UFOs - Leslie Kean [110]
PART 3
A CALL TO ACTION
“The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.”
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
CHAPTER 21
Fighting Back: A New UFO Agency in America
Despite the astonishing yet rational deduction that the extraterrestrial hypothesis should be considered to explain some UFOs, as our experts have just pointed out, governments have an aversion to addressing that point or its implications. They are not motivated to pool resources and find out if this hypothesis can be proved, ignoring the popular interest in the subject and its potential for revolutionary discovery. In fact, the discomfiting quality of the extraterrestrial hypothesis—again, we’re only talking about a theory, not a fact—likely explains why many governments want to keep a safe distance from the whole messy business. The difficulty of researching something as evasive and unpredictable as UFOs is also a problem—though not an insurmountable one. The agencies that are attempting to face the challenge have accomplished a great deal, as was demonstrated in the previous section, but ultimately they lack the resources to fully resolve the UFO mystery on their own. Even after many decades of focused research in France, exploration of defense implications in the UK, and field investigations in the Brazilian Amazon (to take three significant examples), we still don’t know what the objects actually are. In their respective countries, some government agencies continue to collect case reports and look into sightings, adding more data to the heap but not solving anything, as the rest of the world looks away.
When asked, most military officers who have been personally involved with UFO incidents refrain from interpretation or speculation, yet privately many have a keen, persistent interest in getting to the bottom of the problem. They want to know what it was they themselves have seen, or what their trusted military colleagues have encountered, and this desire does not diminish over time. These witnesses and insiders recognize the extraterrestrial, or maybe interdimensional, possibility; once you have observed one of these bizarre manifestations at close range, your mind is newly opened, through no choice of your own. Even those who were prior debunkers, who would have scoffed at the mere notion of a UFO, are forced to recognize the once inconceivable. They often feel isolated, afraid of ridicule, unsupported by the world around them. But collectively, they may be able to make a difference.
Credible witnesses and government investigators have documented thousands of compelling case reports and first-person accounts. We now have accumulated enough data to establish the reality of some kind of consistent physical phenomenon without a doubt. Still, the American government lags behind, refusing to acknowledge any of this, leaving us American citizens stuck in a perpetual stalemate.
How can we overcome this? In terms of finding a workable model, we can look to France’s UFO agency as the mother of them all, because, as we have seen, its office within CNES has been diligently working on the problem for over thirty years, from a research perspective rather than a military one. By seeking knowledge purely for its own sake, the French have been open to a wide range of explanations for UFOs, as scientists should be. The historic COMETA Report of 1999 broke a barrier when its generals, admirals, and engineers, along with a former head of CNES, brought the issue into the military realm and declared with great authority that even though it had not yet been proved, the extraterrestrial hypothesis was the most likely explanation of the phenomenon.
Will we ever be able to find out, to the satisfaction of scientists in the world community, what UFOs are and where they come from? Is this something we, as a planetary society, would be capable of deciding to do? If so, we would have to be proactive, rigorously seeking a resolution to this problem, making it a priority. Alternatively, would we prefer to sit back and wait for