EDITORIAL

TRYING TO LEARN THE LESSONS OF HISTORY...

Both this and the next RB issues are oriented to the history of ufology. We are publishing an extensive survey by Mikhail Gershtein dealing with observations of anomalous atmospheric phenomena in the territory of Russia from ancient times up until the 19th century, memoirs of the late Yuriy Fomin, the first Soviet ufologist, as well as a very interesting response by Chris Aubeck to Dr. Yuriy Morozov's article about the "Russian Roswell" (RB Vol.6, No.4). We are also reprinting the first set of UFO reports ever published in the Soviet press - as far back as 1966.

All these things are certainly interesting in themselves. The history of ufology is already being formed as a separate scientific research field (cf., for example: Tulien T. (Ed.), Proceedings of the Sign Historical Group UFO History Workshop. Scotland, CT, 1999). It is of importance both from the viewpoint of pure factuality, so to speak (many details of how the science top brass and governments of leading powers viewed the UFO phenomenon are still "behind the curtain"), and for specialists in epistemology - at least for those who understand that the process of cognition is not limited by its scientific form, and that some essential features of it may be better seen in "borderland" examples. But the main thing is not even this. The history of ufology is for contemporary ufological studies far more important than, let's say, the history of genetics for contemporary genetic studies. The point is that genetics is a normal scientific discipline, possessing its own well-established theoretical models and a set of reliable empirical data, as well as effective research methodologies and procedures. Even though it would not be totally useless for a geneticist to know some of the history of the science, he or she may, generally speaking, take the liberty of not becoming too deeply absorbed in it. There exists a certain paradigm, inside which the geneticist may work and obtain scientifically meaningful results.

As for ufology, it is definitely far from such a mature state. In fact, it simply does not exist as a scientific field of research. One of its main defects is the lack of cumulativeness - the feature so natural for "normal" scientific fields of research.

One can disagree: the set of UFO reports (together with reports about "contacts" and "abductions") is constantly growing; if this is not a cumulative effect, what is it? ...The lack of any "final solution" does not prove anything either: the problem itself is just too difficult and the resources allocated for this work are utterly inadequate to its real scope.

Yes, this data set does grow rather swiftly. But the ratio of "anecdotal evidence" ("stories") relative to objective data, as well as the ratio of "ufological entertainment" relative to ufological studies, grows even more quickly. And the proportion of reliable information in this set swiftly tends to zero.

Almost the only "relatively proved" fact about which the specialists-ufologists (CSICOP dabblers may be here excluded from consideration) agree is as follows: there exists the UFO phenomenon in the strict sense of the word, that is objects and phenomena whose nature and origin defy any explanation in terms of existing scientific conceptions. Outside this small area of concordance, we can see nothing but divergences in opinions.

Another side of "ufological non-cumulativeness" is that potentially important works of various authors (especially those not written in the English language) are swiftly forgotten and withdrawn from active use by the ufological community. This is a trait typical more of the mass media than of science.

As distinct from its Western counterpart, Soviet ufology originated - and for a long time existed - as a "pure" field of research and cognitive interest; there was in fact virtually no "entertainment". But since the collapse of totalitarism it has very quickly rushed into the arms of the yellow press, although not totally. In general, at least in this area, we have at last overtaken and surpassed the West. ("To overtake and surpass" was a very popular official slogan in Soviet times.) Nevertheless, there still exist in Russia, Ukraine, and other countries of the Community of Independent States some relics of their ufological past, which are not so typical of Western ufology (say, somewhat better tolerance of UFO studies by SETI specialists). This is why, among other things, the history of Soviet ufology provides important and interesting material for theoretico-methodological analysis.

Of course, standards of science do not function in an "automated" mode: they are interpreted and applied by human beings. And we poor humans are so prone not to see the beam in our own eyes...

Here is an illustration. On October 3-7, 2001, there was held in Moscow a symposium "Profanation of Reason: Expansion of Charlatanism and Paranormal Beliefs into Russian Culture of the Beginning of XXIst Century". It was organized jointly by CSICOP and the Commission for the Struggle Against Pseudoscience and Falsification of Results of Scientific Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences (together with the Philosophical Department of Moscow State University and the Russian Humanistic Society). We have already considered the activities of the Commission on Pseudoscience (see RB Vol. 6, No. 4, pp. 2-3); unfortunately, participation in this symposium only confirmed our main conclusion: the attitude of the Russian academic elite to "pseudoscience" is a mixture of fear and incomprehension.

