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Is Interest in UFOs Disreputable?

IamSundog

IamSundog

Not insane
Joined
Oct 11, 2002
Messages
3,426
Not belief in ETs, alien spaceships, ultraterrestrials.....

Just an open minded willingness to consider evidence, suspend judgement, and face the confusing, contradictory, and ambiguous information head-on. Anything less than outright dismissal and condescension.

Is it socially disreputable? Does it mark one as eccentric and weird? Or is it just me? [Opportunity for punch line here]

I am interested in the subject, I make a good effort to remain rational and skeptical, and I think I am responsible about assessing the quality of information and avoid jumping to conclusions. I have no conclusions, beyond that there's some reasonably compelling information out there. I think its an entirely valid area of interest from a purely intellectual point of view. But over time I have come to avoid discussing it or even raising my interest to anyone, even close friends and family. I find people are uncomfortable with any talk of UFOs except in the context of a Hollywood movie or a joke. I feel its completely a taboo subject, even more taboo than discussion of belief in God or ghosts or how much money you make.

Does anyone else have a similar feeling? Why is this? Especially given that so many people supposedly "believe in UFOs"...

To set social context, I am a middle aged white male in the U.S. working in IT management, and I hang out generally with college-educated professionals. I imagine that thirty years ago most all of my friends would have been happy to conjecture all night about UFOs after smoking a joint, but can't afford to now (either one).
 
General interest in the subject waxes and wanes - you don't have to go back even 30 years to see that the subject is occasionally considered by a wider range of people. 'The X Files' started off a craze about various UFO-related stuff for quite a while. I wouldn't say it's taboo as such - it's probably really more to do with the subject being less in the public arena at the moment.
 
Yes, it does mark one as eccentric and weird.

Why? Possibly because the topic is so open-ended. The topics of "polite" social interaction tend to be closed: which team is best can be readily resolved; what the weather is doing only requires immediate observation; which foods you enjoy are apparent.

Open-endedness makes people uneasy, and uneasy is not how people want to be made to feel.
 
Ask people if they've ever seen a ghost (a more "in" subject currently) and you might find an interesting topic of conversation, so why shouldn't it be the same with UFOs? Talking about any subject risks rejection of something you personally have an interest in, whether it's sport, TV, or the paranormal. Bring it up, nothing ventured nothing gained, I say. If you're eccentric, so what?
 
My experience has been that bringing up the subject of UFO's is more likely to get you raised eyebrows than trying to open up a discussion on almost any other 'fringe' topic.

My theory is that this derives from UFO's being popularly portrayed as the fringe topic most likely to be associated with a truly deranged mind.

Anytime a non-murderous loony character is contextualized in a script, it seems saucers and aliens are involved ... :roll:
 
Well, when X-files was at it´s height you could get away with it. But it does have stigma about it, lots of nutters. But ghosts are in, as mentioned earlier. In a few years it might be something else.
Of course for small talk you usually need something uncontroversial and generally boring.
 
i posted this somewhere else, but here goes

last summer i was invited to spend a couple days at some friends' countryside house - and i mean lost in the countryside, on top of a hill, barely any other houses in sight etc. so it was a gorgeous night and we went outside to look at the stars (a sight very unusual to people who live in a big and polluted city). we happened to see a shooting star, which made me say, "btw, have you guys ever seen a UFO?".
mind you, i didn't say "an alien spacecraft" or "green men crawling up your lawn".
anyway they cracked up and went on laughing for five minutes, as if i had said "i am still convinced that santa claus exists".



ok, so we go back into the house and she grabs her precious deck of tarots. in which she firmly believes.


so how come UFOs are laughable and tarots are not?
 
I find that even mentioning the fortean times is enough to send some people into a fit of giggles, so UFOs - no chance.
 
More than anything else, I think it comes down to the immediate assumption in the popular mind that interest in UFOs= belief in flying saucers=belief in little green men=bobble hatted weirdy nerdishness.

