The Return of the Teen UFOlogist? or, Eat Your Heart Out, Edward Condon

Of course you’ve noticed–how could you not?  The media, among them the most respectable, are awash in UFO stories.  I don’t remember having seen anything like it.

The left-leaning British newspaper The Guardian has published a series of particularly high-quality pieces.  At the end of last month, they ran a fine article by Andrew Gawthorpe, historian of modern America at Leiden University, headlined: “Everyone is now serious about UFOs.  But they reveal more about earthling politics.”  (The conclusion, in which Gawthorpe calls us “to remember the other truths which UFOs can reveal – the ones that aren’t out there, but buried deep within ourselves,” made me want to stand up and cheer.)  Last week, a skeptical piece by Mick West, focusing on the UFO videos; just a few days ago, a profile of Leslie Kean headlined “The woman who forced the US government to take UFOs seriously.” 

And, on June 9, an article by Linda Jacobson (originally published in “the 74”) on American high school students and their fascination with UFOs, and how their teachers are making use of UFOs to get the kids hooked on science.

This last was the piece that really intrigued me.  That led me to wonder if that long-extinct creature, the teen UFOlogist, is about to make his–and now also her–comeback.

Reader, do not despise this query.  It is not motivated solely by nostalgia, by sorrow at the relentless thinning of what was once a flourishing cadre of more or less geeky teenage boys (hardly any girls) who poured our adolescent energies into chasing what Gray Barker used to call “the elusive disks”–though, to be sure, that’s part of what has prompted me to write this post.  I’m still a bit stunned by the death (May 31) of my old UFOlogical pal Timothy Green Beckley, about whom I blogged three months ago.  “One more empty chair at our reunion table …,” was the comment of another old pal, Rick Hilberg, from whom I heard the sad news.

But I also have the sense that teenage UFOlogy was a cultural phenomenon that demands attention.  What did it mean that so many of us were attracted to it?  Why was that attraction so lopsidedly for the male half of the teen population–and was this a minus for us, or a plus?  When and why did it dwindle and ultimately vanish as we grew into our mature years, barely noticing that we were leaving few or no successors behind us?

There’s perhaps a backhanded recognition of teen UFOlogy’s importance in the complaint with which Professor Edward U. Condon concluded his introductory remarks to the University of Colorado’s Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects (1969), the document that was supposed to permanently lay all the “UFO nonsense” to rest, like the stake through Dracula’s heart.  (More than 50 years ago!  A fine irony, isn’t it?)

I no longer have my copy of the “Condon report,” as it’s come to be called.  I quote David Jacobs’s summary:

“Condon’s final remarks in the opening section concerned the problem of ‘miseducation’ in public schools.  This arose because teachers allowed their children to use their science study time to read books and magazine articles about UFOs.  Because of errors in the material, children were ‘educationally harmed’ or retarded in the ‘development of a critical faculty with regard to scientific evidence.’  To remedy this situation, Condon recommended that teachers withhold credit from students who study UFOs and instead ‘channel their interests in the direction of serious study of astronomy and meteorology, and in the direction of critical analysis of arguments for fantastic propositions that are being supported by appeals to fallacious reasoning or false data.'”

I’m not sure to what extent UFOlogy was actually encouraged in public schools at the time Condon wrote.  My own teachers, who knew very well my fascination with UFOs, did nothing either to promote or to inhibit it, but viewed it (as far as I can tell, looking back) with a bemused tolerance.  I recall that for a ninth-grade science fair I submitted a homemade “Flying Saucer Detector,” set up to ring an alarm bell when an electromagnetic disturbance–which the literature suggested UFOs were likely to cause–was nearby.  Along with it, I submitted a typed paper of 25 pages or so explaining the theoretical and evidential basis for the device.

No flying saucers were detected, but I seem to remember that I got an honorable mention anyway.  This would no doubt have driven Condon into a frenzy of rage.  My teachers must have understood what he never could: that it was precisely the disputational back-and-forth of UFOlogy, where status and authority counted for nothing and evidence, reasoning, and persuasive writing were all that mattered, that gave me the best training in critical thinking I could have had.

One more irony: it was in a review of Condon’s report for the American Journal of Physics (1969) that Thornton Page, then professor of astronomy at Wesleyan University, described his own educational use of UFOlogy.  “In fact, we have offered Flying Saucers as a 1-semester course at Wesleyan University for the past two years, with some success.  (It attracted students who would not otherwise have had any science.)”

Which is precisely what, according to Linda Jacobson’s Guardian article, some creative high school teachers are doing right now.

David Black, teaching science at a private girls’ school in Utah, “hooks students with tales of close encounters and uses hand-on projects and 3D models to explore the math and physics involved in aliens traveling for tens of thousands of years to reach Earth.”  Jeff Adkins, an astronomy teacher in California, uses UFO conspiracy theories to teach students to be open-minded but also skeptical.

Both Black and Adkins, I gather, approach the subject from a more or less skeptical perspective.  But Berkil Alexander, a Georgia science teacher, holds a yearly “ET exoplanet symposium in which teams of students, taking on the roles of astronomer, astrobiologist, historian and a Pentagon investigator, compete against each other to make a case using the evidence they have collected.”  And Alexander himself, it seems, believes “the truth has been concealed for decades because it might provoke panic.”

Eat your heart out, Edward Condon.  Jacobson’s article includes a delightful photo of Georgia teacher Alec Johnson’s high school class in tinfoil hats, supervised by a green mylar-balloon alien, engaged in “an alien-themed chemistry lesson.”  According to Johnson, “the possibility of alien life is the topic they get most passionate about, perhaps because of the stereotype that UFO sightings are more common in rural areas like theirs.

“‘The kids get into it, especially if you don’t take a side,’ Johnson said. …  Johnson goes all out, enhancing his lessons with The X-Files theme music and classroom decor.  ‘Any self-respecting astronomy teacher has to have a Fox Mulder poster on the wall,’ he said.”

I note, with some gratification, that most of Johnson’s students seem to be girls.  Will these be the 21st century’s cadre of teen UFOlogists?  Which is to say, will they carry on their researches with one another as colleagues, no teacher looking on, but only each other and the “elusive disks”–non-existent, but as powerful and enduring a myth as any that’s emerged from the human unconscious–as their companions?

“A generation passeth away,” says Ecclesiastes 1:4, “and a generation cometh.”  Our teen-UFOlogist generation, for better or for worse, is on its way out.  Is another one coming? Let’s all stay tuned.

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And speaking of the “passing away” generation …

A few days ago, I was surprised and delighted to find that John E.L. Tenney had posted to Twitter a photo taken by another of my old pals, Allen Greenfield, of the “after party” of the 1964 Congress of Scientific UFOlogists (mistakenly dated to 1965; thanks to Allen for correcting the error!).  And yes, I’m there, all of 16 years old, in the bottom right corner.  Rick Hilberg stands in the center of the photo.  Between me and Rick, in checkered sport coat, is the late Dale Rettig.  And that’s Gene Steinberg of “The Paracast” on Rick’s right.

After party of the 1965 UFO Congress. pic.twitter.com/Q6CDNs16Xi

— John E.L. Tenney (@JohnELTenney) June 14, 2021

Jesu, Jesu, the mad days that we have spent …