UFOs Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record (45 page)

A third factor sustaining the taboo is pervasive official secrecy about UFO reports involving military personnel, the effect of which is to remove from the system knowledge that might bolster the argument for taking UFOs seriously, thereby (at least implicitly) reinforcing the skeptical case.
¹¹
UFO secrecy takes at least two forms. The most obvious is withholding information on known cases, whether by redacting text or telling citizens requesting documents through the Freedom of Information Act that no relevant documents exist at all. (In the United States, the law requires government agencies to inform the public if requested documents are classified, or else release them with sensitive sections redacted.) The other form of secrecy—not reporting military UFO encounters at all—is more difficult to assess, since it is impossible to know how many such cases there are. Still, the fact that most governments do not release UFO reports as a matter of course—although in recent years this trend has started to shift in some countries, but not in the United States—does not inspire confidence that we know the complete universe of cases.

This secretive pattern of behavior is of course grist for the mill of conspiracy theorizing, since it naturally raises the question “What is the government trying to hide?” However, we are concerned not with the particular content but only the
effect
of official secrecy, which helps to reinforce the UFO taboo by removing potentially contrary knowledge from the system. Our personal view is that far from hiding the truth about aliens the state is more likely hiding its ignorance, but who knows? In a context of UFO secrecy, personal belief is all we have.

The last mechanism is
discipline
, by which we mean techniques for ordering thought and action that rely not on rational appeals to science, but more nakedly on social pressures and power. A particularly prominent form in the UFO context is the social dismissal of people who express public “belief” in UFOs—through ridicule, gossip, shunning, public condemnation, and/or character assassination—so that it is not just the idea of UFOs that is dismissed but the person advocating the idea whose credibility is called into question. Given individuals’ desires for approval, reputation, and professional advancement, an expectation of this kind of discipline leads to self-censorship, fueling the “spiral of silence” about UFOs that makes it so hard to speak out in the first place.

Resistance Through Militant Agnosticism

These are powerful mechanisms, and as such some might say that with respect to the UFO taboo, “resistance is futile.” Yet the taboo has at least three weaknesses that make it, and the anthropocentric structure of rule that it sustains, potentially unstable.

One is the UFO itself. Despite authoritative efforts to deny their reality, UFOs stubbornly keep showing up, generating an ongoing need to transform them into non-objects. Modern governments might not recognize the UFO, but in the face of continuing anomalies, maintaining such nonrecognition requires work.

Another weakness lies in the different knowledge interests of science and the state. While the two are aligned today in authoritative anti-UFO discourse, ultimately the state is interested in maintaining its skeptical narrative about UFOs as certainly true, whereas science recognizes, at least in principle, that its truths can only be tentative. The presumption in science is that reality has the last word, which creates the possibility of scientific knowledge countering the state’s dogma.

And then there is liberalism, the essential core of modern governance. Even as it produces rational subjects who know that “belief” in UFOs is absurd, liberalism justifies itself as a discourse that produces free-thinking subjects who might doubt it.

The kind of resistance that can best exploit these weaknesses might be called “militant agnosticism.” By “agnostic” here we mean that no position on whether UFOs are extraterrestrial should be taken until they have been systematically studied. Resistance must be agnostic because, given our current knowledge, neither denial nor belief in the extraterrestrial hypothesis is justified; we simply do not know. Concretely, agnosticism means “seeing” the UFO for what it is rather than ignoring it, taking it seriously as a real and truly unidentified
object
, broadly defined to include any natural phenomenon. Since it is precisely such acknowledgment of UFOs’ reality that the taboo forbids, “seeing” alone is a kind of personal resistance.

To be
politically
effective, however, resistance must also be militant, by which we mean public and strategic. Indeed, purely private agnosticism about UFOs, of the kind that people in the modern world might have about God, does nothing to break the spiral of silence that surrounds the issue and so in effect contributes to it. To break the cycle resistance needs to be directed at the central problem posed by UFO phenomena, namely reducing our collective ignorance about what they are, rather than at the side issue of official secrecy, which strategically is a diversion. (If we’re correct that governments are hiding not the truth but their own ignorance, then even if they released all their files we would be no closer to knowing what UFOs are.) That is to say, what is needed above all else is a systematic
science
of UFOs, on the basis of which we might eventually be able to make informed judgments about them, as opposed to simply reiterating dogmas one way or the other.

To go beyond the minimal scientific research that has already been done and make new breakthroughs, such a science will have to do three things. First, it will need to focus on aggregate patterns rather than individual cases. Given our inability to manipulate or predict UFO phenomena, there are inherent limits to what case studies can show. Already, official analyses of selected cases have sometimes been able to rule out conventional explanations—what they are not—but this does not tell us what those UFOs
are
. UFOs are like meteorological phenomena, which can be properly studied only in the aggregate.

Second, a science of UFOs
¹²
will need to focus on finding new reports rather than analyzing old ones. This is because existing high-quality reports are relatively few in number and were collected by accident and through a variety of means, making it almost impossible to find patterns. Moreover, there is only so much information that can be extracted from a historical report, particularly one disconnected from knowledge of the environmental context. Trying to generate new reports systematically might greatly increase our data points, and put them automatically into context, as well.

Finally, a science will need to focus on collecting objective, physical evidence rather than subjective, eyewitness accounts, for only the former will convince the authorities that UFOs “exist,” much less that the extraterrestrial hypothesis is worthy of consideration. Of course, getting such evidence is no easy task, but as shown by existing radar and video images, as well as chemical analyses of a few UFO “landing sites,” it can be done.

