The conference season beckons ...

Harold Burt, the author of Flying Saucers 101 (UFO Publishing, 2000), once referred to the UFO community as a kind of academic community where people delve into their own specialties and carve out their own niches. Like academics, researchers will argue with each other, sometimes quite uncivilly, over the tiniest of details. Arguments of minutia, whether significant or marginal, can be so intense that the proponents will often lose sight of the common ground and the broad areas where their ideas overlap.

Unlike an academic community, however, the UFO community brings people together who have vastly different backgrounds. There are scientists and engineers, government people, former military, pilots, former law enforcement, people from the world of spirituality, New Agers, and enthusiasts who discover they have a passion for the field. Different backgrounds often mean different skill sets and points of entry into problem-solving and research.

Different backgrounds also means that people assign different levels of importance to things they discover. Thus, you'll find someone beating the drum for one aspect of a piece of evidence while someone else will dismiss it as irrelevant or not as important as something else. As a result, there's lots of debate and often real conflict in a field where the members of the community have more in common than not. This becomes very apparent as the conference season approaches.

Unlike the academic community, however, the UFO community consumes itself with passion for something that does not officially exist. That's right, ask any skeptic or debunker and you will quickly find out, amidst peals of derisive laughter, that you might as well be wearing a tin helmet -- and people still do -- or walking around like a sandwich man with a sign that reads, "They're Here." Ask the FAA about pilot UFO sightings and they will forcefully tell you there are no official UFO reports about UFOs. Ask the military and you will get the same answer.

So if there are no UFOs, what's all the fighting about in the UFO community? How do you distinguish between the bunk of a UFO story and its credibility when there are, officially, no such things as UFOs, when all we're talking about is something that could well be a fantasy?

Find me a piece of a UFO, a chunk off the crashed Roswell craft. Is there a piece of it at Wright Patterson, at Area 51, at Eglin Air Force Base, tucked away in a museum somewhere or in an attic? Are there pieces of an alien body somewhere, maybe in Brazil or in Mexico? Is the truth in small pieces or is it so big we can't even begin to measure it?

These are the kinds of arguments that will play out during the coming year as the spate of conferences and debates ramps up as the summer winds down. We hope to be at some of them, cover more of them, and of course, alert you to them: see the conferences link over there on the right side for up-to-date info on the best of them.

Bill Birnes