House divided

Is a multi-discipline approach to the study of UFOs even possible?

Likely as not, Grant Cameron’s now much-discussed epiphany that consciousness is at the core of the UFO phenomenon has made him no friends within the “nuts and bolts” research community, but he isn’t the first credible ufologist to question the strict materialist paradigm … and to lose credibility thereby.

Physician and Fortean generalist Dr. Andrija Puharich, for example, coined the terms “Mobile Center of Consciousness” (MCC) and “inergy” (intelligent energy) to describe the disembodied entities he and his colleagues contacted during the 50s, 60s and 70s at his Roundtable facility near Camden, Maine.

Harvard psychologist and abductee researcher Dr. John Mack wrote that “consciousness itself may be the primary creative force in the universe,” and renowned ETH proponent Dr. Jacques Vallee touched on this idea in Messengers of Deception (p. 48) when he wrote, “The abduction experience and the contact experience, which seems at first to suggest an extraterrestrial source for the UFOs, can result, I think, from deeper, subtler processes of the human mind.”

All well and good, you might say, but what of it?

Here’s National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS) team leader Dr. Colm Kelleher writing in The Hunt for Skinwalker (p. 207):

The “nuts and bolts” UFO research people regard the “psychosocial” researchers with disdain. UFO researchers in general regard the cryptozoologists with contempt. Cryptozoologists who embrace the possibility of a paranormal connection to Bigfoot sightings are generally viewed with derision because of the prevailing view that Sasquatch is an undiscovered primate species, not an interdimensional playmate of alien beings. Likewise, the paranormal researchers view the UFO researchers with disdain, while the ghost hunters keep their distance from everybody else.

In other words, despite countless reports of multiple paranormal phenomena occurring simultaneously, cooperation across the various disciplines is rare. Kelleher wishes it were otherwise, but folks like Cameron, those who broaden their perspective to include “competing” theories, generally are regarded more as defectors or capitulators than as pioneers.