TOP 10 DEVELOPMENTS IN FRINGE-OLOGY: 9

UFOS—LOTS HAPPENING, LITTLE PROGRESS

The year or so since I finished Fringe-ology did not lack for activity on the UFO front.

The FBI and NSA made their declassified files easier to find. The Brits and New Zealanders released more UFO files. I was, I must admit, perversely pleased when the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) lost its funding in spring. In my opinion, searching for alien life—ie., advanced civilizations—using radio technology is almost guaranteed to turn up bupkus.

Also in spring, shortly before Fringe-ology was released, Annie Jacobsen released her provocative book on Area-51. The book held lots of surprises, but one got all the attention. A single, anonymous source told Jacobsen the famous Roswell crash of 1947 was a hoax engineered through a collaboration of Russian scientists and Nazi Joseph Mengele. Their purported, nefarious plot was to scare America into thinking aliens had landed. Presumably, chaos would ensue and we would, like, eat each other or something.

Just months after it shut down, SETI started up again. And somewhere along the way, astronomer Derrick Pitts came forward and said UFOs deserve serious study. I interviewed Pitts, who, like me, emphasizes the unidentified nature of Unidentified Flying Objects. I admire Pitts, lead astronomer at the Franklin Institute, for stepping up, publicly, and getting involved. Those who've read Fringe-ology know I believe believers and skeptics alike are too keen to define UFOs. Believers look mostly to aliens; skeptics claim weather anomalies, sky lanterns, balloons, flares and anything else that sort of comes close to maybe fitting any given sighting. And the upshot is this: Combatants insist so adamantly on their preferred explanation that we forget what we're talking about: Something unidentified.

If we made progress on any front in the last 15 months or so, it's that we might actually have more momentum now among people advocating for that middle position. For instance, Leslie Kean's book collects UFO accounts from government and military sources around the world. And throughout, she diligently lets the UFO stay a UFO without insisting on an extraterrestrial explanation.

The rate of sightings appears to be on a steady rise.

MUFON reported that between 2008 and 20011 there was a 67-percent increase in claimed sightings. The early part of 2012 featured sightings in 36 of 50 states here in the U.S., and a wave of sightings around the world. But no sighting won the public's widespread attention. Or, at least, there was nothing to equal the Stephenville Lights, of January, 2008, which I focus on in Fringe-ology. There were some sightings reported out of China. Robert Hastings reported a series of sightings around a military base near Cheyenne, Wyoming. He also released a report analyzing a photo of a Chilean UFO. But the two most intriguing developments have probably been psychological.

The Area-51 Nazi kerfuffle actually united skeptics and believers. Was the purported crash of an alien disc in 1947 the result of a foreign government's attempt at psychological warfare? Proponents and opponents of alien visitation both cried no! in sweet, unlikely harmony. In my opinion, in addition to whatever fact-based reasons they listed, both had emotional reasons for adamancy. Many believers are invested, decades-deep, in claiming the 1947 Roswell crash is evidence of E.T. visitation. Skeptics likely can't stand the idea that, if Jacobsen's account is true, the Roswell witnesses would be duped innocents, who were right about a government cover-up, instead of fantasists and hayseeds with no credibility whatsoever.

The other story I found intriguing, in psychological terms, is the revelation that a man stepped forward to claim he hoaxed a very famous photograph snapped during a 1990 wave of sightings in Belgium. Granted, the hoax was the news. But it seemed curious to me that the hoax finding didn't also provoke a fresh look at the numerous civilian, government and law enforcement eyewitnesses who professed to see something in the sky. In sum, the UFO reports seemed to get lost in the hoax they inspired, a fact Kean herself mourns in the story I link  to above.

I'll conclude with one last event, which also fell far short of the clichéd UFO landing on the White House lawn. Huffington Post reporter Lee Speigel published a story claiming the Air Force deleted a passage about UFO policies and procedures from a personnel manual, just days after he requested an interview about the odd instructions. I call the instructions "odd" because the U.S. Government, officially speaking, stopped investigating UFOs in 1969, with the release of Project Blue Book—a report that dismissed the whole phenomenon.

The directive Speigel discovered, in a 2008 Air Force manual, asked personnel to note the size of any "UFO" by comparing it to a known object ranging from a "pea" or "silver dollar" to known, similarly sized "aircraft". Witnesses were also asked to take down the "number, and formation" of UFOs and—gotta love this—"how it disappeared."

What disappeared after Speigel made his inquiry was the UFO section of the directive. You can read all about it, and see the excised instructions at HuffPo.

For what it's worth, the military claimed the timing of this pruning was a coincidence.

The event moves the needle, a bit. Believers would argue that the "UFO" reference was deleted because the government is hiding the truth about alien visitation, or at least about their own continued interest in these strange sighting reports.

Skeptics can claim the UFO-reference was deleted because it never should have been there, as the government doesn't take UFO reports seriously and neither should we. Clearly, however, the incident reveals the government is concerned enough about how we perceive the subject of Unidentified Flying Objects to take action—deleting this intriguing little instruction right after a reporter started asking questions.

Further reading: Alejandro Rojas sent me his own personal Top 20 developments of the year, along with an article about a sharp uptick in celebrities talking about UFOs in surprisingly serious ways.

Author's Note: As the year wound down, I started thinking about the most important things to happen in the realm of the paranormal since I finished writing Fringe-ology in the late fall of 2010. I'll post all the items here, though a few will appear first on my guest blog at the Daily Grail.