Yep, UFOs Are Going Mainstream

Let's begin with the story we haven't seen and likely never will:

DAYTON, OH A team of physicists and metallurgists from the University of Chicago and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has concluded that metallic material collected from a Roswell, NM ranch in July 1947 is "conclusively not of terrestrial origin". "It has clearly been worked by intelligent beings not from our planet," said Edwin P Albright, Director of MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics, "and the metallic material contains isotopes that haven't been found up to now on Earth". The material was brought to the Roswell Air Force base on July 8, 1947 and immediately flown in a B-29 to Fort Woreth, TX. It was later transported to Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton, where it had been held under tight security until the Department of Defense allowed the team of investigators to conduct detailed tests earlier this year. . .

So let's put that non-event into the context of a story at yesterday's Hot Air:

Ever since Congress got the ball rolling on the investigation of UFOs and established the new horribly-named AOIMSG office, other government agencies have slowly but surely moved toward cooperating in these efforts. The latest to join the party is NASA, arguably one of the best-suited agencies in terms of possessing the technology to see what might be “out there.” On Thursday, NASA announced that they will soon be launching a program wherein they will comb through their mountains of telescopic and sensor data to find out if they may have recorded anything anomalous that should be brought to the attention of the new UFO investigatory office. The initial program will run for nine months, with extensions being possible if the results are promising. So will traditional scientists scoff at using NASA’s vast scientific resources in such a pursuit? Perhaps. But the agency’s science mission chief isn’t worrying about any “reputational risk.”

As far as I can see from this account, NASA is bringing nothing new to the party, it's simply opening up existing "telescopic and sensor data" to allow a new bunch of civil servants to pull up the usual blurry images and do the usual wild speculation. NASA even goes so far as to acknowledge "reputational risk" in this course of action, but they're plunging ahead.

Something's hinky here. We're coming off the tail of the COVID panic, but I'm wondering if a substantial part of the population hasn't calmed down. The fact is that there's nothing new on the UFO front, and there hasn't been anything new -- just the same old first-person accounts and blurry images -- since the original UFO panic in the 1940s and 50s. I remember as a kid finding books by George Adamski in the town library, and it's worth revisiting that guy's career. The Wikipedia entry is entertaining:

George Adamski (17 April 1891 – 23 April 1965) was a Polish-American author who became widely known in ufology circles, and to some degree in popular culture, after he displayed numerous photographs in the 1940s and 1950s that he said were of alien spacecraft, claimed to have met with friendly Nordic alien Space Brothers, and claimed to have taken flights with them to the Moon and other planets.

Adamski was the first, and most famous, of several so-called UFO contactees who came to prominence during the 1950s. Adamski called himself a "philosopher, teacher, student and saucer researcher", although most investigators concluded his claims were an elaborate hoax, and that Adamski himself was a charlatan and a con artist.

Adamski authored three books describing his meetings with Nordic aliens and his travels with them aboard their spaceships: Flying Saucers Have Landed (co-written with Desmond Leslie) in 1953, Inside the Space Ships in 1955, and Flying Saucers Farewell in 1961. The first two books were both bestsellers; by 1960 they had sold a combined 200,000 copies.

. . . In the early 1930s, while living in Southern California, Adamski founded the "Royal Order of Tibet" in Laguna Beach, which held its meetings in the "Temple of Scientific Philosophy". Adamski served as a "philosopher" and teacher at the temple. The "Royal Order of Tibet" was given a government license to make wine for "religious purposes" during Prohibition; Adamski was quoted as saying "I made enough wine for all of Southern California ... I was making a fortune!" However, the end of Prohibition in 1933 also marked the decline of his profitable wine-making business, and Adamski later told two friends that's when he "had to get into this [flying] saucer crap."

In 1940 Adamski, his wife, and some close friends moved to a ranch near California's Palomar Mountain, where they dedicated their time to studying religion, philosophy, and farming. In 1944, with funding from Alice K. Wells, a student of Adamski, they purchased 20 acres (8.1 ha) of land at the base of Palomar Mountain, along highway S6, where they built a new home, a campground called Palomar Gardens, and a small diner called Palomar Gardens Cafe.

At the campground and diner Adamski "often gave lectures on Eastern philosophy and religion, sometimes late into the night" to students, admirers, and tourists. He also built a wooden observatory at the campground to house his six-inch telescope, and visitors and tourists to Palomar Mountain often received the false impression that Adamski was an astronomer connected to the famed Palomar Observatory at the top of the mountain. Adamski would correct this inaccurate impression "only when pressed to do so." Though he was usually referred to as "Professor" Adamski by his admirers and followers and he often implied or claimed to possess various academic degrees, Adamski held no graduate or undergraduate degree from any accredited college or university, and in fact had only a third grade education.

The picture I get is of a type of California pioneer who somehow perceived a deep-seated unease in the population and an openness to quackery that reached full bloom in the various moral panics of the late 1940s and 1950s -- McCarthyism and comic books come to mind as well as UFOs. Adamski was a key entrepreneur of the 1950s UFO panic. But we see signs of a renewed UFO panic now, including a new generation of Adamski-style hucksters building on the seminal work of Erich von Däniken, who added the ancient alien wrinkle to the whole story.

So we see renewed congressional investigations and what's shaping up to be Project Bluebook on steroids. We're seeing renewed quasi-academic respectability for the field, but beyond that, a media gold mine. It means government budget, academic careers, hit TV shows, and heaven knows what else is to come.

I think the bottom line is that, as they did in the late 1940s and 1950s, the times they are a-changin.