Letter to Astronomy Magazine in response to their March, 2015 editorial on UFOs

New year notes - What have we accomplished?

Yeeoow - is it 2015 already?

And furthermore, have I really been involved in MUFON for nearly 20 years?

As I look at the history of my involvement with MUFON - mostly with the local UFO scene - I find myself asking two important questions: What has changed in those twenty years? and What have we accomplished in that time? 

What is different now, outside of each of us being about twenty years older? To me, the answer is that a lot of details have changed and yet, fundamentally we have accomplished very little. 

The biggest change seems to be that we now realize just how little we really understand the UFO/CE4 phenomenon. When I became increasingly involved in UFO studies - in about the 1994-1996 time frame - I imagined that simply by acquiring enough data, we could solve the problem. All we had to do was to observe and/or reconstruct flight dynamics of UFO sightings, make physical measurements of ground traces, analyze radar/visual reports, etc. And at the core has been the field investigation of sighting and encounter reports. Twenty years later MUFON is deeply involved in this - and while it has yielded a lot of data, it does not appear to have gotten us much closer to a definitive answer.

Yet while we may be little closer to a solution, I believe we have accomplished a lot in twenty years. Now, we appear to have a better idea of the scope of the problem. I believe we have established without a doubt, the reality of UFOs. Purely by the volume of reports in our database, we have developed a statistical picture of the events that make up sightings and close encounters, a pixel by pixel portrait of the phenomenon. And in all of this, we see that there are no easy answers to the fundamental question - what is going on?

In twenty years, the close encounter phenomenon has moved from being a fringe element within UFO studies to being in some ways at the core of the mystery. What is the nature of the visitor presence and why are they here? I suspect we are still no closer to truly understanding this. But we have begun to see that the answers we thought we would find were merely first steps. The problem is far more complicated than we ever imagined. 

What will a solution to the UFO/CE4 mystery require? Will we be able to understand this phenomenon within the framework of our present-day picture of how the world/universe works? Or will it require a fundamental change to at least some aspect of our world-view? I suspect it will be the latter. Once we understand the problem of UFOs and close encounters, I believe we will have learned much about the very fabric of reality, itself. And what we learn will probably be very different from what we think we know, today.

Understanding the UFO/CE4 mystery will require us to understand parapsychology. How do the visitors communicate by thought alone. Encounter reports also contain myriad ways in which they seem to be able to manipulate our reality. How is it that they can affect our minds and our perception in such strange ways?

In addition, we have come no closer to understanding their location of origin. Do they come from among the stars or are they, in some way, from right here? Is there even a distinct location of origin? Is there really a location they call home? Or is there an over-arching civilization that spans the cosmos, a universe of many homes?

To understand the visitors, we will need to understand their technology. How can they simply walk through walls, float through the air and ascend/descend over beams of light. How can their vehicles stop on a dime, hover, and then zip to a new location, all without experiencing the forces encountered in the Newtonian world? I suspect that the answer to this will shake the foundations of our present-day physics to its core - and to some extent perhaps it already has.

In twenty years, we have acquired a lot more data. We have begun to piece together a picture of our interactions with the UFO/CE4 phenomenon. But have we come any closer to a full understanding of what is really going on? In some ways, perhaps we have made some progress. But fundamentally, I believe we still have a very long way to go.