Recently, the disclosure community, such as it is, has been
beating the drums about official announcements of a UFO
presence on this or that imminent date. November 14,
November 27, December 10--all were claimed as the big date
when the President of the United States would go before the
world and announce that aliens are indeed among us and the
U.S. has extensive relations with them and has had for years.
Now, I have to be honest with you. I was not on tenterhooks
about any of these dates. Maybe there will be some sort of
official U.S. announcement concerning this matter one of
these days, but I doubt that it will take anything like the
dramatic form imagined by the disclosure believers.
It is conceivable that NASA might quietly accept that some
objects tracked in and near our planet are unknowns. The
next step would be for the National Science Foundation to
agree that research into the origin and nature of such
objects was an appropriate and grantable scientific pursuit.
If those two things happened, a few scientists here and
there would probably propose various research programs, and
seek funding for them from places like the Ford Foundation.
(Granting for UFO research is not possible now due to the
NSF's current stance on it.)
There are three primary areas of research that would
potentially provide a useful data harvest.
First, a wide angle sky search using automatic cameras and
possibly other forms of detection, that would build maps of
the movement of unknown objects, seeking consistencies of
any kind.
Second, the physical and mental study of people claiming
close encounter, both those whose bodies reveal the presence
of unknown objects, and those who do not appear to bear them.
Third, once all possible in situ exploration of such objects
is exhausted, their removal and analysis.
The combination of these three types of study would provide
a harvest of data that offer a reasonable prospect of
developing a realistic hypothesis about what is happening.
To do this, though, science has to put certain
preconceptions behind it, the first of which is that we have
even the slightest idea of what is actually happening. We do
not know if we are being visited from other planets. In
fact, unless we start from the basis that we know
essentially nothing except that the whole phenomenon is
unexplained, we will be facing a high probability of
intellectual failure, even if we do acquire good data.
Of course, there is a large community who would say that the
government and parts of the defense industry already know
these things, and that may be true. However, classified
scientific work is notoriously unreliable because it is done
by so few people, and generally not by those at the
pinnacles of their fields. In addition, in this case,
because of the need to operate in secret, there is probably
a serious lack of methodically collected data.
How are you going to do what is needed, which is to collect
samples and information from hundreds of thousands of
affected individuals, in secret?
The answer is that you are not. Instead, you're going to
sample just a few people and extrapolate from those findings.
Thus, you are going to open yourself to what has probably
actually happened behind the scenes: your data acquisition
is going to be controlled by whomever or whatever is
generating this mystery in the first place.
By working in secret, in other words, the various scientific
groups who have made methodical attempts to understand, have
only acquired what data our visitors--whoever they
are--wanted them to obtain.
We cannot expect that conclusions drawn from a managed
sample like this will have any value beyond affording us an
understanding of what it is wanted that we should believe.
Therefore, information coming from those legendary secret
groups that allegedly exist deep within the bowels of the
defense department and its satellite industries may or may
not be correct, and therefore cannot be trusted at all.
Open research, broad-based data acquisition and the use of
existing institutional structures such as the peer-reviewed
scientific press are essential to drawing trustworthy
conclusions about what is happening, and even then it is
going to be the single greatest social, cultural and
intellectual challenge in the history of the human species.
This is especially true because the original source of the
data we need is not passive. On the contrary, our visitors
appear to possess vast and extraordinary knowledge, and
even brains that may offer them superior command of reality.
Nevertheless, if we are sufficiently rigorous in our
approach, there is little question in my mind but that we
can come to an understanding that advances human knowledge,
and probably in ways that are more significant than anything
else we have ever done.
