“UFO Reports as Information Pollution: Managing Science and Security in Cold War America”

Adam Dodd (University of Queensland)

This paper offers an account of how, collectively, UFO reports came to function as a form of “information pollution” (Rayner 2012) for military, intelligence and scientific institutions in Cold War America. As a kind of noise or interference, UFO reports, and the apparently anomalous “matter out of place” (Douglas 1966) they sought to describe, endangered the emerging aerospace/national security ambitions – including, at times, the telecommunications systems – of the very institutions tasked with resolving the UFO problem. In the interests of both aerospace/national security and the preservation of institutional integrity, UFOs were framed as a “non-phenomenon” (Wendt and Duvall 2008), rendering UFO reports all but redundant. UFO sightings and reports continued, but state institutions effectively “tuned them out” through strategies of “denial, dismissal, diversion and displacement” (Rayner 2012). The implicit procedure of ignorance as organizational strategy is perhaps most officially expressed in the USAF-funded Final Report of the Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects (1969), a sprawling, internally inconsistent document of a deeply dysfunctional research committee. The report’s swift, unanimously positive reception by a panel of the National Academy of Sciences, and indeed its effective removal of the UFO problem from the purview of the physical sciences, should be regarded as a triumph of “agnogenesis” (Proctor and Schiebinger 2008) buoyed by a broader climate of “antiepistemology” (Galison 2004) in which ignoring UFOs, rather than investigating them, had become the institutionalized consensus of the scientific community by the late 1960s.

“Belief, Proof, and Pure Science: Understanding Scientific Consensus and Dissent through Cold War UFO Studies”

Kate Dorsch (University of Pennsylvania)

The scientific consensus at the end of twenty years of official investigation through United States Air Force-organized projects was that the study of UFO phenomena had produced nothing of serious scientific interest, and that the studies should be discontinued. Interest in “flying saucers” dropped off precipitously following the publication of the USAF’s Final Report of the Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects (1969), and serious scientific study of the phenomena was largely considered dead. This story, however, obscures the small-but-vocal group of scientists who advocated for serious study of the phenomena, in both the years leading up to and the decade following the publication of the Final Report. Drawing on rich archival sources, this paper discusses the efforts of “true believer” establishment scientists to keep the study alive. It will focus especially on the social and political tools leveraged by these scientists to mobilize the American public and the U.S. federal government to their cause and the efforts of these scientists to be ‘popularizers’ of scientific UFO studies. This paper also explores how “true believer” scientists (or, to borrow a phrase from historian Christopher Donohue, “dissenting scientists”) – namely Dr. James E. McDonald and Dr. J. Allen Hynek - utilized the modes and methods of their disciplines to argue for comprehensive study of the phenomena as an example of true “science” – open-minded, curious interrogation of a phenomenon, freed of any preconceived ontological suppositions.

“Articulating the Alien: The Constraints of Astrobiology”

Luis Campos (University of New Mexico)

While earlier conceptualizations of life in the universe often envisioned a plurality of worlds “peopled with various forms of life” or “tenanted by living creatures,” the contemporary field of astrobiology orients itself instead around questions of “habitability.” How might we better understand this important shift from little green men to little green microbes and beyond? In this paper, I suggest that astrobiologists’ longstanding efforts to avoid the specter of sensationalism not only reflects a deep-seated quest for scientific legitimacy, but has structured the very science of the field. Ongoing contestations in astrobiology about the border between the respectable and the fanciful, and between science and science fiction, are not only perennial but productive for astrobiology’s efforts to articulate the alien. Building off Steven Dick’s claim that “UFOs and science fiction are two ways of working out the biological universe world view in popular culture,” in this paper I trace how efforts as diverse as SETI and efforts to detect biosignatures of life elsewhere have simultaneously sought to sideline older concepts of alien life even as they have actively and successfully integrated “alien” perspectives into their approach. By examining the contributions to astrobiology of investigators like Drake, Lovelock, Margulis, Sagan, and even Simpson (a self-described “addict” of science fiction) I will explore how some key advances in mid-twentieth-century astrobiology have resulted from shifts in perspective first enabled by speculative fiction, suggesting a more complex and more productive intellectual engagement of astrobiology with science fiction than has heretofore been recognized.

“From Prophets and Crackpots to Victims and Survivors: How Contact with Aliens Was Pathologized”

Greg Eghigian (Penn State University)

While the first reports of flying saucer sightings appeared in 1947, it was not until the 1950s that witnesses began claiming to have encountered extraterrestrial visitors. Throughout the fifties and sixties, the reports of “contactees” tended to emphasize the shyness and philanthropic intentions of extraterrestrials. Over the course of the seventies, eighties, and nineties, however, the stories increasingly revolved around traumatic encounters with coercive aliens engaged in performing human experiments. From the beginning, close encounter reports were greeted by most observers with a great deal of skepticism. While critics often dismissed the first generation of contactees as “crackpots” and questioned their motivations and lucidity, some witnesses cast themselves as modern day messengers and prophets, even if most steered clear of the public eye. Starting in the mid-1960s, ufologists started citing reports of “hostile incidents” involving extraterrestrials, culminating in tales of alien abduction. With the second generation of contactees, psychiatrists and psychotherapists began to play a more conspicuous role both within and outside alien abductee circles. Broad accusations of insanity framed in vernacular terms were increasingly replaced by applications of specific clinical diagnoses – most often post-traumatic stress and personality disorders – at the same time that witnesses began founding self-help support groups. This paper, based on extensive archival research, discusses how the alien contact phenomenon was increasingly psychopathologized over time. The evidence shows that not only critics and clinicians, but also contactees and their advocates, contributed to this development.