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RELATED (scivillage): Something is wrong with psychological research
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It’s time to hear from social scientists about UFOs
https://www.scientificamerican.com/artic...bout-ufos/

Whether or not UFOs exist, we need to pay attention to how they are influencing our politics and culture.

EXCERPTS: Not everyone has welcomed the UFOs’ newfound measure of legitimacy in the meantime, and critics have questioned both the science and the money behind the resurgence.

[...] We don’t conclusively know if UAP physically exist beyond the mundane, but we do know this: UFOs are social facts. Debate about them is transforming our politics and culture—with effects that are largely overlooked.

Social scientists should weigh in on UAP, now. It is a task for which they are well equipped. They not only offer effective techniques for assessing social change, but for decades, social scientists have been conducting research on such relevant topics as human-technological systems, behavioral factors in manned space travel, public attitudes toward UFOs, and the psychophysical and cognitive aspects of sightings.

To start, there are three pressing issues surrounding UAP that bear serious study and discussion: intelligence, trust and research ethics.

[...] Given national security needs, what appears to be part of a UFO cover-up may also be explained by mundane organizational failures at the Defense Department [...] Whatever the case, unidentified flying objects represent a challenge to governmental and military authority. This is because the state is expected to have answers to all possible threats. UAP undermine that guarantee since they are, by definition, unknown.

[...] When it comes to truth and trust, contemporary public communication, especially in the U.S., is characterized by a growing suspicion about established experts. Researchers observe a crisis in confidence in traditional scientific and political institutions.

That’s troubling. [...] How can we move beyond this? To enhance social trust, experts should lay out responsible standards of research. Deciding how UAP are investigated and by whom raises a variety of research ethics questions warranting reflection.

[...] Talk about UFOs has never been just about UFOs. The social sciences likely won’t tell us whether UAP are from another world. They will, however, help us explore the “what ifs” and reveal what our actions today tell us about ourselves... (MORE - missing details)

"Deities, conspiracies, politics, space aliens: you don’t actually have to believe in these to find them interesting. Just focus your attention not on the things themselves, but in how other people regard them, what they say when they talk about them, and why they think about them the way they do. Psychotherapist and onetime Freud protégé Carl Gustav Jung treated UFOs this way when he wrote his book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, which examines “not the reality or unreality” of the titular phenomena, but their “psychic aspect,” and “what it may signify that these phenomena, whether real or imagined, are seen in such numbers just at a time” — the Cold War — “when humankind is menaced as never before in history.” As what Jung called a “modern myth,” UFOs qualify as real indeed.

In 1957, with Flying Saucers to appear the following year, New Republic editor Gilbert A. Harrison wanted to get this Jungian perspective on UFOs in his magazine. At the top of this post, you can see (via The Awl) a scan of Jung’s response to Harrison’s query, the text of which follows:

'the problem of the Ufos is, as you rightly say, a very fascinating one, but it is as puzzling as it is fascinating; since, in spite of all observations I know of, there is no certainty about their very nature. On the other side, there is an overwhelming material pointing to their legendary or mythological aspect. As a matter of fact the psychological aspect is so impressive, that one almost must regret that the Ufos seem to be real after all. I have followed up the literature as much as possible and it looks to me as if something were seen and even confirmed by radar, but nobody knows exactly what is seen. In consideration of the psychological aspect of the phenomenon I have written a booklet about it, which is soon to appear. It is also in the process of being translated into English. Unfortunately being occupied with other tasks I am unable to meet your proposition. Being rather old, I have to economize my energies.'

Jung, as you can see, doubled his own interest in the subject by not only considering flying saucers a social phenomenon, but as a real physical phenomenon as well. Serious enthusiasts of both Jung and UFOs might consider bidding on the original letter, now up for auction. Estimated sale price: $2,000 to 3,000."---
https://www.openculture.com/2013/05/carl..._ufos.html

(Oct 9, 2023 10:52 PM)C C Wrote: [ -> ]RELATED (scivillage): Something is wrong with psychological research
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It’s time to hear from social scientists about UFOs
https://www.scientificamerican.com/artic...bout-ufos/

Assuming that "social scientists" actually exist and that the "social sciences" really are sciences in the same sense as the natural sciences.

