His eyes beam beneath the metal frames of his glasses. As Richard Spence sits at a picnic table in East City Park he talks about UFOs and intelligence agencies. Spence, a recently retired UI professor, has made a career out of studying the history behind espionage, secret societies, and the occult.
Q: What made you interested in history?
A: History interested me because it was about everything. It’s the only subject that really is about everything.Chemistry, you study chemistry. Anthropology, you study anthropology. History is about the sum total of human experience. It just seems to be bigger and more interesting.
Q: What got you into studying the history of spies, occultism, and secret societies?
A: Well, they’re interesting, because there’s a lot of questions about them. There’s always something to be discovered. Let’s take, for instance, the American Civil War, there are still things to be known about it but on the other hand, it’s been hashed over in so many ways, so there’s probably not a lot new to be discovered about something like that. One of the things that attracted me probably to things like espionage and secret societies and occultism, is that there are lots of questions about whether or not they even exist. The other thing they have in common is the element of secrecy. Espionage is all about guarding your secrets and stealing the other guys. That’s the kind of common link between something like occultism, which is about the uncovering of secrets and the guarding of secrets, where there’s really this kind of interesting relationship between those two things. Same thing with a secret society which really just means not a society that is secret that nobody knows about it but then what goes on inside it is secrets.
Q: What are some of the things you learned through your work?
A: I suppose something we all sort of know but really sort of miss is that people lie all the time. They lie about where they were born. They lie about what their name is. They lie about what it is that they’ve done. They create these whole false histories for themselves and that’s an interesting thing to figure out why they do that. Maybe it’s just because it’s not very interesting. But still, you wonder, why did you tell all these elaborate lies, what are you hiding?
Q: What have you been doing since you retired?
A: The difference in being retired, is you’re not working for anybody anymore, and therefore you pretty much can do what you want when you want, which, you know, you still have contracts you have to fulfill. I started working with a company called The Great Courses. So somehow since I’d become the secret society guy, I don’t know how that happened, they call me, and you go through the whole process. The first course I did for them was the real history of secret societies which is available on Amazon Prime and the considered devices. I write the scripts and then I go back east and I sit and I talk and they film them. I get experience working in front of cameras, reading teleprompters, and writing specifically for that kind of medium, which was something that I always wanted to do. It still gives me an ability to work with history, talk about the things that I want to talk about, but in a different kind of medium and I get paid for it.
Q: What are some of the subjects that interest you the most right now?
A: Just this last week I gave a talk for the local library, the 1912 Center and it was what didn’t happen at Roswell. Roswell is one of the more popular stories about flying saucer crashes. That’s one of those things that once you begin to look into it, you find out that none of that is true, none of it. I mean it’s the whole story as it exists today, bears no relation to what actually happened at the time. I think part of the problem with that whole field, the whole thing that we follow is that historians have never really looked at it. You’ve got people who are UFO researchers and look at it, but they’re almost always coming at it by trying to prove one thing or another, maybe they’ve already got some kind of conclusion and they’re looking for evidence to support them. Whereas what historians do or are eternally supposed to do is to try to go back and reconstruct things from the beginning which was what it was trying to do with the Roswell thing. So, I think, to me, that’s just a whole field that can really benefit by having some, just simple historical analysis to look at what we’ve got.
Q: How has your research and career shaped your personal views on intelligence agencies and the occult?
A: I think it’s probably becoming aware that intelligence, they probably have a bigger historical footprint than people realize. The CIA doesn’t go in and advertise everything that they do, that’s completely the opposite of their whole reason to exist. The CIA is like a giant bureaucratic secret society, everybody knows they exist, but nobody knows exactly what it is that they do. You’re not supposed to know that. So I think it’s given me a greater appreciation for the role that intelligence agencies have played in everything from popular culture to politics. What my research did is to convince me not to believe in anything. Anybody who’s had my classes will generally know that I always say that there’s this great distinction you have to make between believing something and knowing something. If you know something, you know it. Believing something is something that you can’t prove. Because then you would know it. So when you believe something, you’re holding something to be true that you actually can’t demonstrate is true. You’re taking it on faith.