Encounters: Are people really skeptical of UFOs of just sh!t-scared?

“I’m—I’m shit scared. I’m terrified,”  Kudzanai says in “Believers,” the second episode of Netflix’s four-part docuseries Encounters. That’s how he felt following his sighting. He and his brother Tapfu were among the over 60 students who reported seeing a UFO and mysterious being during break time at the Ariel School in Ruwa, Zimbabwe, in 1994.

But did they? Dallyn, another former student, says they couldn’t have because he made it up. He wanted to get out of Shona lessons, a Zimbabwean native language. So he pointed to a rock and said, “Look! It’s an alien!” Before he knew it, all the other kids claimed to really see something.

At least, that’s his story now. Back then, he admits he went along with it when reporters showed up to cover the mass sighting. Professor John Mack, a renowned Pulitzer Prize-winning American psychiatrist, even came to talk with them about it.

Not that the other students knew they were lying or had been tricked. Dallyn was the only student who said the mass sighting didn’t actually happen. The rest said it did. They knew what they saw that day and agreed with Tapfu’s assessment: “It was not a rock.”

It also profoundly impacted their lives, which former student Emma poetically articulated.

“In a time where you are growing up,” she said. “And you’re not being believed about a really important thing, that meant that when I had other important things happen to me, or…or just life happen, I found it very difficult to then open up to anybody else and tell them about anything that happened.”

Because for the Ariel students, like almost all of the witnesses in the docuseries, people didn’t believe them. Worse, parents and other authority figures completely dismissed them entirely.

That was one of the common themes in all four episodes of Encounters. Why are witnesses immediately ridiculed? Is it really skepticism that elicits dismissive reactions and a lack of focused research, or is it fear? And why hasn’t there been a more serious investigation into the subject until recently?

God vs. Aliens

“Why should this be so remarkable when we claim to believe in—in God and all kinds of spirits,” Dr. John Mack asked in episode 2. “And yet, there’s something about this one, which takes a form that is particularly alien to us.”

It wasn’t clear whether he was talking about the Ariel School case or sightings in general, but he raised a good point. Why is it so easy for people to believe in their preferred religion’s deity (or deities) and to poo-poo alien life?

“Why is everyone thought crazy if they have…if some intelligence is coming to them, and they’re honestly experiencing that this is the case?” Dr. John Mack also asked.

Sadly, Dr. Mack passed away in 2004, but if he was still alive, he might have found former New York Times contributor Ralph Blumenthal’s answer intriguing. Blumenthal admitted that the biggest risk he faced in his field covering UFO stories was ridicule and not being taken seriously. Something that’s true no matter who you are, whether you’re a witness, reporter, UFO hunter, researcher, or even a Harvard psychiatrist who worked with alleged alien abductees.

A lot has to do with the fact that UFOs are a “disreputable subject,” as Blumenthal put it. He was the one who published a New York Times article in 2017 that exposed the Pentagon’s secret program investigating unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP). In a way, that article might’ve been the catalyst for NASA’s recent UAP research.

Speaking of UFOs vs. UAPs, the government prefers the latter acronym —and seems desperate to get the new one to stick. However, guess what? UFOs aren’t going anywhere, either in the vernacular or out of people’s imaginations. Some of the government experts interviewed used them interchangeably. Most everyone else, especially the witnesses, stuck to UFOs.

Anyway, Blumenthal contends it’s “not by accident” that dealing with UFOs draws ridicule.

Ridicule and Stigma

“Our government, unfortunately, in the ’50s, made a policy decision to—to ridicule people who…who had sightings of UFOs and came forward with these fantastic stories. And that stigma has lasted to this day,” he said.

Astrophysicist and former NASA Research scientist Dr. Kevin Knuth echoed these same sentiments in episode 3.

“You know, for our whole lives, and our parents’ whole lives, since the 1940s, we’ve been told by authorities and scientists that this is ridiculous. That this is nonsense. And I think that’s the main reason why you don’t have many serious, or until recently, you have had very few serious scientists studying this.”

He also admitted that he was worried about getting into it because of the stigma. Colleagues even approached him, questioning why he would. But as he pointed out, we “completed the first stages of the exploration of our solar system” and are now moving beyond that. Robots are even working on Mars. So why would we think it’s impossible for aliens to visit us? Why is our first reaction to dismiss it as fantasy?

Credible Witnesses

There’s very little hard evidence to prove UFOs exist. Sure, there’s no shortage of grainy or out-of-focus photos and videos. There are also thousands of eyewitness accounts. But actual verifiable evidence is lacking. Which is part of why it’s so easy to dismiss witnesses.

Plus, some are more believable than others. For the most part, the majority of those in the Encounters episodes are credible. There seemed to be at least one each episode who registered at least a little on my BS meter. Even then, I felt compelled to give them the benefit of the doubt.

The only one who I flat-out called “Shenanigans!” on was Miho Ninagawa, a woman who claims to be an alien who speaks “light language,” or what some call “space language.”

“When I speak it, I take the wavelengths I receive and output them into sound,” she said. “Sometimes it’s musical. Other times, it’s words, like…” and then she proceeded to speak gibberish.

She seemed nice —and sincere— enough, but her claims about who she is and her talents raised a huge red flag. Sorry. Wasn’t in the market for what she was trying to sell.

But I couldn’t help but wonder what Dr. Mack’s assessment of her would’ve been. However, even Dr. Mack’s credibility came into question.

