UFO Skepticism gone (really) awry?

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Indomitable (French) UFO skeptic Gilles Fernandez posted this to his Facebook page, UFO Pragmatism:

“1896-97 Airship Wave: "The Roger Park (Walter R. McCann) faked photograph", by Dominique Caudron... (In French) + original clipping.

Or how to make an airship photo...”

http://oncle-dom.fr/paranormal/ovni/canulars/rogers_park/rogers_park.htm

This shows how erudite Gilles is when it comes to refuting UFO accounts or reports.

But I have a quibble with such splendid skepticism, and it’s this….

Gilles is a cognitive psychologist and like the professorial Zoam Chomsky and long-time UFO buff Christopher Allan (CDA), Gilles is so zealous in his attempt to debunk UFOs that he misses the meat of the matter.

If the Airship wave(s) of the late 1890s (and early 1900s) are hoaxes or misrepresentations of astronomical bodies, what caused the societal frenzy that engendered such hoaxes or errant observations?

Just as my pal Zoam rabidly dismisses the reality of UFOs altogether, why doesn’t he seek or ask why there is such a mad desire for persons to believe in a UFO reality? And I’m not talking about his penchant for pushing the (stupid) Null Hypothesis (also a favorite device of Gilles).

I’m asking why Zoam, like Gilles, isn’t more inclined to determine why human beings are so mad (insane, in the Foucaultian sense) as to believe in the alleged phony or unreal UFO phenomenon?

And CDA’s persistent and intelligent attempts to persuade Roswell enthusiasts that the whole 1947 and later 1978 recurrence (caused by ufologist Stanton Friedman and others) is hogwash is beside the main point, which is why did so many Roswellians get hyped up about a military snafu and then get reworked up again by UFO researchers’ zingy efforts to establish that earlier snafu as an extraterrestrial flying disk crash?

My point?

That UFO skeptics, in their efforts to erase UFOs as a meaningful or actual phenomenon, are overlooking the social, psychological, neurological misbehavior inherent in the whole UFO reportorial panoply, abetted by seemingly normal news media and/or miscreant human beings.

That’s the story that the skeptics sidestep; they miss the real story in order to follow the fizz.

RR