UFOs Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record (43 page)

The need for a new way of thinking about UFOs was painfully illustrated when NBC’s Tim Russert popped a surprise question to Ohio congressman Dennis Kucinich during the nationally televised presidential debate in 2007. Russert asked Kucinich whether he had actually seen a UFO, as was reported in a book by Shirley MacLaine. Snickers from the studio audience became audible as soon as the dreaded U-word was uttered. The poor man replied, accurately, that yes, he had simply seen something unidentified, reiterating that it was “an unidentified flying object.” Despite the straightforward honesty and clarity of his reply, Kucinich could not escape the laughter that had begun even before he had a chance to speak. He followed his comment with a joke of his own, as a way of saving face.
²

A U.S. government office, like the British UFO desk or the French GEIPAN, would quickly dispense with the notion that this subject is silly. We need a different language, a whole new frame of reference without the baggage of the past. Some scientists and military officials have attempted to begin this process by switching to the broadly defined term “unidentified aerial phenomena,” or “UAP.” This obviously is not enough to change the deeply embedded association of UFOs with science fiction or mental aberrations, but for them it is a step in that direction, and also helps to lessen the power of the taboo.

A small, simple change in policy is all it would take to make a very big difference. A body within the government to address the UFO issue can be set up easily, quietly, and inexpensively. To get started, all it requires is funding for a small office, staffed by one to three people, equipped with a few computers and file cabinets and tucked away in one of many possible locations. The staff would create links to scientists, law enforcement officials, civilian researchers, and specialists from a range of disciplines, who would step in as needed if a major UFO event were to occur. Few additional resources would be necessary, because investigation of the occasional worthwhile cases would involve drawing on established facilities, equipment, and personnel, such as cross-referring to satellite imagery and existing records of aviation, meteorological, astronomical, and radar data. Reputable labs could be used for the analysis of photographic images and physical evidence. A qualified volunteer board of advisors, to include academics, scientists, and retired military officers, would meet regularly with the staff to offer input and help coordinate the public release of information. Ideally, information about UFOs that may currently be withheld by U.S. intelligence agencies would be released to the office and the public.

Details of the mission and structure of the agency would obviously have to be carefully worked out, but experienced people are ready and available to assist in that process and make sure the mistakes of Project Blue Book are not repeated. This new plan would initiate a fundamentally different organization from that of Blue Book, because it would be committed, with public oversight, to properly investigate cases and to work with other countries. It would be the opposite of our previous Air Force agency—a controlled public-relations mechanism covering up the unsolved cases—that existed in the 1950s and ’60s.

In November 2007, twenty-two distinguished individuals, including six retired generals, from eleven countries signed a formal request for such an agency to be established. The “International Declaration to the United States Government,” which I drafted in cooperation with members of my group, the Coalition for Freedom of Information (CFi), includes most of the writers for this book along with five others, and is posted on the CFi website. The document is signed by current and former military and government officials and pilots, each of whom, while on active duty, “has either been a witness to an incident involving an unidentified flying object or has conducted an official investigation into UFO cases relevant to aviation safety, national security, or for the benefit of science.”
³

The declaration states that the current level of disengagement by the American government with important UFO sightings, such as the Phoenix Lights and the O’Hare sighting, “represents both a missed opportunity and a potential risk.” The call to action asks the U.S. government to “join in cooperation with those governments which, recognizing the reality of unidentified flying objects and related aviation safety concerns, have already set up their own investigative agencies.” It suggests that the U.S. Air Force or NASA serve as the location for such a research effort and ends with a final request: “We call on the United States of America to engage with us and with currently active officials around the world to address this problem in an ongoing dialogue.”

The credentials of the names making this request are impressive. As a result, the document received wide coverage in the press when it was endorsed by former governor Fife Symington and released at the November 2007 press conference in Washington, D.C. But nothing has changed as a result. Our group sidelined this initiative during the build-up to the 2008 presidential election, which fully occupied the country, and in the time following when the new Obama administration first took office and was faced with numerous engrossing and urgent challenges. Yet we remain as convinced as ever that this is not too much to ask. It is something the American public has wanted for a long time, and now that we have an administration committed to openness and a global vision, with a commander in chief who is also a Nobel Peace Laureate, our chances of success are better than ever.

CHAPTER 27

Militant Agnosticism and the UFO Taboo

by Dr. Alexander Wendt and Dr. Raymond Duvall

In August 2008, I received an e-mail from Dr. Alexander Wendt, a professor of political science at Ohio State University; he attached his twenty-six-page paper just published in the leading scholarly journal
Political Theory.
Co-authored with Dr. Raymond Duvall, “Sovereignty and the UFO” provided a complex, detailed, and deeply thoughtful analysis of why governments systematically ignore the UFO phenomenon despite the overwhelming evidence for its existence.
¹
We’ve touched on various aspects of the UFO taboo within these pages, exploring also the question of secrecy and possible threatening aspects of UFO reality, but even so, the deeper questions remain unanswered: Despite all the evidence, why is the prohibition against taking UFOs seriously so powerful, and what keeps it going? In order for a new government agency to function properly and successfully, this is the final aspect that must be addressed along with the logistical and structural proposals
.

In my many years of work with this material, the unresolved loose ends involving issues related to the UFO taboo seemed to point to something larger and more fundamental than had been articulated, but it wasn’t clear what that was. Former Air Force scientific consultant J. Allen Hynek probed this question in 1985, but was unable to resolve it. He described the problem as a strange “malady” with the power to plunge its victims into “a deadly stupor. Like a virulent apathy virus, it could easily immobilize cities and the entire country … as though a bad fairy had administered a sleeping potion.”
²
Yet he couldn’t quite find the reason why it so severely afflicted those responsible for running governments and protecting citizens, and therefore he could not offer a cure
.

