Exploration, Knowledge, and the Future of UFOlogy: The State of UFOlogy

The State of UFOlogy

The vistas offered by the Worldwide Web were unimagined during Blue Book’s day—a time of land lines, typewriters, scratch pads, the U.S. mail, and in-person interviews. Now, UFOlogists and the merely curious can locate each other with simple keystrokes. UFO-related news, such as the apparent discovery of Planet Nine, flashes around the world in hardly more than a heartbeat.

The Web has been invoked many times in this book. It stands as the medium— and the socio-cultural driver—that is the signpost to the present state of UFOlogy. The Web is unarguably a blessing, but because UFO study remains a marginal discipline, UFOlogists are especially vulnerable to the energetic nonsense made possible by the Web’s unregulated nature. Pleasure and real knowledge are afoot on the Web, and if you wish to explore UFOs in the context of hard science, history, and legitimate cultural study, you’re in luck. But as we’ve seen, a great deal of UFO Web content amounts to junk thinking characterized by faulty reasoning and egged on by silliness, fakery, snark, and old-style humbuggery.

The hazard is that all of those things deliver a disreputable sort of fun that easily commands everyone’s attention—including the attention of media people that go for entertainment whenever they need background for the (now-rare) UFO feature article or TV-news segment. Faced with opportunities to contact a sober astronomer or, alternatively, the fellow from the Web who insists the Mars Rover photographed a squirrel (Google it), a feature writer or segment producer may struggle to resist the siren call of Squirrel Guy. That sort of decision encapsulates a portion of the external threat to UFOlogy. Government disinterest and scarce funding for institutional research are other external factors that loom large.

Internally, danger is posed by the continual, frankly dreary infighting among individuals and UFO factions, which exposes UFOlogy’s lack of standards and discipline. If UFOlogy expects to grow into general respectability, it must move beyond things that are of interest only to UFO insiders, particularly arguments— posted to the Web, for all to see—about who in the field is an alleged idiot and who is not.

Worse, UFOlogy has been hijacked. Far too many dubious ancillary topics clamor for attention: Bigfoot; time travel; Nazis in the Antarctic; the Bermuda Triangle; crop circles; quasi-religious UFO cults; the Illuminati; alternate dimensions; the JFK-alien connection; chakras, auras; and alien implants. The never-ending flow of alien abduction accounts is now less concerned with science than with personal accounts reflective of the childlike “I me mine” emphasis that drives Facebook and other social media. A resurgence of interest in ancient astronauts flushes science so that a racialist faction preoccupied with DNA links to extraterrestrial Aryans can have its say. And science takes it on the chin again when the metaphorical mic is handed to little Paul Reveres eager to warn of secret alien bases peppered here and there on Earth, or on nearby planetary bodies.

Hard science needs to be the chugging core of UFO study, but because hard science is, well, hard, too many UFO enthusiasts—particularly wide-eyed newbies—avoid it. Certainly, the so-called mainstream media are not interested.

Hard science isn’t easily comprehended by laypersons, and it sure isn’t sexy (except during occasional cable-TV talking-head remarks from young, unusually good-looking astronomers or physicists). There is real romance in science—not the instant-gratification kind, but the sort that develops during years of serious study. But we are an increasingly impatient society in love with action, artificial emotiveness, and the certitude that relieves us of the obligation to think. We don’t have time for years of anything.

USAF

Unfortunately, segments of the UFO establishment buy into this cultural pique.

MUFON, which performs valuable work as a repository of UFO news and research, nevertheless tops its glossy home page with the words, “AS SEEN ON”—followed by the logos of CNN; the History Channel and that network’s tabloid-style H2 spinoff; the National Geographic Channel; the Travel Channel; the Science network; Syfy; and the Discovery Channel—as if cable television confers intellectual value and scientific legitimacy.

In a 2014 article for New York magazine’s Daily Intelligencer Web page, journalist Mark Jacobson lamented the flat attendance—just four hundred souls —at the annual MUFON convention, a get-together that drew four thousand to five thousand registered attendees, year in and year out, a generation ago. The relative lack of present-day interest suggested to Jacobson that UFOlogy had become passé. He proposed that “the simple flying disc from far, far away has become a quaint, almost nostalgic specter.” If that is indeed the case, UFOlogy is realizing that nostalgia is death to any undertaking that wishes to move forward. Nostalgia can never compete with the new, and yet UFOlogy remains wedded to stories and controversies of the past.

Roswell never goes away. The Condon Committee still raises hackles. Barney and Betty Hill are discussed as if their experience happened last week instead of a half century ago. Rendlesham Forest, George Adamski, Mothman, the Shaver Mystery and hollow Earth, Kenneth Arnold, Captain Mantell’s P-51 crash, the Lubbock Lights—all of those and the rest of the fascinating, fundamental history of UFO study have acquired an outsized importance, as if UFOlogy now exists only to frame the ghosts of those past people and events.