I swear to God - I swear to God - I was not going to write about 90's woo woo X-Files bullshit this week. I was not going to write about how things were when I was a kid. I was going to write about gardening!!! But then I went to High Bridge.

High Bridge, New Jersey is you know what. I’m not going to pretend I know anything about High Bridge, New Jersey. High Bridge is about 45 minutes from my house by car and Saturday before last I went on a hike there along the beautiful Columbia Trail, developed from a railroad bed that originally served the iron forges of High Bridge. If you want to actually learn the honestly fascinating history of the town this is one of those online articles where you read it and become suddenly aware of how much history we exist within, everywhere, all over the world.

I was hiking along with a number of Girl Scout Brownies and Daisies, in a group lead by older Girl Scouts, and all of that was as charming as you can imagine. My actual impression of High Bridge, from the very short time that I was there, is that it is as close to a Catskills mountain town as I have seen in New Jersey. The park where you access the rail trail is at the top of a hill and the top end of Main Street; below you, the entire commercial district rolls out like a picnic blanket. There is the bar called Mrs. Riley’s where you could, I assume, absolutely demolish a plastic basket of mozzarella sticks after a hike, there is the more upscale brewery, there is the restaurant that has gotten rave reviews in the New York Times, there is the cafe which is kind of half-retro half-hippie themed and appears to be in a house, and there’s the coffee shop with the pride flag in front. That last one is Scout’s and, after the hike and a craft (making “nature cookie” pendant necklaces) we made our way there.

It was great, obviously. They had an unreasonable number of scones - there were everything bagel scones with cream cheese inside and cinnamon roll scones that were scones but shaped and frosted like cinnamon rolls. Great coffee. Every second Sunday they have a queer meetup in the salon room which meant that when my five year old daughter was trying to carry too many dinosaur books back to the library shelf seven gay men in polos swooped in to assist her. My wife and I split a breakfast burrito and it was miles better than it had any need to be.

There was something at Scout’s that was both strange and nostalgically comforting. Our barista was wearing a neon-green t-shirt with a frankly gorgeous woodcut-style design of a dog being pulled into a UFO by a beam of light; inflatable green aliens sat on the shelves. There were “alien bait” scones with Reeses Pieces in them, and green alien iced lattes. It felt… retro?  It felt like the 1990s, specifically the mid-90s where quasi-serious UFO paranoia was in vogue - from The X-Files to “take me to your dealer” t-shirts. And I quickly learned why - we had, completely by chance, come to High Bridge during the third annual Howard Menger Day, celebrating a resident who in 1956 announced that he had made contact with beings from Venus, including one who called himself Valiant Thor. Valiant Thor - who was actually photographed looking kind of like a greaser - had been sent to earth from a higher race of beings that lived inside of Venus and hoped to guide humans away from nuclear war. There’s a lot more information about Menger in this piece from the estimable Weird NJ, as well as a clip of a “Waking Weird” segment that appeared on WFMU’s killer morning show Wake n Bake with Clay Pigeon.

The most interesting thing to me about Howard Menger Day as celebrated in High Bridge was the distance between the goofy, celebratory atmosphere in the coffee shop and the rest of the town, which celebrates with a screening of E.T. as well as a house decorating contest, with the one “official” Howard Menger Day event a three-hour-long pair of lectures about Menger’s experience, starting with a completely earnest attempt by a MUFON speaker to explain the geopolitical situation at the time and explain why that would have been of interest to Venusians. Several other people in the coffee shop appeared to have traveled in specifically to attend the lecture (we had to miss it, unfortunately), and it felt incredibly quaint in the year of our Lord 2025 for UFO enthusiasts to drive to a physical location to hear about about something that allegedly occurred sixty years ago. How are they not just watching TikTok videos about nephilim and seed oils at home, like the rest of us?

My own nostalgia for the sort of 90s “weirdness” counterculture always leaves me with a queasy feeling, for a few reasons. I think a lot of that stuff was operating from the extremely wrong assumption that the End of History had occurred - that the good guys had won, that right-thinking people had come around on racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. and that we were in the midst of a slow but inexorable process of convincing everyone else, and so - if you were properly inoculated, basically - you could engage with the racist, sexist material of previous generations with a sort of ironic distance. That the largely young, white men who were the main drivers of this culture were themselves racist, misogynistic, etc. in ways that were completely inscrutable to themselves almost goes without saying. But even the good, fun stuff is difficult to separate out from what came next.

The reason why MUFON presentations about alien contact in the 1950s seem quaint today is that the conspiracy mindset - the manner of constructing an intellectual model of the world that is based not around proof but around connections - is now the major model of understanding the world around us for most Americans. People who are actively and obviously engaged in conspiracies - to defraud the American public, to hide evidence of their financial and sexual crimes, to punish their political enemies - themselves rant about the vast conspiracies arrayed against them, the Marxists and antifa super soldiers. Joe Rogan is probably the most popular commentator of our time and his podcast is, as far as I can tell, just three hours of weird roiling fantasy, the kind of stoned dorm room bull session stuff where multiple contradictory theories can coexist simultaneously because the goal is not a cohesive worldview but a sense of illicit discovery. People used to listen to Art Bell to get this stuff, or drive out to remote areas to convince themselves they were seeing UFOs, but those people were weirdos (complimentary); now the target audience is the guy next to you in line at Sweetgreen. Normies are listening to the stuff now, and making it the basis by which they analyze reality.

