UFOs

3 UFO skeptics think that human beings know The widely used phrase “UFO skeptic” can be misleading, because “skepticism” should imply doubt but openness. However, in UFO discourse it has been deformed into positive denial.

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4 over 400 extrasolar planets Dennis Overbye, “A Sultry World Is Found Orbiting a Distant Star,” New York Times, December 17, 2009.

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5 “They Can’t Get Here” Some of this section is reprinted verbatim from the 2008 paper, Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall, op. cit., p. 616. Occasional phrases or sentences in “Militant Agnosticism and the UFO Taboo” were also used in the first paper.

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6 civilizataions should have reached Earth long ago Martyn Fogg, “Temporal Aspects of the Interaction Among the First Galactic Civilizations,” Icarus 69 (1987): 370–84.

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7 the speed of light is truly an absolute barrier J. Deardorff et al., “Inflation-Theory Implications for Extraterrestrial Visitation,” Journal of the British Interplanetary Society 58 (2005): 43–50.

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8 to skip over space without time dilation H. E. Puthoff, S. R. Little, and M. Ibison, “Engineering the Zero-Point Field and Polarizable Vacuum for Interstellar Flight,” Journal of the British Interplanetary Society 55 (2002): 137–44.

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9 “Fermi Paradox” Stephen Webb, Where Is Everybody? (New York: Copernicus Books, 2002).

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10 UFOs are not a national security concern Richard Dolan, UFOs and the National Security State, pp. 193–203.

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11 reinforcing the skeptical case Peter Galison, “Removing Knowledge,” Critical Inquiry 31 (2004): 229–43. On UFO secrecy see especially Dolan, UFOs and the National Security State, and, for the official view, Gerald Haines, “CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947–1990,” Intelligence and National Security 14 (1999): 26–49, and Charles Ziegler, “UFOs and the US Intelligence Community,” Intelligence and National Security, vol. 14 (1999), pp. 1–25.

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12 a science of UFOs One could imagine, for example, a complementary, bottom- up or “democratic” strategy centering on an Internet-funded NGO, an idea we (Wendt and Duvall) have explored elsewhere.

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1 “a powerful desire to do nothing” Hynek, “The Roots of Complacency,” op. cit.

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2 “the dam breaks, sometimes cataclysmically” Ibid.

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3 Dr. James E. McDonald, senior atmospheric physicist Dr. James E. McDonald, “Statement on Unidentified Flying Objects,” submitted to the House Committee on Science and Astronautics, Symposium on Unidentified Flying Objects, Washington, D.C., July 29, 1968. This report is recommended reading. For a detailed biography about McDonald and chronicle of his work, see Ann Druffel, Firestorm: Dr. James E. McDonald’s Fight for UFO Science (Wild Flower Press, 2003).