It seems every now again a high profile name comes forward saying UFO studies should be legitimized, but this latest announcement comes not from a UFOlogist, but a professor of anthropological studies. It’s long been thought by several within the field that regardless of the source of the UFO phenomenon, there should be a serious investigation into the cultural aspect of the subject.
The professor, currently teaching at the Niagara State Community College in New York, came forward stating that with the incredible number of sightings every year, there’s no shortage of reasons why the UFO community should be studied for anthropological reasons.
“It’s about time we looked into this as a worthy area of study,” the professor Philip Hasely said. The professor, himself a tentative believer, has staked his public reputation on the voluminous body of research material that has been gathered by UFOlogists and members of the community who have either themselves had experiences or study the field in their own time.
There are currently only private organizations and a laundry list of officially dismantled government organizations that have been dedicated to the study of UFOlogy. Mr. Hasely cited the millions of people across the world who have reported varying degrees of UFO contact ranging all the way from lights in the sky that exhibit unexplainable maneuvers to actual close encounters with beings that appear to observers to have hailed from another world. Of course an integral point of UFO research is not to look necessarily at the phenomenon as a chronicling of incidents wherein observers see an alien spacecraft, but rather deal with “just the facts.” The “just the facts” approach would keep the focus honest on the actual observations rather than allowing a simple sighting to become a “tall tale” and therefore of little use to the scientific community. Of course one of the foci that the anthropological community would have to come to terms with is the possibility that the source of the phenomena could indeed be another world.
The response from the skeptical community has been predictably uniformed with skeptics largely dismissing any inquiry into the field as a waste of time and money. Of course with the amount of funding going to more mundane subjects, Professor Haseley’s disdain for closing the possibilities for future research is understandable. This is clearly a subject that affects millions of witnesses worldwide every year. One must look only to the daily stream of MUFON reports to observe why this area of research is a timely one, but also integral to the study of human interaction.
Even if there were nothing more to the UFO field than a series of stories, it would tell us a great deal about the move our culture has made toward a technologically based mythology where magic is replaced by objects that are of highly advanced scientific origin. As Arthur C. Clarke’s third law of prediction dictates, “Any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic.” Could they be filling the same cultural purpose?