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likelihoods And when there is such are objective likelihoods are anyone's guess. And when there is such "reasonable doubt," scientific hypotheses should not be rejected a priori. Far from proving that UFOs are not extraterrestrial, in short, current science proves only its ignorance. If the proper application of science demands that at present we be agnostic about whether any UFOs have an extraterrestrial origin, neither believing nor rejecting this, then the taboo on trying to find out what UFOs are is deeply puzzling. After all, if any UFOs were discovered to be from somewhere else in the universe, it would be one of the most important events in human history, making it rational to investigate even a remote possibility. It was just such reasoning that led the U.S. Congress for a time to fund the SETI program looking for evidence of life around distant stars. So why not fund the systematic study of UFOs, which are relatively close by and at least sometimes leave physical evidence? Even for those for whom the question of extraterrestrials is not on the table, what about simple scientific curiosity? Why not study UFOs, just like human beings study everything else? Our thesis is that the origins of this taboo are political. As political scientists, we are concerned with a possible connection between the need to dismiss the UFO and the way in which modern peoples organize and govern their societies. The inability to see clearly and talk rationally about UFOs seems to be a symptom of authoritative anxiety, a socially subconscious fear of what the reality of the UFO might mean for modern government. mm a The threat is threefold. On the most obvious level, acceptance of the possibility that the UFO is ¢ruly unidentified, and that therefore an unknown, very powerful "other" might actually exist, represents a potential physical threat. Clearly, if some other civilization has the ability to visit Earth, then it has vastly superior technology to human beings, which raises the possibility of colonization or even extermination. As such, the UFO calls into question the state's ability to protect its citizens from such an invasion. Second, governments may also be reacting to the possibility that a confirmation of extraterrestrial presence would create tremendous pressure for a world government, which today's territorial states would be loath to form. The sovereign identity of modern states depends on their difference from one another. Anything that required subsuming this difference into a global sovereignty would threaten the fundamental structure of these states, quite apart from the risk of physical destruction. Third, however, and in our view most important, the extraterrestrial possibility calls into question what we call the anthropocentric nature of modern sovereignty. By this we mean that, in the modern world, political organization everywhere is based on the assumption that only human The Threat of the UFO