uair01 said:
It's fascinating to notice how unimaginable it is nowadays that someone would make a career out of UFO's and that he should be taken seriously (Hynek, Klass). And that abductees should be taken seriously. The whole media landscape has changed. Indeed, the Zeitgeist has changed. There should be some sociological studies about this somewhere. Does anyone know some?
Indeed. I've been meaning to say something like this for a while now.
There seems to be a widespread attitude that everything is done and dusted and that questions of the past are no longer relevant and have been fully decided. I find it a strange attitude but nevertheless it does seem widespread.
Paradoxically, Youtube is full of purported UFO sightings but clearly many of them are obvious CGI (albeit increasing high quality!). Perhaps this ubiquity of very high quality CGI is part of what causes many people to say: "Oh, the mystery is over: It's all been decided hasn't it?".
But there are other causes too as I see it. Two of them leap to mind.
First is the resolution of millennial fears: There was no world war in 1999, disasters did not happen, and latterly the world did not come to an end in 2012[1]. The fear (no matter how slight it might have been in most people's minds) is gone and now people can become blasé about it. E.g. "Oh, it's all done and dusted isn't it... it's all been decided, there never was a mystery, etc.". I realise here that I am conflating wider Fortean issues with UFO-related issues but I think that they merge into a single group of 'mysteriousness' in people's minds. Additionally, a younger generation is beginning to find its voice, a generation which was never so concerned with last century's UFO (and other Fortean) issues. To this generation, all these issues are well... so last century.
The second reason is what seems to me to be an increasing reliance amongst many people on 'big providers'. What I mean by 'big providers' here are large organisations both public sector and private that people increasingly choose to rely on. This can be exhibited both in terms of greater reliance on the state and on greater reliance on private service providers of all sorts[2]. (The growth of and massively increasing popularity of cloud providers on the Internet is one particular manifestation of this trait). The point being that this mental state of reliance on a 'big other' (not simply a nanny state but a nanny economy, if you will) bleeds over into a kind of implicit acceptance of the 'big other's' world view, an acceptance of the status quo. E.g. The mental model of "Don't question it, there is officially no mystery so it's all sorted out, isn't it."
Footnotes:-
1: That said, I wonder if future generations might well look back at the period of 1999-2001 to the 2010s and say: "That's when it all began".
2: This too is paradoxical: Even as people realise ever more than before that both governments and large corporations are untrustworthy and often unreliable they also seem to be bent on putting more and trust and reliance into such organisations. Paradoxical but that's what is happening.