A UFO conspiracy theory is any one of many often overlapping conspiracy theories which argue that evidence of the reality of unidentified flying objects as extraterrestrial visitors is being suppressed by various governments around the world. According to the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, such theories are backed by little or no evidence despite significant research on the subject by non-governmental scientific agencies. They are therefore considered pseudoscience.
Believers commonly argue that Earth governments, especially the Government of the United States, are in communication or cooperation with extraterrestrials despite public claims to the contrary. Some of these theories claim that the government is explicitly allowing alien abduction. British researchers have found some evidence of suppression of UFO incidents by governments during the Cold War but have found no evidence of it having a conspiratorial nature. The motive is attributed to the governments' desire to avoid admitting that they could not explain the UFO phenomenon and its associated hysteria at its height.
Read more about UFO Conspiracy Theory: Origins, Popular Culture and Opinions, Chronology, Allegations of Evidence Suppression
Famous quotes containing the words conspiracy and/or theory:
“If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme. Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It’s the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and a daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act.”
—Don Delillo (b. 1926)
“The weakness of the man who, when his theory works out into a flagrant contradiction of the facts, concludes “So much the worse for the facts: let them be altered,” instead of “So much the worse for my theory.””
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)