UFOLOGY?

Copyright 2020, InterAmerica, Inc.

In the current [5/4/20] New Yorker is a piece, The Pandemic Protocol by Charles Duhigg, that contains this, on Page 17:

“Epidemiology is a science of possibilities and persuasion, not of certainties or hard proof.”

Remove Epidemiology, replacing it with Ufology and you have a definition that accurately fits the often-laughable rubric for UFO studies.

Ufology is a "science" of possibilities and persuasion, not of certainties or hard proof.

The sentence following Mr. Duhigg’s Epidemiology definition is even more applicable, perhaps, as a corollary for Ufology; a quote from Scottish epidemiologist John Cowden:

“Being approximately right most of the time is better than being precisely right occasionally.”

Lately, one sees a return to UFO bromides – Are UFOs real? – and a trend to turn UFOers away from Unidentified Flying Objects to UAP – Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, UAP taking away the inclination toward objects from outer space by calling the strange stuff seen and reported in the skies “objects.”

Using UAP, however, opens the door to lights and descending meteors and/or jet contrails, which someone here recently thought was worthy of avid discussion, when all we had was a cloudy mass looking odd.

UAP is a con word offered by those who would take away the unique aspect of the UFO phenomenon: the things seen or reported that provoke interest or awe look like spacecraft or something mechanical flying in ways that throw viewers for a loop.

It comes time, finally, for some UFO notables to step up to the plate and insist upon finding what UFOs are – for me “flying saucers” – not necessarily extraterrestrial spacecraft, that I eschew, as you know, but something material, with heft and within, the ultimate clue to what reality really confronts us, as humans.

RR