Yes,
I know, but this really isn’t about that. It’s about lessons learned and what
we all can do to improve the state of UFO research… though at this point it
might be a lost cause.
There
were two loose groups operating here. One of them was engaged in secrecy and
nondisclosure agreements and limited release of information. The other was an
international coalition that shared all the information they could and relied
on the expertise of their members to get things done. In one case, the story
kept building to a climax that was less than accurate (to put it kindly) and
the other solved the mystery rapidly. Had the information been shared the
fiasco in Mexico could have been avoided.
So,
what is the take away on this?
We
have the opportunity here to engage in changing the face of the research in the
UFO community. We could create a coalition made up of believers and skeptics
and try to avoid the rabid ends of the spectrum whether true believers or
debunkers. We could work together to share information about cases and attempt
to come to a consensus about it. We have seen, in recent years, that better
knowledge, better education and access to the World Wide Web, allows us to
solve cases that were once puzzling.
Back
in July 1947, Major George Garrett, at the urging of his boss, Brigadier
General George Schulgen, created a mini Estimate of the Situation. It consisted
of some eighteen cases that they found puzzling and asked for assistance in
solving them.
In
today’s world, some of those cases aren’t particularly puzzling. Solutions have
been offered and some of that, I think, are the results of investigators who
are no longer overwhelmed by the information. I mean, that assumptions, such as
these people seeing something strange in the sky would be able to tell the
difference between something truly strange and something mundane, are not being
made. We now know that sometimes conditions converge to fool even the most
careful and experienced observer.
The
point of this is that we have better techniques, we have access to a wide range
of information and we can communicate easily with others around the world. It
seems to me that a loose coalition of researchers, bringing their expertise to
bear on a particular problem or sighting might resolve that sighting in a
matter of hours or days and give us some insight into what is happening.
I
don’t believe we’d want to create a formal organization simply because that
could result in a “corporate” philosophy that would dictate results rather than
search of a logical and solid answer. It would have to be made up of people
from across the spectrum so that a charge of pandering to a specific belief
structure would not be a valid claim. The members of the coalition would ebb
and flow with the sightings because sometimes specific expertise would be
required and other times it would not.
It
would seem that a web site, blog, or Facebook page could be created that would
facilitate the communication and where results could be published. The
activities of the Roswell Slide Research Group is a good model for the
beginnings of this because, once they had the proper material (meaning a good
quality scan of the slide) they were open and transparent, providing the
information to anyone who cared to look at it. And so it shouldn’t be
forgotten, their results were replicated from a half dozen other sources around
the world.
This
would also provide a forum for peer review, which is something I have advocated
for fifteen years. Instead of hiding information behind a veil of secrecy, it
is all open to be discussed by those who had knowledge of the situation and of
the various disciplines necessary for unraveling the mystery.
And
finally, some of the nasty and snarky things that appear in the comments
section of this blog and so many others would have to be eliminated. The
assumption must be that all of us are searching for the truth and not just to
impress our own belief structures on others. Sometimes the answers will be
simply and obvious when all the information is available, and sometimes there
just might not be an answer. This would be a search for answers whatever those
answers might be and not an advocacy for a point of view.
