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inspire confidence that we know the complete universe of cases. This secretive pattern of behavior i is of course grist for the mill of "4 weet a conspiracy theorizing, since it naturally raises the question "What is the government trying to hide?" However, we are concerned not with the particular content but only the effect of official secrecy, which helps to reinforce the UFO taboo by removing potentially contrary knowledge from the system. Our personal view is that far from hiding the truth about aliens the state is more likely hiding its ignorance, but who knows? In a context of UFO secrecy, personal belief is all we have. The last mechanism is discipline, by which we mean techniques for ordering thought and action that rely not on rational appeals to science, but more nakedly on social pressures and power. A particularly prominent form in the UFO context is the social dismissal of people who express public "belief in UFOs—through ridicule, gossip, shunning, public condemnation, and/or character assassination—-so that it is not just the idea of UFOs that is dismissed but the person advocating the idea whose credibility is called into question. Given individuals' desires for approval, reputation, and professional advancement, an expectation of this kind of discipline leads to self-censorship, fueling the "spiral of silence" about UFOs that makes it so hard to speak out in the first place. public "belief in These are powerful mechanisms, and as such some might say that with respect to the UFO taboo, "resistance is futile." Yet the taboo has at least three weaknesses that make it, and the anthropocentric structure of tule that it sustains, potentially unstable. One is the UFO itself. Despite authoritative efforts to deny their reality, UFOs stubbornly keep showing up, generating an ongoing need to transform them into non-objects. Modern governments might not recognize the UFO, but in the face of continuing anomalies, maintaining such nonrecognition requires work. Another weakness lies in the different knowledge interests of science and the state. While the two are aligned today in authoritative anti-UFO discourse, ultimately the state is interested in maintaining its skeptical narrative about UFOs as certainly true, whereas science recognizes, at least in principle, that its truths can only be tentative. The presumption in science is that reality has the last word, which creates the possibility of scientific knowledge countering the state's dogma. And then there is liberalism, the essential core of modern governance. Even as it produces rational subjects who know that "belief in UFOs is absurd, liberalism justifies itself as a discourse that produces free- thinking subjects who might doubt it. The kind of resistance that can best exploit these weaknesses might be called "militant agnosticism." By "agnostic" here we mean that no And then is the essential of modern core UFOs—through ridicule, Resistance Through Militant Agnosticism