Those who follow the topic are probably aware that NASA announced, on October 21st, that it was beginning a UFO-oriented program in late October. As the agency's Twitter post reads:
We’ve selected 16 individuals to participate in an independent study team on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), or observations in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena. The nine-month study will begin on Oct. 24.
I made a similar thread on r/UFOs and wanted to present the topic here as well, at the risk of redundancy. I also edited and added to the original post to make it presentable as an essay, if anyone wants to read it on Medium.
Essentially, very little about this study's organization and emphases strike me as useful or even relevant to the research of UFOs. In fact, some of its specifications could be described as counterintuitive. As I've already written:
There is nothing about NASA’s structuring which has ever made it beholden to exploring “fringe” trends, especially in a way which involves coordinated academic/establishment interests, as we see here. After literal decades of NASA publicly distancing itself from the topic of UFOs on the basis of its supposed insignificance or lack of evidence, one cannot expect that this program will all of a sudden yield a bounty of information, especially if that information would conflict with governmental interests.
Nor does NASA’s study represent an attempt to bridge a disciplinary gap: despite years of preexisting research, none of the people on this study’s team have even a partial background in the study of UFO data. The rift between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” analysts/analysis remains intact. Furthermore, the study’s emphasis on astrophysics marginalizes the studying of UFOs within the range of Earth’s atmosphere — precisely the place where most UFO sightings occur!
And:
...there is also nothing about [NASA's] foci which necessarily makes it more suited to studying UFOs than other agencies or fields of research. [...] Why the presumption that the appropriate arena here is outer space? Indeed, given the multiplicity of sightings of UFOs emerging from or submerging into large bodies of water (as explored by authors such as Ivan T. Sanderson and Debbie Ziegelmeyer), why would oceanography not have more of a potential claim here than astrophysics?
My hypothetical conclusion is that NASA's study, which "[reintroduces] the bare-surface question of whether or not UFOs are even observable phenomena", is not so much a concerted effort at genuinely studying UFOs but, rather, a performance comparable to recent developments involving major news outlets and programs, various spokespersons, and branch departments of the US government. I've borrowed a term of Jason Reza Jorjani's, "phenomenal authorization", to describe this performance, wherein:
...institutions can define the terms of reality. Once the parameters are set, anything outside of those parameters is rendered as conceptual junk.
NASA might not be thought of as an "authority" in the same sense in which the US government is, which is precisely why it is in a much more advantageous position, compared to, say, the Department of Defense to act out this performance. While suspicion of varying degrees is now a fairly common tenor of citizens regarding their government, mainstream perception seems to regard NASA as a pretty transparent, face-value organization. Suspecting NASA of anything more or less than what it says is to bring associations, and accusations, of paranoid, pseudoscientific thinking. NASA's defenses are built into its brand image.
To reiterate: what is important here is not merely that NASA is publicly associating itself with the subject of UFOs, but that its engagement is exclusively contemporaneous in what it deals with [...] and that this has consequences for how it retroactively frames the issue.
All of the media, all of the reports, all of the language about UFOs today is trying to bundle the phenomenon up into a twenty-years-long package. There is no attempt to form a connection to reports spanning the 1940s to the 1990s, implicitly maintaining an official, institutional position that there was really nothing worth studying in those years...
What do people here think?
Submitted November 15, 2022 at 02:58PM by Abrbarzan https://ift.tt/pnYRlAS
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