Any serious attempt to satisfy these requirements will require considerable technological infrastructure (radar installations or other monitoring equipment) and large amounts of money. Normally one would expect the state to provide such capital. Although every effort should be made to bring this about, our particular theory of the UFO taboo—that it is a functional imperative of modern, anthropocentric rule—necessarily makes us pessimistic that world governments will act anytime soon. As such, it seems important strategically to consider, alongside efforts to enlist the state, alternative ways of establishing a science of UFOs.

Whether tackled by the state or by civil society, or both, the problem of UFO ignorance is fundamentally political before it is scientific, and as such a truly militant agnosticism will be necessary to overcome it. Even then, there is no guarantee that systematic study would actually end human ignorance about UFOs; that must await the science. But after sixty years of official denials about this potentially extraordinary phenomenon, it is time to try.

CHAPTER 28

Facing an Extreme Challenge

A
deeper understanding of the unconscious aspects of the UFO taboo—the ones otherwise beyond our reach—is essential if we are to finally close the door on old ways of thinking and move this issue forward. The provocative ideas presented in the previous chapter may not answer all the questions, but the two political scientists make an intriguing and persuasive argument. They state that the fundamental problem afflicting true understanding of UFOs is ignorance, not secrecy, and that this ignorance is accepted because it serves a political purpose. Hidden forces and fears lurking under the surface of this political ignorance sustain it, while also transforming it into something far more potent: an active denial and zealous prohibition against even
considering
UFOs as a serious subject. The problem is more energized, more confrontational than simple ignorance, as we have seen. It manifests as the familiar taboo, something so accepted and taken for granted that most of us have never thought twice about it.

That political purpose is a powerful one: to maintain the imperative that we must avoid facing the possibility that
any
UFOs could be extraterrestrial. For if they were, that would mean that these miraculous craft, vehicles, objects of unknown origin—whatever they are—are generated by a more powerful “other” from somewhere else. Such a concept is simply unacceptable, and can generate a primordial terror in human beings. We take care of this through the political strategy of denying that UFOs exist at all, a stance that protects us, however temporarily, from having to confront this unthinkable threat to our core stability.

Scientists have their own reasons to be fearful. UFOs demonstrate characteristics appearing to contradict the fundamental laws of physics on which our understanding of the universe is based; if scientists did make a concerted effort to identify them, is it possible they might find the phenomenon somehow “unknowable” through our current methodologies? So far, the UFOs have made any study difficult—they come ever so close, but not quite close enough. Does this mean we might never be able to learn what they are, even if we tried? Maybe, all of a sudden, the phenomenon will reveal itself to us before we know much of anything about it, and we’ll be powerless to react.

Each of us can explore the roots of our own resistance to accepting the reality of UFOs, a process that hopefully has already begun for most readers. We may not be fully aware of buried responses and thought patterns, especially since the resistance is universally accepted. When they ridicule UFOs, skeptics do not consciously worry about abstractions such as anthropocentric humanism, or the loss of statehood, or the threat of annihilation, but that doesn’t mean these issues do not underlie their knee-jerk reactions. Government officials don’t actively contemplate such fears either, when choosing to ignore UFOs or to keep information from the public, following the decades-old trend. Scientists conveniently claim there is no evidence, but they are not thinking about the potential challenge UFOs bring to the foundation of science as they know it. So much operates outside our field of conscious awareness, perpetuating a kind of blindness.

A personal exploration might reveal only a strange discomfort with the whole notion of UFOs, an automatic, instinctual avoidance of the challenge they inherently represent. As Wendt and Duvall describe it, “the UFO taboo is akin to denial in psychoanalysis.” Without pondering it, many would probably say they can’t put their finger on what this challenge really is. For those willing to examine further, perhaps the “skeptical arguments” articulated in the previous chapter will surface; or, for others, there will be religious conflicts. Most of us would prefer not to contemplate the subject at all, because we have been handed a convenient way out—an accepted prohibition against “believing in UFOs” that allows us to identify with the “elite” position. My hope is that, maybe now, having digested all the material presented in this book, those who have managed to come this far will not be as easily influenced by this transparent taboo as they were before.

Unconscious fears about the implications of UFOs most likely lodged in the larger mind of the American political system beginning in the late 1940s, when UFOs first burst upon the scene at a national level. Yet a certain portion of the American population was already predisposed to view reports of “flying saucers” as hoaxes or exaggerations. In 1938, Orson Welles’s famous radio broadcast of
The War of the Worlds
panicked numerous listeners with its all-too-realistic dramatization of an invasion by Martian spaceships, presented as if it were a live, unfolding news report. People actually fled their New Jersey homes—the site of the alleged invasion—and many others were convinced that the Earth was indeed under attack and we all would die. The broadcast tapped into an entirely different kind of fear than Americans had ever encountered before, something inexplicably terrifying. Those impacted by this would have a harder time trusting future reports of unidentified flying objects, and in this sense, a self-imposed discomfort with UFO reports was reinforced at the very outset.

But in those early years and into the 1950s, we were in our infancy when dealing with the possible meanings of the UFO phenomenon. Military and intelligence agencies were preoccupied with the task of trying to discern what these things might be in the context of the Cold War. The U.S. Air Force coped with public concerns by trying its best to explain away all UFOs, and if it couldn’t, by pretending that it could. This incipient denial, bolstered by the 1953 Robertson Panel and then strengthened by the 1968 Condon report, has become even more entrenched over time. Perhaps as we learned more about UFOs after the close of Project Blue Book, gaining a clearer picture of at least their characteristics and behavior, we progressively had more reason to be worried about their threatening aspects. When J. Allen Hynek battled the problem of the taboo in the 1980s, he noted that officials had “a powerful desire to do nothing.”
¹
But he also added ominously that “history has shown that in time the dam breaks, sometimes cataclysmically.”
²