Max Spiers: Why The Conspiracy Theorist Community Will Never Accept The British UFO Hunter’s Death

When British conspiracy theorist Max Spiers died suddenly in Poland in 2016, it wasn’t surprising that his community of fellow sleuths and UFO hunters thought it was suspicious. Soon after his death, rumours of “black liquid” emerging from his body spread across the internet.

Spiers, 39, had made a career out of investigating alleged government cover-ups of UFO sightings. He was well known, spoke at conferences, and believed there was a secret underground alien base in New Mexico that used children for their “pure energy”.

That summer in 2016, he had travelled to Warsaw to talk at a conference about  “secret military programmes”. There he met a woman, Monika Duval, 50, who he soon moved in with. But two months later, however, Spiers was texting his mother claiming he feared being murdered and urging her to “investigate” if anything happened to him.

He died in her home on 18 July 2016. But after his death, the Polish authorities didn’t carry out a post-mortem, and his family were told that he had died of natural causes. In the absence of a full investigation, many in his immediate circle claimed extra-terrestrial involvement in his death, or governmental mind control, or the involvement of a satanic cult.

Now, more than two years on, an inquest in Britain recorded a narrative conclusion, giving Spiers’s cause of death as pneumonia and intoxication by drugs, which caused an “aspiration of gastric contents” – an explanation for the black liquid that had fuelled so many conspiracies. A post-mortem examination carried out by a pathologist in Kent also found deadly levels of oxycodone, an opioid, in his system.

For his mother, Vanessa Bates, the long-awaited inquest has brought a sense of closure, after she fought hard for an investigation into her son’s death. But for members of the conspiracy theory community in which Spiers made his name, the inquest has simply deepened the mystery as to what happened to him.