. Zundel’s engagements with UFO culture were grounded in the assumption that people who already believed in one such theory could be susceptible to further radicalization and in the knowledge that figures like McKay were already in conspiratorial headspaces.
McKay became interested in UFOs in 1965 after witnessing strange lights in the sky. Thus began his career as an independent UFO researcher and lecturer. McKay was able to build himself a (reasonably) respectable reputation; the Globe & Mail described him as “one of Canada’s foremost ufologists,” the Toronto Star at various points as “Canada’s leading ufologist,” “Mr. Big in Canadian ufology,” and, slightly more disparagingly, “the high priest of Canada’s UFO cult.” He was characterized by writer Marq de Villiers as “a good example of the less eccentric, more scientifically minded ufologist,”
McKay claimed to be an expert on the physical evidence of UFO landings and was known to race to reported sightings to perform his own investigations. He was associated with local and American research groups; he was the first director of the Canadian branch of the Mutual Unidentified Flying Object Network and performed investigations for the American National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena. This work led to regular speaking engagements at Ontario libraries and to lectures at local high schools and colleges. Several still-active UFO researchers cite his talks and classes as having influenced their involvement with the community.
An ad in the Brantford Expositor for a talk given by McKay.
Although McKay believed that his UFO research was conducted with proper scientific skepticism and hard-data collection and he condemned “the loonier ufologists” to the Globe & Mail for regularly embarrassing the field, he also actively spread information about other fringe topics lacking scientific merit. Advertisements for his library talks describe his evangelizing interest in pseudosciences such as parapsychology, telepathy, and psychic photography. He regularly made speculative and unfounded claims to the press; in 1977, for example, he told the Toronto Star that a recent surge in UFO sightings was the result of curious aliens checking out the CN Tower’s new transmission antennae. Over the years, he showed multiple reporters a UFO detector that he’d purchased and claimed to never travel without — he was told, he said, that it would indicate whenever a UFO was overhead.
McKay was regularly frustrated by what he saw as intransigent and opaque behaviour on the part of government officials and law enforcement, and his “scientific” mindset meant he was easily drawn into anti-government conspiratorial thinking. (This is a common pattern among UFOlogists, one traced by historian Mathew Hayes in Search for the Unknown: Canada’s UFO Files and the Rise of Conspiracy.) One incident at a tobacco farm outside Brantford in 1975 would drive McKay to suspicious and speculative conclusions. That summer, according to newspaper records, farmer Joe Borda reported witnessing what he described as a gleaming vehicle on his property. He claimed it left behind a 12-foot crop circle, within which ruined tobacco plants were covered with traces of a “purplish substance.” The Ontario Provincial Police performed lab analysis on the residue and concluded that the substance was likely tractor-lubricating fluid.
Henry McKay with his UFO-detection device. (Courtesy Toronto Star Photograph Archives)
Although his own investigation into the Borda farm revealed no residue, McKay came to believe that the substance could have been “propellant fuel left behind by a flying saucer.” The OPP refused to give him their report. He concluded that a cover-up was afoot and immediately jumped to speculating about mysterious men in black with ulterior motives. He asserted to a local reporter that “the government doesn’t want foreign powers to know that we’re in possession of a unique form of energy” and suggested that “if the formula of the new fuel were to leak out, it would ruin the petroleum industry.”
At other times, McKay expressed his frustration with what he perceived to be a conspiracy of silence between military and government officials, whom he believed were tampering with his mail and encouraging public skepticism in the face of his “overwhelming evidence.” Although he does not appear to have shown any interest in more extreme facets of UFO interest, he was spiralling into anti-government conspiracism while engaging with other fringe subjects.
Enter Christof Friedrich, real name Ernst Zundel, a German émigré who arrived in Canada in 1958. Here, he soon associated himself with the Canadian fascist Adrien Arcand and involved himself in hateful organizing under the guise of German Canadian advocacy. A 1965 letter quoted in a United States Justice Department memo warns that Zundel “speaks easily and well” and that “if this man should contact gullible people who’s [sic] values are completely twisted, he could become a real threat, for he is a political, social, and racial absolutist.” In 1974, he published an English translation of the Holocaust-denial essay The Auschwitz Lie, kicking off an ignominious and multi-decade career as one of the world’s biggest traffickers of hate.
Zundel was well aware that individuals with fringe interests could be manipulated into absorbing radicalizing fictions. Zundel quickly found that he wasn’t able to place advertisements for his Holocaust denial in periodicals. What they would accept, however, were ads for UFO literature. Writing under a pseudonym, Zundel in 1974 released UFOs: Nazi Secret Weapons?, which told of Adolf Hitler’s escape from Berlin to subterranean bases in Antarctica by way of South America in a Nazi-developed flying saucer. The book was an abridged translation of a German text that Zundel augmented with esoteric ideas — taken from the Thule Society — about a hollow inner Earth accessible through Antarctica, Nazi-collaborating extraterrestrials, and distorted versions of actual military operations like Operation High Jump.
Like many conspiracy theories, it started with facts — the Nazis did indeed go to Antarctica, and Operation High Jump was a real military operation conducted by the United States, but that’s about where accuracy ends and speculation begins.
