If the number of hits a blog post generates might be thought a sort of Gallup test, then events this past (first!) year at Skunkworks seem to confirm Jung’s own experience with the world press in the 1950s, “that news affirming the existence of the Ufos is welcome, but that scepticism seems to be undesirable.”
Skunworks was launched 21 February 2018, and the first post after the inaugural one was an encyclopedia article I had compiled for James R. Lewis’ UFOs and Popular Culture: An Encyclopedia of Contemporary Myth on attempts to explain UFO phenomena and close encounter experiences as resulting from electromagnetic effects. It garnered over 400 hits. Then, most recently, with a little help from two, initial friendly notices from UFO Conjectures and The Anomalist that, in turn, resulted in the post’s being shared on even more platforms, a essay on the logic of ufology Concerning the Unreal Reality and Real Unreality of the UFO generated, again, over 500 views. Meanwhile, posts exploring why UFOs and in particular the ETH prove so compelling, due to deep sociocultural patterns with equally grave implications (What’s so compelling about ET, Cover-up and Disclosure?, The Extraterrestrial Hypothesis: Symptom or Pathology?, and Ancient Astronauts, the Linguistic Turn, and the Hermeneutic Circle) generated less than a hundredth of the interest.
This pattern would seem to support the intuition that inspired another post concerning the enduring if unacknowledged influence of Donald Keyhoe, that the views Keyhoe presents in his first book The Flying Saucers are Real (1950) still govern and guide most of what passes for ufology to this day, that the various stabs at understanding the nature of the UFO are curiously, obsessively repetitive, that ufology seems frozen in a certain schema since the modern advent of the phenomenon over seven decades ago. In that most popular, recent post, I distinguished scientific ufology that seeks to identify the object or objects that underwrite UFO Reality from phenomenological ufology that brackets the question of the being, reality or nature of the UFO to turn its attention to the UFO Effect, how the UFO phenomenon affects human beings individually and collectively, what it might be said to mean. Here, it seems, is another holding pattern, another compelling aspect of the UFO Effect, the way UFO Reality possesses such an exclusive fascination for the ufophilic.
The well-known poet T. S. Eliot famously observed that
the chief use of the ‘meaning’ of a poem, in the ordinary sense, may be … to satisfy one habit of the reader, to keep his mind diverted and quiet, while the poem does its work upon him: much as the imaginary burglar is always provided with a bit of nice meat for the house-dog.
Eliot-the-ufologist might say that the question of UFO Reality diverts the mind of ufophiles and most ufologists, while the phenomenon does its work upon them….
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