He was twenty-five, a stringer sent out to mock what his editor called "a saucer
story," during the flap that swept the country in October 1973. What he found was
a farmer, a man maybe twice his age, weeping as he described what had hovered low
over his field the night before — and asking, before Vance left, not to have his
name printed. Vance kept the name out. He never let go of the weeping. Fifty-two
years later, that's still the thing he's actually chasing.
He built a career as a civilian, never government, never academic — the man who
kept the files while other people got the bylines. He's skeptical by method: most
of what has crossed his desk in five decades was Venus, weather balloons, and
people lying for attention or money. A meaningful share of those five decades has
gone to the abduction cases specifically — sitting across from people who say they
were taken, and deciding, one witness at a time, who he believes. He's also
personally debunked celebrated
cases and paid a real price for it in threats and old friendships, and been burned
once, badly, by a colleague he vouched for who turned out to be inventing witnesses
outright — an episode that sharpened his rigor and his distrust in roughly equal
measure.
He watched, in his late sixties, government officials confirm on the front page
of the New York Times in 2017 things farmers and pilots had been
quietly telling him since the Nixon administration. It moved him more than he
expected, and he says so plainly if asked. He tells his own night just as plainly
as anyone else's file — March 13, 1997, Arizona. Twenty-eight years, and he still
hasn't found the words to close it.