Their American colleagues displayed mainly the latter feeling. By the way, Professor Paul Kurtz, when speaking at the symposium, drew a definite parallel between the aims and activities of CSICOP and those of the Commission on Pseudoscience. A very significant confession, one must agree. Again and again, the organizers of the symposium repeated like an incantation the same absurd thesis - "extraordinary claims need extraordinary proofs" - which probably seems to them a piece of extraordinary wisdom and the quintessence of the principles of science... Yes, it sounds good and even poetical... but it has actually nothing to do with science at all. A simple counter-example: can you find a more extraordinary claim than, say, the idea that the electron is both a particle and a wave? And nonetheless, it may be proved with the help of quite "ordinary" - even not too sophisticated - physical experiments. It is therefore quite evident that any scientific claim, however unusual, needs for its acceptance nothing but a normal scientific proof. Otherwise, science could not exist at all.

The criteria according to which a claim is accepted or rejected by science cannot vary with the contents of the claim, still less with its supposed "level of extraordinariness". If the "rules of the game" are changed at will, depending on whether or not the "judges" like the claims under consideration, the result of the "trial" may be easily predicted. And this situation can be interpreted in only one way: inside contemporary big science there has arisen a sort of pseudoscientific inquisition based on the axiom of its own infallibility and completely forgetting about any self-tests.

A ufologist may consider the current state of world ufology to be even worse than does a CSICOP member (or a member of the Commission on Pseudoscience) - but he at least knows from his own ufological research experience that the UFO phenomenon is real and no fantasy. It can't be helped if a self-styled scientific inquisitor remains unaware of this fact or prefers to ignore it. After all, a specialist in cosmology will hardly seriously argue with, say, a philologist who, due to some strange reason, "dislikes" cosmological studies. As the saying goes, ignorance is not a justification.

...It would probably be somewhat premature to state that we are already able to conclude from the works published in RB by now, where ufology went wrong on its historical path. But hopefully, these works could provide some food for the mind. The bent of contemporary ufology for entertainment or even for social psychology, being understandable, remains nevertheless definitely blameworthy. If there is "at the center" of the UFO phenomenon something "tangible", then at the center of UFO studies there must be search for and investigation of this objective component.

What is needed for this? First of all, ufology requires its own paradigm - a model for posing and solving its research tasks shared by the whole ufological community (or at least, by its scientifically-oriented part). It has remained for too long in a "pre-paradigmal" state. Of course, at this stage of investigations we do not need the "only correct" model of the phenomenon - but we need an effective approach to its study. Perhaps, investigating the abductees could be effective in this sense: that is, the investigators could have found, say, genetically altered DNA as a result of alien intervention in human organisms. But up to now we have nothing of this sort. "Stories" in themselves cannot be an empirical basis for scientific research - even though they may "give a push" to such research.

...Yet, perhaps somewhat inconsistently, I should confess that we at RIAP do not consider the "stories" as quite useless. And even more inconsistently, we open in this RB issue a new section - Testimonies - intending to publish in it "pure stories" - though lacking objective corroborations, but internally consistent, informative, and strange enough to interest anomalists. In this RB issue we are publishing a letter written by Yuriy Agarkov, a resident of the Russian city Nizhniy Tagil, who describes a highly unusual incident that happened to him 43 years ago in the steppes of Kazakhstan; in the next RB issue a report will be published by Valeriy Kukushkin, a well-known Russian anomalist, about a visit of a strange being to his apartment.

Can these stories be of any help and value to ufology and anomalistics in general? I think yes. We can hope to find in them some significant parallels to other similar stories ("meaningful regularities", so to speak), as well as an occasion to stimulate the "potential of innovations" inside our research community. True science advances by combining the freedom of imagination with the discipline of logical thinking in a sort of dialectical unity. To suggest the "impossible" postulates of quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity was, probably, even more difficult than to logically develop them further into the well-balanced theories confirmed by experiments. But the main thing is that these postulates make such a development possible. Some alternative conceptions in physics of this day and age are, alas, lacking just this essential trait. Perhaps we ufologists do also happen to lack in our theoretical considerations not only "good logic", but first of all "good imagination".

— Vladimir V. Rubtsov 

To download RB, Vol. 7, No. 4, containing this paper, please click here:
http://www.geocities.com/riap777/EPRB-74.pdf (380 KB)

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