So said a U.S. Air Force sergeant in 1953, trying to explain to investigators (and, I suspect, to himself), what he had seen, standing on a roof on an August night, watching three well-lit, color-changing objects fly by. His statement, which can be read on Project Blue Book Archive, a site devoted to supporting “serious UFO research,” gets at a fundamental misunderstanding of the people who believe in UFOs—that they are anti-science.
In a recent paper published in Public Understanding of Science, Greg Eghigian, an associate professor of modern history at Penn State University, traces the history of ufology and its relationship with mainstream science, arguing that the mistrust between the two was not because ufologists were ignorant about science. And his analysis holds lessons for understanding other beliefs that run counter to scientific evidence.
Take the Air Force guy—maybe he was an amateur ufologist, or maybe he was just a person who saw something in the sky he couldn’t explain, but he hardly seems to be spouting blind, irrational belief. Rather, he seems to be trying for a Sherlock Holmesian deduction—he’s reviewed the “known quantities” and is trying to arrive at the most logical answer he can, which is that “this was something that I have never seen before or since.”
Many ufologists, Eghigian says, have tried to go about their inquiries logically and systematically, usually by one of two methods. They would either come up with ways to code reports of UFO sightings so they could be statistically analyzed, or they would do detailed case studies.
“These folks were trying to do what scientists do,” he says. “They were trying to model and mimic all the trappings of scientific practice.”
But from the beginning, mainstream science was not welcoming to hypotheses about UFOs, especially not that they could be extraterrestrial in origin. When the first reports of disks and strange lights in the sky appeared in the years after World War II, several governments did collect and analyze these stories. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency theorized that they could be foreign weapons, or maybe a mass hysteria, (“midsummer madness,” officials said in 1952) that could be another kind of security threat.
A few academics engaged with the UFO question (the University of Colorado psychologist David Saunders came up with a widely-used coding system, for one), but not many. For the most part, academia saw the study of UFOs as illegitimate.