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| Photo: The Times |
“[…] One might expect unexplained incidents in NATO airspace to concern the authorities, particularly given that since 1947 over 100,000 UFOs have been reported worldwide, many by militaries. However, neither the scien- tific community nor states have made serious efforts to identify them, the vast majority remaining completely uninvestigated. The science of UFOs is minuscule and deeply marginalized.
Although many scientists think privately that UFOs deserve study, there are no opportunities or incentives to do it. With almost no meaningful variation, states—all 190+ of them—have been notably uninterested as well. A few have gone through the motions of studying individual cases, but with even fewer exceptions these inquiries have been neither objective nor systematic, and no state has actually looked for UFOs to discover larger patterns. For both science and the state, it seems, the UFO is not an 'object' at all, but a non-object, something not just unidentified but unseen and thus ignored.
The authoritative disregard of UFOs goes further, however, to active denial of their object status. Ufology is decried as a pseudo-science that threatens the foundations of scientific authority, and the few scientists who have taken a public interest in UFOs have done so at considerable cost. For their part, states have actively dismissed ‘belief’ in UFOs as irrational (as in, ‘do you believe in UFOs?’), while maintaining considerable secrecy about their own reports.”
— Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall, Political Theory (Volume 36, Number 4)
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