Ufology needs a makeover

I was just reading a post from IgnoreTheFacts, and I think he touched on a very important topic. In his post he states this

We can't continue to be represented by the stereotype that we ourselves perpetuate unless we just don't care about getting to the truth anymore.

I for one think he is spot on. I replied to his post with this

For a long time now I have felt that ufology needs a makeover (yea yea, I know poor terminology, but it is true). How many times have you seen a breif news report on UFO's only to see a picture of someone wearing a tin foil hat at the end, while the reporter makes some condescending comment about it. To get anyone to start taking us seriously, we need to present ourselves seriously, then once it is common knowledge that there is something to the phenomenon, we can dig deep.

Who are the ambassedors of Ufology to the casual observer? Bill from UFO Hunters? Stanton Friedman? These are knowledgeable guys but to the casual observer they probably come off as crazy. I first became interested in Ufology after watching the Bob Lazar video. I almost turned off the TV when he pulled up in his corvette but I gave it a chance and once I realized what he was talking about was a possibility, I started looking into the phenomenon. But if I had turned off the TV I may have never given Ufology a chance, and I think alot of people are turned off of the idea based on whats presented to them.

Now I know the media plays a big role in the presentation of Ufology, so we need to limit the "tin foil hats" per say, so we are represented as the intelligent, sane individuals that most of us are.

-E-

[edit on 5-5-2009 by MysterE]

The internet has been a godsend and a curse for ufology it seems. Too much back and forth. The "believers" get mad at the "skeptics" for not switching their brains off and swallowing obvious bunk, while the skeptics get mad at the believers for not believing in their "superior intellect", lol. We are all chasing our tales anyway I think.

And as of late, there seems to be an abundance of posts that are designed to do nothing but inflame the debate and start an argument. It does seem to be coming from one side though. Threads with titles demanding something get "debunked" and pages of posts with one liners of folks taunting the "debunkers" to come out and play their ignorant and damaging game. It is a shame really, that kind of discussion hurts the very cause they hold dear.

But yes, the more fanatical, and outrageous stuff seems to be the thing that represents us all now days, and it has only gotten worse with the internet. I would say, even if the wilder stuff is 100% true, that we can't get serious attention to the subject unless we turn that stuff down and pick the low fruit first.

I understand your point and I can't help but agree. A little bit of professionalism would definitely help people take us a bit more serious. Regarding the 'skeptics' vs 'believer' issue. Personally I'm getting sick and tired with this 'skeptic' vs 'believer' tag-o-war game. I get a little ticked off whenever I read a thread titled "Amazing UFO video filmed in xxx - Skeptics won't debunk this one!". Give it a break already. I'm a 'believer' and I must admit that we all need to be 'skeptics' in some form or another. I won't get into that here though. I don't want to get off topic. Here's a star, sir.

Too much in this field in the "why" scenario that is unverifiable.
It's like theoretical physics without the science to provide a good foundation.
In order to study UFO's you have to be open minded. And when you open those doors, you allow way too much flow information in-wrong or right. There's NO standard that is too far reaching for UFO studies so much that it is universally ridiculed by the group.

A) One thing is empirical- that strange events with similar properties are occurring all over the world...enough so that they can all be classified into one subject of study.

But that's where it ends...once you start asking "why" its happening, everything falls apart. Not only do you have legitimate researchers having a hard time, you have wackos trying to push forth their new age garbage and dilute the information. Also it wastes considerable time trying to debunk.

something like seventy percent of the population believes in the possibility of ufos. we don't need to start segregating believers based on whether we agree or disagree with their chosen belief system, skin color, financial status, blood type, gender, country of origin, grade point average, and the countless other reasons some will use to attempt to isolate folks. if it's a tinfoil hat subject that must mean seventy percent of the populace are wearing tinfoil hats.

The main problem is that so many of those within the Ufo community are divided on every level, that the amount of organisation it would take to change the way theyre percieved is unnattainable. As a result, the message is jumbled and incohesive, which means the average schmuck working 9 to 5 will simply dismiss any UFO-related info that distracts him from his football game.

I can't tell you how many times someone has claimed to have "irrefutable evidence" that we are being visited/abducted only to have a skeptic come along and blow it out of the water. The real problem here is that it's just too easy to poke holes in what little trace evidence there seems to be. Testimonials are no substitute for empirical data and there aren't enough real scientists on the job where ufology is concerned.

