Mitch Horowitz is a former book editor who has written several books on alternative spirituality, the occult, and other esoteric ideas and movements. He tends to take a very nuanced and even-handed approach to the topics, which makes him a solid choice to co-host a show that tries to determine whether various unexplained encounters are possible UFO sightings or something that can be explained in a much more mundane way.
I recently spoke with Horowitz via Zoom about his upcoming Discovery series Alien Encounters: Fact Or Fiction and the challenges of trying to determine the explanation behind some of the encounters recounted in the series. He also discusses how participating in the show has changed his thoughts on the likelihood that some of these encounters might be real.
The following interview has been lightly edited to clarity:
From your perspective, what do you think you bring to a show like this that just the average host wouldn't?
What I bring to it is decades of experience writing, chiefly, about alternatives, virtuality, and to some degree, unknown phenomena. But I've never been a player within the UFO field. And I think that is a benefit. Because there is an enormous amount of partisanship and UFO culture. In fact, as with all human endeavors, partisanship seems to overshadow what everybody showed up for in the first place.
So I come to the table without necessarily belonging to any particular team or camp. For example, some people feel that the whole story of UFOs since World War Two is one of a government cover-up. Others feel there are conspiracies, and others feel that the aliens are already here. And then, of course, you have the denialists, who would deny any kind of empiricism, of any degree of quality sightings. I don't belong to any of those camps. I have a background as a historian and a journalist in an adjacent field, but I don't land squarely in the middle of any partisan camp, and I feel that's a benefit.
Let's talk a bit about your background, where you're writing a lot of things about, as you describe it, alternative spirituality. And it's an area where it's tough to write about stuff to cover because, frankly, there's a lot of grifters and frauds. There's just a lot of people out there, who see it as a way to make a buck or they have some, they're stuck in some rut and this is a way to get attention. How does your experience dealing with those people inform your work on this show? Does it make you more or less skeptical when you're listening to other people's stories about possible UFO encounters?
I think I bring several insights to the table in that respect. The chief problem facing any historian of the occult is which sources to trust because that is a field where there has been an enormous amount of fraud say over the past 150-200 years and so. The evaluation of sources is the jumping-off point that any reasonable observer has to start with as far as the presence of grifters in the field. But I have to sound a dissenting note. And that said, I would say there are also a lot of idealists. I would say there are a lot of true believers. I would say there are some people who are overly credulous, but very little in the way of grifters.
It's funny, about nine months ago I was interviewing the author Whitley Strieber. And Whitley and I go way back. We were talking about how UFO rejectionists will immediately lead to the conclusion that someone wrote this book for money or someone made that book for money. I served as Whitley's editor for many years because I was also a publishing executive for a long time. And Whitley said, "Well, having published four of my books and paid me for them, you're in a unique position to know how false that assumption is." And so, he said the money is obviously nowhere near what people think it is. There are probably easier ways to earn a book than putting oneself in the crosshairs of critics.
So I think the greater problem is over-credulity rather than grifting. And that's a problem in all human affairs, you have that problem in politics, where people will simply believe something just because they like it. Look, it's human nature that we seem to have an endless capacity to believe in things that are in line with our needs. And so lonely people or isolated people, or people who just feel they have something to share, you know, will come to the table in the UFO field or any other field. And probably with things that may not be true, but cutting through that involves evaluating their character, their background, and also very plainly the evidence they can bring to the table if there's a mundane explanation for something.
Usually with all the data that we have available to us today, that mundane explanation can be arrived at pretty quickly. And then you start to whittle down the pool of claimants and experiences.
I want to talk specifically about the show a little bit. What's your role in an average episode? What does the process look like?
We camp out in a bar called The Variety, which is one of the most popular watering holes in Roswell. And it's awesome because it's a cross-section of just everybody in our country. And needless to say, every third person up to Roswell has a very sincerely felt UFO story. And some of them do have stories that that defy ready explanation.
And we have some people who experienced unexplained sightings. We order something to drink, say hello, and they tell us their story. And we have in most cases already subjected the evidence they've submitted or the narrative that they've submitted to some kind of pertinent analysis. It may be a multi-pronged analysis, or it may be an analysis of aerial phenomena such as weather. We look at whether there's a satellite launch or something like a Starlink launch that appeared over their skyline that night that perhaps would dismiss their account. There might be medical evaluations of material that they've said, reporting burns or lacerations on the body after the reporting of some sort of physical close encounter. But we let them tell their story.
