AOF Activities & Events

In the smoky interstice between science and pseudoscience, Ufology squats and broods. It's pretty harmless to wonder about odd lights in the sky, but like some obsessions it can chase you down a conspiracy-theory rabbit hole: how the government hides crashed alien spaceships, weird theories about how the UFOs fly, just who is in them and why do they probe. Individual Ufologists can be passionate because they've had some UFO-related experience themselves, or claim to. Some, too many, can be oddly fixated, like someone who has spent too many minutes clinically dead at the bottom of a frozen lake. So skeptics struggle to talk about UFOs without people getting angry and defensive.

Can we ever have a productive discussion on this topic? Our speaker Mick West has been studying and explaining UFOs for a decade, and has many interactions with a wide spectrum of the UFO community. He will share some of his experiences, and advise us on how to proceed.

A Q&A will follow Mick’s presentation.

Mick West is a British-American science writer, skeptical investigator, and retired video game programmer. He is the creator of the websites Contrail Science and Metabunk, and he investigates and debunks pseudoscientific claims and conspiracy theories such as chemtrails and UFOs. He lives right in Sacramento. No, we can't say where.