Photographic evidence is by no means conclusive in this day and age. I firmly believe that our best evidence must come from genetics and materials science; things that can be verified independently by laboratories around the world. Genetic and trace physical evidence supposedly exists but I have yet to come across a thorough analysis of any sort! I have been scouring the Internet for years and haven't come across one paper that details the methods, analysis and results (like any good scientific paper should)! Can anyone find me a paper that has these characteristics? All I am asking for is just one paper!

The problem with ufology's leading figures is that they seem more interested in selling books and getting hired for public speaking engagements than discovering the truth about this phenomena. Even people like David Jacobs (with proper academic credentials) can't seem to enlist anyone with the sorts of forensic skills required to perform the sort of analysis that's called for here.

I think a lot of people would pay good money to get their hands on a book that details a proper forensic investigation of some well-known incidents in ufology! Furthermore, getting these studies published in some format (preferably in a peer-reviewed journal) would go a long way towards giving ufology a fresh lease on life, so to speak!

Quit peddling books and start churning out some real data!

reply to post by X-tal_Phusion


empirical data. please provide for me, irrefutable evidence that fossils prove evolution. and i don't mean photos of it. those can be doctored. and i don't mean video of some scientist who claims he agrees, cause he could be senile, paid under the table or a sheep. i want irrefutable evidence. begin when you are ready

reply to post by mostlyspoons


this is a misnomer. joe schmuck is the guy more likely to believe you than harvard know-it-all.

reply to post by undo


Yes that is true, but he is also the less likely to DO anything with that information if he does believe. They believe it in the same manner a child believes in the easter bunny. But they don't care much because it doesn't affect their daily lives, where as if you got science to believe, we would see a change.

Originally posted by X-tal_Phusion
The problem with ufology's leading figures is that they seem more interested in selling books and getting hired for public speaking engagements than discovering the truth about this phenomena. Even people like David Jacobs (with proper academic credentials) can't seem to enlist anyone with the sorts of forensic skills required to perform the sort of analysis that's called for here.

I think a lot of people would pay good money to get their hands on a book that details a proper forensic investigation of some well-known incidents in ufology! Furthermore, getting these studies published in some format (preferably in a peer-reviewed journal) would go a long way towards giving ufology a fresh lease on life, so to speak!

Quit peddling books and start churning out some real data!

I agree with this completely, but for those few who really need it, who in the hell funds this research? I mean...there's almost no monetary return on researching UFO's(which is mandatory for investment) unless you are like Greer and think there's some kind of energy technologies out there.

mostlyspoons

so now you're saying that joe schmuck is the problem because you take offense at the fact he believes. first he's the problem cause he doesn't believe. now he's the problem because he believes

which.doesn't.make.sense. to me i think you're too caught up in the "elitist" movement, and it's starting to incite class hatred. joe schmuck is a fictitious person, used as a way to disparage whoever doesn't make as much money as a harvard grad or watches football or both.


i apologize for the long empty space, my keyboard went on the blink

argh, it won't let me edit it out of the box. it's permanently long and everytime i try to fix it, it gets longer.

MODS HELPPP










































































































































[edit on 6-5-2009 by undo]

profile of an average joe (that i happen to know in real life)

--joined the navy and chose ultrasonics as his career path
--enhanced his career path with engineering skills
--witnessed a ufo rise up out of the ocean and shoot off into space, as did the rest of the guys on the naval ship he was on at the time
--left after the second enlistment and got a job working for morton thiokol (the people who made the solid rocket boosters for the space shuttle. the company is now known as ATK launch systems) as an electrical engineer.
--was transferred to cape kennedy where he works in the vehicle assembly building, maintaining the equipment on the solid rocket boosters
--is still in the middle to low income bracket, even though he is quite intelligent. and yes, he watches football.
--he would be considered average joe based on the current incarnation of the stereotype (which sucks, btw)

i think people need to just dispense with the stereotypes, especially on a subject like ufos.

[edit on 6-5-2009 by undo]

Perhaps they are all part of a con group supported the Illuminati
establishment.

Do the Tesla Societies know anything of Tesla that has
been taken away by the Illuminati establishment.
No.

UFO groups can't be expected to know the biggest secrets on
the planet.

I think the term Ufology is too broad. It seems to cover more then just the UFO phenomenon, and include Aliens and other fringe ideas. Maybe there should be seperate terms depending on the subject matter, such as "Fringe Ufology" to cover the more speculative topics.

