The State of Ufology

I forgot to add a list of comprehensive reading material!

There's already a thread on this (and I've added the list there), but for ease of access I'm also copying it here.

For those looking for objective reading material this is a good start. There are some books here I don't fully endorse, but I include them simply because they provide valuable perspective.

Knowing what I know now this is the order I would have read them:

NOTE: The UFO Encyclopedia (vol 1 & 2) by Jerome Clark is an excellent companion to have on hand while researching this subject.

1. Science and the Failure to Investigate Unidentified Aerial Phenomena - Leslie Kean, executive summary of the UFO problem.
   
2. Disclosure - Steven M. Greer, M.D., govt. witness testimony (mixed bag of very credible and some not so credible individuals)
   
3. The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects - Edward J. Ruppelt (also freely available online here), Ruppelt was one of the first project directors with Blue Book and predating Blue Book worked on Projects Grudge & Sign.
   
4. The Hynek UFO Report - J. Allen Hynek, Scientific consultant to Project Blue Book, debunker turned believer, eventually founding the Center for UFO Studies. Provides insights in to the operations at Blue Book and brings forward several of the better cases.
   
5. Firestorm, by Ann Druffel, biography of Dr. James E. McDonald's (senior atmospheric physicist at the University of Arizona) and his research in to the UFO phenomenon
   
6. The Flying Saucers are Real - (freely available online) Donald Keyhoe, USMC officer, ex-NICAP director, one of the first civilians to push for government disclosure, of what he viewed, as a cover-up.
   
7. UFOs: A scientific debate - Carl Sagan and Thornton Page. Great thoughts and insights. Exposes some fairly obvious biases of the leading minds of the time.
   
8. Flying Saucers from Outer Space - Donald Keyhoe, exposé on Keyhoe's findings after a cooperative effort with the USAF.
   
9. Project Beta : The Story of Paul Bennewitz, National Security, and the Creation of a Modern UFO Myth - Greg Bishop, a seminal piece showing to what extent the US (specifically the AFOSI) used (or perhaps uses) counter-intelligence techniques against UFO proponents.
   
10. Shoot Them Down! - The Flying Saucer Air Wars Of 1952 - Frank Jr. Feschino, could use some editing, issue aside, the book conclusively demonstrates the unlikeliness US citizens were simply observing TS military aircraft.
    
11. A world history of UFO's - Hilary Evans & Dennis Stacy, provides a broad view of UFO history, giving interesting testimony from Quintanilla, Adamski, Pflock and nicely covers the Allagash abductions, England UFO Flap of the '60s, and some other rather profound cases that otherwise go unnoticed ('54 Australian UFO "invasion," African UFOs, Soviet Ufology, etc)
    
12. Dimensions - Jacques Vallee, computer scientist & astronomer, delves in to the mythical & psychological aspects of the phenomenon.
    
13. The UFO Evidence - Volume 2 - Richard H. Hall, tough reading for some, going over many many quality cases in great detail.
    
14. UFO-FBI Connection - Bruce Maccabee, Ph.D, Naval optical physicists, don't let the cover fool you, Bruce is one of the few legitimate ufologists. Provides evidence of government agencies' involvement in UFO matters over several decades, evidence gathered straight out of government files, mostly from FBI and Air Force Intelligence files, but also includes other agencies.
    
15. Above Top Secret - Timothy Good, respected British broadcast journalist, shows many national governments continue to suppress information about UFOs, focusing on post-World War II era (focus on CIA and USAF files)
    
16. UFO Phenomena and the Behavioral Scientist, Richard F. Haines, discusses eyewitnesses of the UFO phenomenon and many of the complex sociocultural factors that surround them.
    
17. Project Identification: The First Scientific Field Study of UFO Phenomena - Harley D. Rutledge, Ph.D, 620 volunteers over a seven year period of time, Dr. Rutledge's study demonstrates through time lapse photography the physical nature of this phenomenon. Even touching on what some felt was an "awareness" of the objects to the observers.
    