Now, the same question has been taken up by two accomplished political scientists, putting fresh eyes on the problem from within the academie
community. Alexander Wendt is the author of the award-winning book
Social Theory of International Politics
(Cambridge University Press, 1999), and is interested in philosophical aspects of social science and international relations. Raymond Duvall is professor and chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. His focus is on critical theories, with particular attention to power, rule, and resistance in world politics. The two met when Alexander Wendt was a student of Duvall’s while in graduate school, and they have remained in touch since then. Beginning around 1999, Wendt spent about five years reading and thinking about the UFO subject on his own. “I tried to figure out what’s really real in this context, given how much nonsense, disinformation, and conspiracy theorizing there is out there,” he told me
.

In 2004 he started talking to his former advisor about his ideas and their relevance to political theory, and the decision to explore the taboo emerged from these discussions. “I initially approached him with a focus on why there was official secrecy about UFOs,” Wendt explains. “Talking with him helped me see that secrecy was just a symptom of the problem, which goes much deeper.” At first, Duvall was skeptical at best, he says, having given no thought to UFOs before Wendt initiated a conversation about them. “It’s probably fair to say that I embodied the taboo,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Working on this paper with Alex has transformed my thinking.”

The two scholars deconstruct the arguments made by debunkers that perpetuate the cultural and political position that UFOs should not be taken seriously, and they examine the deep-seated fear of the extraterrestrial hypothesis that underlies such irrational skepticism. Yet, ironically, they say that they were directly impacted by this very taboo themselves after publishing “Sovereignty and the UFO.” In this sense, the paper became a “natural experiment,” providing a textbook illustration of their thesis. “As the first article taking UFOs seriously published in a social scientific journal in decades—if ever—one might have expected it to generate some controversy,” Wendt says. “Academics certainly get into controversies about much less, and they are usually interested in debating such papers. But to our knowledge, none of our fellow social scientists, in the English-speaking world at least, has yet taken up the
paper’s challenge. This is disappointing, but this dismissal is at least consistent with the paper’s hypothesis that there is indeed a taboo on this topic which prevents reasoned debate.”

Dr. Wendt and Dr. Duvall agreed to write a new essay specifically for this volume, incorporating their ideas from the first article into one designed for nonacademic readers, with some new thoughts added. I hope this piece will help address lingering questions about the roots of the fundamental disconnect between the powerful evidence for UFOs and the disinterest of our government and scientists toward investigating them. It should also disarm the debunkers who routinely come up with defensive arguments that show they have not actually studied the facts, in itself an illustration of the taboo in action. Since the paper distills these arguments and dispenses with them, perhaps we can all gain a new perspective on these debunkers and adopt a more rational approach to the disconcerting questions raised by the mystery of UFOs
.

T
here is a taboo on this book—the UFO taboo. Not in popular culture, of course, where interest in UFOs abounds and websites proliferate, but in elite culture—the structure of authoritative belief and practice that determines what “reality” officially is. With respect to UFO phenomena this structure is dominated globally by three groups: governments, the scientific community, and the mainstream media. Although their individual members may have varying private beliefs about UFOs, in public these groups share the official view that UFOs are not “real” and should not be taken seriously—or at least no more seriously than any other curious cultural belief. For these elites, a book like this, which
does
take UFOs seriously, is intrinsically problematic.

One manifestation of the UFO taboo is official disinterest in responding to UFOs or in finding out what they are. Since 1947, when the modern UFO era began, neither the scientific community nor governments (with the partial exception of France) have made a serious effort to determine their nature, as far as we know. Reports have been filed and a few officially investigated after the fact, but the vast majority have been ignored, and no authoritative effort has been made to survey systematically or seek out UFO phenomena. The media reinforce this disinterest by rarely covering UFOs, and when they do it is inevitably with a wink and a nod, as if to reassure us that they don’t
really
take UFOs seriously, either.

Given that modern science seems to find almost everything in nature interesting, such disinterest is puzzling. But disinterest alone does not make a taboo—which is something prohibited, not just ignored. Rather, what gives the UFO this special status is that it is considered to be outside the boundaries of rational discourse. Although members of the general public might
believe
that UFOs exist, the authorities
“know”
that UFOs are merely figments of overactive imaginations, no more real than witches or unicorns. Thus, to take UFOs seriously is to call one’s
own
seriousness into question. When UFO “believers” appear to deny empirical reality, there is not much more for the elite culture to do than either ignore or condemn them as irrational or even dangerous. In this light the UFO appears not as an “object” at all, but as a troublesome fiction that is best not talked about—in short, a taboo that prevents reasoned debate.

Yet, the reality is that UFOs are
not
matters of belief, but facts. Many thousands of reports worldwide describe unexplained objects in the sky. Most consist only of eyewitness testimony, which might be disregarded as unreliable—and some undoubtedly actually are—but the fact that many UFO reports come from “expert witnesses” like commercial and air force pilots, air traffic controllers, cosmonauts, and scientists should give one pause. However, some UFO reports are also corroborated by physical evidence, including scientifically analyzed photo and video images, physical ground traces affecting plants and soil, effects on aircraft, and anomalous radar tracks. In modern society, physical evidence is normally considered definitive evidence of reality, objective evidence for
something
that has a cause in the physical world. By this criterion, then, at least some UFOs are clearly real. The question that makes them a problem is: Could they be extraterrestrial?