Sep 10 2007
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What Is the Question?
While the public interest in UFOs continues to wax and wane, the people whose self-appointed job is to explain the unexplained in the skies apparently continue to play their favorite tunes from their favorite record–the one entitled “UFOs Are Real.” Songs from this former best-seller include Government Coverup, Abduction, and Extraterrestrial Hypothesis.The songs get your toes tapping and at first, made you think. Nowadays, memory lane should be reserved for the old guard and those who are satisfied with the thrill of thinking that their belief system is the One Truth. They still think that if the world would just realize that aliens from other planets are here, things would be much better.
Let’s go out on a limb here and propose that we will never “prove” that aliens are coming here to surprise motorists on lonely roads, kill our livestock and diddle our behinds. If it hasn’t been determined by now, whose fault is that? The phenomenon itself seems to change each time we think we have it figured out, or more accurately, stays a few steps ahead of us–at least where we are in our technological development at the time. Perhaps we are complicit in this.
My old friend Donna Kossy, historian and philosopher of the kooky and weird, once said that spiritualist-type religious movements always seem to be placing their extraterrestrial gods just out of reach of our telescopes. Consider that the Theosophists and later the Contactees originally worshipped ascended masters from Mars and Venus. After we landed on the moon (or supposedly so  ) and we had sent probes to Mars and beyond, the space brothers were moved out of the solar system.
No one that we know of has tracked a flying saucer heading back towards home, somewhere in interstellar space. There could be a coverup of this sort of thing, but no one has turned up anything on the matter, as far as I know. If this is true, then the Powers That Know More Than Us are just as dumb in their assumptions as the UFO believers. Everything that has trickled down to us from officialdom agrees with our preconceived ideas about aliens and UFOs. Our filtering system may be too narrow to catch things that don’t agree with the extraterrestrial hypothesis. This applies to much of the human race.
The Occam’s Razor argument replies that this is simply because we are on the right track and the government really does know everything. If this is the case, why are former spies still skulking around the fringes of Ufology, and still interested in answers to the biggest question?
That’s why I like to look at theories that aren’t as obvious or popular. Not only is it more interesting, it may hold part of the answer to both the UFO question, and perhaps how we look at ourselves and how we affect and filter the things we study. It may be one of the few options open to those who study UFOs, and if history teaches us anything, it’s that we will probably never know everything.
For more on this, please search the Ufomystic archives and embedded links.
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September 10th, 2007 at 3:09 am
With the apparent lack of real scientific investigation into the subject, the study of anomalous aerial phenomena still needs a longer gestation period before it can truly called a legitimate science. The mainstream scientific community would rather it die stillborn lest they end up with egg on their faces if and when the mystery is revealed. Much of it may stay permanently buried because if so much as one abduction case is found to be the work of gov’t sponsored scientists doing Lord knows what inhumane experiments on unwilling participants, those Dr. Mengele’s involved will face criminal charges and civil suits out the wahzoo as will the gov’t. Considering what has already been revealed about past horrific medical experiments performed on the military and minorities, a clandestine multi-generational program of genetic experiments isn’t that much of stretch for the public to believe. Any of those persons involved should be prosecuted to the fullest extent possible. That said how can we as curious beings not want to know what or who is flying in our skies above our heads? I can’t believe that humanity itself has become that jaded. Bluebook is over 40 years old and there hasn’t been another serious survey done since and that my friends is a crying shame.
September 10th, 2007 at 3:35 pm
This is something that is linked to a simmilar discussion I had at the Daily Grail site. The ethymological definition of SCIENCE is “knowledge”, and the scientific disciplines we are so familiar with relly on a set of ordered rules wich we call Scientific Method in order to try and make educated interpretations about observed phenomena in nature.
Granted that the UFO phenomenon, by its very nature, may be found impossible to yield to the rigours demanded by orthodox science.
But that does not impede modern Ufologists to try to come up with some sort of METHODOLOGY that helps us approach the UFO mistery in such a way that can broaden our understanding and expectatons of it.
This I think should be the task of the ufologists of this century, regardless of the fact this generation most likely will not come any closer to know the real nature or purpose of UFOs, but it would honor nonetheless the efforts made in the past by serious researchers such as Hynek and Vallee, and it would help future generations to have something to build upon.
Well, at least IMHO.
September 10th, 2007 at 10:13 pm
Here’s an idea:
-Read George Hansen’s “The Trickster & The Paranormal” You get the idea that UFO’s ought to be grouped into the category of paranormal. And that paranormal phenomena yields events or personas that seem to fit the “trickster” archetype. And like laboratory PSI research, it will always evade institutionalization, professionalization, & hard data. Like PSI it will always produce an intermittent & weak signal. We know something is there, but it will not provide precise defintion & it’s character will be indeterminate.
September 11th, 2007 at 9:37 am
Personally misteranderson, I have a little troubles with terms like PARA-normal, as it implies there are some things that escaoe the realm of Nature.
For Science Nature is the physical world we can observe, but then it gets more complicated, since if we can’t observe something at the moment, does it necessarily means we will not be able to observe it in the future, with better or more potent instruments, that are nothing but extensions of our rather limmited senses?
Because right now for example, Dark Energy and Dark Matter are part of the realm of para-normal phenomena, in the sense that
a)we know next to nothing about them
b)we have no way to observe them, and
c) it may very well be they do not exist in the first place.
Maybe it’s just that para-normal is acomfy epistemological term that helps us deal with our unfathomable ignorance of the world we inhabit.
September 11th, 2007 at 12:05 pm
All,
We’re basically in agreement on these matters. What Nick and I have been driving home in this blog is that science and ufology need to expand their horizons for our understanding of UFOs to change and improve.
The main reason for the present stalemate is that people like to have answers, even if they’re wrong or unprovable. If we have a mental box to put things in, many of us move on to other things. What we’re arguing is that the “extraterrestrial” box is full of holes and not many want to admit that it has been leaking for a long time.