A Puzzling Taboo

On March 30-31, 1990, two Belgian F-16s were scrambled to intercept a large, unidentified object in the night sky over Brussels, which had been observed by a policeman and ground-based radars. The pilots confirmed the target on their radars (never visually) and achieved radar lock three times, but each time it responded with violent turns and altitude changes, later estimated to have imposed gravitational forces of 40gs. In a rare public statement the Belgian defense minister said he could not explain the incident, which remains unexplained today s1The official report by the Belgian Air Force is at www.ufoevidence.org/documents/doc408.htm. .

One might expect unexplained incidents in NATO airspace to concern the authorities, particularly given that since 1947 over 100,000 UFOs have been reported worldwide, many by militaries n1In the literature, 100,000 is a stylized figure since there is no complete database. . However, neither the scientific community nor states have made serious efforts to identify them, the vast majority remaining completely uninvestigated. The science of UFOs is minuscule and deeply marginalized. Although many scientists think privately that UFOs deserve study s2PeterSturrock,“ReportonaSurveyoftheMembershipoftheAmericanAstronomical Society Concerning the UFO Problem,” Journal of Scientific Exploration 8 (1994): 1-45. , there are no opportunities or incentives to do it. With almost no meaningful variation, states—all 190+ of them—have been notably uninterested as well n2We lack the space to defend this key empirical assumption of our argument. Suffice it to say that although there is some variation in UFO secrecy, in our view the only serious poten- tial exception to the taboo itself is France (although there have been suggestions the Soviet Union became interested in UFOs in the last days of the regime). Since 1977 the French gov- ernment has quietly funded study on selected UFO cases; see Gildas Bourdais, “The Death and Rebirth of Official French UFO Studies,” International UFO Reporter 31 (2007): 12-16. This falls far short of a systematic effort to find out what UFOs are, but in light of our argument the French case (and perhaps Soviet) would be worth examining in detail.. A few have gone through the motions of studying individual cases, but with even fewer exceptions these inquiries have been neither objective nor systematic, and no state has actually looked for UFOs to discover larger patterns n3The only nominally scientific study of UFOs in the United States was the politicized and methodologically flawed 1969 Condon Report; Edward Condon and Daniel Gillmor, eds., Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1969). For critiques of the Report see David Saunders and Roger Harkins, UFOs? Yes! Where the Condon Committee Went Wrong (New York: World Publishing, 1968); J. Allen Hynek, The UFO Experience (New York: Marlowe, 1972); James MacDonald, “Science in Default: Twenty-two Years of Inadequate UFO Investigations,” in UFOs—A Scientific Debate, ed. Carl Sagan and Thornton Page (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972), 52-122; and Peter Sturrock, “An Analysis of the Condon Report on the Colorado UFO Project,” Journal of Scientific Exploration 1 (1987): 75-100.. For both science and the state, it seems, the UFO is not an “object” at all, but a non-object, something not just unidentified but unseen and thus ignored s3 cf. Lorraine Daston, ed., Biographies of Scientific Objects (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000)..