The very fact that interest in UFOs in it's purest sense means being interested in unexplained lights and shapes in the sky, ie flying objects that are unidentified without all the ETH baggage is beside the point. The Streiber/HJM/X-Files promotion of greys have IMHO just muddied the waters still more - now many people immediately connect a broad or even vague interest in UFO sightings with an absolute and unconditional belief in alien abduction.

All Fort-interest subjects exist on a spectrum, though, from being interested from a purely psychological/ sociological /anthropological perspective in those that believe, without subscribing at all to belief in the phenomenon itself (skepticism), to full on, fingers-in-ears, "la la la I'm not listening I was abducted by the ghost of Nessie and don't you dare say I wasn't" delusion (true belief.) The problem is to most people it's the latter that are identified most closely with the area of study. They think of the fluffy woo woos rather more than they think of most of us.
 
What I don't understand is how anyone can not be interested in UFOs. That seems weird to me.
 
ginoide said:
ok, so we go back into the house and she grabs her precious deck of tarots. in which she firmly believes.


so how come UFOs are laughable and tarots are not?
Click to expand...

Tarot is laughable. However, whether people dare to laugh may depend on how pretty the woman is.
 
I agree that the subject has been completely distored by popular culture, and there's deep suspicion that anyone with an interest will turn out to be a total nutcase so DON't MAKE EYE CONTACT. In fact, I feel that way about people who openly profess interest in UFOs myself!

But on the flip side, in the last few years there have been a few somewhat reasonable specials on TV, and Discovery Channel shows, that air some of the "good" evidence and reasonable arguments on both sides. It is possible to watch one of these and get enough information to realize that the subject is not so lightly dismissed.

I'm with mindalai - I don't understand how anyone with a brain, a little curiosity about the world, and a healthy disrespect for authority can look at the evidence and not be intrigued.

Here's another theory. I think there is much better evidence for UFOs being a real "paranormal" phenomenon than there is evidence for ghosts, OBEs, Bigfoot, or the BVM, etc (not unassailable, just much better). I think most everyone is vaguely aware of this to some degree, and has a sense that the UFO evidence presents a genuine mystery, and potentially threatens our worldview, and that if they were to delve any deeper they'd have to start confronting some discomforting and unanswerable questions. So better to avoid thinking about it. Ghosts are OK because they're so much more conjectural and tenuous.
 
P.S. I don't laugh at Tarot, or I Ching or that sort of thing....I've found them to be ocassionally useful for wrestling with issues and dilemnas. Not because they have any power of prophecy, but because they can act like a kind of Rorschach Test reflecting your own thoughts and subconcious knowledge back to you.

And yeah especially if the reader is hot....
 
IamSundog said:
I'm with mindalai - I don't understand how anyone with a brain, a little curiosity about the world, and a healthy disrespect for authority can look at the evidence and not be intrigued.
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Indeed.
I think Elisheva might be right - people like predictability. It's one reason why brainless soaps are so popular with mass audiences - there's a predictable range of outcomes.
Only intelligent people like us prefer original, off-the-wall ideas.
 
I think most people are a bit bored with the whole UFO thing to be honest - the subject was so over-exposed during the 1990's that even people who are interested in Fortean phenomena have had their fill of UFOs.
 
I have been into UFOs for a number of years but am finding myself more and more turned off by it. This is entirely due to the nutters. If someone sends in a video or a description of an object which is obviously venus and you say it is venus, they go off their head. I've had someone writing to the head of my UFO group complaining about me being too skeptical because I suggested that the reason more people see UFOs in winter is because it is dark and people are more likely to look up to look at stars etc! And you can see the sort of attacks made on the likes of David Clarke just for saying something sensible. You begin to wonder what the point is. Which is a shame really because I think the answer to many aspects of Forteana lie in UFOs.
 
While agreeing with most of the remarks here, I think (and perhaps this may be another way of saying 'nutters'...though not meant to describe anyone on this thread) that the UFO phenomenon seems to attract a religious-type following/framework among a good number of folks that are interested in it, one that goes beyond what one finds in those that endorse the existence of (not merely studying or investigating, which may have their own level of "disrepute") Bigfoot, ghosts, what-have-you.