18. Unconventional Flying Objects - Paul R. Hill, Ph.D, physicist and distinguished NASA scientist, discusses the basic science and technology behind the UFO characteristics.
    
19. Secrets of Antigravity Propulsion: Tesla, UFOs, and Classified Aerospace Technology - Paul A. LaViolette, Ph.D, perhaps overly sensational, but still good content. LaViolette reviews numerous field-propulsion devices and technologies that have thrust-to-power ratios thousands of times greater than that of a jet engine and whose effects are not explained by conventional physics and relativity theory.
    
20. UFOs National Security - Richard M. Dolan, considered by many the best current history of UFOs ever written. Detailing activities of more than fifty military bases relating to UFOs, innumerable violations of sensitive airspace by unknown craft, analyses of the Roswell controversy, the CIA-sponsored Robertson Panel, and the Condon Committee Report.
    
21. Passport to Magonia - Jacques Vallee, specializing in Celtic lore, Dr. Vallee strings folklore of old with the modern day UFO phenomenon, demonstrating UFOs did not originate in modern times.
    

(continued below)

[edit on 30-3-2009 by Xtraeme]

(continued)

1. The UFO Enigma - Peter A. Sturrock, Ph.D, Stanford physics professor, hard scientific analysis of radar cases, even handed, and debunks government bureaucratic obfuscation smugly dismissing UFO events.
   
2. Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe - Karl T. Pflock, a good pedantic, if not harsh, take on Roswell. However not all of Pflock's conclusions are fully backed in fact, some are easily steeped in position.
   
3. The Roswell Incident - Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore, the first Roswell book, starting the phenomenon.
   
4. Crash at Corona: The U.S. Military Retrieval and Cover-Up of a UFO - Stanton T. Friedman, nuclear physicist, original civilian investigator of the Roswell incident.
   
5. Top Secret/Majic: Operation Majestic-12 and the United States Government's UFO Cover-up - Stanton T. Friedman, research from 20 archives and libraries, and with the assistance of handwriting and document verification experts, makes a case for the authenticity of the MJ-12 documents.
   
6. The UFO Experience, A Scientific Inquiry - J. Allen Hynek, takes on the Condon Report.
   
7. Confrontations: A Scientist's Search for Alien Contact - Jacques Vallee, 100 cases are reported on in this volume, in which some observers were harmed or died as a result of viewing a UFO.
   
8. UFO Danger Zone: Terror & Death in Brazil - Bob Pratt, has investigated the Brazilian UFO phenomenon for some 18 years, this book discusses the Colares UFO attacks amongst other cases showing aggressive, if not hostile, behavior.
   
9. Faded Giant - Robert Salas, USAF Captain LCC DMCCC, and James Klotz. Perhaps one of the most substantial cases in recorded UFO history. Details a UFO flight over Oscar-Flight Missile Launch Control Center resulting in the deactivation of 18 nuclear minutemen missiles. Boeing engineers revealed tests confirmed no cause for missile shutdowns was ever found.
   
10. UFOs and Nukes - Robert Hastings, has investigated nuclear weapons-related UFO incidents for 3 decades, compiling the most detailed work to date linking UFOs and nuclear facilities.
    
11. The Edge of Reality: A progress report on Unidentified flying objects - J. Allen Hynek and Jacques Vallee, several case studies, and a dialogue between scientists to attempt to establish a framework for the further study of the UFO phenomenon.
    
12. Night Siege: The Hudson Valley UFO Sightings - J. Allen Hynek, Philip J. Imbrogno, Bob Pratt. Details the 13-year UFO wave that took place over the Hudson River Valley from 1982 through 1995, seen by an estimated 7,000 people, often described as a "boomerang-shaped" brightly-lit UFO "bigger than a football field." On 1990/07/24, in the evening, this object was seen hovering 30 ft over the Indian Point Nuclear Reactor.
    
