UFOs - Leslie Kean [148]
A second technique by which the taboo is maintained turns the point about pseudoscience on its head. Here we are thinking of officially sanctioned but problematic inquiries into UFOs like the 1968 Condon report, the purpose of which was to give the appearance of an objective, scientific assessment while reaffirming the dominant view that there is nothing to such phenomena. As has been amply documented in the literature, in the Condon case this ideological bias led to gross errors of research design and empirical inference, as well as to an Executive Summary that completely rejected the extraterrestrial hypothesis even though conventional explanations could not be found for fully 30 percent of the cases that had been studied. This is not to say there is no good science in the Condon report (on the contrary), but that ultimately it was a “show trial” for the extraterrestrial hypothesis. Nevertheless, the report’s conclusion that UFOs are definitely not extraterrestrial was immediately accepted by the larger scientific community, and also enabled the U.S. Air Force to disengage publicly from the UFO problem, which it had wanted to do for some time. That such a flawed report could be embraced so readily attests to how deep-seated the “will to disbelieve” is.
A third factor sustaining the taboo is pervasive official secrecy about UFO reports involving military personnel, the effect of which is to remove from the system knowledge that might bolster the argument for taking UFOs seriously, thereby (at least implicitly) reinforcing the skeptical case.11 UFO secrecy takes at least two forms. The most obvious is withholding information on known cases, whether by redacting text or telling citizens requesting documents through the Freedom of Information Act that no relevant documents exist at all. (In the United States, the law requires government agencies to inform the public if requested documents are classified, or else release them with sensitive sections redacted.) The other form of secrecy—not reporting military UFO encounters at all—is more difficult to assess, since it is impossible to know how many such cases there are. Still, the fact that most governments do not release UFO reports as a matter of course—although in recent years this trend has started to shift in some countries, but not in the United States—does not inspire confidence that we know the complete universe of cases.
This secretive pattern of behavior is of course grist for the mill of conspiracy theorizing, since it naturally raises the question “What is the government trying to hide?” However, we are concerned not with the particular content but only the effect of official secrecy, which helps to reinforce the UFO taboo by removing potentially contrary knowledge from the system. Our personal view is that far from hiding the truth about aliens the state is more likely hiding its ignorance, but who knows? In a context of UFO secrecy, personal belief is all we have.
The last mechanism is discipline, by which we mean techniques for ordering thought and action that rely not on rational appeals to science, but more nakedly on social pressures and power. A particularly prominent form in the UFO context is the social dismissal of people who express public “belief” in UFOs—through ridicule, gossip, shunning, public condemnation, and/or character assassination—so that it is not just the idea of UFOs that is dismissed but the person advocating the idea whose credibility is called into question. Given individuals’ desires for approval, reputation, and professional advancement, an expectation of this kind of discipline leads to self-censorship, fueling the “spiral of silence” about UFOs that makes it so hard to speak out in the first place.
Resistance Through Militant Agnosticism
These are powerful mechanisms, and as such some might say that with respect to the UFO taboo, “resistance is futile.” Yet the taboo has at least three