It was a humbling experience. My cerebral cortex might have sneered at stories of flying saucers, but the part of my brain where those stories were stored had been activated by the powerful experience of the icy meteorite. At an unconscious level, my mind was busy making connections and associations. I was primed to see a flying saucer-and my brain filled in the details. Who has not seen an animal in dusky twilight that turns into a bush as one takes a closer look? But something more than the mind playing tricks with patterns of light is needed to explain why hundreds-by some accounts thousands-of people claim to have been abducted by aliens, whisked aboard a spaceship and subjected to some kind of physical examination, usually focusing on their erogenous zones.
After the examination, the aliens are frequently said to insert a miniature implant into the abductee's body. Often the memory of an abduction has a dreamlike quality, and subjects can recall the details only under hypnosis. UFO hysteria. Scientists themselves are not immune to such beliefs. In a five-day conference was held at MIT to assess the similarities among various accounts of alien abduction. The conference was organized by John E. Mack, a Harvard psychiatrist, and David E.
Pritchard, a prize-winning MIT physicist. Mack had been treating patients who thought they had been kidnapped by aliens. His treatment was to reassure them that they were not hallucinating but really had been abducted. Pritchard, an experimentalist, was more interested in the physical evidence of the kidnappings, particularly the minuscule implants. The most promising candidate seemed to be an implant that abductee Richard Price said had been inserted midshaft into his penis.
The implant, amber in color and the size of a grain of rice, was clearly visible. Under a microscope, what appeared to be fine wires could be seen protruding from it. What wonders of alien technology might be revealed by a sophisticated analysis of that diminutive device? Amid high expectations, the "implant" was removed and examined.
The conclusion? It was not from Andromeda. Its origins were distinctly terrestrial: human tissue that had accreted fibers of cotton from Price's underwear. It is hardly surprising that there are similarities in the accounts of people who claim to have been abducted by aliens.
All of us have been exposed to the same images and stories in the popular media. My local bookstore stocks three times as many books about UFOs as it carries about science. Aliens stare at us from the covers of magazines and make cameo appearances in television commercials. As time goes by, the depictions become increasingly uniform.
Any six-year-old can now sketch what an alien looks like. Popular culture is, in fact, undergoing a kind of alien evolution: each new creation by a filmmaker or sci-fi writer acts as a mutation, and the selection mechanism is audience approval.
Aliens subtly evolve to satisfy public expectations. The widespread belief in alien abductions is just one example of the growing influence of pseudoscience. Two hundred years ago, educated people imagined that the greatest contribution of science would be to free the world from superstition and humbug.
It has not happened. Ancient beliefs in demons and magic still sweep across the modern landscape, but they are now dressed in the language and symbols of science: A best-selling health guru asserts that cancer can be banished from the body by the power of the mind.
If anyone should doubt it, he explains that it's all firmly grounded in quantum theory. Inventors claim to have built perpetual-motion machines that circumvent the laws of physics.
Educated people wear magnets in their shoes to draw "energy" from the earth. Voodoo science is everywhere. But why? Perhaps the most endearing characteristic of Americans is their sympathy for the underdog. They resent arrogant scientists who talk down to them in unfamiliar language, and government bureaucrats who hide behind rules. Scientists, meanwhile, often look the other way when science is being abused, expecting bogus claims to self-destruct.
But members of the public are often not in a position to distinguish between fabulous but verifiable phenomena, such as hermaphrodites and antimatter, and fanciful ones, such as touch therapy and astrology. It's up to the scientists to inform the nonscientists-and to remember how easy it can be to subscribe to erroneous ideas.
Whenever I become impatient with UFO enthusiasts, as I often do, I try to remember that night in New Mexico when, for a few seconds, I, too, believed in flying saucers. The current fascination with aliens can be traced back to the strange events that took place near Roswell in the summer of On June 14 of that year, William Brazel, the foreman of the Foster Ranch, seventy-five miles northwest of Roswell, spotted a large area of wreckage about seven miles from the ranch house.
The debris included neoprene strips, tape, metal foil, cardboard, and sticks. If the Russian spy ship in Cuba was part of an intelligence gathering operation using covert tools of electronic warfare, that would mean the Kremlin unveiled a potentially sensitive system that would be more valuable as a surprise during an actual conflict.
There are vast military ranges in Russia and China where sensitive systems can be tested without tipping their hand—just as there are within the United States. Meaney says a cardinal rule in electronic warfare is: The less shown, the better. Perhaps a combination of physical objects and electronic warfare is responsible for some of the UAP incidents, but no one seems to be able to put all the puzzle pieces together in a way that makes sense. Last year, when the Pentagon initially confirmed the leaked UAP incidents were indeed encounters with unidentified objects, the witnesses involved in the sightings went from the fringe to the mainstream.
These are all legit. But in , Dietrich says, the personal and professional stigma of reporting UFOs cost the Navy an opportunity to get more answers. We knew we could intercept it in multiple ways. Why didn't we … redirect our attention and our assets and our sensors into that airspace and get more evidence?
Since that encounter, discussions around unidentified flying objects at the Pentagon have completely changed. New protocols encourage personnel to report sightings, and military leaders are taking these reports seriously. Dietrich retired from the Navy as a lieutenant commander in May , having taught as an ethics professor at the United States Naval Academy in Maryland for more than six years.
Just before retiring, she went on the record for the first time, identifying herself as a UAP witness. She wants to end the stigma of pilots reporting strange things in the sky, still disquieted by the fact that whatever she saw remains unexplained. Voorhis is seeking his own answers, planning on mounting sky-facing cameras on Catalina Island to search for the UAPs he encountered near there in All rights reserved. Science News. A video shows U. Share Tweet Email. Read This Next Wild parakeets have taken a liking to London.
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While those who dabble in the unknowns of outer space are hoping for alien evidence, many others in government hope the report will settle whether the objects might be spy operations from neighbors on Earth, like the Chinese or Russians.
The highly anticipated report is expected to settle little, finding no evidence of extraterrestrial activity while not ruling it out either, according to officials , but it will jumpstart a long-suppressed conversation and open new possibilities for research and discovery and perhaps defense contracts. Suddenly, senators and scientists , the Pentagon and presidents , former CIA directors and NASA officials, Wall Street executives and Silicon Valley investors are starting to talk openly about an issue that would previously be discussed only in whispers, if at all.
In a deeply polarized country where conspiracy theories have ripped apart American politics , belief in a UFO coverup seems relatively quaint and apolitical. Interest in UFOs waxes and wanes in American culture, but millions have questions and about one-third of Americans think we have been visited by alien spacecraft, according to Gallup. But those questions have been met with silence or laughter from authorities and the academy, leaving a vacuum that has been filled by conspiracy theorists, hoaxsters and amateur investigators.
But he would like to see the U. The government has examined UFOs in the past but often in secret or narrow ways, and the current Pentagon task force is thought to be relatively limited in its mission and resources. West pointed to models from other countries like Argentina , where an official government agency investigates sightings and publishes its findings, the overwhelming majority of which are traced to unusual weather, human objects like planes or optical effects.
That has clearly switched, and that's a good thing.
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