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'They Are Already Here' author explains spread of UFO belief (interview)

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https://www.space.com/they-are-already-h...rview.html

EXCERPT: . . . "They Are Already Here: UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers" (Pegasus Books, 2020), by freelance journalist Sarah Scoles, tackles these questions and many more. (Read an excerpt from "They Are Already Here.") [...] This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

[...] Space.com: You end up writing a lot about information, authority and trust. How did working on the book change the way you think about those topics?

Scoles: I came into it with a pretty traditional science-journalist mindset: Why do people not value scientific expertise, why do they subscribe to conspiracy theories, and why do they think about evidence in illogical ways? — just like fundamentally not understanding that. I think I came away from it having looked at the history of UFOs, and specifically the way the government agencies have dealt with the topic in the past, which is some bad-faith investigation projects and a lot of hiding of documents and proceedings for one reason or another.

I came to understand why it was that people didn't trust the government on this topic or didn't trust scientists. And a lot of it was because, in the past, federal agencies and scientists had kind of dismissed the topic, been untruthful about the topic or, in some cases, spread false information, and I think also coming to think of UFOs as a belief system instead of actually a scientific topic helped me understand the ways that other people think about other things like vaccinations or climate change. People don't interact with it like you would a scientific experiment. And while I don't think that's great, I feel like I came away understanding why people think that way.

Space.com: Why did you think it was so important to approach these people on your own terms and to try to understand them?

Scoles: It actually comes from a story that I won't name that I did kind of early in my science journalism career, where I took this kind of pseudoscience subculture and just ripped it apart and wasn't very nice to the people who were part of it. I didn't really like the feeling that I had after publishing that article. I didn't like the way that people thought that I had entered it in bad faith, which I probably had, and that I had spent 2,000 words making fun of what they believed, which even if it was a thing that I didn't think was valid, was important to them.

I've kind of kept that with me. When you're not talking about people who have power or money, I guess I didn't want to punch down is the journalism lingo. And so when I set out to [write this book], it was very important to me not to write a book that was just making fun of people, which I think it would have been easy to do. [I wanted] to actually try to engage with people who thought differently than I did and to understand where they were coming from and not just say that where they were coming from didn't make sense.

As I was choosing people to talk to, sometimes I would encounter people who weren't powerful or weren't making money off of people, but who had beliefs or experiences that I didn't think that I could treat respectfully while maintaining my own credibility. And so in that case, I would just not write about them and instead choose people who I thought I could do journalistic justice to while also not just making fun of what they thought... (MORE - details)
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