Rattling the Cage of a Worldview

Dr. Mack’s was tested, too. His lawyer, Eric MacLeish, explained he represented Dr. Mack when Harvard tried to revoke his tenure.

“Harvard’s position was that John had committed malpractice,” MacLeish explained. “That John should not have accepted these patients without treating them with either medication or intensive psychotherapy, that these patients were psychotic, and that by listening to them and not discounting what they claim to have experienced, John was harming them.”

“I’m pretty thick-skinned about it,” Dr. Mack said about it. “And I’d certainly expected, you know, if you’re rattling the cage of a worldview with something that’s just not supposed to be, you’re gonna…the empire will strike back.”

In the end, they didn’t revoke his tenure.

He also made a compelling argument defending not only his position on the matter but also those making claims.

“Hundreds of thousands of people, all over the country, from various polls, we know, maybe even millions of people, have had very similar experiences,” he said in an old Oprah interview. “They don’t know each other. The details that they’re describing were not in the media. They have nothing to gain by it. They feel ashamed about it. That’s number one. When I also heard that this was occurring in children as young as two or three years old, that ruled out personality explanations. And, as said before, the people, when examined, are not psychiatrically disturbed. So the only thing that behaves like that is real experience.”

Patterns

“There’s a pattern here that…that, as a psychiatrist, I can’t explain,” Dr. Mack said in one of his interviews from back in the day. He was talking about eyewitness accounts and experiences, but nanotechnology engineer Robert Powell, an expert from the first episode, spotted a major one.

“Messengers” examined a 2008 case from Stephenville, a small town in Central Texas. Over 300 witnesses reported seeing strange, fast-moving, inexplicable lights in the night sky.

Powell explained he has a degree in chemistry and was an engineering manager in the semiconductor field. He’s studied UFO phenomenon for the last 16 years “with the goal of bringing science to the subject.” Like quantifiable, hard science.

He was tenacious in his analysis of the Stephenville sightings. Not only did he interview witnesses, but he mapped their sightings and compared that to radar data he’d retrieved from the FAA using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). That was both impressive and compelling because he was able to verify something was in the sky at the time and place people reported them.

“It’s not very often that you get radar data that just corroborates exactly what a witness said in terms of geographic locations and time,” he said.

That’s why what was noted at the end of the episode was baffling: “Following this case, the FAA changed its official policy and no longer releases data to the public.”

Speed Discrepancy

“It showed it in black and white that there was something flying out there,” Erath County Constable Lee Roy Gaitan, one of those who saw the Stephenville lights, said. “And that the speeds that these things were traveling are, like, speeds that we cannot do here on Earth.”

Gaitan described the lights shot off at a “blazing speed.” Many others who saw them also described them as “fast-moving.” Powell’s radar data confirmed they weren’t exaggerating. Whatever it was zoomed at 1,900 miles per hour.

However, Gaitan’s assessment isn’t entirely accurate. Humans have produced aircraft capable of even faster flight than 1,900 MPH. According to Stratos Jet, “The Lockheed YF-12, for example, was a 1960s fighter jet that managed to reach a top speed of 2,274 mph.” And NASA and the USAF operate the X-15, which Stratos points out “may be the fastest plane in the world, with speeds at 4,520 mph and Mach 5.93.”

Fear of the Unknown and a Difficult State of Ignorance

Dr. Knuth estimated “there’s on the order of 15 experts in the world” on the topic of UFOs/UAPs. (Clearly, he’s never been to a UFO con, where there’s never any shortage of self-proclaimed expert ufologists.)

But why aren’t there more scientists studying it? Lack of opportunity? No funding? Or is the stigma of it and the ridicule that follows that potent?

“It suggests that there’s something maybe deeper than the stigma, and all of the obvious things, that are preventing people from studying this,” Dr. Knuth said. “That maybe people don’t want to know what this phenomena is. Maybe people don’t wanna know the truth. Maybe it scares them a bit, somehow.”

Or maybe it scares them a lot. Particularly because we have no idea what UFOs are. After the compelling evidence that came out as a result of Blumenthal’s Times article, Dr. Knuth thought, “Scientists need to be studying this.” So he decided to.

But he pointed out that we make a lot of assumptions with very little fact when it comes to UAPs. Or, as he put it, “We’re in a difficult state of ignorance.”

“We don’t know what they are,” he said. “We don’t know what their intentions are. Intention is everything, right?”

So are assumptions, and in all the episodes, people claimed to know what they were. The kids in the Zimbabwe case believed the visitors were trying to warn us to treat our planet better. In Japan, they shared a similar eco-conscious messenger sentiment. However, they also viewed them as almost a parent-like authority figure. Even faeries were floated as a theory.

At the end of the day, it’s the unknown and “what if” that scares us. Because we don’t really know what it’s all about, what it means for us, or how to handle it.

Answers in Sight

Dr. Knuth felt that if more scientific groups seriously engage in the study of UAP/UFO phenomenon, we’ll find an answer. And it won’t take long. He hypothesized it could take as little as a decade to do it. And that “it’ll change everything” when it happens.

But I think that’s what people fear most. The change. Because it will change everything, including complicating how governments control the masses.

Or are they worried about not being able to protect us? Either way, it will upend life as we’ve always known and enjoyed it. That seems like an excellent incentive for governments to instill a policy of ridicule.

Check-In

Do you listen to people with UFO stories with an open mind or automatically label them a nut job? Or does it depend on the storyteller?