Friday, April 22, 2005
 From Michael E. Salla, PhD, late of American University, on his ExoPolitics.org April 11, 2005: In the past couple of months that I've been posting on the UFO Updates list it's become clear that many researchers have great difficulty in acknowledging the legitimacy of an exopolitical approach that uses social science criteria for analyzing UFO/ETH data from witnesses, whistleblowers, contactees, etc. For many on this list, the bottom line is hard evidence as the primary criterion for any methodology that qualifies as a rigorous scientific approach to UFO research. Those who diminish the important of hard evidence are criticized as going outside the scientific paradigm and attract pejoratives such 'true believers', 'pseudo scientists', 'conspiracy theorists', 'sloppy', 'Scullys', etc. So is hard evidence the primary basis for a rigorous scientific approach to UFO research?...
Yet there is the annoying problem for those advocating a rigorous scientific method based on hard evidence. That is obviously the cover up of the UFO phenomenon and the corollary that some national security agencies are tampering with or removing the hard evidence.
From what I have seen there is widespread agreement on UFO updates that national security agencies are engaged in a cover-up based on national security considerations. Scholarship on the Roswell crash demonstrates that a crash did occur, evidence was subsequently removed, witnesses intimidated into silence, and deceptive statements made by various national security agencies. When 'crash retrievals' such as Roswell are combined with Majestic Documents such as the Eisenhower Briefing Document, the Special Operations Manual, these appear as confirmation that national security agencies have regularly covered up evidence, intimidated witnesses, instructed military officials to lie, put out disinformation, etc. I have not seen serious objection on the UFO Updates list to the proposition that national security agencies are engaged in a political cover up concerning UFOs and the ETH. However, there appears to be serious objection to the idea that national security agencies tamper with or remove hard evidence. This extends to such agencies removing the records of former employers in black projects in the manner alleged to have occurred for some whistleblowers.
Many UFO researchers concede that a political cover up exists, but paradoxically contend that this does not negatively impact on their search for sufficient hard evidence to reach definitive conclusions about UFO/ETH hypotheses. This does not appear to be logical to me, and appears to be more a statement of faith than a rigorous scientific approach to the UFO phenomenon. More precisely, I am proposing that advocates of the hard evidence approach are really engaging in a faith based approach to UFO research.
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If top secret committees set up a parallel infrastructure to deal with a national security 'threat' deemed too sensitive to be disclosed to the general public or congressional officials who exercise budgetary oversight; then the security system would be sure to eliminate, remove or taint hard evidence, and intimidate/discredit witnesses and whistleblowers. That this has happened can be identified in key documents such as JANAP 146.
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Science uses deductive reasoning from premises that are based on an accurate appraisal of the environment in which research is conducted. This applies both to the physical and social sciences. The current national security system prevents the kind of rigorous scientific method advocated by many UFO researchers, yet these researchers stubbornly advocate a process that does not make logical sense in the present national security system.
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