BLASTS FROM THE PAST

PETER BROOKESMITH surveys the latest fads and flaps from the world of ufological research

Vampiric vapours THEO PAIJMANS

One goes in this life from Geezerhood to Old Geezerhood and then, once you’ve devoured your biblical ration of three-score and 10 years, you’re nowt but another coffin dodger. Ufology fast approaches this venerable state.

To mark its 70th birthday, Vicente-Juan (V-J) Ballester Olmos and Thomas ‘Ed’ Bullard have produced a brace of papers: “The Nature of UFO Evidence: Two Views” (www.academia. edu/33352049). They’re not exactly full of streamers, balloons and party hats. Indeed, some may take V-J’s contribution as less party popper than party pooper. After half a century of research, he has reluctantly concluded that, in so many words, ufology has been dodging its coffin since well before its ‘official’ time. Introducing the papers on his UFOCAT blog, he says: “These are the views of a sincere investigator of a mystery that seems to play with us, until we realise that we have simply allowed ourselves to be led astray by a number of surrounding circumstances and influences. What seems at first sight absurd, really is illogical, irrational, incoherent... finally inadmissible.” V-J’s wan conclusion is based on his long and fruitless hunt for evidence that UFOs are extraterrestrial craft. It would be both unkind and otiose to remark that he was perhaps looking in the wrong direction. He already knows this: “Somehow Mark Twain’s phrase is applicable here: ‘You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.’” And besides, “…it hurts. There is nothing more frustrating than realising that you have wasted your life in the pursuit of a mirage or a delusion.”

In this, as in all his work, V-J is nothing if not thorough. He covers, and dismantles, all the bases of ETH- enamoured ufology, from ‘Attitudes’ to ‘Epistemology’ and beyond. His take on ufological history and the grip of the ETH upon it is illuminating: “[A]n idea based largely on poorly investigated incidents and shaped by the fertile imagination of writers fond of sensationalism finally created a ‘real’ phenomenon that both housed and draws its observational substance from those previous, weak tales… This has been possible by the conjunction of a continuing flow of new UFO stories, increasingly weird and absurd, and the fuel contributed by magazines and books, motion pictures, television films and documentaries. Once the belief is established, sightings never cease to pour into the system, and a newborn mythology grows and matures.” What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed, as Alexander Pope had it.

V-J sees plenty of future in what Robert Sheaffer has neatly labelled “retail ufology (bread and circuses for the crowd)” – as anyone might. But, notes V-J: “Practically every major UFO case defended as unaccountable [sic] by believers has a plausible counter-explanation among sceptics” and so, he concludes, “I more than anyone wish to be proved wrong, but all indications are that in the future flying saucers and unidentified flying objects will be categorised as a mass sociological phenomenon.” In other words, a myth, and it is a very potent one.

Ed Bullard is more sanguine. He says at the outset that he does “not want to hear that we have tilted at windmills for decades, but sadly, I have to agree with most of what [V-J] says.” This will come as no surprise to those acquainted with Bullard’s increasingly disillusioned writing in recent years. He reinforces one of V-J’s points unequivocally: “A complaint that science ignores the UFO evidence is really a complaint that UFOs have not produced any evidence worthy to attract scientific attention.” And he admits what is surely heresy in some quarters: “[I]n the end Condon was right: The study of UFOs contributes nothing to physical scientific knowledge, much less proof of alien visitation.” Yet he clings on: “I still cannot accept the absoluteness of [V-J’s] conclusion. I still find some substance among UFO reports and see a path, albeit narrow, that may lead to a true anomalous phenomenon, and without detours into the ‘alternative facts’ of UFO mythology.” As he points out, fairly and properly, “UFOs can be both mythic and phenomenal at the same time. This duality complicates the job of understanding, but we can live with it and work around it by learning to separate the human contributions from the objective basis.” This raises (in my mind at least) J Allen Hynek’s great first question when considering a UFO report – “Unidentified to whom?” One implication of that dry enquiry involves the reliability and accuracy of the report. Ed wants ufologists to trawl the reliable historical record of UFOs for anomalies and seek patterns in them. How anyone is to decide what is a reliable report he leaves unexplained, and he admits that revelations from previous attempts (such as that sightings cluster around a particular day of the week – John Keel’s ‘Wednesday Phenomenon’) have been what you might call a tad sterile.

Perhaps oddest is his choice of challenging unknowns waiting to be confirmed or solved. The Minot AFB case of October 1968 I can buy, pro tem, on the basis of Tom Tulien’s possibly exhaustive investigation (www. minotb52ufo.com/index.php), which I’ve yet to see any sceptic tackle. Lincoln La Paz’s 1947 sighting of a “white, rounded object” is surely too shrouded in the mists of time for plausible re-evaluation. But to cite the 2006 Chicago O’Hare ‘cookie-cutter’ case as a “foundation for a genuine and puzzling” phenomenon is bizarre. Witnesses said the sighting lasted anywhere between two and 15 minutes, while the object was something between six and 35ft across, at an altitude between 500 and 1,500ft, and maybe rotating or maybe not. Nothing showed on radar and amazingly no one photographed whatever it was. As a foundation for anything, this is all pretty sandy, isn’t it?

“Maybe I grasp at straws like a true believer still holding out,” says Bullard. Sorry, Ed, but I fear that’s just what you sound like.