13. Revelations: Alien Contact and Human Deception - Jacques Vallee, analyzes the full gamut of UFO incidents from alleged saucer crashes, retrieval of aliens, to subterranean communities of hostile humanoids. Suggesting that many are complex hoaxes that have been carefully engineered. Who and what are their goals? The result is too many false reports are accepted as real while many actual cases go overlooked.
    
14. Interrupted Journey - John G. Fuller, the first reported abduction story. Detailing Barney and Betty Hill's encounter.
    
15. Above Black: Project Preserve Destiny Insider Account of Alien Contact & Government Cover-Up - Dan Sherman, USAF ELINT officer, an intriguing history of Dan's time in PPD (Project Preserve Destiny) an organization inside the USAF tasked with communicating with EBEs.
    

If you read all of this from beginning to end you'll have a good enough grounding to assess for yourself whether or not there's anything to the UFO phenomenon. I'll admit I have an extremely hard time buying abduction cases. I blame Whitley Streiber's Communion for making me want to gag whenever I pick up an abduction book. I tend to require some sort of outside corroboration, like radar, physical evidence, etc. The Betty and Barney Hill abduction (Interrupted Journey) is the only case I know of to date with a potential radar confirmation of an unidentified craft in the vicinity of the abduction.

Honorable mention that I would have liked to add to the list, but couldn't justify after looking at the already overstuffed curriculum :

1. Battle of Los Angeles - 1942: The Silent Invasion Begins - Many news clippings and officials records detailing the 02/24/1942 Battle of Los Angeles. Also some historical perspective to better acclimate the reader to the mindset and events of the time.

I have probably another 20 to 30 books on top of this. If anyone's desperate enough to want more than what's already provided I'll happily supply.

[edit on 30-3-2009 by Xtraeme]

reply to post by Xtraeme


Chock up another great post for Xtraeme! I agree with majority of your hypothesis. However, I partially disagree with you analysis of Manned Secret Craft.

While I think you are correct iwhen referring to certain Military encounters such as the Teheran 1976 UFO case, I believe that many Exotic/Experimental Craft, Drones etc can be attributed to a percentage of UFO reports made by untrained observers.

I think this is more of a mixed bag than can be attributed to one particular source.

S&F my man!

IRM

Originally posted by chunder

Originally posted by jackphotohobby

I think UFOs are a good way of hiding advanced projects.

That may very well be the case for a number of sightings since perhaps WWII but how could that be an explanation for sightings of identical unknown aerial phenemona, albeit described in the language of the time, that have been reported prior to that date ?

When would you propose the leap in terrestrial technology occurred from powered lift / lighter than air to whatever propulsion system allows the objects described to perform in that manner ?

I don't think all UFOs are advanced projects. I also don't think all UFOs are aircraft. I think they're lots of things. A lot of historical reports, much like today, are influenced by prevailing cultural trends. Depictions of comets are interesting because we know comets exist, and in some cases can associate artwork with specific comets. Take the Bayeux Tapestry and the comet:

www.bayeuxtapestry.org.uk...

I don't know if Halley's Comet was widely thought of as a bad omen (the Normans maybe retrospectively thought it a good omen), because the tapestry was made by the victors, but it's an example of phenomena being culturally interpreted. Somewhat less tragically (for the Normans at least) than Hale Bopp . I think historical reports are burdened by the people that recorded them having no reference point. How does someone, prior to modern aircraft, guess at speed? By comparing to a horse drawn carriage, or whatever is the fastest thing they've seen. Their concepts of heavens and the universe, via religion, also significantly influenced them.

Similarly, from what I've read (I could be wrong) during the 19th Century airships (like balloons in the 18th) were certainly part of popular culture, take Frank Reade:

www.bigredhair.com...

The 19th Century, post industrial revolution, had lots of attempts at flight, which surely must have been reported-on, there was established press in most countries, and must have influenced interpretations of aerial phenomena (I suspect the following Wikipedia page of being incomplete):

en.wikipedia.org...

Airships were popular prior to winged craft:

en.wikipedia.org...

Which, again, if spotted by laymen, military or otherwise, would be interpreted through the lens of the prevailing culture, and using whatever is fast during their time as a reference point (trains maybe).

