FOUR UFOLOGICAL ASSUMPTIONS

There are four assumptions that many, if not most, ufologists and UFO enthusiasts make that seem to me to be unjustified. In the spirit of constructive criticism, I’ll discuss them here.

UFOLOGICAL ASSUMPTION #1. The visitors (though they may be a million years ahead of us) are actually not very intelligent in certain ways: for instance, they are not intelligent enough to be capable of calculated deception. As if we were natural scientists, studying polar bears or honey bees, we can take what we perceive of the visitors at face value; we can uncritically infer facts about them and their machines from the UFO reports.

CRITIQUE. The visitors’ motives are mysterious, so there could well be reasons for them to want us to believe things about them that are not true; and, unlike polar bears or honey bees, they are certainly intelligent enough to be capable of calculated deception, to present us with a carefully fabricated false image of themselves.

They have, for example, been witnessed taking spoonfuls of earth, or taking samples of an abductee’s skin, thus giving us the impression that they are simply curious scientists investigating an unfamiliar world. But their real mission may well be very different, and they may not want us to know what it is. Encounters might well be carefully staged by the visitors, every detail of the vignette being carefully designed by them to convey a false impression.

We simply cannot be confident that we can learn about the visitors by taking their perceived activities at face value.

Similarly, investigators have to be aware of the possibility of “planted evidence.” UFO researchers, using instruments, may discover say, radiation, at a landing site and infer that it constitutes a clue to UFO propulsion. But the visitors might well wish to have us believe that their propulsion system emits radiation when it does not, in order to steer us away, for instance, from an understanding of how their craft actually fly.

We simply cannot be confident that we are able to learn about the visitors by taking their perceived technology at face value.

This means that we have no choice but to accept the fact that the methods and instruments of the natural sciences simply do not constitute appropriate means for the study of intelligent entities who know that they are being studied, who are capable of deception, and who have the ability to cause these instruments to give any sort of readings that they want them to give.

The visitors certainly are intelligent, they certainly know that they’re being studied, they clearly are capable of deception, and their visits to our nuclear missile sites, the Tehran case of 1976, the Levelland, Texas case of 1957, and other cases prove that they are capable of skillfully manipulating our electronic and mechanical devices, apparently at a distance.

So it appears that Sherlock Holmes or Lt. Columbo, whose methods take planted evidence into account, would be much better at studying UFOs than are the natural scientists. But surely the visitors’ misdirections would be extremely hard, if not impossible to expose. How then might such UFO detectives tailor their methods for the study of UFOs? I suggest that to understand the visitors’ motives, the investigators might look to how the visitors’ activities have changed our world, and then take those changes as clues to the visitors’ goals.

UFOLOGICAL ASSUMPTION #2. The visitors — though they may be a million years ahead of us and have been here for at least 70 years and may have been here mush longer — don’t actually know very much about us: for instance, although the visitors seem to want to limit what we know about them, we will be able to trick them into revealing more by setting up surveillance equipment, or by sending quick-response teams to sightings, and we can inform the ufological community about these projects, using published articles and podcasts, without tipping off the visitors.

CRITIQUE. The visitors certainly are very smart, and they have been here long enough to know all about our world, or at least as much as we, ourselves, know about it; they certainly know about the projects that ufologists have devised to trick them. The visitors can easily get information about such projects by, for instance, simply monitoring the Internet. They can then take steps to defeat the ufologists’ plans.

Again, the methods of the natural sciences simply do not constitute appropriate means for the study of intelligent entities who know that they are being studied.

UFOLOGICAL ASSUMPTION #3. There is no question that the government is to be condemned for the UFO cover-up.

CRITIQUE. But it seems just as likely that the visitors, wanting to disclose their identity and goals in their own way, are compelling the government to engage in the cover-up, on pain of some threatened punishment. Perhaps the incursions into nuclear missile sites were warnings — some of the best-known of these incursions happened at the very same time that the Condon Investigation and the FOIA were threatening disclosure.

It is simply a mistake to ignore the possibility of a visitor-enforced cover-up. It is at least a distinct possibility that the government should be commended, not condemned, for the cover-up.

UFOLOGICAL ASSUMPTION #4. The creation and dissemination of UFO reports, including screening by ufologists, is an adequate method for advancing the goal of ufology (the goal being to demarginalize ufology).

CRITIQUE. It seems reasonable to model ufology, as a method of truth-finding, on our venerable truth-finding system of criminal justice. Let us first note that the purpose of a police report is to prepare a prosecutor to argue his or her case, against the defense lawyer, face-to-face in front of a jury, where each party challenges the other, point by point. By analogy, then, the “jury” in ufology is the public, and the “defense lawyers” are the skeptics. But, even though all the arguments are on the side of ufology, the ufologists almost never actually debate the UFO skeptics face-to-face in public. (It is true that many ufologists have, in books, articles, podcasts, etc., put solid arguments into the public sphere, and some skeptics have put contrary arguments out there, too; but this all amounts to an extremely low energy, hard-to-follow, kind of debate.)

So, given that there is no real ufological “prosecutorial” branch, the UFO reports seem not to be effectively leveraged. Ufology has simply let its thousands of excellent case files pile up; it needs to “prosecute” its cases; it needs an organization, one that’s complementary to MUFON, that’s dedicated to organizing such debates. I have developed a plan for such an organization,TEUFOS — see www.truthenginebook.com/TEUFOS.html