by Leslie Kean
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?
Proving Our Ignorance
UFO skeptics think that human beings know,3 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,4 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 reasons to think that it does. Bottom line: We don’t know yet.
“They Can’t Get Here.”5 Skeptics argue that even if there is intelligent life elsewhere, it’s too far away from Earth to get here. Relativity theory tells us that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light (186,000 miles per second). At .001 percent of light speed, or 66,960 miles per hour—already far beyond current human capabilities—it would take 4,500 Earth years for any vehicle to arrive just from the nearest star system. And at speeds much closer to light a single spaceship would need to carry more energy than is presently consumed in an entire year on Earth.
Physical constraints on interstellar travel are often seen as the strongest reason to reject the extraterrestrial hypothesis, but are they clearly decisive? Computer simulations suggest that even at speeds well below light, any expanding advanced civilizations should have reached Earth long ago.6 How long ago depends on what assumptions are made, but even pessimistic ones yield encounters with Earth within 100 million years, barely a blip in cosmic terms. Additionally, there are growing doubts that the speed of light is truly an absolute barrier.7 Wormholes—themselves predicted by relativity theory—are tunnels through space-time that would shorten greatly the distances between stars. And then there is the possibility of “warp drive,” or engineering the vacuum around a spaceship to enable it to skip over space without time dilation.8 Such ideas are highly speculative, but given how far we humans have come in just 300 years since our scientific revolution, imagine how far another civilization might have advanced 3,000 years (much less 3,000,000) after theirs. In light of these arguments, if anything, visitors from other civilizations should be here, which prompts the famous “Fermi Paradox,”9 or “Where are they?”
“They Would Land on the White House Lawn.” So skeptics often take the argument one step further, by asking: If visitors from other planets have come all this way to see us, why don’t they land on the White House lawn and introduce themselves? After all, if human beings were to encounter intelligent life in our own space exploration, that’s what we would do. On this basis, the fact that UFO occupants have not done so is evidence that they are not here.
But is it? It is not at all clear that space-faring humans would land on an alien equivalent of the White House lawn if they journeyed to a distant planet. Perhaps advanced explorers would maintain a policy of noninterference toward lower life forms. Regardless of what human beings might do, however, on what scientific basis can we know the intentions of alien beings, whose nature and agendas might be utterly unimaginable to us? There is none, and as such one cannot rule out the possibility that extraterrestrials might have reasons for avoiding contact.
“We Would Know If They Were Here.” This final argument appeals to human authority—that, due to our vast surveillance of the skies with sophisticated radar and telescopes, the world would know definitely by now if extraterrestrials were here, because the experts would have discovered them.
This position, too, is by no means decisive. First, it assumes an ability to observe and recognize UFOs that may be unwarranted; if some are vehicles able to visit Earth, then their occupants could easily have the technology to limit knowledge of their presence. Second, the authorities have not actually looked for UFOs, and what is not looked for or expected is often not seen. Finally, in view of pervasive official secrecy about UFOs, more is probably known about them than is publicly acknowledged. This does not mean that what is known is their origin, but in the face of so much secrecy it is natural to raise the question.
Importantly, our point about each of these arguments is not that they are wrong, but that reasonable people can disagree about whether they are wrong, since they all ultimately rely on unproven assumptions rather than established scientific facts. Indeed, the very fact that it is so easy to raise reasonable objections to UFO skepticism is further evidence that, scientifically speaking, human beings can’t rule out the extraterrestrial hypothesis. Some of us may look at the evidence and arguments and conclude that the probability is zero, while others may give the hypothesis more credence—but who really knows? No one knows, because we do not have the scientific knowledge to make such probabilities meaningful. As former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld might put it, we are dealing here not with “known unknowns” but “unknown unknowns,” where objective likelihoods are anyone’s guess. And when there is such “reasonable doubt,” scientific hypotheses should not be rejected a priori. Far from proving that UFOs are not extraterrestrial, in short, current science proves only its ignorance.
The Threat of the UFO
If the proper application of science demands that at present we be agnostic about whether any UFOs have an extraterrestrial origin, neither believing nor rejecting this, then the taboo on trying to find out what UFOs are is deeply puzzling. After all, if any UFOs were discovered to be from somewhere else in the universe, it would be one of the most important events in human history, making it rational to investigate even a remote possibility. It was just such reasoning that led the U.S. Congress for a time to fund the SETI program looking for evidence of life around distant stars. So why not fund the systematic study of UFOs, which are relatively close by and at least sometimes leave physical evidence? Even for those for whom the question of extraterrestrials is not on the table, what about simple scientific curiosity? Why not study UFOs, just like human beings study everything else?
Our thesis is that the origins of this taboo are political. As political scientists, we are concerned with a possible connection between the need to dismiss the UFO and the way in which modern peoples organize and govern their societies. The inability to see clearly and talk rationally about UFOs seems to be a symptom of authoritative anxiety, a socially subconscious fear of what the reality of the UFO might
mean for modern government.
The threat is threefold. On the most obvious level, acceptance of the possibility that the UFO is truly unidentified, and that therefore an unknown, very powerful “other” might actually exist, represents a potential physical threat. Clearly, if some other civilization has the ability to visit Earth, then it has vastly superior technology to human beings, which raises the possibility of colonization or even extermination. As such, the UFO calls into question the state’s ability to protect its citizens from such an invasion. Second, governments may also be reacting to the possibility that a confirmation of extraterrestrial presence would create tremendous pressure for a world government, which today’s territorial states would be loath to form. The sovereign identity of modern states depends on their difference from one another. Anything that required subsuming this difference into a global sovereignty would threaten the fundamental structure of these states, quite apart from the risk of physical destruction.
Third, however, and in our view most important, the extraterrestrial possibility calls into question what we call the anthropocentric nature of modern sovereignty. By this we mean that, in the modern world, political organization everywhere is based on the assumption that only human beings have the ability and authority to govern and determine our collective fate. Nature might throw us a curve ball in the form of a pandemic or global warming, but when it comes to deciding how to deal with such crises, the choice is ours alone. Such anthropocentrism, or human-centeredness, is a modern assumption, one less common in prehistoric and ancient times, when Nature or the gods were considered more powerful than human beings and thought to rule.
Significantly, it is on this anthropocentric basis that modern states are able to command exceptional loyalty and resources from their subjects. Because a possible explanation for the UFO phenomenon is extraterrestrial, taking UFOs seriously calls this deeply held assumption into question. It raises the possibility of something analogous to the materialization of God, as in the Christians’ “Second Coming.” To whom would people give their loyalty in such a situation, and could states in their present form survive were such a question politically salient? Our contention is that the political survival of the modern state depends on that question not being politically salient. As such, an authoritative taboo on the UFO is functionally necessary for rule to be sustained in its present form.
In sum, the UFO creates a deep, unconscious insecurity in which certain possibilities are unthinkable because of their inherent danger. In this respect the UFO taboo is akin to denial in psychoanalysis: the sovereign represses the UFO out of fear of what it might reveal about itself. There is therefore nothing for the sovereign to do 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,10 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.11 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 discip
line 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.