Ufo Sighting Research Paper

Writer Charles Fort called them "the damned." De-bunkers call them superstitious nonsense that threatens to undermine the fabric of science. Christian fundamentalists call them satanic manifestations that undermine faith in God. Other people simply call them anomalies.

Anomalies are things, or alleged things, that don't fit. They can be minor oddities, of no interest to anyone except a scientist in a highly specialized discipline. Or they can be something else, something hinting at dramatic possibilities and attracting widespread attention and controversy: a UFO sighting, a psychic experience, an encounter with a poltergeist, a report of an unusual animal not known to conventional zoology. Anomalies are nothing new. As long as there have been
The committee, whose members included such luminaries as Cornell astronomer Carl Sagan and Harvard zoologist Stephen J. Gould, declared as their mission nothing less than the salvation of Western civilization from "irrationality" and "dangerous sects," which, because they accepted the reality of anomalies, opposed science - or so CSICOP charged.

Not long afterward CSICOP complained to the Federal Communications Commission about an NBC documentary that treated paranormal phenomena more sympathetically than the debunkers liked. Although CSICOP alleged that the point of view the documentary represented was harmful to the public, the FCC, unimpressed, refused to
Klass, learning of a forum on anomalies research that the University of Nebraska was sponsoring, called the school to protest that CSICOP's views were not being represented and that, moreover, in questioning the United States government's word on the nonexistence of UFOs, speakers at the conference were seeking "what the Soviet Union does" to convey to the public that our government cannot be trusted, that it lies, that it falsifies ... As a patriotic American, I very much resent [this]." After Klass threatened legal action against the university, it canceled its sponsorship of future conferences of this kind. Klass withdrew the threat and pronounced himself satisfied with the university's action.

Since then satellite groups of debunkers have proliferated all around the country, determined to do battle with "pseudoscience," real and imagined. Not content simply to argue the issues on their merits, they have harassed colleges and universities into dropping (usually non-credit) courses in parapsychology, conducted vituperative campaigns against anomaly proponents, and done, in the words of Philadelphian Drew Endacott, one of their number "anything short of criminal activity" to get "the point across to people who have no demonstrated facility to