What We Know Today

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Thoughts of author and researcher Edoardo Russo after 45 years of involvement with the UFO phenomenon

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At a conference I took part in, I was asked to summarize what has become known after 70 years of research in ufology. Personally, I count more than 45 of those years. Seven decades of research and study have, in reality, neither closed the discussion on the subject of UFOs nor given any definite answer about the existence and nature of the phenomenon behind the millions of sightings. In recent decades, the phenomenon has evolved into the modern myth we now know, with many witnesses and many enthusiastic students, making it even more difficult to unravel.

To these, we must add those who accuse a group of people of a “conspiracy of silence,” and those who claim that the very intelligence hiding behind UFOs is responsible for this. Also, those who argue that beneath the myth there is nothing unexplained at all, and those who continue with research without predetermined positions.

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So, what conclusions can be drawn after more than four decades of personal experience and study? One question I will try to answer is why it remains so difficult to move ufology beyond the pre scientific stage in which it has become stuck. For a long time I have abandoned any personal ideology or general theory, arriving years ago at what Pier Luigi Sani called “UFO agnosticism.” I have always known that one never entirely sheds one’s views, and that inevitably they remain, layered through personal experience (investigations, reading, study). So I tried, both for myself and for those who would listen to me at the conference (and who now read me here), to put together a summary not of what “we” know, but of what I have learned after so much active involvement. I usually begin these talks with a provocative question to attract attention:

 

“What do Pierino’s father, the Greek philosopher Socrates, and the American physicist–ufologist Peter Sturrock have in common?”

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The joke about Pierino makes us smile:

Pierino is in the car with his family, heading to their summer holiday spot, and every so often he asks his father, who is driving:
“Daddy, daddy! What bird is that?”
And the father replies: “I don’t know, Pierino.”

After a while:
“Daddy, daddy! What is the name of that village?”
And the father: “I don’t know, Pierino.”

A bit later:
“Daddy, daddy! What trees are those?”
And again the father answers: “I don’t know, Pierino.”

Then the mother intervenes:
“Pierino, leave your father alone, he’s driving.”

But the father replies:
“No, let him ask, that’s how he learns.”

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It sounds paradoxical, but here Socrates steps in to embrace the same idea:

 

“I went to one of those who are reputed to be wise. Examining him, and thinking together with him, it appeared to me that he had the air of being wise, both in his own eyes and in the eyes of many others, but in reality he was not. He thought that he knew, but he did not know. He did not know, and he did not even think he did not know.” And to narrow down ignorance in this specific field, I would like to quote Peter Sturrock, an Anglo American astrophysicist, who, upon reading the Condon report (which was supposed to be ufology’s gravestone at the end of the 1960s), became convinced that the UFO problem was a real issue that deserved investigation. He also carried out the first survey of American astronomers, discovering that many of them had themselves seen UFOs.

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In the 1980s he founded an association and a scientific journal for unexplained topics (Journal of Scientific Exploration), and in 1988 he organized a scientific workshop on UFOs, later condensed into his book on the UFO enigma. For years Sturrock has said:

 

“If someone tells you they know what UFOs are, don’t believe them: either they are crazy or they are acting in bad faith.”

So the first thing I want to say, after so many years, is this: what we know is that we do not know.

But even if we do not know “what UFOs are” (assuming the question itself makes sense), there are many things we do know today that we did not know in the past.

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Another scientist–ufologist whom I had the pleasure of meeting repeatedly, spoke of the embarrassment caused by the abundance of data: that was astronomer Joseph Allen Hynek. In his talk at the 1973 Mutual UFO Network conference, he used the expression “embarrassment of riches” to refer to the large number of available data, where the problem was above all what to do with them and how to extract useful scientific conclusions.

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Even if we limit ourselves to our own backyard, we are talking about roughly 30,000 UFO reports collected in the archives of the Italian Center for UFO Studies, an order of magnitude higher than that of other European countries with a similar population (not because ETs have bases in Italy, but simply because systematic collecting has been done there for decades and still is).

And this number is small if we consider estimates of how many Italians believe they have seen a UFO: the number determined by the CISU–Doxa survey in 1987 for the first time was 3.5 million (6.5% of the adult Italian population) who believe they have seen a UFO about a hundred times more than what is known to researchers.