The authoritative disregard of UFOs goes further, however, to active denial of their object status. Ufology is decried as a pseudo-science that threatens the foundations of scientific authority s4The orthodoxy’s attitude toward ufology is typified by the Skeptical Inquirer (circulation: 35,000), published by the aptly named “CSICOP,” or Committee for the Scientific Investigation of the Claims of the Paranormal. See T. Pinch and H. M. Collins, “Private Science and Public Knowledge,” Social Studies of Science 14 (1984): 521-48., and the few scientists who have taken a public interest in UFOs have done so at considerable cost. For their part, states have actively dismissed “belief” in UFOs as irrational (as in, “do you believe in UFOs?”), while maintaining considerable secrecy about their own reports s5On the U.S. government’s involvement with the UFO issue see David Jacobs, The UFO Controversy in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975), and Richard Dolan, UFOs and the National Security State (Rochester, NY: Keyhole, 2000).. This leading role of the state distinguishes UFOs from other anomalies, scientific resistance to which is typically explained sociologically s6See Ernest Hook, ed., Prematurity in Scientific Discovery (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).. UFO denial appears to be as much political as sociological— more like Galileo’s ideas were political for the Catholic Church than like the once ridiculed theory of continental drift. In short, considerable work goes into ignoring UFOs, constituting them as objects only of ridicule and scorn. To that extent one may speak of a “UFO taboo,” a prohibition in the authoritative public sphere on taking UFOs seriously, or “thou shalt not try very hard to find out what UFOs are.” s7Note that the taboo is not necessarily on publicity; although official secrecy about UFOs is pervasive, it is a contingent rather than essential feature of the taboo (also see note 74 below). As for the term taboo, if one may speak of a spectrum the UFO taboo seems deeper than the “nuclear taboo” in international politics (Nina Tannewald, “The Nuclear Taboo,” International Organization 53 [1999]: 433-68), but shallower than the paradigmatic anthro- pological cases of incest or cannibalism. cf. Nachman Ben-Yehuda, Deviance and Moral Boundaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).

Still, for modern elites it is unnecessary to study UFOs, because they are known to have conventional—i.e., non-ET—explanations, whether hoaxes, rare atmospheric phenomena, instrument malfunction, witness mistakes, or secret government technologies. Members of the general public might believe that UFOs are ETs, but authoritatively We know they are not.

In the next section we challenge this claim to knowledge. Not by arguing that UFOs are ETs, since we have no idea what UFOs are—which are, after all, unidentified. But that is precisely the point. Scientifically, human beings do not know that all UFOs have conventional explanations, but instead remain ignorant.

In this light a UFO taboo appears quite puzzling. First, if any UFOs were discovered to be ETs it would be one of the most important events in human history, making it rational to investigate even a remote possibility. It was just such reasoning that led the U.S. government to fund the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), which looks for signs of life around distant stars. With no evidence whatsoever for such life, why not study UFOs, which are close by and leave evidence? s8 Indeed, Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) advocates have been at the forefront of UFO skepticism. For a critique of SETI see Alex Ellery, Allen Tough, and David Darling, “SETI—A Scientific Critique and a Proposal for Further Observational Modes,” Journal of the British Interplanetary Society 56 (2003): 262-87. Second, states seem eager to “securitize” all manner of threats to their societies or their rule s9On securitization see Barry Buzan, Ole Waever, and Jaap de Wilde, eds., Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998).. Securitization often enables the expansion of state power; why not then securitize UFOs, which offer unprecedented possibilities in this respect? And finally, there is simple scientific curiosity: why not study UFOs, just like human beings study everything else? At least something interesting might be learned about Nature. Notwithstanding these compelling reasons to identify UFOs, however, modern authorities have not seriously tried to do so. This suggests that UFO ignorance is not simply a gap in our knowledge, like the cure for cancer, but something actively reproduced by taboo.

Taking this taboo as a symptom, following Nancy Tuana s10Nancy Tuana, “Coming to Understand: Orgasm and the Epistemology of Ignorance,” Hypatia 19 (2004): 194-232; and Tuana, “The Speculum of Ignorance,” Hypatia 21 (2006): 1-19., we inquire into the “epistemology of [UFO] ignorance,” or the production of (un)knowledge about UFOs and its significance for modern rule. We are particularly interested here in the role of the state, while recognizing the story is also about science s11For the latter see especially Ron Westrum, “Social Intelligence about Anomalies: The Case of UFOs,” Social Studies of Science 7 (1977): 271-302.. Thus, our puzzle is not the familiar question of ufology, “What are UFOs?” but, “Why are they dismissed by the authorities?” Why is human ignorance not only unacknowledged, but so emphatically denied? In short, why a taboo? These are questions of social rather than physical science, and do not presuppose that any UFOs are ETs. Only that they might be.