A Religious Commitment to UFOs: Faith replaces Science

A comment from hallowed UFO researcher The Professor (Michael Swords) to my previous post about the death of ufology and its adherents, examples, for some of us, how UFOs have become a religious-like tenet, with dogma that is faith-based rather than objective.

Bruce Duensing, like us (me particularly) understands that the UFO phenomenon, while worthy of scrutiny, has to be understood in a gestaltian way; that is, UFOs are an interesting topic for myriad hypotheses, yet can only be understood within an intellectual collective, unified totality

But UFOs have become a miasma set upon by charlatans and “believers” rather than cool, objective researchers.

The Professor, like the rest of us in our waning years, hopes to get a handle on the phenomenon, having spent a lot of time and effort, in our short existences, to quell the enigma.

Jerry Clark, Stan Friedman, and a raft of other old persons who contribute and have contributed to the UFO panoply, wish to get a denouement before they pass on from this earthly dominion.

Phil Klass said that the UFO mystery shall outlast us all. And it will apparently.

The Professor is touting a backward look, by one of his young sycophants, about the 1966 Ann Arbor swamp gas fiasco.

Having covered that event for the Detroit NEWS, and a recent follow-up with Ronald Mannor, who saw the “flying saucer” with his father, Frank, I can say that the apparition was real to them, and not an hallucination nor swamp gas. (They knew what swamp gas looked like.)

But, as Mr. Duensing, intuits, what do we have by reconsidering the event?

As noted in my comment back to Michael Swords, we can excoriate J. Allen Hynek for his off-handed “swamp gas” explanation – he was lacerated by the press at the time – but that’s about all that can be said.

What the 1966 sightings in Hillsdale and Ann Arbor/Dexter were of cannot be answered, now, as they could not be answered then.

What is the UFO dogma?

That UFOs are real, and other-worldly.

That may be true, but like the belief in Jesus Christ, the evidence is faith-based.

The great theologians Edward Schillebeeckx and Hans Kung have proffered theologic proofs for the Jesus/Christ reality. But even their erudition ends up being cemented in faith not objective reality.

That UFOs and its advocates try similar argumentation, but to no avail for those who stand back and review the UFO materials and witness accounts with an unbiased eye.

Yes, I believe that UFOs, like Jesus/Christ, have a reality. What that reality is remains elusive and unexplained, in one case after over 2000 years.

So trying to get a handle on the UFO riddle has settled into a religious orthodoxy rather than a Newtonian-like inquiry.

Not to understand that will continue the ufological folly.

RR