Fame, What You Get Is No Tomorrow

Tina Sena of Y.Ufology has an excellent follow-up article to Bruce Duensing's piece "Does Ufology Have A Future When It's Non-Existent?" (also a great article). As you might surmise, both discuss the sorry state of UFOlogy today (and probably yesterday, too).

Some of the expected points are made, such as how those who use UFOlogy as some kind of quasi-celebrity vehicle, are helping to slowly kill the entire 'field', and how Science is still donning the gloves of elitism, denouncing paranormal claims as hogwash, simply because the existence of bizarre phenomenon is (currently) void of anything scientifically plausible. And they are good points -- but my favorite part is Tina's argument that the world we live in just isn't as cool as a lot of the UFO Yo-yo's and knuckleheads prefer to believe.

And she's right -- Fiction and Reality have been merged in the minds of the overly-wishful, most probably out of a need to believe that there has to be more to life than work, sleep and fucking (though I am rather fond of the latter). They dive into UFOlogy and start to build their case for the existence of a galaxy crammed full of extra-terrestrials, playing out some geek's elaborate Star Trek fantasy.


Tina put it best:

"Because we let the fantastical, ridiculous things creep in and slowly mix and congeal with the possible. The fact that people are seeing the same things they've been seeing for thousands of years means nothing to mainstream science if the only people speaking out are the clinically insane."

But lets go back to the 'fame' thing a moment. What is that about? Of course, anyone in such a position within UFOlogy would swear up and down they weren't looking for any kind of fame. The funny thing is that fame usually requires work on both sides of the fence -- meaning that these reluctant 'celebrities' really can't have been all that reluctant. They did do some leg work to get there. I get that people need to pay the bills and eat. I'm not condemning fame itself, but instead, fame based on the sole desire to be famous, to be held in high regard based on an illusion of power.

Look, anyone putting themselves 'out there' in UFOlogy is looking for some sort of fame, no matter how big or small. Otherwise, we'd have a field stuffed with anonymous researchers and an internet laden with anonymous bloggers. So, fame is what it is, and that's fine -- but what does the real damage here are those who seek this kind of status only for the purpose of holding it, ignoring any real notable contribution to the research.

I mean, how big a deal is being regarded as a celebrity among such a small percentage of people in a field that has no real solid base from which to stand on? Sure, they may think they have all of the answers, but as Bruce's touched on in his article, UFOlogy has been in a transitional state for years now. Lately, that shift from one basic belief to another has been more apparent as everyday people begin to put the strictly nuts-n-bolts theory of UFOs farther behind them, opening up to the consideration of something even more 'alien' than we initially imagined.

It's not a bad thing to consider. My ideas have greatly changed over the last few years. I was pretty resistant at first, and still am from time to time, admittedly. Reassessing one's beliefs is not that easy. I also fought that feeling of 'giving up on an old dream' -- the dream of people from another world. Then it occurred to me that I didn't have to give that idea up. There aren't any real answers here (yet). Perhaps both physical and non-physical phenomenon exist, independent of each other. I don't really think you have to ditch the possibility of visitors from another star system making the long voyage to Earth in a metallic craft. That could very well still be valid, but more and more, a lot of sightings and experiences are pointing to something not so easily explained as an alien spaceship. The more the stubborn toes of UFOlogy wiggle and scoff at this new line of thinking, the more the field chokes on it's own bile.

A lot of hardcore and long-standing researchers appear to be threatened by any other theory than the ones they've held fast to, many of which evolved from events that supposedly transpired in '47. Why? Why can't it be something else? Why cant it be more than one thing? What's so hard about opening up to the idea that maybe everything they thought they knew... was wrong? After all, isn't that the argument with their debunking counter-parts -- that they're close-minded and near-sighted?

The simple answer is that they (and just about everyone else on this planet) are afraid of change. Especially if most of their life has been spent promoting their idea of what's going on. It would be a bit like Stephen Hawking finding out that he was totally off about black holes. All of the many years of work spent trying to prove the existence of those theoretical planet-eaters, all for nothing. I imagine that kind of realization would be quite a crushing one, and I can't really blame them for being reluctant -- but I can blame them for being outright stubborn.

UFOlogy is changing. It feels like its approaching a reboot, and possibly (and perhaps for the best) a fresh new name. The term 'UFO' almost always invokes a silvery disc and super-secret paramilitaries, reverse-engineering extra-terrestrial craft in the shadow of the Cold War. Meanwhile, the kinds of experiences people are having are changing and becoming stranger and stranger. Like many of the modern UFOs, UFOlogy is morphing and becoming harder to put into a neat little box. Will it survive its metamorphosis and come out swinging? Or will it end up like poor Gregor Samsa -- an enormous vermin regarded with deep disgust and barely acknowledged?

Oh, wait...