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.”[184] 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 who routinely come up with defensive arguments that show they have not actually studied the facts, in itself an illustration of the taboo in action. Since the paper distills these arguments and dispenses with them, perhaps we can all gain a new perspective on these debunkers and adopt a more rational approach to the disconcerting questions raised by the mystery of UFOs.
There is a taboo on this book—the UFO taboo. Not in popular culture, of course, where interest in UFOs abounds and websites proliferate, but in elite culture—the structure of authoritative belief and practice that determines what “reality” officially is. With respect to UFO phenomena this structure is dominated globally by three groups: governments, the scientific community, and the mainstream media. Although their individual members may have varying private beliefs about UFOs, in public these groups share the official view that UFOs are not “real” and should not be taken seriously—or at least no more seriously than any other curious cultural belief. For these elites, a book like this, which does take UFOs seriously, is intrinsically problematic.
One manifestation of the UFO taboo is official disinterest in responding to UFOs or in finding out what they are. Since 1947, when the modern UFO era began, neither the scientific community nor governments (with the partial exception of France) have made a serious effort to determine their nature, as far as we know. Reports have been filed and a few officially investigated after the fact, but the vast majority have been ignored, and no authoritative effort has been made to survey systematically or seek out UFO phenomena. The media reinforce this disinterest by rarely covering UFOs, and when they do it is inevitably with a wink and a nod, as if to reassure us that they don’t really take UFOs seriously, either.
Given that modern science seems to find almost everything in nature interesting, such disinterest is puzzling. But disinterest alone does not make a taboo—which is something prohibited, not just ignored. Rather, what gives the UFO this special status is that it is considered to be outside the boundaries of rational discourse. Although members of the general public might believe that UFOs exist, the authorities “know” that UFOs are merely figments of overactive imaginations, no more real than witches or unicorns. Thus, to take UFOs seriously is to call one’s own seriousness into question. When UFO “believers” appear to deny empirical reality, there is not much more for the elite culture to do than either ignore or condemn them as irrational or even dangerous. In this light the UFO appears not as an “object” at all, but as a troublesome fiction that is best not talked about—in short, a taboo that prevents reasoned debate.
Yet, the reality is that UFOs are not matters of belief, but facts. Many thousands of reports worldwide describe unexplained objects in the sky. Most consist only of eyewitness testimony, which might be disregarded as unreliable—and some undoubtedly actually are—but the fact that many UFO reports come from “expert witnesses” like commercial and air force pilots, air traffic controllers, cosmonauts, and scientists should give one pause. However, some UFO reports are also corroborated by physical evidence, including scientifically analyzed photo and video images, physical ground traces affecting plants and soil, effects on aircraft, and anomalous radar tracks. In modern society, physical evidence is normally considered definitive evidence of reality, objective evidence for something that has a cause in the physical world. By this criterion, then, at least some UFOs are clearly real. The question that makes them a problem is: Could they be extraterrestrial?
UFO skeptics think that human beings know,[185] as a matter of scientific fact, that UFOs are not extraterrestrial and therefore can be ignored. Yet none of the strongest arguments for this view in fact justify rejecting the extraterrestrial hypothesis as a possible explanation for UFOs. They don’t even come close. Actually it is not known, as a matter of scientific fact, that no UFOs have an extraterrestrial origin. If we reject this hypothesis anyway, we are rejecting what just might be the true explanation, without having submitted it to the test. Again, this does not mean that UFOs are extraterrestrial, either; UFOs are, after all, unidentified. But that is precisely our point: At this stage human beings simply do not know.
Given that little systematic science has been done, the case for rejecting the extraterrestrial hypothesis out of hand rests on an a priori theoretical conviction that extraterrestrial visitation is impossible: “It can’t be true, therefore it isn’t.” Skeptics offer four main arguments to this effect.
“We Are Alone.” Human beings have debated for centuries whether intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe, and with the recent discovery of over 400 extrasolar planets,[186] this debate has heated up considerably of late. Good scientific reasons exist to think that intelligent life does not exist elsewhere, but increasingly there are equally good scientific
