The Internet has crashed UFOs. One of the best observations of the year. Excerpt:
The modern UFO era began with Kenneth Arnold's 1947 UFO sighting near Mount Rainier, Washington. National interest in the subject waxed and waned in the following years -- sometimes spiking dramatically, as during the Washington, D.C. "flap" of 1952 or the Michigan sightings in 1966 (which captured the attention of Gerald Ford). Steven Spielberg popularized the modern mythology of UFOs in 1977's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." And with the publication of Whitley Strieber's "Communion" in 1987, alien abduction moved from a freakish, nutty concern to a mainstream phenomenon. Eccentrics had claimed to be in mental contact with aliens since the fifties, and alien abductions had been a part of the American UFO scene since the Betty and Barney Hill case of 1961, but Strieber's runaway bestseller fused the traditional alien abduction tale to a chilling narrative and a modern spiritual sensibility -- thus achieving huge credibility for our friends with the wraparound peepers.
Yet in recent years, interest in the UFO phenomenon has withered. Oh, the websites are still up, the odd UFO picture is still taken, and the usual hardcore UFO advocates make the same tired arguments about the same tired cases, but the thrill is gone. What happened? Why did the saucers crash?
The Internet showed this particular emperor to be lacking in clothes. If UFOs and alien visitations were genuine, tangible, objective realities, the Internet would be an unstoppable force for detecting them. How long could the vast government conspiracy last, when intrepid UFO investigators could post their prized pictures on the Internet seconds after taking them? How could the Men in Black shut down every website devoted to scans of secret government UFO documents? How could marauding alien kidnappers remain hidden in a nation with millions of webcams?
Just as our technology for finding and understanding UFOs improved dramatically, the manifestations of UFOs dwindled away. Despite forty-plus years of alleged alien abductions, not one scrap of physical evidence supports the claim that mysterious visitors are conducting unholy experiments on hapless victims. The technology for sophisticated photograph analysis can be found in every PC in America, and yet, oddly, recent UFO pictures are rare. Cell phones and instant messaging could summon throngs of people to witness a paranormal event, and yet such paranormal events don't seem to happen very often these days. For an allegedly real phenomenon, UFOs sure do a good job of acting like the imaginary friend of the true believers. How strange, that they should disappear just as we develop the ability to see them clearly. Or perhaps it isn't so strange.
The Internet taught the public many tricks of the UFO trade. For years, hucksters and mental cases played upon the credulity of UFO investigators. Bad science, shabby investigation, and dubious tales from unlikely witnesses characterized far too many UFO cases. But the rise of the Internet taught the world to be more skeptical of unverified information -- and careful skepticism is the bane of the UFO phenomenon.
