The ugly truth about ufology
Ufology has not succeeded to explain the UFO phenomenon after over 60 years of effort. One should
wonder why. Yet, the answer to such question is known, and has been known for years, but it is ignored.
In an homage to the late John Keel who left us on July 3rd of this year, one of the first who understood
way back in the 1960s that UFOs were more than just green little men from Mars (or little gray men
from Zeta Reticuli, same thing), it is appropriate to bring back to the forefront a short article he wrote in
1988. It is: “The people problem” in John Spencer and Hilary Evans (eds.) Phenomenon. London: Futura,
1988, pp. 186-198.
Keel, who cannot be accused of being an armchair investigator, provided an interesting piece discussing
some fundamental methodological problems found in ufology. These problems are still plaguing ufology
more than 20 years later.
Useless UFO reports
Ufology has spent much time, energy and resource in the last 60 years to produce data and reports that
are completely useless. Keel wrote in his article a provocative comment that deserves to be quoted in
full:
“ ‘The average UFO report isn’t worth the paper it’s written on’ an Air Force officer in the Pentagon told
me back in 1966. At the time I scoffed at the statement, assuming it was just part of the sinister
conspiracy to downgrade and dismiss the UFO phenomenon. But gradually I came to realize that the
statement was painfully accurate. Few UFO reports, even today, contain enough substantive
information for a valid analysis. The art of writing reports is still a puzzle to many civilian UFO
investigators. The result is a flood of paper and red tape which tells us nothing whatsoever about the
UFO witnesses themselves and very little about the actual case being investigated” (p. 186).
There are now thousands upon thousands of UFO reports available through the Internet, and even more
in the archives of various ufological organizations. Yet, the vast majority of those reports are as poorly
crafted as those described by Keel in 1988. Keel proposed that part of the problem comes from the fact
that many UFO sighting forms are adapted from a US Air Force form that was originally designed for
pilots and astronomers. The main purpose of the original form was to identify if natural or man-made
objects could be responsible for unusual sightings, and thus the questions are essentially focussing on
physical factors such as speed, angle, altitude, etc.
Like any other questionnaire, these forms are not “objective,” as they have a built-in bias (towards
known flying objects in this case). The key here is to realize that any such forms can only show that there
is “insufficient information” to assess the sighting (because it does not conform to known flying objects)
and therefore they can only produce knowledge to be labelled as “unexplained phenomenon”. In other
words, the form is not designed to gather information to help explaining unusual sightings. It tells
nothing about the phenomenon itself, it only helps to show that it is an unknown phenomenon. You can
have ten million of those reports, and the issue will remain the same: OK, I know there are unidentified
flying objects in the sky, so what? Such form was probably useful in the 1950s, when investigators were
still trying to prove that there are unexplained aerial phenomena (UAP). It has been a long time now
that the existence of UAP is no more questioned. Hence, continuing to use this type of form as the key
tool to gather ufological data is simply a waste of time. Yet, most ufologists still do. Keel was probably
too polite to discuss why such a mistake was done over and over.
The ugly truth
When someone, or a group, is doing the same mistake over and over, even after being told, then it is
because there is a payoff in keeping doing the same mistake (as Dr. Phil would say). What could be the
payoff for ufologists? Unconsciously, they know that if they do otherwise, their core belief (i.e. the basic
Extra-Terrestrial Hypothesis) would be clearly exposed as being false. Hence, by collecting useless data
they can continue to be actively engaged in ufological research while unconsciously maintaining the
mystery about the phenomenon so that their core belief is protected from reality. This type of selffooling is called mystification.
Beyond mystification, using this type of form is also contributing to the self-delusion of many ufologists.
By gathering quantitative data that look like “scientific” (speed, angle, temperature, elevation, etc.) they
think they are doing scientific work, while in fact they are simply gathering useless data. This selfdelusion is very useful to reinforce the apparent legitimacy of the mystification process.
The evacuation of useful information
Keel also added in his article that “whenever a civilian UFO research organization came across a case
containing puzzling psychic elements, it has been a long established practice to cry ‘hoax’ and brand the
innocent, well-meaning witnesses liars and frauds. They fail, however, to realize that the stranger the
ingredients in the witnesses’ stories, the more likely it is that the reported incidents are true.” (p. 191).
The key missing piece in ufology, as we are fully aware since the 1970s, is about the witnesses
themselves. As Keel wrote, “it is important to extract a complete biography of the witness with
emphasis on any unusual psychic or occult experiences they may have had prior to their UFO encounter.
I discovered that the majority of all witnesses had latent or active psychic abilities and after I revealed
this in a series of articles in the 1960s other independent investigators around the world confirmed it in
their own research” (p. 192). These findings have been confirmed by a number of studies since. Yet, how
often a typical UFO report gathers such information, even in 2009? Evicting people from their own
experience is probably the most serious aspect of the mystification process.
Understanding who the witnesses are, what is happening in their life, and how they construed their
ufological experience (from their own perspective) are critical data to understand the phenomenon. This
type of information is more often than not excluded from the typical UFO reports. Once again, Keel
wrote that “civilian UFO organizations have never made any progress because they have been
concerned with trying to interpret the meaning of the objects, determining their source and attacking
the Air Force explanations. Proving the reliability of witnesses became more important to them than
learning the details of what the witnesses actually experienced” (p. 194). Keel’s overall assessment of
ufological organizations could not be clearer.
The ugly truth about the last 60 years of ufology needs to be exposed in full, even if it is painful and
unpleasant. Ufology will continue to decline and become an even more marginal topic if it fails to reform
itself in the near future. The good thing is that both the problems and the solutions are known.