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But, as everyone who deals with UFOs knows, from this point on you enter a labyrinth, a hall of mirrors where it is easy to get lost.

Much has been said and written about the “double face of UFOs” since the 1960s, and the contradictions could be seen as the interpretative frame of a ufology searching for its place in modern culture between “good or evil aliens.”

The heart and essence of the problem actually consist of the apparent dichotomy between “UFO in the broad sense (UFO)” and “UFO in the strict sense (IFO – Identified Flying Object).”

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But looking more broadly, we find another dichotomy: that between phenomenon and myth, where by “phenomenon” we mean the set of testimonies from those who saw something, and by “myth” the entire body of ideas, concepts, and images that have now passed into popular culture. These two sides (of the same coin) the UFO phenomenon and the UFO myth are not really opposites, and as we know and accept, they interact with one another.

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After close encounters of the third kind, the previously “uninitiated” witness now knows what a UFO is, and even the proverbial housewife in a small village knows that when UFOs arrive, the dog barks, the television flickers, and the car stalls.

This, however, does not give us a clear answer to the old “chicken or egg” dilemma: whether the myth developed from the phenomenon and then came back in a feedback effect that contaminates our raw data, or whether, on the contrary, the phenomenon arose from the myth.

Nor are the other two sides of the other coin (UFO and IFO) as distinct and separate as we would like. We often find ourselves faced with cases that stubbornly remain balanced between one category and the other, without our being able to determine their nature with certainty.

These findings have led some authors to philosophical reflections on ufology. I’ll mention three of them here, which certainly do not exhaust the epistemological complexity of the field.

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The first is the “law of Guérin,” formulated in the late 1960s by French astronomer Pierre Guérin. Frustrated by the apparent inability to find regularities in UFO appearances which, as in any physical science, would have been the first step toward understanding the problem he noticed that whenever he thought he had found a consistent pattern in UFO descriptions (for example, between acceleration and color), subsequent observations immediately contradicted it. Half joking and half serious, Guérin stated that:

 

“In ufology, every law, once discovered and demonstrated, is immediately refuted by subsequent observations,”

thus formalizing a kind of inherent resistance of the UFO phenomenon to being pinned down.

This notion became the core of philosophical reflection by his friend and colleague Aimé Michel, first in a famous article titled “The Mouse in the Labyrinth,” in which we are likened to a mouse used as a laboratory guinea pig, trying in vain to understand something about the behavior of a higher intelligence, of which UFOs would be an epiphenomenon. In essence: the surrender of rationality and the uselessness of ufology as a rational study.

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From some points of view, this idea was already being projected in the mid 1970s by another French astronomer, later naturalized American and then computer scientist, known to us all: Jacques Vallée. After helping found the scientific current of ufology in the 1960s, Vallée focused his attention on what were then called “close encounters” (landing or low altitude cases, which minimized the risk of confusion with natural phenomena or recognizable objects). He found striking similarities with descriptions of divine beings or other non human entities found in religions and folklore around the world. From there, the step to associations with parapsychology and the so called “control system” or “parasitic hypothesis” was short. Alongside his personal involvement in intelligence related topics (which led to the creation of ARPAnet, the military precursor of the Internet), the astronomer’s viewpoint was replaced by that of the intelligence analyst: here, a non human intelligence (not necessarily extraterrestrial) would be operating behind us, disguised today as extraterrestrial, but essentially a real “control system” that has adjusted evolution and our own species.

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Both positions, despite their differences, seem to rationalize a kind of incapacity to understand the nature of the UFO problem.

The third reflection, formalized by yet another Francophone speaker (a Belgian chemist who has lived in France for a long time), Jacques Scornaux, has a completely opposite orientation. His view of ufologists as “hunters in the tails of Gauss” (after the German mathematician Gauss, who contributed to many scientific fields such as number theory, statistics, mathematical analysis, and differential geometry) is already familiar to researchers. It is documented by the observation that in UFO reports with hundreds of simultaneous witnesses to the same aerial phenomenon even when it is identifiable (for example, a meteor fireball, a pass of artificial satellites, etc.) there are always some “anomalous” descriptions. Out of a thousand people who see a fireball pass by, only one hundred will say they saw a UFO. Of these, about ninety will describe its characteristics (duration, color, direction, dynamics, size) in ways that do not differ much from the average values, which, to a good approximation, will be the real ones.

