{"id":41401,"date":"2017-12-21T03:00:48","date_gmt":"2017-12-21T08:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=41401"},"modified":"2021-06-27T16:03:14","modified_gmt":"2021-06-27T20:03:14","slug":"ufos-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/12\/21\/ufos-again\/","title":{"rendered":"UFOs? Again<\/em>?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I must admit I share Colby Cosh’s just disproven belief<\/a> that we were done with the UFO craze:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Yeah, I know: wrong UFO<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

There can no longer be any doubt: every fashion phenomenon does come back. I, for one, really thought we had seen the last of UFO-mania. When I was a boy, the idea of stealthy extraterrestrial visitors zooming around in miraculous aircraft was everywhere in the nerdier corners of popular culture. If you liked comic books or paperback science fiction or Omni<\/em> magazine \u2014 and especially if those things were among the staples of your imaginative diet \u2014 there was no getting away from it.<\/p>\n

Anyone remember the NBC series Project U.F.O.<\/em> (1978-79), inspired by the USAF\u2019s real Project Blue Book program? As the anthology show\u2019s Wikipedia<\/em> page<\/a> observes, most episodes had the plot of a Scooby-Doo<\/em> cartoon, only backwards: they would end with the investigating protagonists discovering that UFOs remained impenetrably Unidentifiable, but must be \u201creal\u201d craft capable of physically improbable manoeuvres. (I know citing Wikipedia<\/em> will savour of pumpkin-spice holiday laziness on my part, but the Scooby thing is a truly perceptive point by some anonymous Wiki-genius.)<\/p>\n

Then, at the end of the show, a disclaimer would appear on-screen: \u201cThe U.S. Air Force stopped investigating UFOs in 1969. After 22 years, they found no evidence of extra-terrestrial landings and no threat to national security.\u201d<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

There are very good reasons for a superpower\u2019s military apparatus to devote a little money to following up UFO sightings. \u201cThreat Identification\u201d? Sure, whatever. Plenty of U.S. military flyers have seen UFOs, and these people ought to be comfortable reporting odd occurrences without ridicule. But if I were American, I would definitely want most of that budget to go to Scully rather than Mulder. Don\u2019t throw cash at someone who really, really wants to believe.<\/p>\n

What I find vexing is that most of the response to the Times<\/em> story has been in the spirit of \u201cWhoa, aliens!\u201d rather than \u201cTaxpayers got robbed.\u201d Young people may know on some level that ubiquitous good-quality cameras have all but eliminated civilian UFO sightings. But they lack the personal memory of a live, thriving UFO fad, one that bred quasi-scholarly international UFO-study associations along with a whole publishing industry devoted to UFO tales. I wonder if the Times<\/em>\u2019 piece on UFO research, by the very virtue of its flat-voiced Grey Lady objectivity, is having the same weird effect as that disclaimer they showed at the end of Project U.F.O.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I must admit I share Colby Cosh’s just disproven belief that we were done with the UFO craze: There can no longer be any doubt: every fashion phenomenon does come back. I, for one, really thought we had seen the last of UFO-mania. When I was a boy, the idea of stealthy extraterrestrial visitors zooming […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,44],"tags":[263,127,85,101,1427],"class_list":["post-41401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-space-science","tag-1970s","tag-conspiracytheories","tag-sf","tag-tv","tag-ufos"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-aLL","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41401"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41401\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41403,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41401\/revisions\/41403"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}