UFOs - Leslie Kean [151]
A personal exploration might reveal only a strange discomfort with the whole notion of UFOs, an automatic, instinctual avoidance of the challenge they inherently represent. As Wendt and Duvall describe it, “the UFO taboo is akin to denial in psychoanalysis.” Without pondering it, many would probably say they can’t put their finger on what this challenge really is. For those willing to examine further, perhaps the “skeptical arguments” articulated in the previous chapter will surface; or, for others, there will be religious conflicts. Most of us would prefer not to contemplate the subject at all, because we have been handed a convenient way out—an accepted prohibition against “believing in UFOs” that allows us to identify with the “elite” position. My hope is that, maybe now, having digested all the material presented in this book, those who have managed to come this far will not be as easily influenced by this transparent taboo as they were before.
Unconscious fears about the implications of UFOs most likely lodged in the larger mind of the American political system beginning in the late 1940s, when UFOs first burst upon the scene at a national level. Yet a certain portion of the American population was already predisposed to view reports of “flying saucers” as hoaxes or exaggerations. In 1938, Orson Welles’s famous radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds panicked numerous listeners with its all-too-realistic dramatization of an invasion by Martian spaceships, presented as if it were a live, unfolding news report. People actually fled their New Jersey homes—the site of the alleged invasion—and many others were convinced that the Earth was indeed under attack and we all would die. The broadcast tapped into an entirely different kind of fear than Americans had ever encountered before, something inexplicably terrifying. Those impacted by this would have a harder time trusting future reports of unidentified flying objects, and in this sense, a self-imposed discomfort with UFO reports was reinforced at the very outset.
But in those early years and into the 1950s, we were in our infancy when dealing with the possible meanings of the UFO phenomenon. Military and intelligence agencies were preoccupied with the task of trying to discern what these things might be in the context of the Cold War. The U.S. Air Force coped with public concerns by trying its best to explain away all UFOs, and if it couldn’t, by pretending that it could. This incipient denial, bolstered by the 1953 Robertson Panel and then strengthened by the 1968 Condon report, has become even more entrenched over time. Perhaps as we learned more about UFOs after the close of Project Blue Book, gaining a clearer picture of at least their characteristics and behavior, we progressively had more reason to be worried about their threatening aspects. When J. Allen Hynek battled the problem of the taboo in the 1980s, he noted that officials had “a powerful desire to do nothing.”1 But he also added ominously that “history has shown that in time the dam breaks, sometimes cataclysmically.”2
At this point, we have the option of encouraging the dam to break—slowly and methodically, rather than cataclysmically, if possible. We must recognize that the potential dangers of acknowledging and investigating UFOs are real. The fears are understandable,