UFOs

but turn away its gaze—to ignore, and hence be ignorant of the UFO—and make no decision at all.

Maintaining the Taboo

The suggestion that the UFO taboo is functionally necessary for modern, anthropocentric rule does not mean that it will be automatically maintained. Such a strong prohibition takes work. To be clear, this is not the conscious work of a vast conspiracy seeking to suppress “the truth” about UFOs, but the work of countless undirected practices that help us “know” that UFOs are not extraterrestrial and can therefore be disregarded. The work of the UFO taboo is paradoxical, however, because unlike the days when the visions of shamans and prophets were taken to be authoritative, in the modern world we know things by making them visible and trying to explain how they work—which in the UFO case would be self-subverting because it could lead to a validation of the extraterrestrial hypothesis. So what are needed are techniques for making UFOs “known” without actually trying to find out what they are. One might distinguish at least four ways of doing this.

The first is authoritative representations, or descriptions of what UFOs are, as provided by those having the authority to stipulate what defines official reality—governments, the scientific community, and the media. Four such current representations are especially noteworthy: (1) that UFOs are known by science to have conventional explanations, for all the reasons we criticized above; (2) that UFOs are not a national security concern,[192] which allows states to wash their hands of the problem; (3) that any study of UFOs is by definition pseudoscience, since UFOs do not exist; and (4) that UFOs are science fiction, which displaces the existentially scary aspect of a potential extraterrestrial encounter into the safety of the imagination. We are not saying that modern authorities are consciously trying to protect the UFO taboo when they make such representations. Our point is that whatever the concrete intent in particular instances, these representations (and no doubt others) have the effect of reinforcing the authoritative consensus that UFOs should not be taken seriously.

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.[193] 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 weaknesses that make it, and the anthropocentric structure of rule that it sustains, potentially unstable.

One is the UFO itself. Despite authoritative efforts to deny their reality, UFOs stubbornly keep showing up, generating an ongoing need to transform them into non-objects. Modern governments might not recognize the UFO, but in the face of continuing anomalies, maintaining such nonrecognition requires work.

Another weakness lies in the different knowledge interests of science and the state. While the two are aligned today in authoritative anti-UFO discourse, ultimately the state is interested in maintaining its skeptical narrative about UFOs as certainly true, whereas science recognizes, at least in principle, that its truths can only be tentative. The presumption in science is that reality has the last word, which creates the possibility of scientific knowledge countering the state’s dogma.

And then there is liberalism, the essential core of modern governance. Even as it produces rational subjects who know that “belief” in UFOs is absurd, liberalism justifies itself as a discourse that produces free-thinking subjects who might doubt it.

The kind of resistance that can best exploit these weaknesses might be called “militant agnosticism.” By “agnostic” here we mean that no position on whether UFOs are extraterrestrial should be taken until they have been systematically studied. Resistance must be agnostic because, given our current knowledge, neither denial nor belief in the extraterrestrial hypothesis is justified; we simply do not know. Concretely, agnosticism means “seeing” the UFO for what it is rather than ignoring it, taking it seriously as a real and truly unidentified object, broadly defined to include any natural phenomenon. Since it is precisely such acknowledgment of UFOs’ reality that the taboo forbids, “seeing” alone is a kind of personal resistance.

To be politically effective, however, resistance must also be militant, by which we mean public and strategic. Indeed, purely private agnosticism about UFOs, of the kind that people in the modern world might have about God, does nothing to break the spiral of silence that surrounds the issue and so in effect contributes to it. To break the cycle resistance needs to be directed at the central problem posed by UFO phenomena, namely reducing our collective ignorance about what they are, rather than at the side issue of official secrecy, which strategically is a diversion. (If we’re correct that governments are hiding not the truth but their own ignorance, then even if they released all their files we would be no closer to knowing what UFOs are.) That is to say, what is needed above all else is a systematic science of UFOs, on the basis of which we might eventually be able to make informed judgments about them, as opposed to simply reiterating dogmas one