I think interpreting any historical UFO, art, literature, whatever, is fraught, because its quite hard to work out exactly what they were trying to convey without knowing the cultural factors. People claim to see aliens today, people claimed to see angels in the past, both influenced by the prevailing culture, and it doesn't make either true. UFOs in ancient art and literature are extremely dodgy subjects. AFAIK Micromégas in 1752 was the first story to include aliens in a way that we'd recognise today.

But I should stress - I don't think UFOs are any one thing. I think there are genuine unknowns (possibly explainable). It's differentiating them from noise that is the trick.



[edit on 30-3-2009 by jackphotohobby]

Brilliant post,
S and F
I personally believe UFO are our gods, well what we thought were gods anyway.
Thanks
Jacob

First I'd like to say I didn't include every UFO hypothesis / position in The State of Ufology thread, simply because I didn't have the space. That's why I linked to the full list. Furthemore the best cases do fall outside atmospheric, astrononmic, photographic, misidentification, and hoax-based explanations. So I excluded those from The State of Ufology to conserve space and focus on relevant hypotheses for the true unknowns. That DOES NOT imply these prosaic arguments are auto-ruled out for all future cases.

Originally posted by nablator
reply to post by Xtraeme

 

You left out the most obvious explanations in your "what are UFOs" page. You need a list of facts before the speculations:
- misidentification of atmospheric phenomena, well known (clouds, smoke rings, refractions, contrails, ...) and more mysterious (plasma),

I think you may have skipped some of the entries. Atmospheric phenomenon is S.2 (the key for this notation is here).

- hoaxes.

Hoaxes are represented by O.3.2. I lumped prank and the idea of "Blue Beam" together because they represent the same concept. They're both illusionary, false, and for the purpose of misleading a person to believe they're seeing something they're not. The only real difference between a hoax and a government project like "Blue Beam" (I'm not stating such a project exists - just using it as an example) is that one is state-sponsored the other is done by an individual or a group of individuals (ie/ crop circles, solar balloons ).

- misidentification of man made objects (suspended lights, aircrafts, missiles, balloons, satellites, falling debris, ...),

Aircrafts are covered by P.c.1-3.o.2.1. Satellites are partially included in P.c.1.3.o.1. Though I think you're right in the sense that I need to duplicate some of these concepts from Pro to Skeptic. For instance a person can believe an unmanned drone (a UAV) is man-made and another person can believe we're seeing alien UAVs. So therefore there should be a P.c.1.3.0.1 and a S.c.1.3.0.1.

However I'm trying to limit overlap in the taxonomy. What's interesting is a persons position doesn't necessarily 1:1 reflect a hypothesis. I may attempt to further divorce skeptic, pro, & other from "what are UFOs" altogether to better allow mixing of observational characteristics.

- misidentification of astronomic objects (meteors, planets, moon, ...),

I was lumping this in to atmospheric phenomenon (S.2) primarily because we observe stars / planets through the atmosphere (ie/ twinkling of stars, changing color of stars, planets not twinkling, etc). Meteors pass through the atmosphere and when they do they're considered part atmospheric / astronomic science (meteoritics). Since people usually don't observe meteors in space (at least as far as UFOs are concerned) I didn't think to subdivide it in to astronomy.

Maybe I'll relabel that category atmospheric / astronomic phenomenon?

Though this might cause problems for space-borne UFO observations. I'll think on this.

- photographic artifacts ("orbs", "rods", lens flares, emulsion defects, ...),

Now you're getting in to a subject that's, at the moment anyways, near and dear to my heart.

If you think about it a person can observe a UFO directly, indirectly through an optical device (telescope, night vision, etc), indirectly on a recorded medium (video camera film, photographic film, stone tablets, cave walls), or as an interpretation via an automated system (radar filtering, satellite, security camera, project Hessdalen, etc)

I've been giving a lot of time and thought to figure out how to include these means of observation as hypotheses.

These cover most UFO cases.

Agreed.

