“Then the Saucers Do Exist?”: UFOs, the Practice of Conspiracy, and the Case of Wilbert Smith
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article is about the practice of conspiracy theory. It provides a case study of Wilbert Smith, a Canadian government engineer, and the way in which a single document he produced—handwritten notes recollecting an interview with an American scientist—contributed to the perpetuation and expansion of the UFO conspiracy theory in North America. A literary-biographical approach is used to trace the genealogy of Smith’s notes, first written in 1950 but not discovered until the late 1970s. This recounting of Smith’s story demonstrates how the ufology community reproduced his notes and eventually used them to expand the UFO conspiracy theory into ever more fantastic realms. Conspiracy theory is understood here as a creative activity in which people across the political spectrum engage in order to make sense of a world in which it seems everything is connected. Conspiracy theory studies is still very nascent, especially so in Canada, and this article is a contribution to the study of the morphology of conspiracy theory. It provides a detailed Canadian case study that demonstrates the complicated transition from evidence to conclusion, showing how a single aspect of a larger conspiracy theory is constructed and maintained.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.070 | 0.083 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".