Wanted: A Science of UFOs | Alexander Wendt | TEDxColumbus

thank you all for coming my name is Alex went I'm a professor of political science here at Ohio State before that I taught at Yale Dartmouth and the University of Chicago I'm well known in my field of international relations and I have a serious reputation that I have no intention of squandering today and I say that because what I'm going to do today is break a taboo a taboo deeply held in the scientific and academic community especially but also in the government the news media and all modern institutions of modern society hold this taboo and the taboo is on taking UFOs seriously and by that I mean three things first there's a taboo on admitting in public that UFOs exist that they're real second that some of those UFOs might be might be extraterrestrial and third there's it's also forbidden to do science on UFOs to find out one way or the other now I'm going to say a few more words about that last point because it's kind of surprising when you think about it human beings are incredibly curious creatures we will study anything we do not understand if given the given the possibility in fact we are so curious that we have spent hundreds of millions of dollars building giant radar telescopes to look for signs of intelligent life around distant stars for which there's no evidence whatsoever but when it comes to UFOs not a cent the scientific community has never done any serious sustained systematic study of UFO phenomena and that's in spite of the fact that if it were found that some UFOs were ETS or extraterrestrials it will be one of the most important events in human history and yet scientists give us only silence and/or ridicule for people who are UFO believers okay and of course that's because they believe that UFOs don't exist so my first challenge in challenging this taboo is to make the case that UFOs actually are real phenomena and to do that I need to start with a very clear definition of what a UFO is most of us when we hear the term we automatically associate UFOs with ETS little green man although it turns out they're probably gray but little green men who pilot UFOs and that's that equation of UFO and ETS is fundamentally mistaken okay a UFO is nothing but an unexplained aerial phenomenon and you can divide these into roughly two groups there's the larger group is cases where with a bit more study but more probing we could probably figure out that the likely explanation for this UFO was the stealth fighter or a drone or some kind of natural phenomenon satellites or whatever okay those are uninteresting UFOs let's call them temporary UFOs okay the kind of UFOs I'm interested in let's call genuine and this is about five to twenty percent of the cases that we have and these are cases of UFOs that don't have an obvious conventional explanation these are the ones that I'm interested in for the rest of the talk today okay and what I want to do now is bring in the authority of the US Navy to make help me make the case that genuine UFOs are real and to do that I won't need to do a bit of background and talk about pilot reports okay civilian and military pilots have been reporting UFOs since World War two some pilots have reported their incidents to their commanding officers or whatever many pilots have not because of fears of ridicule and so on but in the past few years fighter pilots especially in the United States and elsewhere have begun to become more and more vocal about what they perceive as the safety hazards that UFOs posed to their personal operations in the sky in particular UFOs routinely penetrate prohibited military air spaces and more from the pilots point of view of concern UFO sometimes fly dangerously close to UFOs tube pilots themselves literally 50 feet away and so pressure from the pilots led the US Navy this year miss was a big story in The New York Times led the US Navy to an official policy change on how they handle UFO in the past they would always ignore their pilots reports now they have working on a procedure to require their pilots to report something okay so the US Navy has taken a big step in this way and in justifying this policy change publicly one thing they've done is they B least two very short clips video clips of UFOs that their fighter pilots had taken they probably had dozens or maybe hundreds of these clips who knows but these are the two they've released they're about a minute long and I want to just play them for you so that you can get a sense of what a genuine UFO looks like well going against the wind the window hudson qui NOS OS oh baby that's right oh is it it's rotated [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] all right so those are two UFO reports from fighter pilots just from a couple years ago if you notice in the very first one the guys said did you know there's a fleet of them out there so it wasn't just one it was a whole fleet of those things it was flying but whatever you or I may think is in those videos the Navy has officially classified them as unidentified and what that means is that they've done some homework and they basically ruled out all the standard conventional explanations for these two cases and probably many other cases as well and so what they're in effect saying is there's something on that video it's real it's not a hoax or it's not an illusion there's something on that video those videos it's real but they just don't know what it is okay so to my mind the Navy has just well proven or at least established that genuine UFOs are real now are they ETS also that's a totally separate question okay it's quite possible that even those genuine UFOs have no ETS involved in them at all okay but it's important in this respect to i think listen to the pilots okay well actually on the eat on the UFO et question the Air Force said nothing or the Navy said nothing about ETS at all when they release those videos now they're prone or con okay so nobody has a clue but it's important I think to listen to the pilots because they have reported you at many times UFOs having aerodynamic capabilities that seem to far exceed anything possessed by human societies for example right turns at five thousand miles an hour extraordinary rates of acceleration and so on things that seem impossible according to our laws of physics on the other hand just a little over a century ago our laws of physics told us that air travel was impossible much less space travel so imagine a civilization that's just a thousand years ahead of us which is really just a blip historically imagine what kind of technology they would have much less a civilization that is a million years ahead of us okay to us what they could do when our skies might look like a complete magic so I think if we're totally honest with ourselves we have to admit first with the Navy that genuine UFOs are real okay and secondly that we really have no idea that we are ignorant not only of what the you oppose are though we're ignorant of whether or not they are ETS and that leads to my punchline okay which is that if any UFOs are ETS then we are not only ignorant but in my view we are truly stupid if we're not using science to try to find out what's going on and because the first question that comes up if they are here if okay if they are here the first question that comes up is well why okay and there are a lot of options here in which we have no clue about but just consider a couple examples it might be an Independence Day scenario so they're here to exterminate us and they just haven't got around to it yeah okay on the other hand they might be here to help with climate change okay but they're reluctant to land on the White House lawn because they know that if they do so there'll be a panic in the streets the stock market will collapse and governments will lose control either way any kind of up close personal contact between human beings and an alien civilization here on our planet would be an extraordinarily profound and probably disruptive event for all of humanity okay and that alone to me justifies investing in a science of UFOs to find out what this is what all this is about so what would such a science look like there are different models for this that have been proposed the one I like is the idea of a ground-based network of automated surveillance stations each of them equipped with a sky sky cameras like sky but also other simple instruments and they would monitor the sky 24/7 looking for UFOs anything comes along they immediately start recording as much data as they can okay ideally the government or the scientific community would build such a network but they are still in UFO denial those are heads in the sand right there so we're unlikely I think to see government's funding UFO research anytime soon despite the Navy admitting that UFOs are real okay the good news though and ironically is that this is not rocket science okay there's the camera technology we have today is extremely sophisticated and also surprisingly cheap so in my view it would be possible to organize and build the building of such a network through an a scientific nonprofit funded essentially through the Internet by crowdfunding okay either way a top-down science or a bottom-up science it seems to me that applying some science to this phenomenon would tell us something more than we know now which is essentially nothing okay so to ask final points first of all why is this a taboo at all okay why is it that pilots scientists even political scientists need to worry about their reputations to talk about this issue in public okay why don't we treat UFOs the way we treat everything else that we don't understand which is the scientists all go rush and try to study it but in this case the scientists won't touch it with a ten-foot pole and I think a clue to this idea of why the taboo exists is in the word taboo itself because taboos are about fear cultural fears usually and I think my suggestion here is that perhaps the reason this taboo is so powerful is that we are afraid subconsciously of what we might find out if we actually opened up the door of science and tried to understand what these phenomena are okay but that leads to my second point and the last thing I'll say which is that in my view the first responsibility of academics is to tell the truth and the truth is we had no idea what UFOs are and no one in a position of power or authority is trying to find out that should surprise and disturb us all I think raises the question of whether the people should try to find out for themselves first instead thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 508,663

