the timboucher experience

The Guardian has an interesting article about the demise of UFO studies. Really, this is news to me, as this stuff seems as rampant as ever on the internet. Or at least among the circle of weirdos that I travel. The article talks about how some UFO groups in England have closed up shop for lack of sightings, and that some other groups in the United States are also experiencing similar technical difficulties.

The article quotes memeticist Susan Blackmore (for whatever fucking reason):

“The whole UFO thing is a kind of meme,” says Susan Blackmore, a psychologist who studies paranormal activity. “It’s a craze, a bit like sudoku. UFOs were just a rather long-lived version. But crazes thrive on novelty, and eventually that dies out. It’s taken a long time, but it’s good that the UFO era is over. My prediction is that it will go away for a long time and then come back.”

Of course, Blackmore also says right after that that she believes everything can be explained in terms of psychology, and that “I’m as sure as you can be that there are no paranormal experiences, and I’ve spent 30 years looking.” Which is funny to me, because I’ve spent only a couple years really looking in earnest, and I’ve become more certain than ever that weird shit happens, and I’ve even had some of it happen to me firsthand (not aliens though, thank god). Anyway, perhaps Blackmore’s problem is her starting belief, that UFO’s are nothing more than “memes” or conceptual viruses that get transmitted through culture. If that’s what you go into the game looking for, then that’s what you’re going to find. It’s a simple equation.

But anyway, this leads away from the main question, stated here:

So is there a crisis in ufology? Joe McGonagle, who runs UFOlogyinuk, the main internet newsgroup for British ufologists, believes there is. “Ufology has shot itself in both feet and needs drastic surgery in order to recover,” he told his 1,000-strong membership yesterday in an emailed response to the news from Cumbria. “Ufology is suffering from the paranoid accusations of government cover-ups which some of the more vociferous groups and individuals are all too willing to believe and kick up a fuss about. All of these things drive people away from what is already a peculiar subject.”

Are UFO’s really on the decline - either in terms of visitations, abductions and sightings, or else in the popular consciousnes? It doesn’t seem to me like they are, but maybe there’s at least a change afoot. It definitely seems like conspiracy theory as a genre is trying to birth itself into legitimacy, and for many that means a jettisoning of a lot of the more far-out aspects of it like ufology. But on the other hand, I’ve seen an enormous increase in talk of the occult-UFO connection, and a huge upsurge in the concept of ultraterrestrials - entities which cohabitate our earth but on another plane, and who have crossed over throughout all of history to meddle in our affairs. What trends have you noticed in the areas of ufology and alien studies?

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