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administration committed to openness and a global vision, with a commander in chief who is also a Nobel Peace Laureate, our chances of with a CHAPTER 27 UFO TABOO In August 2008, I received an e-mail from Dr. Alexander Wendt, a professor of political science at Ohio State University; he attached his twenty-six-page paper just published in the leading scholarly journal Political Theory. Co-authored with Dr. Raymond Duvall, "Sovereignty and the UFO" provided a complex, detailed, and deeply thoughtful analysis of why governments systematically ignore the UFO phenomenon despite the overwhelming evidence for its existence. [1] We've touched on various aspects of the UFO taboo within these pages, exploring also the question of secrecy andpossible threatening aspects of UFO reality, but even so, the deeper questions remain unanswered: Despite all the evidence, why is the prohibition against taking UFOs seriously so powerful and what keeps it going? In order for a new government agency to function properly and successfully, this is the final aspect that must be addressed along with the logistical and structural proposals. In my many years of work with this material, the unresolved loose ends involving issues related to the UFO taboo seemed to point to something larger and more fundamental than had been articulated, but it wasn't clear what that was. Former Air Force scientific consultant J. Allen Hynek probed this question in 1985, but was unable to resolve it. He described the problem as a strange "malady" with the power to plunge its victims into "a deadly stupor. Like a virulent apathy virus, it could easily immobilize cities and the entire country ...as though a bad fairy had administered a sleeping potion." [2] Yet he couldn't quite find the reason why it so severely afflicted those responsible for running governments and protecting citizens, and therefore he could not offer a cure. Now, the same question has been taken up by two accomplished political scientists, putting fresh eyes on the problem from within the academie community. Alexander Wendt is the author of the award-winning book Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1999), and is interested in philosophical aspects of social science and international relations. Raymond Duvall is professor and chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. His focus is on critical theories, with particular attention to power, rule, and resistance in world politics. The two met when Alexander Wendt was a student ofDuvalVs while in graduate school, and they have remained in the American public has wanted for a long time, and now that we have an administration committed success are better than ever. MILITANT AGNOSTICISM AND THE by Dr. Alexander Wendt and Dr. Raymond Duvall