News coverage of the recent O’Hare UFO – this sighting with the added frisson of multiple credible witnesses and FOIA-extracted proof of a government cover-up – has fallen into a predictable pattern. The story is always introduced with a chuckle, as though to suggest “don’t worry, we’re not actually taking this seriously,” and the assumption is always made that whatever was seen must either be
- a) some perfectly familiar and ordinary phenomenon misidentified, or
- b) an alien spaceship.
Hence all the jokes: “Who would fly a million light-years just to land at O’Hare?”
Indeed the term “UFO” has virtually come to mean “extraterrestrial spacecraft” (as when people ask “do you believe in UFOs?” or inquire of some anomalous sighting “was it a UFO?” – clearly the term is well on its way to becoming a dead acronym, in a sense analogous to a dead metaphor); thus language is once more pressed into the service of foreclosing alternatives.
Yet alternatives of course there are. Just to name three, UFOs might be:
- c) some unfamiliar natural phenomenon not yet understood, perhaps electromagnetic in nature;
- d) parapsychological phenomena along the lines suggested by Jacques Vallee and Kenneth Ring (and earlier, Carl Jung);
- e) secret experimental military aircraft.
And probably there are more possibilities. I hold no particular brief for any of (c), (d), and (e); nor do I claim they’re especially likely. Then again, (a) and (b) aren’t especially likely either – indeed, those two strike me as the least likely of the five.
But I don’t have any particular UFO theory. As long, however, as the prevailing attitude toward UFOs remains a mix of embarrassed titters on the one hand and fantastic visions of space invaders on the other – as long as the aliens-or-nothing paradigm prevails – serious investigation of the UFO phenomenon will continue to be minimal.
Which might be just the way our rulers want it, especially if something like (e) is the truth. (Indeed, cynical-minded folks have suggested that some UFO sightings may be deliberate hoaxes perpetrated by the government to discredit the actual sightings. But then, we all know that the Illuminati are a front for the Illuminati ….) In any case, the media seem remarkably uninterested in the government cover-up, despite the fact that in this case the FAA was caught red-handed and basically had to admit it had lied. But what news agency is going to risk its credibility by investigating Saucermen from Sagittarius?
Generally speaking governments, corporations, major organisations and just plain folks lie to cover up incompetence, laziness or forgetfulness not big damn conspiracies. Even if we make the big assumption that UFOs are ‘real’, they don’t seem to be either a military threat, aviation safety hazard or predictable enough to turn into a money making tourist attraction, so why don’t we all just leave them alone.
Generally speaking governments, corporations, major organisations and just plain folks lie to cover up incompetence, laziness or forgetfulness not big damn conspiracies.
I’m not sure what weight the term “conspiracy” has for you. Lying to cover up incompetence, laziness, or forgetfulness is a conspiracy, at least if more than one person is involved. That’s what the word means.
Also I’m not sure in what category you would place, say, the Holocaust or the Manhattan Project.
For my general view on conspiracy theories see here.
Even if we make the big assumption that UFOs are ‘real’,
What does it mean for UFOs to be “real”? “UFO” means “unidentified flying object.” Whenever you see an airborne object you can’t identify, you’ve established that UFOs are real. Unless you’re smuggling into the meaning of the term “UFO” some specific theory about what sort of thing they’re supposed to be. But one of the main points of my post was that using the term that way obstructs understanding.
they don’t seem to be either a military threat, aviation safety hazard or predictable enough to turn into a money making tourist attraction, so why don’t we all just leave them alone.
Not a big fan of science, I take it?
I certainly agree conspiracies do happen. Adam Smith made some unkind comment about people of the same trade rarely meeting, even for “merriment and diversion” , when the talk does not turn to some conspiracy against the public interest. Governments have and do run conspiracies, e.g. your great example of the Manhattan Project, and they have set up whole agencies to facilitate this sort of thing. There are a lot of conspiracies out there. To a large extent this is ‘situation normal’, to the rich and powerful conspiracy is just an operational procedure. They exist everywhere from the Pentagon to your local tennis club.
There are logical grounds to assume we generally under-rate the extent of conspiracy in history and current events. By definition a successful conspiracy is the one we don’t hear about. And the very common-ness of conspiracy implies that there is something to be gained from it, so that there must be successful conspiracies out there. If conspiring didn’t work, at least sometimes, we wouldn’t bother.
All this implies that a certain degree of paranoia is just common sense in any real world historical political system. The biographies of powerful men like LBJ and Richard Nixon, for example, show them to have been acutely aware of real or imagined conspiracies against them. Some of this was certainly misplaced paranoia, for example, LBJ’s belief that Bobby Kennedy was pulling the strings behind the civil rights movement. Still these guys are the professionals so presumably they know their craft better than we do. What’s good for rulers is good for the ruled. Those of us who aren’t presidents or prime ministers need to keep an open mind about conspiracies.
The problem is when people conflate a whole lot of little conspiracies into one big conspiracy, or if they assume successful conspiracies are behind everything. Very often a mistake is just a mistake. The real “one big conspiracy” that makes sense is the overwhelming desire by government, corporate and tennis club rulers to convince us all that “they’re in charge” and “they have a handle on things”, especially when they don’t.
On the other hand ruling elites (whether global or tennis club) have an interest in dispelling paranoia because it makes both their management, and their conspiring, more costly. Intellectuals buy into this too. As pundits, whether in support or opposed to the current ruling elite, the intellectuals have their own goods to sell and Joe Blogg’s conspiracy of the week is a competitive product.
By UFOs being real, I meant some kind of physical manifestation, whether a spaceship from Sagittarius, a spy plane or electrostatic discharge from the pan-dimensional quadrosphere.
I am a sci fi fan, love BSG, Firefly and even old Star Trek. Are we being visited by LGMs? My guess is probably not, I suspect that if they wanted to spy on us we’d never find out. I’m inclined to think UFO phenomena are 99% misreporting amd 1% poorly understood atmospheric phenomena (luntil a few years back we knew zip about sprites). (See here for intro to sprites). Still none of this stuff seems to hurt anyone or interfere in legitimate commerce, so I can understand the reluctance of agencies like the FAA to get involved. It is still worthy of scientific investigation, and there are investigators like Michael Persinger who are developing some fascinating hypotheses. But the phenomena itself is quite wil o’ the wisp-ish so you don’t need a conspiracy theory to explain why time clock punchin’ career scientists generally avoid it.
P.S. by the way, besides sprites, another interesting aerial phenomenon are atmospheric halos due to airborne ice crystals. see site here which has some interesting example photos you can walk through on the site. Could these be mistaken for UFOs? Sure.
John Keel is an interesting defender of hypothesis d) and Leon Davidson of e).