So is my nostalgia for inflatable green aliens, for the sort of stuff from the AMOK 5th Dispatch, is that bad? Is it… pick your poison, morally bad, evil, counterrevolutionary - to have any positive feelings towards this stuff? Is it okay to believe in aliens - to allow yourself to believe in something that you cannot affirmatively prove?

I was trying to figure out how to ask that last question on Bluesky when I realized that believing in something you cannot affirmatively prove is what we usually call faith. I think there are definitely people who will argue that taking the intellectual liberty to basically bullshit yourself is bad, or they might specifically term it counterrevolutionary or something along those more political lines - and seeing how the Right has used ideas about “wellness” and “natural living” to bring whole swaths of disaffected voters into a fascist project, not to mention how long faith in its more traditional religious form has been used to oppress and divide - well, it’s hard not to feel like they have a point.

The High Bridge Incident, as it is known, isn’t the only alleged alien contact to occur in New Jersey - far from it. The entire state has a shocking amount of UFO history, along with the fringe groups and individuals that go along with it. I first learned about Ellen Crystall from a single paragraph in a typewritten report on the Pine Bush lights from P.E.A.R. - the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab, which - as a part of Princeton University! -studied parapsychology and other weirdness from 1979 to 2007, when it was shut down for basically being a bunch of bullshit.

This incredibly bitchy mention not only misspells her name but - as my further researches on Ellen Crystall revealed - vastly understates her popularity in the UFO community of the time. The book mentioned but not named is Silent Invasion, which came out in 1992 and seems to have been fairly popular at the time, going through multiple printings and garnering Crystall appearances on talk shows and general interest news programs. There is a surprisingly great bio available on a website about cassette-only synth musicians in New Jersey, because she was also that. I have only been able to find one of her compositions online, and it of course slaps. But all of Silent Invasion is available on OpenBooks, and the introduction is telling.

By the standards of American culture Ellen Crystall lived her life without much success. She lived with her parents for almost all of her adult life, working temporary office jobs; when she found steady employment as a high school music teacher, she hated it. But in the world of UFOology, Crystall was not just a respected researcher but a direct conduit to extraterrestrial life, whose long documentation of strange lights around the southern New York hamlet of Pine Bush lead it to be apparently considered “the UFO capital of the world” - it, too, has an annual UFO festival to this day. The introduction of Silent Invasion does not detail a mundane life - instead, she rapidly summarizes her hundreds of extraterrestrial encounters, ranging over decades of her life, and she asks

Why me? Why us? Why, I ask myself, am I in the incredible position to be able to photograph these ships so frequently? And who am I that I can bring almost anyone with me, so that they can also observe and photograph the ships?… The 1971 events served as preparation for what I and my colleagues were to experience in 1980. The 1980 sightings established the grounds for understanding what occurred in 1984 and into the present. This is not a subtle point; it is as if a conditioning process is occurring. The events appeared to be planned by the aliens as if I an other contactees seem to have been chosen or targeted for it.

Silent Invasion does not describe the life of a underemployed synth musician but a contactee who has been specifically chosen by otherworldly entities as their emissary on earth; in From Outer Space to You, the two humans that the Venusians approach with their message of peace and nuclear disarmament are President Dwight Eisenhower and a sign painter living on a farm outside of a small town in rural New Jersey. To be contacted is to be chosen, to be special; to be a conspiracy theorist is to transcend the material differences between yourself and the other members of the conspiracy through your ability to uncover the truth. I don’t think it is a coincidence that The X-Files largely occurs in small American towns reeling from the collapse of local industry. Later in life Howard Menger admitted that his photographs of alien spacecrafts were actually photographs of drawings he did - after his actual photographs were stolen, of course. But you can imagine the sign painter, working in the quiet night, creating the images that would make him - for a short period, within a very specific group of people - famous, and what that must have meant to him.

I am a confirmed Episcopalian, although I think I probably believe in God around 30% of the time*. I spend a portion of my week in church, I teach Sunday School, I help with coffee hour, and it’s hard for me to describe what I get out of it - I love the people at my church and the small good that we do in our community, but becoming religious has not in any way made me less anxious and depressed about everything.

What does make it worth it - what I find compelling - is the idea that this is not everything - that I am not just a downwardly-mobile middle-aged white man with a lot of ambition and no follow-through, living through the most banal End Times imaginable. That there is more to me than my bank account and the cracked driveway I can’t afford to fix and the charitable donations that I can’t afford to make - that there is a metric by which I can be judged based on my love for other people and my attempts to make life better for them.

In religious terms, I believe all people are equally beloved in the sight of God, regardless of whether God exists; in more secular terms, I believe that every person is worthy of dignity and sustenance and care. Maybe we turn to faith, to the unproven and unverifiable, when we try to believe that for ourselves in a world that very much does not believe it at all. To imagine yourself as having worth in a culture that constantly salivates at the thought of your replacement may mean, for some of us at least, having to believe something that cannot be seen or proven, and maybe what I do at church is not very different from what Ellen Crystall or Howard Menger did. Something out there cares about me, they thought. And, I guess, so do I.

* this is actually considered pretty good for Episcopalians.