Let’s go to the movies — again

Hate to keep banging this tired old drum, but what is it about UFO discussions that prompt so-called skeptics to resort to sci-fi movie analogies? There’s something a little constipated going on here, and there has to be a clinical name for it. To quote my favorite guru, James Brown, “SOMEbody HE’P me!”

Mainstream science can handle UFO debates, so long as they're confined to big-screen metaphors/CREDIT: scootershoptalk.blogspot.com

I’m thinking specifically of SETI astronomer Seth Shostak’s podcast interview last year with UFOs On the Record author Leslie Kean. Shostak devoted a whopping nine minutes to the debate without mentioning the strongest cases in her book. Time is an issue, fine, no problem, understood. But whoa — at the end of the show, he and podcast producer Molly Bentley managed to find eight minutes to speculate on the imaginary warp-drive properties of Hollywood spaceships in “District 9,” “Close Encounters,” “Independence Day,” etc. No discussion of real-life radar records of the Japan Air Lines UFO incident off Alaska in 1986, mind you, but plenty of time for gabbing about cinematic fantasy.

Well, it happened again, in the latest edition of Quest: The History of Spaceflight Quarterly. In yet another curious review of UFOs On the Record, Roger Launius of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum produces a conflicted analysis that reveals more about him than it does the book, which he characterizes as “less sensationalistic than you might think.” He certainly knows his audience.

Launius, senior curator of the Museum’s human spaceflight collection, is clearly impressed with Kean’s research. He says the author “uses solid, accepted, and not spurious documentation from official military and government UFO investigations,” and “in every case their veracity is unquestionable.” That’s a major concession, coming from a man so deeply embedded in structural groupthink.

But once again, rather than discuss the specifics of any case that puncture the limits of knowledge, Launius devolves into stale cliches of humanity’s eternal fascination with fairies, devils, elves, Zeus, the Virgin Mary and all other manner of lore that never left behind a single radar track or burned-soil sample. Then he makes his predictable tack into the Hollywood thing, about how we accommodate our insecurities and aspirations symbolically through films as divergent as “The Day the Earth Stood Still” and “War of the Worlds.”

Rather than acknowledge the apparent intelligence and high technology driving the incidents in Kean’s book, Launius falls back on his contention that “there is not a scintilla of evidence” to support the ET hypothesis behind UFOs. Which is true — none of these incidents leave roadmaps behind. And that leads him to conclude “Despite her best intentions to do so, Leslie Kean does not convince me [of extraterrestrial visitation].”

Launius, of course, missed the whole point. Kean isn’t trying to convince him or anyone else of ET visitation — the default hypothesis — but merely to confront the available evidence with some integrity. What’s a more plausible alternative for the data he himself credits for its unquestionable veracity? Launius knows better than to go there. He’d find himself on trial inside a dunk-the-clown booth, alongside all the other Midway barkers.