Because it's Halloween, I've decided that I must come clean concerning an off-again-on-again hobby of mine, looking at the perpetual "what the f@*k WAS THAT?" factory that is the UFO and all the interrelated subphenomena attached to it. The trick is, I can't do it by just ranting at the reader, and only I know the questions to ask and the answers to give, so here we are using the interview format.
So when and how did you get involved with this bizarre stuff?
Well, I grew up in the glory years of "weird crap" television, re-runs of That's Incredible!, new episodes of Ripley's Believe It or Not, OMNI: The New Frontier, In Search of.... when it was both new and in reruns at the same time, a fate it shared with MASH. It did not hurt that I had a few relatives who were also interested in the topic. To me the idea of looking out a second-story house window and seeing a "ship" just hanging there is an image both absurdist and utopian at the same time. Until the Internet came along, most of my sources for UFO "case narratives" were books checked out of the library. I've never gone to a UFO conference, and I wasn't a big listener of Art Bell's AM radio show.
When did you start dealing with the skeptics?
When I was a grade-school kid my mother and I were at a certain local library that has since changed location and we were talking to this guy and the topic was brought up and the guy was adamant that I needed to read Philip Klass' books on the subject, that they would "explain everything." I was skeptical, and I avoided reading the books for years. I began reading them after thumbing through back issues of Skeptical Inquirer in the community college library while at the same time reading James Moseley's Saucer Smear newsletter which was being retyped into html on the Internet. Klass' ideas about the phenomenon are complicated, revolving around the theory that ball plasma was being produced from a variety of sources (high-power lines, aircraft vortexes from jetliners flying though the air, etc.) and that the UFO is just ball lightning. My problem is that I grew up in a dry area with heavy aircraft traffic and power substations every few miles, and we never saw electricity arcing, plasma balls forming, or general UFO activity. I saw more hot air balloons, Pink Floyd blimps, and military aircraft than UFOs.
I can understand why the skeptics went on their 40-plus year crusade against everything from astrology to Immanuel Velikovsky - the professors and scientists had a very hackneyed view of historical forces, and they were certain that the 1970s paranormal boom might lead into some sort of reversal for science and technology, even though scientific improvement and technological systems were (and remain) intrinsic to modern living. Meanwhile, the stage magician contingent was involved mainly because most of them saw various psychics appearing on TV talk shows as honing in on their business; later CSICOP skeptic James Randi was infuriated with the sudden rise of Uri Geller in 1973 - that was the straw that pushed Randi from being interested in odd things to being a critic, and quickly a debunker. At this point in 2019, what I see is a fear of disrespect by STEM graduates and STEM wannabes.
So what is the phenomenon?
I truly do not know. What I can say - after reading a load of books including the 1969 "Condon Report" (Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects), watching witness videos of mostly marginal quality on YouTube, and seeing documentaries - is that I am highly skeptical of ETH, the "extra-terrestrial hypothesis." If you look into this massive blob, you will notice that witness descriptions of the "ships" varies from case to case, as do the "aliens" - everything from giants to tiny glowing figures walking on a shelf inside a "ship" (witness was taken on board) to "robots" of various shades of an android body type, to creatures who were just basic shapes bouncing around, to things that would be described as ghosts or "psychic imagery" if there wasn't a UFO as part of the narrative.
That's what makes me leery of ETH, the variation of creatures and crafts - if it was one or two different groups of "aliens" and ships that seem to follow a family design language (or is that too human?) I could possibly buy ETH. But there is just too much variation.
Can you rattle off the counter-explanations to the phenomenon?
There are many: hoaxes (and there have been a number of faked photos, videos, "debris", etc.), high-altitude reflections (astronomer Donald Menzel's pet theory), misidentified aircraft or satellites, "mass hysteria" (official US Air Force explanation in the 1950s), other misidentifications. The less skeptical would be time-travellers using androids or artificial beings, projections from other realities, projections from a mass unconsciousness that is riddled with sci-fi imagery, glitches in the holographic universe that we actually "live" in, and the more New Age ideas of "astral projection", angels in disguise (some people in the Pentagon were firm believers that UFOs were demons in disguise, a hint at how many American military personnel hold Christian Fundamentalist beliefs), ley line weirdness, and probably many more. There may be some sort of force out there that makes the human mind hallucinate sci-fi imagery, though OMNI magazine before it died in the early '90s was doing their own "Blue Book", and one of the things they uncovered was that heavily Catholic countries have a higher occurrence of seeing the Blessed Virgin Mary in the sky during UFO flaps than non-Catholic countries. It would explain why extremely isolated communities still have sightings of fairy-tale creatures like pixies and dwarves.
So where does Wikipedia fit into all of this?
Because investigators of UFOS, ghosts, and whatnot make their money from producing books, they are loathe to dump it all online to be read for free. The skeptics of the last twenty years are a younger lot, coming at this from college/university, and willing to put things on YouTube - but before YouTube was a mass thing, they were there on Wikipedia. A lot of this merges into the Scientology wars of the Bush II years, but we know that for years there was a group called "Guerrilla skeptics" run by Susan Gerbic (who has her own Wikipedia page) that fought anybody who wanted to edit UFO/paranormal articles away from being party-line CSICOP-approvable content. Rome Viharo took loads of abuse for editing the Rupert Sheldrake article, in fact, thanks to RationalWiki he's still being abused.
....And once again we have non-experts in the main telling people who may be experts that "no, you are wrong" calling them "woo-woos" and other nonsense. It's because en.Wikipedia has developed "wiki-lawyering" and this idiotic "old-boys club" that keeps the arguments from happening. Wikipedia will unfortunately have to be dead and buried (the files sold on thunbdrives in souks in the Middle East) before the other side will get a chance to post a balanced article on some online encyclopedia, mark my words.
I've run out of questions.
And I've run out of answers. Goodnight!
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