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Summary: Deceit is conceived by ufology theorists as intrinsic to the behavior of UFO phenomena, often experienced as slippery and theatrical. In abduction experiences, there is what has been described as a simulacrum of medicine and science, whose content can be absurd and whose purposes are largely obscure. If we begin from the humanist perspective, we could say that these experiences produce antipodal stances—contradictory statements and affective postures that show intense paradox within a schema of play. I argue that this play has two fundamental and oscillating (or simultaneous) aspects. It is both bottom‐up, in the sense that it is a confined or segregated aspect of society, and top‐down, in the sense that it is experienced as a cosmos of aliens with unknown designs that manifest paradoxically. I argue that the terms of our analysis in the social sciences must reflect the fact that, in this simultaneity of opposites, these extraordinary and sometimes traumatic experiences are neither subjective nor objective but lie in a sort of "hermeneutical" middle ground that recognizes the deeply ironic and recursive nature of UFO phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is based on a year of fieldwork with ufologists, contactees, abductees, and skeptics in Chile, using methods including ethnography, media and website analysis, and in-depth interviews. Our argument is that the "UFO" serves as, what Galison would call, a theory machine, a multiplicity generating not simply heterogeneous interpretive frameworks through which to understand anomalous flying phenomena, in different ideological spheres, but thresholds of evidence as well. We take evidence here, not as given but as an ethnographic category. In particular, the UFO as a theory machine in the Chilean context, and the different stakes of evidence found within it, yields a theory of possibility and impossibility, which we have called evidence-as-possibility. This is not confined to matters of the existence of UFOs, but also spatial differences in which one conceives of such manifestations. We pit materialist understandings of evidence against ones that regard alien contact as something interior and embodied. But we also forego this division and explore how different, apparently contradictory facets of the evidence-as-possibility theory actually work together, such that each condition or event creates its own spatial configurations for UFOs. Finally, we explore "absurd" moments in which this theory machine collapses or goes into overdrive, escaping this spectrum of possibility altogether. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]