Originally posted by MysterE
I think the term Ufology is too broad. It seems to cover more then just the UFO phenomenon, and include Aliens and other fringe ideas. Maybe there should be seperate terms depending on the subject matter, such as "Fringe Ufology" to cover the more speculative topics.

This is a good point and raises a compelling question: What, exactly, is UFOlogy? If it is the study of UFO's (Unidentified Flying Objects) - their characteristics, whether they are weather phenomena, experimental military craft, or something completely beyond our capabilities that points to them being extra-terrestrial or inter-dimensional in orign - then much of what falls under the umbrella of UFOlogy ought to be considered a different field of study.

Theorizing about who or what controls the craft, what their motivations are, their origins, etc. leads us inevitably into the world of the weird: People proposing grandiose, complex conspiracies often based on faulty or no factual evidence, new agey quasi-religious experiences and messages (and sometimes cults) and people who claim they are ambassadors or prophets for the aliens (or whatever they supposedly are). All of this is far removed from studying an actual phenomenon that can be captured on film and video and if real may very well leave physical evidence behind in the form of high radiation levels at landing sites, depressions in the ground, cancer caused by radiation in people that have come close to the UFO's, etc.

After all that, I guess what I'm getting at is UFOlogy ought to be rooted as much as possible in quantifiable empirical data, and not abductions and people telepathically communicating with ET's and so forth. If people want to study those phenomena, that's all well and good, but to lump it all under one umbrella dilutes, IMO, a legitimate field of study, i.e. unidentified flying objects.

Of course the fields would not be mutually exclusive. Sightings of UFO's, for example, often precede cattle mutilations. But I don't think that therefore cattle mutilations ought to be lumped under the field of UFOlogy, unless direct evidence proves otherwise. But too many people are apt to do just that, and it muddies the waters and leads to non-sequiturs and the field as a whole being outright dismissed by many.

UFOlogy proper ought to get back to its roots - NICAP and books like Incident at Exeter - where an attempt is made to study the phenomena based upon physical evidence in conjunction with reliable eye witnesses. Theorizing beyond that is okay to a degree, but too often that theorizing has come to dominate the field and by many has come to be accepted as fact - for reasons I don't quite understand.

Just my opinion from someone that does not claim to be an expert in UFOlogy. Just a very interested observer and reader of what I deem to be good UFOlogy - trying to sift through all the clutter and white noise, so to speak.

UFOlogy proper ought to get back to its roots

not sure you can define its roots by listing one organization's history. sitchin was talking ufology before the advent of much of modern ufology. so was von daniken. you can't force people's experiences and knowledge into little boxes of narrowly defined legitimacy. that kinda thing has never worked in the past, and it still doesn't work ( and most likely, will never work).

French sociologist Pierre Lagrange once said:

"My definition of "ufologist" is: someone who speaks of the UFO phenomenon. Thus, I am a ufologist, Pierre Lagrange also, and so are for example Philipp Klass, Jean Jacques Vélasco, Jacques Vallée, and the members of COMETA. Their respective sayings are of course not the same."

If this is the case then perhaps all ufologists could learn a bit from Bernard Haisch:

"I propose that true skepticism is called for today: neither the gullible acceptance of true belief nor the closed-minded rejection of the scoffer masquerading as the skeptic.
One should be skeptical of both the believers and the scoffers. The negative claims of pseudo-skeptics who offer facile explanations must themselves be subject to criticism.
If a competent witness reports having seen something tens of degrees of arc in size (as happens) and the scoffer -- who of course was not there -- offers Venus or a high altitude weather balloon as an explanation, the requirement of extraordinary proof for an extraordinary claim falls on the proffered negative claim as well. That kind of approach is also pseudo-science. Moreover just being a scientist confers neither necessary expertise nor sufficient knowledge.
Any scientist who has not read a few serious books and articles presenting actual UFO evidence should out of intellectual honesty refrain from making scientific pronouncements. To look at the evidence and go away unconvinced is one thing. To not look at the evidence and be convinced against it nonetheless is another. That is not science."
Bernard Haisch, astrophysicist.

[edit on 02/10/08 by karl 12]

I think those cases that are the 1%ers need to be looked over, over, and over again.

Such as the "Roswell" type cases

Also evidence from pilots, airforce, military, FAA, ect...

Abduction cases

And what we learn about space in general, the discovery of Earth-like planets, and so on...

reply to post by karl 12


Great Quotes! Thanks for the post

-E-