Last night, I spent a few hours watching some of the latest UFO and alien encounter documentaries. Some were pretty campy, others were pretty good. So far, after seeing the first episode, I'm pretty impressed with Hangar 1 - the MUFON official-line documentary about the UFO phenomenon. I'm not privy to the inner workings of how the show was made, yet I did get a good feel for it just from seeing the show. It looked like much of the show was simply good legwork. A lot of care went into keeping it objective and professional. They build some pretty convincing cases about the history of the UFO coverup, etc. In short it looks like they did their homework.
While I was very impressed, there were also a few things that left me a bit cold. The biggest of these was the presentation of a secretive, dark hangar. They portrayed the MUFON sighting and investigation reports as being housed in this super secret repository called Hangar 1. They went to great pains to stress that MUFON is not a governmental organization. Yet then they turned around and drew the image of a dark, forbidding secretive repository of knowledge. They pointed out that few have been able to see this repository until now. Now, as they open the hangar to us, we can see it for the first time (or something like that). As a field investigator who has been working on these sighting investigations for nearly 20 years, that image left me a bit cold.
The show portrayed an old hangar, looking like something from the movie Roswell, or maybe some place deep within Wright Patterson AFB or Area 51. They portrayed MUFON cases as being boxes on dusty shelves from deep within these archives. It was a fascinating way to portray old cases but it had one disadvantage - it makes the organization look like part of the very coverup it is trying to unmask. Instead of a researcher studying cases, I half expected to see a man in black, wearing a suit and dark glasses, demanding to see my security clearance.
Much of the correspondence I've heard in the last few weeks tells me how this show is the official line of MUFON. They have been working on this show for years, with many hundreds of hours of painstaking research and documentation. Indeed, the show does a good job of keeping the discussion focused on science, evidence, and rational/skeptical stufy of the unexplained. While I generally echo that official line, I also have to ask - do we really want to have an official line at all? Isn't this an organization based upon open, discerning inquiry?
While I was quite impressed with the first episode, I think we need to be careful about how we project the image of our organization. We are working to be part of the search for truth, to unmask the secrets behind UFOs and close encounters. We need to be careful not to look like someone hiding those same dark secrets somewhere on the far side of the hangar.
While I was quite impressed with the first episode, I think we need to be careful about how we project the image of our organization. We are working to be part of the search for truth, to unmask the secrets behind UFOs and close encounters. We need to be careful not to look like someone hiding those same dark secrets somewhere on the far side of the hangar.