And then we ask them questions, which may change the outcome of our point of view. Because although the analysis has already been processed before they entered the bar, there's a very real human factor there. Just like a member of a jury might ask himself, "Do I trust this person upon the witness stand? Do I trust his or her background? Do I trust these stories? Do I believe that there's some common standard of good sense that I can bring to bear as to whether this person has veracity?"
Then we render a judgment on camera and Christy Newton is our data analysis. Sometimes she and I agree, sometimes she and I disagree. Sometimes the experience doesn't agree with our point of view. And there may be instances where it's a no, you saw a satellite launch, or you saw a reflection in the window pane. And that's disappointing. But people take it generally very maturely. Sometimes they push back also maturely and say no, you know, I was in the Navy and I know what a real phenomenon is. I don't agree with how you guys have crunched the data, and we take it from there. But it basically comes down to human stories.
Thinking back over the season, are there any stories that surprised you one way or the other? A story where you think, "Oh, this sounds like it would have been an encounter, but I can see that it wasn't. Or vice versa, where you just think, "Wow, this seems like a really legitimate encounter. And that's not something I necessarily would have expected."
There were stories where let's say the analysis, there wasn't sufficient evidence for analysis. In those cases, I might make a judgment call based on the quality of the person's character. I'm not necessarily able to say, "Oh, you had a close encounter, signed, sealed delivered." But I would be very willing to classify something as unknown or unidentified unless we've been able to rule it out.
My favorite case, personally speaking, and I didn't expect it to be, was a geologist at the New Mexico Military Institute named Frank Kimball. And Frank very painstakingly searched the supposed crash site at Roswell. And he found a bit of aluminum that showed signs of distress, showed chemical analysis making it incredibly unusual. And I frankly expected "My God, it's been generations since the alleged crash. People have combed over that area so much over the decades, it's just not going to happen." And yet he is a serious man, and he has real credentials in Earth Science. And frankly, I was blown away. I think there's something there. I can't I can't speak precisely to what it is. But if we're talking about an unidentified phenomenon, it's as good a piece of material evidence as I think we've got.
You mentioned at the top of the interview that you come to the show not being in any particular "camp" when it comes to UFOs. Did participating in the show change your mind about how you feel one way or the other?
My mind was changed in this area. I was very pleasantly surprised by the quality of most of the people who stepped up. Most of the guests are people who have some degree of tech background, they might be a computer programmer, or they might work in the tech industry. They might be active duty military, they might be veterans from the Navy, or Air Force, and they're not strangers to unexplained phenomena.
And they're canny enough to at least do a check of nightly star atlases to try and determine what they might have seen. Most of them came to the table having ruled out the most obvious explanations on their own. They live near a military installation, so could it have been some sort of test flight or Starlink launch? They've done their homework.
Some of them came to the table with no expertise. But I was surprised by the number of people who had some technical background, maybe they were backyard astronomers. A lot of good backyard astronomers out there are as capable as some people who do professionally and so they have their arms around some of the basic facts. It's not just somebody stereotypically walking in and saying, "I saw lights rising above the swamp." It's capable people, mature people. And I was really, really grateful for that because I didn't want it to turn it into a Jerry Springer episode. We had mature, able people and if they needed to push back, they were capable of pushing back.
Based on your experience with the show trying to determine if a sighting is real or not, what do you recommend to someone who has an encounter of some sort, or has some mysterious event happened to them that they don't understand? How should they document it? What's the best way of laying things out so that if someone's going to look at it later, they can kind of understand what their experience was like?
I would say that if they're alone or with friends, they should document it on their phone. Mass group sightings carry a weight of evidence that's greater than individual sightings. They should be very conservative about deciding what they see. Because the truth is, we live in an era of extended technology. There are drones, there are satellite launches that are altogether routine today. Launchings are going on at public and private test facilities. This activity has stepped up very significantly from where it was from when I was a kid, for example.
So be conservative, because there there there sometimes are mundane explanations even for things that just look wildly unfamiliar. They may not look unfamiliar in a few years. Check local star atlases and star maps and see if they're launching satellite launchings or anything like that near you at the time. And I would also check the news to see if other people spotted this in your area. If there were people who were interviewed in the press - both experiencers and either academics or military people or whatever - just gather as many facts as you possibly can. And then you can come forward.
Alien Encounters: Fact Or Fiction premieres Wednesday, June 19th, 2024 on Discovery.
