Estimate of the Situation
Oh Science, Wherefore Art Thou?
Scientists should have been powerfully interested in the UFO/UAP issue. Instead, their public rejection has been nearly total.
What you have already thought is usually the basis for what you are willing to think.
By virtue of being called unidentified, UAP (née UFOs) are best approached with an open mind mainly because they are by definition nothing you have been tutored to expect. Scientists, who in concept make their living by finding out what is the accurate way to regard uncertain things, have for decades refused with only rare exceptions to help out by taking a good look. They had their reasons.
A disconnect evolved between ufology and the scientific community. A filter of disbelief in one another came into being over a disagreement about finding common value in taking up something mysterious. Interests were calculated and there was no functional match. After stepping on each other’s toes for a while, there arose an almost autonomic response of denial (“You’re not listening to me!”). These preconceptions spread throughout the human herd in the United States.
No one wants to hear that their hard won knowledge, cherished belief, or joyous vision is limited, incomplete, or in error.
The actual experience of life is a learning curve that advances by showing us where we are, if not wrong, then not fully right either. An encounter with unexpected realization can change uncomfortably how we see our place in the world. Cognitive dissonance is never the friend of the way things are supposed to be.
Cognitive dissonance is the intellectual crisis that happens when beliefs or philosophy fail upon being confronted with proof of implausibility. This inconsistency causes feelings of unease or distrust. Often, people try to relieve this tension by rejecting, explaining away, or avoiding new information.
Science Versus Scientism
The scientific method refers to a process of investigation, a way of discovering how existence works by building a framework of consistently reliable knowledge on the basis of independently reproducible results. In the authentic practice of science, preconceptions have no function. Repeatable experiments are for showing that anyone can pull up a chair and get dealt the same hand. Baking soda and vinegar volcanoes thrill every time.
Scientific practice is about trying new approaches to understanding the why of phenomena, unidentified or otherwise.
Science is not about sitting on laurels, which scientists often do while purring like cats over recognition of past work. They can be very territorial and predatory toward unwanted presences.
Expensive, hard to get books and papers hoarded behind paywalls written in arcane language form a moat surrounding the walled garden of academe. From within comes a solemnly chanted affirmation of what is and is not possible, never mind what may be seen coming toward the gate. Best not to look, speak up, and lose status. This is properly called scientism, which has nothing to do with scientific experiments except to refuse to perform them.
Science is the search for expanded knowledge, Ecclesiastes 1:9 notwithstanding and even if it tips the canoe. Religion invented dogma, but scientists still use it. Out of reflex they lean into their oars against challenges to the received wisdom. The chair captains at universities will throw you overboard quickly without looking back if you appear to be a boat rocker. Rely on Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (published in 1962, fourth edition 2012!) to understand how this attitude keeps a tenacious grip on the tiller of their establishment.
Hidden Influences Have Their Way
In the background, a powerful authoritarian force armed with the sword of counter intelligence and the shield of official secrecy long ago hardened into place concerning UFOs (and everything else they represent). Enough Freedom of Information Act-request documents have been exposed to doubt this no longer. These people ensured diligently and very successfully that any public interest in unidentified phenomena was met with ridicule, shaming, and, if need be, outright suppression.
One phone call by such a puppet master to the chair of a university department, who then summons a scientist into the administrative office for a verbal knuckle thwacking, and grant applications get round binned. No scientist, even one with tenure, wants to get tarred with a reputation as a silly person.
Theoretically, ufology and scientists should have been natural partners. Maybe they were secretly married and we have just not been told, but in the free range world the spurning was nearly so complete as to count as whole.
Instead of the potential for progress through cooperation, there was the effective road block of separation.
Any good secret agent will tell you to control a situation always with the lightest touch possible. This provides the cover of maximum deniability, including in this case that any coverup exists. Structure how your subjects are meant to think, then keep them busy thinking. Set a spark but let the fire start itself. This happened neatly with the respective communities of scientists and ufologists.
Bright Minds Become Useful Idiots
Indeed, scientists were recruited to reinforce the message that ufology was merely a case of mistaken identity. Some, like the fundamentally decent Dr. J. Allen Hynek, were made into patsies useful for public relations.
To his later regret at being responsible for launching the swamp gas meme, Hynek went on to get serious about finding out the meaning of sightings he couldn’t explain — and felt betrayed that significant reports had been withheld from him by his former U.S. military employers. Research funding was suddenly hard to come by.
On the other hand, the credibility of a vaunted physicist like Edward Condon could be co-opted more easily. During the Cold War, his reputation was assailed by uncertainty over his potential political sympathies. Some in Congress asked openly if was he cozy with Commies. Condon was looking for a way to revive the fortunes of his influence. Miracolo! An opportunity was ready to hand.
Informally called the Condon Committee, the University of Colorado UFO Project was sponsored by the U.S. Air Force. That possibly tells you something about why we are hearing disclosure news these days from only the U.S. Navy. Under Condon, results were reduced to the stage dressing of men in white lab coats standing around a silvery saucer shaped model (missing were a few who had quit earlier in outraged disgust at the lack of actual scientific analysis). No doubt about who was the alpha male in the room.
