UFOs - Leslie Kean [143]
In my many years of work with this material, the unresolved loose ends involving issues related to the UFO taboo seemed to point to something larger and more fundamental than had been articulated, but it wasn’t clear what that was. Former Air Force scientific consultant J. Allen Hynek probed this question in 1985, but was unable to resolve it. He described the problem as a strange “malady” with the power to plunge its victims into “a deadly stupor. Like a virulent apathy virus, it could easily immobilize cities and the entire country … as though a bad fairy had administered a sleeping potion.”2 Yet he couldn’t quite find the reason why it so severely afflicted those responsible for running governments and protecting citizens, and therefore he could not offer a cure.
Now, the same question has been taken up by two accomplished political scientists, putting fresh eyes on the problem from within the academie community. Alexander Wendt is the author of the award-winning book Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1999), and is interested in philosophical aspects of social science and international relations. Raymond Duvall is professor and chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. His focus is on critical theories, with particular attention to power, rule, and resistance in world politics. The two met when Alexander Wendt was a student of Duvall’s while in graduate school, and they have remained in touch since then. Beginning around 1999, Wendt spent about five years reading and thinking about the UFO subject on his own. “I tried to figure out what’s really real in this context, given how much nonsense, disinformation, and conspiracy theorizing there is out there,” he told me.
In 2004 he started talking to his former advisor about his ideas and their relevance to political theory, and the decision to explore the taboo emerged from these discussions. “I initially approached him with a focus on why there was official secrecy about UFOs,” Wendt explains. “Talking with him helped me see that secrecy was just a symptom of the problem, which goes much deeper.” At first, Duvall was skeptical at best, he says, having given no thought to UFOs before Wendt initiated a conversation about them. “It’s probably fair to say that I embodied the taboo,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Working on this paper with Alex has transformed my thinking.”
The two scholars deconstruct the arguments made by debunkers that perpetuate the cultural and political position that UFOs should not be taken seriously, and they examine the deep-seated fear of the extraterrestrial hypothesis that underlies such irrational skepticism. Yet, ironically, they say that they were directly impacted by this very taboo themselves after publishing “Sovereignty and the UFO.” In this sense, the paper became a “natural experiment,” providing a textbook illustration of their thesis. “As the first article taking UFOs seriously published in a social scientific journal in decades—if ever—one might have expected it to generate some controversy,” Wendt says. “Academics certainly get into controversies about much less, and they are usually interested in debating such papers. But to our knowledge, none of our fellow social scientists, in the English-speaking world at least, has yet taken up the paper’s challenge. This is disappointing, but this dismissal is at least consistent with the paper’s hypothesis that there is indeed a taboo on this topic which prevents reasoned debate.”
Dr. Wendt and Dr. Duvall agreed to write a new essay specifically for this volume, incorporating their ideas from the first article into one designed for nonacademic readers, with some new thoughts added. I hope this piece will help address lingering questions about the roots of the fundamental disconnect between the powerful evidence for UFOs and the disinterest of our government and scientists toward investigating them. It should also disarm the debunkers