UFOs-as-religious belief (meaning the ET hypothesis) is hardly an original insight with yours truly, but there really is a fear that you've just been the recipient of a "Brother, have you heard The Good News?"-type question when the subject 's brought up and people are hesitant to engage in that type of conversation because it just seems to have a good possibility of ending up in offense to one party or the other (or even just a 'way more than I wanted to know about your personal belief system' sort of reaction. )
 
stuneville said:
More than anything else, I think it comes down to the immediate assumption in the popular mind that interest in UFOs= belief in flying saucers=belief in little green men=bobble hatted weirdy nerdishness.

The very fact that interest in UFOs in it's purest sense means being interested in unexplained lights and shapes in the sky, ie flying objects that are unidentified without all the ETH baggage is beside the point. ...
Click to expand...

I agree ... It seems to me that general interest in UFO's (as phenomena) has been stifled by all the 'baggage' - the weight of popular characterizations that attribute *all* odd aerial phenomena to one interpretation (physical vehicles from another planet).

I've personally witnessed strange aerial phenomena of the sort cited in some classic UFO stories. However, the majority of these phenomena did not strike me as being associated with an artificial flying object, either in the moment or upon reflection.

IMHO the very term 'unidentified flying object' is prejudicial, insofar as it connotes a tangible 'object' that is engineered for / capable of flight.
 
The fact that so many weirdos, profiteers and charlatans got and get involved doesn't help the nuts and bolts community get their message across and be accepted.
 
Well, the various camps within ufology have never been immune to in-fighting, so they have themselves to blame as much as anything. Saucer Smear has always been good at noting this sort of thing from wings.
 
i am not part of any "nuts and bolts" community. actually, the weirdest ufo i've seen didn't look as if it were made of nuts and bolts . if it were, that would be proof that nuts and bolts are not good building material. i'm talking about weird, apparently unexplainable flying stuff.
 
When was the last case of a good, solid, nuts and bolts UFO anyway?
 
ginoide said:
the wonderful russian pictures of the crashed saucer?
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Hmm, they looked pretty fake to me... but it's something I suppose.
 
You're all changing my mind somewhat - I guess the babbling nutter factor is the main thing that makes interest in UFOs disreputable in the eyes of the average person. Most folk are probably unaware of the existence of "good" evidence and know only of the tin foil hat crowd.

I've grown tired and disillusioned and put the subject away in the closet more than once, partly because of the idiotic level of discussion and partly because, even focussing just on reputable material, I despair of ever arriving any closer to "truth". Since I'm not an experiencer, wondering about "the truth" is really just a pointless intellectual exercise. But a year later I'll pull out one of the old books and reread some compelling, well-documented event, and I'm struck again that this is important, and possibly world-shattering.....

Corallary question (15 extra points): To what extent do you think that the "ill repute" of this subject has been purposefully created, or at least encouraged and shaped, by the intelligence community in order to make meaningful public discourse about UFOs impossible? Or is this just me being paranoid?
 
IamSundog said:
Corallary question (15 extra points): To what extent do you think that the "ill repute" of this subject has been purposefully created, or at least encouraged and shaped, by the intelligence community in order to make meaningful public discourse about UFOs impossible? Or is this just me being paranoid?
Click to expand...

You're assuming the intelligence community know anything more than the average person about UFOs. I don't think 99% of them have thought about it to the extent that your common or garden ufologist has; there's too much business down here on Earth for them to worry about.
 
I´d say the nutters are doing a very good job themselves, I don´t think there are any attempts at spreading disinformation from higher levels.
 
I think there must have been some mis-direction by security services and militaries various over the years, but mostly I suspect to draw attention away from secret, terrestrial hardware.

Whether or not the Powers That Be know more than we do about the core phenomenon itself is a moot point. The fact remains that inscrutability on their part works well for them on a range of levels so I don't actually expect that to change any time soon.
 
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