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touch since then. Beginning around 1999, Wendt spent about five years reading and thinking about the UFO subject on his own. "I tried to figure out what's really real in this context, given how much nonsense, disinformation, and conspiracy theorizing there is out there," he told me. In 2004 he started talking to his former advisor about his ideas and their relevance to political theory, and the decision to explore the taboo emerged from these discussions. "I initially approached him with a focus on why there was official secrecy about UFOs," Wendt explains. "Talking with him helped me see that secrecy was just a symptom of the problem, which goes much deeper.”’ At first, Duvall was skeptical at best, he says, having given no thought to UFOs before Wendt initiated a conversation about them. "It's probably fair to say that I embodied the taboo," he wrote in an e-mail "Working on this paper with Alex has transformed my thinking”. The two scholars deconstruct the arguments made by debunkers that perpetuate the cultural and political position that UFOs should not be taken seriously, and they examine the deep-seated fear of the taken seriously, and they examine the deep-seated fear of the extraterrestrial hypothesis that underlies such irrational skepticism. Yet, ironically, they say that they were directly impacted by this very taboo themselves after publishing "Sovereignty and the UFO." In this sense, the paper became a "natural experiment/ providing a textbook illustration of their thesis. "As the first article taking UFOs seriously published in a social scientific journal in decades—if ever—one might have expected it to generate some controversy," Wendt says. "Academics certainly get into controversies about much less, and they are usually interested in debating such papers. But to our knowledge, none of our fellow social scientists, in the English-speaking world at least, has yet taken up the paper's challenge. This is disappointing, but this dismissal is at least consistent with the paper's hypothesis that there is indeed a taboo on this topic which prevents reasoned debate."Dr. Wendt and Dr. Duvall agreed to write a new essay specifically for this volume, incorporating their ideas from the first article into one designed for nonacademic readers, with some new thoughts added. I hope this piece will help address lingering questions about the roots of the fundamental disconnect between the powerful evidence for UFOs and the disinterest of our government and scientists toward investigating them. It should also disarm the debunkers who routinely come up with defensive arguments that show they have not actually studied the facts, in itself an illustration of the taboo in action. Since the paper distills these arguments and dispenses with them, perhaps we can all gain a new perspective on these debunkers and adopt a more rational approach to the disconcerting questions raised by the mystery of UFOs. There is a taboo on this book—the UFO taboo. Not in popular culture, of course, where interest in UFOs abounds and websites and the culture, of course, where interest in UFOs abounds and websites proliferate, but in elite culture—the structure of authoritative belief and practice that determines what "reality" officially is. With respect to UFO where interest in UFOs abounds and