We're not exactly asking what the true nature of the UFO phenomenon is. It's more like we're asking how people form the beliefs they do (which turns out to be a pretty good way to structure an inquiry into the true nature of something). What does being exposed to lots of stories about encounters with UFOs and their occupants, from people who are clearly emotionally impacted by those encounters, do to someone? What if they tell stories that are similar enough to corroborate one another, but too different to add up to any stable, coherent picture? We examine the long history of researchers, after years of immersion in the details of many cases, coming to the conclusion that the UFO phenomenon is real, but deceptive about its own nature. 

We focus on one particularly compelling argument for this position: the bewildering number of supposedly crashed or malfunctioning crafts people have encountered over the years. Could vehicles capable of interstellar travel really keep getting tangled up in power lines and crashing into mountainsides? Are all the astonished crowds who see such things really just telling versions of the same idiosyncratic lie, in an unbroken chain down the centuries? And if neither of these scenarios sound very plausible, where does that leave us? Perhaps we might feel deceived. But there are so many ostensible crashes, involving such a bewildering diversity of UFOs and their pilots, that it almost feels less like being lied to, and more like, paradoxically, being told we're being lied to. Perhaps there's just no making sense of any of this. Or perhaps to make sense of it, we need to examine the nature of our own attempts to communicate with, and conduct research on, other species.