Zundel released UFOs: Nazi Secret Weapons? at a psychic book fair in Toronto, where it caused enough buzz that he was invited onto CBC’s As It Happens. There, Zundel told a skeptical Barbara Frum that Nazi UFO surveillance flights were being regularly conducted around Canada, particularly around the Pickering nuclear power plant. Zundel told the Windsor Star that he was “keenly alert that in America anything with a swastika would sell” and that “people who are willing to believe in flying saucers and to invest in unconventional things like that are unconventional thinkers.” In an interview with journalist and skeptic Frank Miele, Zundel explained that the book was “a chance to get on the radio and TV and talk shows. For about 15 minutes of an hour program I’d talk about that esoteric stuff. Then I would start talking about all those Jewish scientists in concentration camps, working on these secret weapons. And that was my chance to talk about what I wanted to talk about.”
UFOs: Nazi Secret Weapons? is hardly subtle about its purpose. Before delving into UFOs, Zundel insisted on walking the reader through the Nazi Party’s platform, which he claimed was an exercise essential to understanding Hitler’s genius as “a prophet” with a “global vision.” His book was dedicated to “the unsung and often-maligned heroes of the Second World War,” and he hoped it would serve “the unprejudiced individual as a catalyst” for revaluating the Nazi regime. Tapping into conspiratorial narratives of government cover-up, Zundel claimed that the Nazi UFOs had been suppressed due to anti-German sentiment.
The first edition of 2,000 — which he claimed sold out in only two months — helped him build a reputation as (as he described to the Windsor Star) a “cult figure or guru.” This “seed stock” of followers would reliably buy anything he subsequently wrote, helping to bankroll his operations. He framed his publishing house as the “most active UFO organization and publisher on Planet Earth” and himself as a lecturer on UFOs and (like McKay) psychic matters. Zundel later released three additional books on the subject: Secret Nazi Polar Expeditions, Hitler on the South Pole?, and 165 Little Known UFO Sightings.
Ernst Zundel wrote under the pseudonym Christopher Friedrich.
To build his audience among the “unconventional thinkers,” he purchased a mailing list from the president of NICAP, the organization that McKay had performed investigations for. Members were then “barraged by Nazi propaganda” according to a 1979 issue of the MARCEN Journal. In the late 1970s Zundel and his associates displayed a “working model” of a Nazi UFO at a Star Trek convention in New York City; they claimed to have drawn a large crowd.
Zundel was not the first to spread tales of Nazi UFOs and superweapons; they’d been promoted by German nationalists as early as the 1950s. He did, however, play an integral role in developing aspects of the mythos: he wove various existing strands into a semi-messianic narrative that predicted a revanchist war for Hitler’s hypothetical Fourth Reich — and packaged it for vulnerable audiences. Zundel’s synthesis and contributions worked their way into Nazi UFO lore, where they were repeated and further developed by subsequent writers for both propagandistic and sensationalist purposes.
By the 1990s, UFO culture had become infected by the New World Order-style conspiracies prevalent on the far-right, which brought in elements of militia culture. The intertwined nature of anti-government conspiracism and UFO culture is well-illustrated by Oklahoma City bomber and neo-Nazi Timothy McVeigh’s interest in Area 51. Conspiracy theorists such as David Icke and William Cooper, both of whom engaged deeply in UFO culture, have reproduced euphemistic edits of the antisemitic hoax The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in their own works.
UFO culture occupies an interesting spot among fringe interests. Unlike conspiracy theories about the Illuminati, the September 11 attacks, or the flat Earth, it is less stigmatized and occasionally enjoys good-faith engagement from mainstream media and political figures. There are regular stories about UFO sightings and disclosures in mainstream media outlets, and as mentioned, Canadian politicians are warming up to the idea.
Nazi UFOs are also routinely sighted in popular culture. Operation High Jump details that Zundel synthesized into Nazi UFO mythos have been discussed credulously on programs with incredible reach such as Joe Rogan’s podcast, while Blink 182 member and UFO researcher Tom DeLonge has worked the ideas into his own books. The 2012 Finnish movie Iron Sky plays on a version of the Antarctic escape myth in which Nazis are hiding on the moon, plotting their eventual return. In 2018, the model company Revell was forced to take a Nazi UFO model kit off the shelves. Conspiracy and disinformation researcher Abbie Richards has demonstrated how the hyperborean myths of the hollow Earth, which inform Zundel’s own narrative, are spread widely on Tik Tok. As for Zundel, his UFOs: Nazi Secret Weapons? is still sold today by retailers, including Amazon.
Today, UFO culture, much of which is benign, unfortunately still has pockets of hate. Television programs such as Ancient Aliens promote racist pseudohistories that involve myths of technological backwardness and incompetence in non-European civilizations (while also engaging with Nazi UFOs in Antarctica myths). Organizations that McKay was associated with, like MUFON, have experienced recent troubles with senior figures posting hateful social-media rants, leading Newsweek to point out that the demographics associated with the organization are “likely to align with far-right viewpoints.”
Nazi UFOs never took physical flight, but they continue to buzz around popular imagination, beaming up curious, vulnerable, and indeed conspiratorial minds and introducing them to barely veiled fascist ideas.