Empty Bleachers: NASA Plays Pretend with UFOs and We Spend Other People's Money

"Three groups spend other people's money: children, thieves, politicians. All three need supervision." -Dick Armey

The Cost of Knowledge

One thing we enjoy doing is telling other people how to spend their money—that’s why we’re proposing that supernatural sugar daddy Robert Bigelow should toss a few bucks at the effort underway by the National UFO Historical Records Center. We can’t think of a better tax write-off than donating a chunk of change towards the establishment of an “Archive of Ufology,” where the abundance of UFO-related material can be made available to the public.

The nonprofit’s executive director, David Marler, has been in the news recently for his efforts to store an impressive collection of UFO books, documents, and other ephemera somewhere other than its current location in his enviable UFO man-cave. Why not in the Robert Bigelow Anomaly Archive Library and Reading Room? (We’ll work on the name.)

Since we’re using someone else’s bank account, why stop at UFOs? The project could expand to encompass the entire spectrum of strange topics associated with paranormal phenomena. Instead of the typical library experience that consists of sorting through a handful of outdated books about the Loch Ness Monster and a laminated copy of Whitley Strieber’s Communion, imagine entire sections dedicated to cryptozoology, remote viewing, or geomancy.

Bigelow could stop shelling out millions of dollars every year to essay contest winners and earmark those funds for RBAALRR’s own life-after-death research facility—a place where scientists could experiment without the ridicule and lack of resources that accompany these pursuits in the world of academia.

The acronym rolls right off the tongue!

Besides a healthy checkbook and enthusiasm for ‘fringe’ topics, Bigelow’s background makes him the perfect benefactor for a venture of this magnitude. He made his fortune in the world of real estate and has experience as a “general contractor, designer, developer, financier, buyer, and manager of many large real estate projects in the US.” Getting a deal done cheaply and efficiently should be no problem for someone with his credentials. High interest rates wouldn’t be a factor since the project would assuredly be a cash transaction.

In all seriousness, we applaud what he is doing with his Institute of Consciousness Studies (BICS) and the incentive those awards provide to potential researchers. He’s put his money where his mouth is many times in the past and it would be great to see him cement his legacy in, well, cement—or whatever construction material he deems most suitable since he’s the building expert.

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NASA: Never Any Space Aliens

Contrary to popular belief and media headlines, NASA’s ‘UFO study’ isn’t tasked with uncovering the ultimate nature of strange objects in the skies. Instead, the study will be studying how UFOs should be studied…by other people down the road. According to the space agency, the panel of 16 experts “will lay the groundwork for future study on the nature of UAPs.”

With a slap in the face to over 75-years of civilian research, NASA said they need more data before deeming UFOs “worthy of scientific investigation.” Despite the existence of enough printed material to fill a library (see previous story), NASA official Thomas Zurbuchen told the LA Times that their mission is to “take a field that is relatively data-poor and make it into a field that is much more data-rich.” So two libraries?

The media is doing its part to muddy the waters around the study’s intent. The misleading title of a recent LA Times op-ed sums up the prevailing pattern: “NASA studying UFOs won’t prove alien life exists. They should do it anyway.” The headline suggests that NASA’s goal is to weigh-in on the extraterrestrial debate. It’s not.

Or take this example, courtesy of the Washington Post: “NASA joins the hunt for UFOs.” The title makes one think that the space agency is planning to launch astronauts into orbit armed with Remingtons in hopes of baggin’ the big one, when in reality they’re simply thinking up new ways to collect data about UFOs.

The Observer reached out to NASA’s UFO point person, Daniel A. Evans, for clarification on the depth of their study. We haven’t heard back. We’re guessing Dan browsed our content online and decided our e-mail message belonged in his SPAM folder. 

Either way, it seems clear that NASA is holding the UFO can in their outstretched hand and are poised to drop-kick the topic as far down the launch pad as possible.

Here. You deal with this.

Take it from panel member and astrophysicist Josh Semeter, who explained to the Boston University website that the team’s job is to “to figure out a roadmap … not to actually resolve this mystery.”

As anyone who has worked on a ‘committee’ can attest, once that ‘roadmap’ is passed off to the next assemblage of experts, you can bet they will need another nine months to analyze the prior team’s conclusions. At that point, expect them to scrap the prior plan and draw up a fresh ‘roadmap’ of their own, continuing the cycle.

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Issue #12