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phenomena this is dominated three structure 1 globally by three groups: and the mainstream media. the governments, the scientific community, and the mainstream media. Although their individual members may have varying private beliefs about UFOs, in public these groups share the official view that UFOs are not "real" and should not be taken seriously—or at least no more seriously than any other curious cultural belief. For these elites, a book like this, which does take UFOs seriously, is intrinsically problematic. One manifestation of the UFO taboo is official disinterest in responding to UFOs or in finding out what they are. Since 1947, when the modern UFO era began, neither the scientific community nor governments (with the partial exception of France) have made a serious effort to determine their nature, as far as we know. Reports have been filed and a few officially investigated after the fact, but the vast majority have been ignored, and no authoritative effort has been made to survey systematically or seek out UFO phenomena. The media reinforce this disinterest by rarely covering UFOs, and when they do it is inevitably with a wink and a nod, as if to reassure us that they don't really take UFOs seriously, either. n 1 Given that modern science seems to find almost everything in nature interesting, such disinterest is puzzling. But disinterest alone does not make a taboo— which is something prohibited, not just ignored. Rather, w'hat gives the UFO this special status is that it is considered to be outside the boundaries of rational discourse. Although members of the general public might believe that UFOs exist, the authorities "know" that UFOs are merely figments of overactive imaginations, no more real than witches or unicorns. Thus, to take UFOs seriously is to call one's own seriousness into question. When UFO "believers" appear to deny empirical reality, there is not much more for the elite culture to do than either ignore or condemn them as irrational or even dangerous. In this light the UFO appears not as an "object" at all, but as a troublesome fiction that is best not talked about—in short, a taboo that prevents reasoned debate. Yet, the reality is that UFOs are not matters of belief, but facts. Many thousands of reports worldwide describe unexplained objects in the sky. Most consist only of eyewitness testimony, which might be disregarded as unreliable—and some undoubtedly actually are—but the fact that many UFO reports come from "expert witnesses" like commercial and air force pilots, air traffic controllers, cosmonauts, and scientists should give one pause. However, some UFO reports are also corroborated by physical evidence, including scientifically analyzed photo and video images, physical ground traces affecting plants and soil, effects on aircraft, and anomalous radar tracks. In modern society, physical evidence is normally considered definitive evidence of reality, objective evidence for something that has a cause in the physical world. By this criterion, then, at least some UFOs are clearly real. The question that makes them a problem a a44 saa testimony, ts out is: Could they be extraterrestrial?