A fascination with UFOs is often benign, even positive. But two figures in the development of the culture in Canada show how easily it can be twisted and exploited. he COVID-19 pandemic seems to have brought with it a renewed interest in UFOs in this country. UFO sightings surged early in 2020, and interest in UFO research has recently been further bolstered by the government. (…) Much of UFO culture is immersed in the murky waters of suspicion and paranoia, where an anything-goes ethos encourages engaging with heterodox sources and adjacent stigmatized subjects. It’s not a coincidence that rising engagement with UFO culture in Canada has corresponded with the spread of so-called theories that, according to polling data released last June, now have millions of Canadians thinking conspiratorially (…) Conspiracy theories are, it seems, like potato chips: you can’t have just one. Two of the most prominent figures in the development of UFO culture in Canada illustrate how easily the conspiracism that often accompanies UFO fascination can be exploited: Henry McKay, an Agincourt-based electrician and UFO researcher who also promoted fringe topics such as paranormal and psychic research, fell into the type of conspiratorial thought that more malevolent figures in the community, like the infamous neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel, sought to prey on. Zundel’s engagements with UFO culture were grounded in the assumption that people who already believed in one such theory could be susceptible to further radicalization and in the knowledge that figures like McKay were already in conspiratorial headspaces. (…) Enter Christof Friedrich, real name Ernst Zundel, a German émigré who arrived in Canada in 1958. Here, he soon associated himself with the Canadian fascist Adrien Arcand and involved himself in hateful organizing under the guise of German Canadian advocacy (…) In 1974, he published an English translation of the Holocaust-denial essay The Auschwitz Lie, kicking off an ignominious and multi-decade career as one of the world’s biggest traffickers of hate. Zundel was well aware that individuals with fringe interests could be manipulated into absorbing radicalizing fictions. Zundel quickly found that he wasn’t able to place advertisements for his Holocaust denial in periodicals. What they would accept, however, were ads for UFO literature. Writing under a pseudonym, Zundel in 1974 released UFOs: Nazi Secret Weapons?, which told of Adolf Hitler’s escape from Berlin to subterranean bases in Antarctica by way of South America in a Nazi-developed flying saucer. The book was an abridged translation of a German text that Zundel augmented with esoteric ideas — taken from the Thule Society — about a hollow inner Earth accessible through Antarctica, Nazi-collaborating extraterrestrials, and distorted versions of actual military operations like Operation High Jump.
via tvo today: From UFOs to Nazi flying saucers: How conspiracy theories can foster hate
Von <a href=”//commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:David_S._Soriano” title=”User:David S. Soriano”>David S. Soriano</a> – <span class=”int-own-work” lang=”de”>Eigenes Werk</span>, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link