Quid pro status quo was served up neatly, backs were scratched, generous checks were cashed, and a foregone conclusion went to the printer. Condon sneered openly beforehand at the very idea there was anything to be examined critically. He ensured the introduction to his report was as far as anyone would read by saying, basically, pay no attention to the data because we certainly don’t (except for the purposes of obfuscation). Finding no little green men in the executive summary, lazy national media did the rest. Boo! Just kidding. There’s nothing there, Dr. Condon says so. Mission accomplished.
Magical Worlds, Wishful Thinking
Ufology took this rejection quite personally and went into a bit of a mood. Things had not been going well for a while anyway. UFO flaps, like the one over the U.S. Capitol Building and White House in 1952 tracked on radar and chased by fighter jets, were less frequent for some reason and receded into yesterday’s newspapers. Other ufological activities, more social than of interest to science, started getting press with exciting promises of see-for-yourself access to these phenomena.
The contactee era had begun.
Those claiming a personal acquaintance with space aliens became chic and attracted adherents. Often drawn by curiosity over interesting photographs (“I want to believe”), people waited patiently in country fields, on local hilltops, and even alpine valleys in Switzerland to enjoy with their own eyes the promised flyby, maybe even landing, of a flying saucer. Encouraged by suggestive murmurings (“Look! There!”), some even said they did.
The cameras never seemed to work right in the moment, however, and questions could be asked about sweet images produced before or after the event.
A former London taxi driver had the notion for an interplanetary parliament. This was an early, probably first example of the since commonplace business model of aliens coming to earth to save humanity from the apocalypse of our self-destructive tendencies. Festooned with noble titles of unfathomable origin, George King reported communing with cosmic masters from Venus, Mars, infinity and beyond. Alas, none of these beings who meant well for the human race ever materialized to take their seats in the proposed assembly.
In America there was a Venusian contactee enterprise in southern California, anchored by a giant rock in the desert next to a plywood cafe, run by George Adamski. True believers, who genuinely enjoyed getting a bit tipsy while looking up into the night sky, slowly realized they had been taken for a ride but just not in a flying saucer. That didn’t matter, though. By then it was fun to go every year anyway to see friends and be teased afresh with new stories. Many retained fond memories of the fine quality of Mrs. Adamski’s fruit pies available reliably in the cafe.
More sweepingly, the New Age was rising. You didn’t need a spacecraft to speak to an alien, you could just channel one from the great beyond in your head. Many times these beings also promised to materialize in a flying saucer upon request, though this proved to be simply a marketing gimmick. Mind to mind transmission could be yours for a few dollars, reducing the pesky wish for physical manifestation.
Making Progress Where Possible
Other approaches more amenable to research did emerge. The topography of ufology expanded to include Erich von Däniken, who had started taking bets on chariots of the gods. The prospective evidence, however tantalizing, was ancient history.
The gods, such as they may have been, appeared to be long gone.
Von Däniken retarded the cause a little by preferring to draft his words in watercolor instead of pen and ink. In recent decades, however, he has become something of a father figure to those looking for, and seeming to find abundantly, evidence of ancient aliens.
Despite the continuing efforts of credible people like Donald Keyhoe or Stanton Friedman to point eyes toward reports of actual sightings or even crashes, ufology had become something of a soiled dove. Except for a chivalrous figure like Jacques Vallee, no reputable scientist was going to propose marriage.
So, the darker things that were underfoot went begging. Exsanguinated cattle with surgically excised tender parts were nothing anyone wanted to see or talk about where all the blood might have gone. The exceptions were ranchers all over the western United States forced to take an expensive loss in head count and some folks at HBO who hired Linda Moulton Howe to produce a grimly disturbing documentary.
Nor were respectable people at cocktail parties inclined to discuss the personal ramifications of small grey beings who shoplifted people from their beds in the middle of the night with beams of blue light; well, maybe in California.
Those people behind the curtain running the coverup had done their work well. The strategy of divide and conquer charmed as surely as ever.
All Hands On Deck
The time is rapidly approaching where we will want to put all that behind us. Scientists are about to have to lower their drawbridge and say, shucks, we didn’t know any better. They may add, we thought we were friends so pooh for not telling us in the first place. Ufologists will be forced to admit that not everything seen under their tent really belongs there, but some is better housed at a circus or museum of disinformation memorabilia. They deserve to be taken seriously, too, if for no other reason than so many of them were right all along.
All this because what is considered possible appears to be changing. A report to Congress on UAP mandated by a recent appropriations bill is due in the summer of 2021. If the people producing the report are not above the law and respond honorably to the clause in the Act that instructs the Pentagon and the spy agencies to be forthcoming in the name of national security, then we can maybe dare to hope for the public disclosure of more real evidence and not have it all shuffled off into a classified appendix. Drip, drip, drip.
One thing though, we will still have to deal with the cognitive dissonance. As Ronald Reagan said, “I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.” UAP may or may not be a threat, but the human anxiety that they could be is what got this upcoming report on the calendar. Now might be the best possible time for substantial disclosure. The revelation could serve as a means to close the gaping fractures in the American polity. That’s real national security.
Even if some will have to kiss and make up, it is a good time to call all hands on deck.
