Publish and Perish: The Mysterious Body Count of UFOLOGY and the darker side of Conspiracy Research [1]

By Olav Phillips

It is said there are two certainties in life, death and taxes. It is a conundrum all people face as we move through life.  We are born, we live and inevitably we perish.  Some people die of old age, maybe an accident, or in some cases we die by our own hand for whatever reason. Mortality as that certainty which propel many to achieve, knowing they only have a limit time on this here mortal coil.  For others that drive to achieve something eventually costs them their lives.

For many years there has been a darker side to ufology and conspiracy research which is occasionally discussed and on occasion documented.  The first real exploration of the ufology/conspiracy body count came in 1971 when the late Otto Bender, writing for Saga magazine, published an article called “Liquidation of the UFO Investigators.”  In that article Bender, who would later meet his own untimely demise, researched the deaths of some 137 researchers, writers, scientists, and witnesses who had died in the previous decade under what some might call “mysterious” circumstances.

In the article Bender mapped out an odd mixture of heart attacks, hyper aggressive cancers, suicides and other source of death amongst ufology.  We need only look towards Phil Schneider’s death as a case in point.