If skepticism can be said to have majors like a university, UFO skepticism is certainly among one of the pillars, along with the supernatural, CAM (Complementary and Alternative Medicine), and conspiracy (my specialty).
There is, of course, a Venn diagram where these majors overlap. I only deal with UFOlogy when it overlaps into my conspiracy world, where it readily does. I stay out of the search for extraterrestrial life because, at its very basic, it does not trouble me at all. A person staring at the sky looking for new things is performing the same task as an astronomer. In some ways, the UFO people are very scientific – as long as they don’t let Fox Mulder’s mantra of wanting to believe override their critical thinking when they see a dot in the sky.
The core belief of UFO people is that human beings are not alone in the universe. This seems to be a harmless belief, and even the hardest of skeptics would likely concede the position. To think that the only life in the vastness of the cosmos is on Earth would require a pretty intricate argument to get me to grant the possibility of that conclusion.
The next step the UFO people make is that there exists other forms of sentient life somewhere out in space. I find this assumption to be plausible as well. Given that evolutionary paths have a nearly infinite number of ‘rolls’ to make, the dice have likely come up with sentience more than once. It is a bit more controversial to make this claim, but I don’t find that it breaks the reason to assent to it.
The final step is that such sentient life has visited Earth. This is where skeptics erect a firm wall with a door that only hard evidence can unlock.
Even those ‘Stanton Friedman’ types are rather harmless. Sure, he concluded definitively that an alien crashed at Roswell and that it wasn’t a secret government project to monitor nuclear detonations. He’s somewhat responsible for bringing what was considered a non-event into prominence. He was also one of the people who were very into Area 51, and exposed Bob Lazar’s numerous claims as lacking any kind of supporting evidence.
Perhaps I am being overly generous to people like Stanton Friedman and the UFOlogists: Friedman has definitely contributed to a culture which values a good story over good evidence, and in this case was an early pebble giving us the avalanche of misinformation that drowns our present world.
The UFO people become conspiracy theorists pretty quickly. It is difficult to just find blinky lights in the sky and let that be the end of it. The lights were there, and the local news isn’t covering it… so therefore there must be a reason they are ignoring this story of stories. It’s not that the image is blurry, it’s a misidentified drone, or just a plane; it is because “they” won’t let the news cover it.
Science is staring at the sky finding odd stuff of note. It’s rigorous, repetitive, and kind of boring until we get something like the WOW signal. Meanwhile, the UFO conspiracy people – the ones already sold on intelligent extra-terrestrial visitation – has a belief system that thrives on a grand coverup. Like other conspiracy theorists who have put their faith in the current US administration for disclosure, they weren’t prepared to get what they had been asking for for decades. While the UFO conspiracy theorists need a curtain of secrecy, pulling back that curtain blunts some of the edge of the UFO theorists.
This is a trade-off: the conspiracy theorist wants disclosure, but they also need the ability to expose the coverup. An honest UFOlogist would desire disclosure above anything else, as it sheds light on a fundamental question of human existence… which brings us to the current administration’s “Department of Defense War”, who created a website for disclosing a great number of documents related to UFO/UAP investigations.
Perhaps, if you “majored” in UFO skepticism you’ve heard of it; but if you weren’t specifically interested, your algorithm probably didn’t bring you the story. I, who both teach and write about this kind of thing, had to find it on my own after having heard an errant reference to it on an unrelated podcast. The difficulty in writing this story is in how little coverage by the mainstream news media there has been. Even the various skeptics that I follow have barely mentioned it. This is quite odd, because an official release of this kind of material by a state like the US should have made a giant splash.
If you visit the website, you can flick through the various images and videos to decide for yourself. The videos get the most attention, but I think only because they are the flashiest. Watching them underwhelmed me in ways not seen since a Star Wars sequel movie.
Most of the videos are IR cameras tracking pixels meaning that the object is really large and far away or really small and close. Another video is claimed to be an F-16 shooting down a UAP, but it’s obvious from watching it that the thing being shot is a balloon of some kind.
For the UFO community this has got to be a disappointment. It’s not even a coverup disappointment. It’s just, “ok, here you go”… and then finding out that the box you’ve been handed is empty.
The most important revelation from the files is how many times the FBI, or some other branch of the U.S. government, investigated these claims. No matter what, the UFO enthusiasts should take this as a win, because while it is likely that the official investigations were conducted out of Cold War paranoia, they were still taken seriously enough that actual investigators were sent out. That’s the only win I can reasonably grant, because so much of this was nothing.
But, if it’s nothing why burn the pixels over it? Well, that’s because of the demons. The current US Vice President went on the Benny Show podcast where he was asked about this release he replied, “I don’t think they’re aliens, I think they’re demons anyway, but that’s a longer discussion…” where he then continued with a statement that there is a lot of evil out there, before concluding with a quote from Verbal Kint in the movie ‘The Usual Suspects’. While we are on the topic of usual suspects, Colorado Representative Lauren Boebert claimed that the newly declassified documents proved that the UAPs are either fallen angels, or the Nephilim (or in David Icke’s parlance the Annunaki).
I’ve confessed in previous articles that I used to be a conspiracy theorist, and the UFO conspiracy was right up my alley. I was the perfect age to get hooked by the first episode of the X-Files. So when I look at government officials who are touting this official release as being monumental, I get a little wistful for my past self. When I then hear the Vice President of the United States tell us that “no, they’re demons, I’ll let you know when I check out Area 51”, I become insulted.
Belief in conspiracy theories sucks away a person’s critical thinking ability. Conspiracy theorists have to find a way to grab a niche. Something which sets them apart from everyone else. Bill Moore (or perhaps Timothy Good) had Majestic 12, the original UFO secret society. Bill Cooper had his experience working for the Office of Naval Intelligence, which set him apart. Stanton Friedman was an actual scientist before he jumped into UFOlogy. There is nothing left to up the ante. All we have now is David Grusch, whose biggest reveal continues to be that other people told him about real aliens once.
What should make the UFO believers enraged is that this demon escalation makes them look like fools. UFOs – actual alien craft – are supposed to be grounded in the natural world. It’s why the UFO conspiracy works are fascinating to read. They have to jump through so many hoops to justify interstellar travel and manoeuvring, but now they are being given explanations based on magic.
The current state of the world has made strange bedfellows. Atheists have been siding with the current Pope on more issues that I would have thought possible, and now I feel an obligation to feel insulted on behalf of the UFO community.