Rating: 4.8654294 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Science, Debate, Exploration, Global issues, Humanity, Intelligence

Id: u_RquOChJuE

Length: 12min 41sec (761 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 04 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/EntropicStruggle]

I think this is hard because you can't just come up with a testable hypothesis and run an experiment.

You have to kind of wait for things to happen when they happen, hope someone gets some sort of data on it, and then do your best to extrapolate from it.

It is much more like detective work than a scientific inquiry at this point given the nature of the phenomena.

[u/jim-oberg]

This was a theme for which I won a worldwide 'scientific essay contest' on 'IS UFOLOGY A SCIENCE' forty years ago. I hoped things would get better. I've seen no signs of it.

For the thirtieth anniversary of 'modern ufology' in 1978 I won a worldwide 'UFO Essay Contest' [link below] with an explanation of why I felt the on-going study of UFO reports was not yet scientific and showed no signs of becoming so, but I hoped that after another 30 years things might have improved [because the mystery deserved more rational investigation], although I doubted it. That time span passed a decade ago, and I can only echo 'Ian Malcolm' in 'Jurassic Park' lamenting [as the T Rex he had tried to warn about is now chasing him], 'Gosh, how I hate being right all the time'.
http://www.debunker.com/texts/ObergCuttySark.html

[u/FrankyPi]

The irony that ted has flagged the video because it's "not corroborated by scientific evidence".

[u/TexWiseOwl]

I think the US government knows a lot more than it is saying. It is afraid of the swift ramifications from disclosure: everyone would question religion and the meaning of life. Then, chaos would ensue.

[u/Curiouslycurious101]

Wendt is a brilliant scholar. He's literally the guy who influenced all social constructivism research in politics and IR. One of the most interesting academic articles I read was written by him, entitled, "Sovereignty and the UFO". If anyone's interested, here's the link: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0090591708317902

[u/UFOIdeas]

I wrote a blog post on "5 reasons why UFOs are Taboo" a couple of weeks ago. https://www.ufoideas.com/why-is-ufo-taboo/ if you take a look and have tips for other or better Taboo reasons I can add/improve the post. (English is my second language, but I think it's readable :))

[u/2ndgencamaro]

I have tagged this for further viewing, but based on the Tedx title I would recommend a book. Unconventional Flying Objects, a scientific analysis by Paul Hill. He was a NASA scientist and attempted to explain UFO sightings and the physics they might be using. He decided to assume that the reported sighting was true, so what were the physics used to perform flight, high speed maneuvers, etc.