REVIEW ARTICLE Ufology: What Have We Learned? - Society for ...

572 M. D. Swords
philosophical reasons for being so. The SETIans in the upper right feel that the
universe swarms with ETI, but they can't get here. They are out-of-step with the
engineering and spacecraft designers (e.g., See Robert Forward's array of
concepts74) and have their prejudices as we've seen. The School of One in the
lower left box believe the engineers, but not the SETIans. They want the galaxy
clean of other rival intelligences so that we can star trek our way to some
Ultimate Grand Human destiny (e.g., see Frank ~i~ler~~). But, for people who
study all the literature, the consensus position would be the lower right: ETI is
common and it could get here. But that's just too much (to admit, anyway), so
we shouldn't really talk about it in polite ("scientific") company. But I have no
such politeness, so on to point #3 of the ETH. Are "they" here?
They're here. They've been here in some force at least since World War Two.
Whatever they're doing, it's a confusing amalgam of covert and overt behavior.
There's lots of it, whatever it is. And, no, neither I nor my colleagues in the
field jest.
Segment number one of this article gave you the barest glimpse of why we
believe-no, that's not nearly strong enough-we know that this phenomenon
is real, external, physical. But that and all the unspoken rest of the cases and
studies do not add up to an uncritical acceptance of the extraterrestrial
hypothesis by the best ufologists. People outside the field do not realize how
intensely (unmercifully? viciously?) we critique our own pet ideas. Sure, people
hold onto their babies in the face of this, people refuse to budge even in the face
of James McDonald, Allen Hynek, or Jacques Vallee. People in short act like
people. Still, the ideas are hacked and shredded. The ETH has been one of those.
Though surely not the first, the young Richard Hall, one of the lifelong
supporters of (mainly) nuts-and-bolts ETH ufology, was musing about the
"Hypothesis of Extraterrestrial Visitors" in the (rare) UFO newsletter, UFO-
Critical Bulletin, in 1959~~ (Figure 20). He reflected on the typical occupants
being reported. Did these humanoid forms make sense? Could not the ufonauts
be from vastly different environments, even aqueous? Were some of the
encounters, those of blobs of light, perhaps not machines but the entities
themselves? Might not there be more than one kind of intelligence behind UFO
experiences? Well, pretty good, my friend-especially for the time.
As the middle years of the sixties arrived, the ETH and its relation to UFO
encounters came under scrutiny (and attack), directly and indirectly, from many
quarters. Establishment biology spoke of the unreasonableness of humanoid
form by way of evolutionist and accidentalist theory giant, George Gaylord
~im~son~~. Robert Bieri replied to the contrary (both in 1964), using intuitions
based in the fledgling school-of-thought of convergent evolution78. Simpson and
his descendants (including Carl Sagan and Steven Gould) naturally held the
field. In 1965 this established victory had already transferred itself into the
minds of UFO-interested persons. Martin Shapiro who had an office near Hynek
in the Sputnik era at Harvard College Observatory wrote him in that year79: