From the Fringe: Ufology as Critique

Introduction

The study of UFOs has occupied an unprivileged position in the scientific community for over half a century, having been alternately ridiculed and ignored by mainstream researchers since at least the early 1950's. From the very beginning of the modern UFO era in 1947, UFO sightings have been associated with the possibility of extraterrestrial visitation—which would imply the existence of otherworldly technologies allowing for super-luminal, interstellar travel. Since neither astronomers nor physicists have yet conceived of how such a technology might work—and because the majority of sightings have consistently been explained away by professional scientists as misidentified natural phenomena—the bulk of accepted scientific knowledge has always been weighted against there being anything to the UFO phenomenon that can be considered worthy of serious investigation.

Meanwhile, the UFO phenomenon itself has stubbornly refused to disappear. Thousands upon thousands of sightings continue to be reported each year. While most can still be accounted for by skeptics under the traditional categories of natural phenomena or unusual, sometimes secret aircraft, there remain a "hard core" of truly baffling incidents involving what appear to be solid (often "metallic") airborne objects, conducting maneuvers no known terrestrial craft can replicate, and which are often reported by sober, trained, highly credible witnesses from the private sector or military. It is the study of these incidents that concerns the most highly respected researchers in the field of Ufology.

Despite the merits of any individual case or sighting—despite even these unknown objects being tracked on radar by the military itself—mainstream science cannot account for the existence of these “craft.” The entirety of the UFO phenomenon has therefore been relegated to the scientific "fringe," its study paraded about as a prime example of "pseudoscience," and its researchers portrayed as being more akin to religious believers than scientists. At the same time, polls consistently show that an overwhelming majority of Americans believe the government to be actively engaged in the practice of hiding information concerning UFOs and/or extraterrestrials from the public (the number has hovered around 70-80% since the late 1990's; as recently as 2002, a poll conducted by the Roper organization in conjunction with the Sci-Fi television network found that 48% of respondents believed UFOs had visited the earth).1

The disparity between public and academic interest in UFOs leads to the question: how much and what form of attention does the subject truly merit? Is it the American public or our scientific community whose beliefs are out of line with reality?

The answer is not as simple as these options suggest. The latter 20th century is filled with examples of pressure being exerted by official bodies upon the public and scientific communities alike to create the impression that one takes the subject of UFOs seriously at one's own risk, both personally and professionally. As early as 1953, the Air Force reported that its investigation of UFOs had resulted in nothing “defying explanation in terms of present-day science and technology,” and that its best scientific efforts had gone into the study.2 The signal received by the civilian world from this and other such pronouncements has been unequivocal, and its intended effects long-since cemented in the public mind: there is nothing to see here, and you must either be a scientifically illiterate citizen or a bad scientist to continue looking. For as long as there has been a UFO “problem,” then, it has been the case that in order to proceed as a UFO investigator, one has had to take these official statements as less than definitive. For those who have, science has by-and-large remained the model for such investigations.

Efforts to engage in the so-called "scientific" study of UFOs have traditionally had as their goal a certain rigor in analysis, a sharpness in classification, and an adherence to scientific standards that, taken together, attempt to convey the discipline with which the study has been conducted. The focus of this desire on the part of the UFO researcher is clear: the researcher wants to show to the respected scientist that their research has been in accordance with accepted scientific methods and that an appropriate skepticism has guided the work. Whatever results are left over should, in the mind of the Ufologist, constitute a scientifically sanitary group of phenomena that are worthy, by virtue of their anomalous nature, of further scientific inquiry and experimentation.

The desire to be taken seriously by the mainstream scientific community runs through the majority of significant publications on the topic of UFOs. At times, it has been expressed blatantly as a plea for recognition. Rarely has Ufology intentionally cast itself as the Other to mainstream science; it is taken for granted that nothing need be done by Ufologists to marginalize themselves in the minds of their institutionally sanctioned counterparts. However, to do so presents an interesting opportunity for the field of Ufology. This opportunity arises from the fact that the possibility of critiquing mainstream science is inherent in the study of UFOs. To engage in such a study—to take seriously a topic that has little possibility of garnering the attention of the "serious"—is, in fact, to engage in such a critique.

Michel Foucault once described critique as "a means for a future or truth that it will not know nor happen to be...it oversees a domain it would not want to police and is unable to regulate" (Foucault, 25). Judith Butler expounded upon this conception by saying, "One asks about the limits of ways of knowing because one has already run up against a crisis within the epistemological field in which one lives...it is from this condition, the tear in the fabric of our epistemological web, that the practice of critique emerges, with the awareness that no discourse is adequate here or that our reigning discourses have produced an impasse" (Butler, 5).

In this paper, I will argue that Ufology--as a field of extra-institutional research which deals with the study of unknown objects that defy the explanatory scope of the institutionalized sciences—meets both Foucault and Butler's definitions of the project of critique. The object of Ufology's critique is what we might call "mainstream science," but a more precise target can be identified: the modern, scientific Subject. In his most extreme formulations of the concepts of discourse and discipline, Foucault held that human subjectivity was wholly constituted by discourse(s), by productive mechanisms of Power/Knowledge, and that the Subject was incapable of acting in ways not already possible according to the imperceptible contours of these discursive mechanisms. Judith Butler took up this generalized problem, first in her discussions of the performativity of gender, and later in a variety of analyses of "normativity" and "marginalization," in an attempt to theorize in what ways a socially-constituted Subject might enact their discursive constitution differently, thus allowing for the exercise of agency.

Using Foucault and Butler, I will show that the study of UFOs can be characterized as a practice of critique, the ultimate goal of which is this exercise of agency with respect to the role of institutionalized academic knowledge in constituting an ideologically-Scientific Subject. For a Scientific Subject so constituted, I will argue, the serious investigation of the UFO phenomenon is a radical act of critique which pits the Subject against his or her own sense of what is intellectually rational and socially prudent, and that agency is exercised at the point at which institutional, academic knowledge itself comes to be seen as suspect.