Your pro/con UFO view is a caricature.

If I was going to engage in subterfuge and pretend to mask my actual position I wouldn't hide it from people I hardly know on a conspiracy board. I'll be straight with you. I'm an NM-UFOP with a QM-UFOP / non-human D-UFOP lean and I have a very good reason for this position.

My subdivision could have been better. You're right. Thanks to your input I'll improve it.

Actually Nab, would you mind helping me with this project? I need people that are willing to speak their mind.

As a skeptic I do not rule out ANY hypothesis in general. The skeptics' methodology is to looks for prosaic explanations, because they are far more likely, and because their properties are known, which makes objective verifications possible.

I wouldn't call that a skeptical stand-point. I would call it a scientific one. There's no reason to reach for an extreme theory when there's one that's already down-to-earth that just as easily explains the observation.

That's why in this post:

... Confirmation bias is very common. Sooner or later, in desperation, most investigators develop a strong attachment to one hypothesis ...

I answered your question thusly:

There are steps that can be taken to limit personal investment.

For example it's beneficial to go through a list of all possibilities ruling them out one by one for every incident. When you explicitly enumerate the list it makes it harder for a logical person to ignore that they're artificially ruling out other legitimate possibilities.

I'm not perfect.

I don't pretend I'm completely unbiased, but I do try extremely hard to prevent myself from expressing that bias in such a way that it prevents me from seeing the truth as it actually is rather than how I expect it to look. I use my bias to try to formulate hypotheses not to color all observations.

[edit on 7-4-2009 by Xtraeme]

reply to post by internos


Wow,good information on that(Iranian UFO).I didn't know about that one,star for you.

Thanks for moving to this thread, I posted in the wrong thread, sorry.

Originally posted by Xtraeme
That DOES NOT imply these prosaic arguments are auto-ruled out for all future cases.

Ruling out the prosaic is often done by making assumptions that turn out to be wrong in some cases. Our eyes (or brains actually) can be very deceptive. You know all that, I'm just being annoying.

I'm an NM-UFOP with a QM-UFOP / non-human D-UFOP lean

Now I'm shocked.

I've been giving a lot of time and thought to figure out how to include these means of observation as hypotheses.

Actually Nab, would you mind helping me with this project? I need people that are willing to speak their mind.

I'll be glad to help, If I can. With constructive criticism or with my little knowledge of digital photo/video analysis & programming.

I wouldn't call that a skeptical stand-point.

The term skepticism has a number of meanings, for me it means striving to think objectively, carefully and critically. Probably not humanly feasible but one can try. It is a caricature that ufoskeptics reject "far out" explanations.

I would call it a scientific one. There's no reason to reach for an extreme theory when there's one that's already down-to-earth that just as easily explains the observation.

True. However some scientists (Bruce Maccabee, Stanton Friedman, etc.) reject prosaic explanations too easily.

There are steps that can be taken to limit personal investment.

For example it's beneficial to go through a list of all possibilities ruling them out one by one for every incident. When you explicitly enumerate the list it makes it harder for a logical person to ignore that they're artificially ruling out other legitimate possibilities.

Yes but one should be aware that the typical errors in doing so is to have a short list and use shortcuts in reasoning. Such as: obviously not natural, not human, therefore alien. It seems to me UFOs are playing with our minds. It takes a rather large conscious effort to not assume anything until it is proven beyond any doubt.

Other highly relevant threads that I would have liked to include in the 'For Newcomers' section, that I couldn't fit because I ran out of space:

1. 'UFOs: Asking the Right Questions ...'
   
2. 'Free UFO Researcher Starter Pack'
   
3. 'Expert's short list'
   
4. 'Top 100 UFO cases - Revealed!'

[edit on 1-6-2009 by Xtraeme]

reply to post by Xtraeme


FYI ... for any of the links that look like this:

http://cjf466/

That don't have a .com or a normal URL format, just take the alpha-numeric string (i.e. cjf466) and append it to,

http://tinyurl.com/

Like so,

http://tinyurl.com/cjf466