OK – an observation and my hands are up in the air – not trying to start a fire here (please) but having heard Don and Walter it made me wonder exactly what the credentials of a UFO researcher might actually be? A background in military intelligence, counterintelligence, cryptography and so forth means skills intended to study human behavior and communication. How directly relevant is that to this phenomenon? It sounds impressive but I can’t help but wonder.
Aeronautical engineers and metallurgists seem to be more likely candidates to be the recipients of whatever data came from this program.
That’s an interesting point. In broad strokes, the prevailing model in recent decades has taken two basic forms; the ufo investigator, akin to an unofficial criminal investigator - interview the witness, check out any kind of physical trace evidence, write a report, and then file it somewhere. And the ufo researcher, who looks at those reports collectively and then writes books and discusses their ideas about the phenomenon. And sometimes people do both. Then once in a blue moon a trained specialist chips in with some kind of forensic analysis, like Bruce Maccabee or Paul Hill.
That model’s fine if you just want to hear about what people are experiencing. I suppose it’s essentially a form of journalism. And the qualifications required for it are pretty modest really; any bright person with a pleasant enough social disposition can conduct a decent ufo investigation in most cases. But the trace evidence cases can easily get all boogered up right off the bat without a forensics specialist on the scene, which seems to pretty much never happen. And most ufo researchers are basically writing historical books and articles, which frankly anyone can do if they do the homework.
But honestly none of this is the right way to actually make progress understanding a subject. Which is why this field has been treading water for seven decades with people telling stories and then debating the meaning of it all.
The only reliable method for making any real progress in understanding a subject is the scientific method. And withholding that from the public is how this whole subject has been very effectively covered up and discredited for decades. Because it takes a lot of money, and all kinds of equipment and instrumentation, and teams of trained scientists, to actually get to the bottom of something like this. We’d need to either design and deploy a network of satellite observatories to collect evidence of intrusions into our airspace from above – similar to how astronomers collect evidence about other kinds of exotic phenomena like quasars or gamma ray bursts – or we’d need access to the military’s excellent existing network of satellites – and frankly I can’t see them agreeing to share any of that stuff, even though we paid for all of it.
A proper scientific investigation would also require specialized instrumentation aboard a number of high-performance jets all over the country, so we could gather precision data with an aerial rapid-response network. As I understand it, the military had a program (or many such programs) like that back in the 50s and/or 60s, but of course we never got to see any of the data they collected. And really in this respect, we would absolutely need their cooperation for this kind of effort – because it would be crazy to try to set up an independent network of jet interceptors and military pilots to fly them, when the Air Force already has all of that stuff ready to go 24/7.
The really infuriating thing is that the military has to have done all of this stuff already. In fact we now know that even the drastically underfunded Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program conducted scientific investigations and generated dozens of reports on this subject, with whatever limited access they had to the kinds of resources that would be required. I think we have the right to demand the release of those reports. Because we’ve already heard Luis Elizondo state that the craft they studied do not belong to the inventories of any country on Earth, so it clearly falls outside of terrestrial military jurisdiction. What they’re doing is akin to withholding evidence of quasars or gravitational waves – we have a right to know about what’s going on in this cosmos, whether it’s mundane physical phenomena, or alien physical phenomena.
Anyway – it’s easy to see why so many people clamor for disclosure from the government/military system. We’re not equipped to conduct the kind of scientific investigation that this subject requires, and they’ve already done it anyway. So it seems a whole lot more reasonable to just demand that they release their reports on this subject, than it would be to try to get our politicians to pony up $100M/year to fund a new program to repeat all of the work that the military has already done on this.
As I see it, those are the only two viable options on the table. Because until one of those two things happens, all we can do is drive each other nuts by talking in circles about whether alien technology is operating in our skies from time to time, or whether some inscrutable mystical phenomenon is only making us
think that alien technology is operating in our skies from time to time, and frankly that whole debate makes me want to throttle people.
