UFOs - Leslie Kean [85]
I had started out as an outright “debunker,” taking great joy in cracking what seemed at first to be puzzling cases. I was the arch enemy of those “flying saucer groups and enthusiasts” who very dearly wanted UFOs to be interplanetary. My own knowledge of those groups came almost entirely from what I heard from Blue Book personnel: they were all “crackpots and visionaries.”
My transformation was gradual but by the late sixties it was complete. Today I would not spend one further moment on the subject of UFOs if I didn’t seriously feel that the UFO phenomenon is real and that efforts to investigate and understand it, and eventually to solve it, could have a profound effect—perhaps even be the springboard to mankind’s outlook on the universe.8
In 1985, the dedicated investigator was confronting an extreme manifestation of a peculiarly American phenomenon known as the UFO taboo—the automatic, deeply ingrained refusal to acknowledge that something so contradictory to what we consider “normal,” and therefore unacceptable to our worldview, could possibly exist no matter what the evidence shows. In this case, Hynek observed that the taboo is so powerful that it can thwart the duties of groups of otherwise highly responsible people in positions of authority. He struggled to find some kind of core answer to this dilemma.
Hynek noted that seeing the otherworldly Westchester County boomerangs caused stress, trauma, and fear among the witnesses. They were given no answers and felt unprotected by their government, and many did not want to “go public” about these events for fear of being ridiculed. Rooted in the minds of most people, such as the policemen who received reports from witnesses and had not seen anything themselves, was the collective belief that this type of event cannot possibly happen. The only way out was to label the witnesses “crackpots.” And yet thousands of people actually saw the objects. They were faced with the conundrum that they knew that these events did happen, as did others from the area personally acquainted with witnesses or informed about sightings from trusted sources, such as local newspapers. Could all of these people be lying or confused? Or could it be that there was something larger, more deeply rooted, that kept government officials from truly listening to these accounts, accepting them as true, and investigating accordingly?
Hynek postulated that, in its inability to accept something as revolutionary as the existence of these inconceivable crafts, our psyche simply shuts the whole thing out. The impossible reality “overheats the human mental circuits and blows the fuses in a protective mechanism for the mind.… When a collective breaking point is reached, the mind must openly disregard the patent evidence of the senses. It can no longer encompass such evidence within its normal borders.” He concluded that, due to the totally bizarre, shocking, and even traumatic nature of such an event, there is no energy for action, as if everyone was operating on a dead battery. This dynamic can affect groups of people as a whole, and those in charge were not exempt from its numbing effects. “With apathy goes the ability to accept even the most inane explanations—anything whatever—to stave off the necessity to think about the unthinkable,” Hynek wrote.
This may not provide a complete answer, but it touches on the profound nature of the UFO taboo, which manages to keep us in the dark even about events in our own backyard. This primarily psychological phenomenon, set in motion by the Robertson Panel in the 1950s, operates here with much greater strength and tenacity than it does in other countries. It infused the improper management of our Air Force agency, Project Blue Book, until its eventual demise. Then the taboo became integrated and accepted, affecting