Quote:Whether or not UFOs exist, we need to pay attention to how they are influencing our politics and culture.

It might be more interesting (to me anyway) to examine "UFO believer" subcultures in light of folklore and religious studies.

Quote:EXCERPTS: Not everyone has welcomed the UFOs’ newfound measure of legitimacy in the meantime, and critics have questioned both the science and the money behind the resurgence.

Sounds like an incipient conspiracy theory brewing there. Money! Some dark force must be funding it for malevolent ends!

Quote:[...] We don’t conclusively know if UAP physically exist beyond the mundane, but we do know this: UFOs are social facts.

That's very true. As I've written before repeatedly, I see them as the contemporary 'secular' embodiment of what once were religious themes: Miraculous divine appearances in the sky. It's as old as human history.

But where once people ascribed them to the supernatural, today we are all supposed to be beyond that. We live in an age of science! So the heavenly manifestations must receive a "scientific" makeover: Spaceships! Aliens seem to me to fill a void vacated by angels and demons.

(That BTW might help explain why the atheists who disproportionately populate the "skeptical" groups tend to respond in such a knee-jerk hostile manner to the whole subject.)

This doesn't mean that I don't believe that UFOs/UAPs are objectively real. I suspect that they might be. As Jacques Vallee has speculated, UFOs/UAPs might have been here the whole time, throughout human history. Or they might be more recent arrivals that have merely resonated with the older themes.

Quote:Debate about them is transforming our politics and culture—with effects that are largely overlooked.

I don't really believe that. It's more like UFO/UAP discussion inevitably reflects other broader themes in the surrounding culture. UFO/UAP discussion isn't what is creating those wider themes.

(But differentiating causation from correlation is one of the weaknesses of "social science", isn't it?)

Quote:Social scientists should weigh in on UAP, now. It is a task for which they are well equipped. They not only offer effective techniques for assessing social change, but for decades, social scientists have been conducting research on such relevant topics as human-technological systems, behavioral factors in manned space travel, public attitudes toward UFOs, and the psychophysical and cognitive aspects of sightings.

Maybe. I'm not convinced that much of that is really relevant. "Human-technological systems" sounds like it might be valuable for designing user-interfaces. "Behavioral factors in manned space travel" has obvious relevance for long duration missions in small confined spacecraft. But what has that got to do with UFOs/UAPs?

Quote:To start, there are three pressing issues surrounding UAP that bear serious study and discussion: intelligence, trust and research ethics.

[...] Given national security needs, what appears to be part of a UFO cover-up may also be explained by mundane organizational failures at the Defense Department [...] Whatever the case, unidentified flying objects represent a challenge to governmental and military authority. This is because the state is expected to have answers to all possible threats. UAP undermine that guarantee since they are, by definition, unknown.

If they exist as described, then I'd say that they represent a much bigger potential threat to national (and world) security than merely a "challenge to governmental and military authority".

Quote:[...] When it comes to truth and trust, contemporary public communication, especially in the U.S., is characterized by a growing suspicion about established experts. Researchers observe a crisis in confidence in traditional scientific and political institutions.

"Especially in the US?" It's common throughout the Western world, as that world passes its peak and falls into decline. (And I'm curious as well to know how much the average Chinese believes what he/she is told by the Party.) It might be a global phenomenon.

Probably with good reason. I think that the bigger problem is that while we all respect objective dispassionate scholarship, we become increasingly skeptical of our self-proclaimed authorities as we watch scholarship being replaced by activism and as we watch everyone who disagrees being censored, excluded and silenced.

That decline and corruption of intellectual life and the intellectual authority that once went with it has little or nothing to do with UFOs/UAPs. (It has more to do with what is published on the pages of 'Scientific American' each month.)