What I’m Reading: “UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record”

Author’s Note: There has a been a lot of really cool UFO news lately (especially this article), so I thought I would re-share an old post I wrote some years ago regarding a fine book on the subject. Enjoy!

From 1989 to 1992 I went to graduate school at the University of Arizona. This was around the same time that Fife Symington was elected governor of that fine state. I don’t remember having any opinion of Symington at the time, except that he seemed a man very much in the mold of Arizona politicians: a conservative, folksy cowboy.

So it was probably not that big of a surprise when, six years later, Symington handled an unusual political crisis in what many saw as a callous, flippant way. The crisis in question was a UFO—literally, an unidentified flying object—that was spotted by hundreds of people in the Phoenix area on the night of March 13th, 1997. The incident, which has since become known as The Phoenix Lights UFO Incident, resulted in dozens of 911 calls and hundreds of letters being written to the governor. Eventually, Symington was forced to hold a press conference about the event, in which he essentially laughed-off the whole affair. (One of his aides came to conference dressed as a green alien. Hilarity ensued.)

This is just one of many stories which writer Leslie Kean has recounted in her fascinating book, UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record. Kean, who has become a favorite bête noire of scientists and UFO debunkers, has been writing about the UFO phenomenon for many years.  In this book, she describes many of the more famous incidents in a sober, agnostic tone that I found completely engrossing. In fact, after reading Kean’s meticulously documented and detailed narrative, I decided that one of two things must be true:

1. The book is an extremely clever work of fiction masquerading as journalism or…
2. UFOs are a genuine mystery, one which has been experienced by many people for a very long time.

Yeah, I know. Any rational skeptic would point out a third, more obvious possibility. Namely, that Kean is just a very silly woman who is misinterpreting the testimony of many other silly people who think they have seen something strange—odd lights in the sky which are almost certainly a natural phenomenon, probably the planet Venus. (Venus seems to be the go-to scapegoat put forth by many of these debunkers.)

But Kean has crammed her book with so many testimonials from so many apparently rational, non-silly people that I just can’t buy this argument. (I mean, have you ever mistaken Venus for a UFO?)

Most startling among these testimonials was that by none other than Symington himself. Incredibly, despite his ridicule of the sightings in 1997, Symington eventually admitted that he had seen the UFO. To his credit, he writes a chapter about this in Kean’s book, beginning with this simple, explosive statement:

Between 8:00 and 8:30 on the evening of March 13th, during my second term as Governor of Arizona, I witnessed something that defied logic and challenged my reality: a massive, delta-shaped craft silently navigating over the Squaw Peak in the Phoenix Mountain Preserve.

Symington goes on to explain that the sighting were so widespread that he felt compelled to “dampen any incipient panic” on the part of his constituents, hence the infamous press conference in which he basically made the whole matter into a joke.

Which leads me to another aspect of Kean’s book that I found totally fascinating: the idea that so-called “UFO coverups,” which are the bread-and-butter of The X-Files and so many other science fiction stories, might be nothing more than an institutional form of denial.

One is reminded of the late Soviet Union, in which prostitution was officially declared to no longer exist, which meant that women who were caught engaging in that trade had be arrested for some other crime, such as loitering. The Party Line is a powerful motivator, psychologically speaking, and it might also be at the root of the self-censorship that high officials like Symington (Jimmy Carter is another famous example) imposed on themselves.

In fact, Kean suggests that such a choice might actually be a complex psychological defense mechanism, a way of dealing with the anxiety which might otherwise result from an actual admission that one has perceived a genuine mystical experience.  This idea was explicated in detail by two political scientists, Alexander Wendt and Robert Duval, in their 2008 academic paper, “Sovereignty and the UFO.” In this paper, they make the case that mere possibility that extraterrestrials might exist represents a such a mind-blowing idea that it cannot be entertained or harbored, not even secretly.  Such a discovery, after all, would completely undermine the legitimacy of every national governments on earth, whose compact with the citizenry is based on the premise that human beings are alone in the universe and must be final arbiters of their own destiny.

It’s a very clever theory, and typical of the kind of intelligent discourse that pervades Kean’s book. As she herself states early on, 95% of all UFO sighting are simple cases of mistaken identity—aircraft, balloons, flares, hoaxes and (yes) Venus. But the other 5% remain a mystery. Nothing more or less; just a mystery.

So what’s the big deal? Can’t we still have mysteries without getting all bent out-of-shape? Apparently, not.

The problem, as Kean explains it, is that…

…[t]he term “UFO” has been misused and become so much a part of the popular culture that its original (and accurate) definition has been completely lost. Almost everyone equates the term “UFO” with extraterrestrial spacecraft, and thus, in a perverse twist of meaning, the acronym has been transformed to mean something identified instead of something unidentified.

When I first read this passage, I was impressed by Ms. Kean’s obviously lucid and graceful explanation of this fascinating paradox. But I could also detect a faint whiff of disingenuousness. After all, if strange triangular objects really are zipping around our skies at tremendous speeds, thumbing their noses at our own pathetic avionic abilities, what other explanation comes to mind?

Even so, I found buying Kean’s essential arguments: that UFOs really constitute some kind of unsolved atmospheric events, that the people who see them are not crazy, and that they might indicate some world-changing scientific discovery (yes, aliens). If she’s a nut, then I’m a nut too.

You be the judge…