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But ten will give descriptions with at least one feature that is consistently different, and of these at least one will differ in more than one feature, enough to make it reasonable to doubt that they are referring to the same object.

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Here, interpretative choices can diverge dramatically:

– Some choose a literal reading of witness testimony and thus are led to suppose a “parasitism” better, a deliberate “mimicry” by UFOs that would exploit conventional phenomena in order to pass (almost) unnoticed. 
– Others accept a margin of error from the “instrument–witness,” whose descriptions naturally spread around those average values.

Scornaux’s reflection moves from mass observation cases to sporadic ones, where we lack that quantitative framework and have only the single observation. If this single case is one that would normally fall at the “tails of Gauss” one of the rarer and more deviant cases and we only have that one, then we find ourselves dwelling on marginal cases (measurement or description errors) without being aware of it, believing that there is an anomaly which, in fact, does not exist.

This is a strictly reductionist thesis, which has sparked much discussion and many studies regarding the impossibility of clearly separating UFOs from IFOs.

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Earlier I said that postmodern ufology can be depicted through a series of antinomies. Many can be listed, but there are some that usually frame my explanatory reasoning, and which I will briefly mention here at the risk of being both superficial and overly dense with concepts that would each merit more development. Beyond the two antinomies already described (UFO vs. IFO, Phenomenon vs. Myth), I cannot avoid mentioning the one between the hard and soft sides of the phenomenon: the shift from the predominance of daylight discs (metallic craft) to nocturnal lights (even at close range), often with strong interactions on witnesses and environment. For some, this marked a derailment away from the “real UFOs” of the early years, misinterpreting 90% of the cases for others, it represented the appearance of the real core of the problem, beneath its disguises.

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Another troubling question, about which almost nothing has been written, is the opposition between the fleeting and the theatrical: especially at the level of higher strangeness experiences (close encounters), at times the phenomenon seems to intentionally want to show itself, while at the same time very often managing to “hide” just enough not to leave us with unequivocal testimony or solid physical evidence (from photographs to ground traces).

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The last two antinomies are closely linked and widely discussed: believers vs. skeptics, and the antinomy between the conspiracy of silence and the conspiracy of noise. The first is nothing more than the reflection, in the small world of UFOs, of the human tendency toward factional confrontation: it is always easy to split reality into black or white when it is actually made of shades of gray. All you have to do is choose your side and fight for your own “Truth.”

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The second antinomy is rooted in conspiratorial thinking: a basic psychological need to attribute one’s frustration to external causes, whatever they may be. It identifies the enemy in the observation that the media and public opinion have never been fully penetrated by ideas, concepts, and beliefs related to the UFO presence, without this ever leading to the longed for final revelation. The alternative view, here, would be that those who changed roles from researchers to propagandists were themselves consciously the architects of the mythic component which, in fact, helped surround the phenomenon with a smokescreen, if not discredit it in a perhaps irreversible way.

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And here I stop, because what I wanted to underline is that the interpretative models are still so different and mutually incomparable, not to mention that they start from mutually incompatible assumptions. And as anyone who deals with or is interested in epistemology knows, this is a characteristic of the pre scientific stage. I am not sure why ufology remains on its current edge of pre science, if it does not in fact fall into one of the two chasms that flank the narrow ridge on which we walk: on one side, pseudo science, which imitates scientific discourse but short circuits logic and method in order to reach far fetched conclusions and on the other side, anti science, which openly rejects the scientific method as a road to knowledge, proposing other approaches (from spiritualism to conspiracism).

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We see many concrete examples of both tendencies around us every day, stubbornly trying to tackle the UFO question from only one perspective, even if it does not draw inspiration from the scientific method. It is no coincidence that it has been written that our position in this battle is defensive: noble, but doomed. To those who point this out, my reply is the classic one: it’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it.

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I will close with the usual question–objection that someone from the audience is bound to raise at this point:

 

“But what is the conclusion?”

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My answer is that there is no conclusion because if there were, we would already have the answers and we wouldn’t still be here discussing these questions.

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And here we return to the ignorance at the heart of the matter, but not as an admission of incompetence. Perhaps this is precisely the fascination which, after so long, still encourages me to continue a line of research that will probably never reach a final result and yet has offered and taught so much to all those who have worked, and continue to work, within it.