LET’S SAY YOU'RE interested in UFOs. It’s a fun hobby, but you’d like to monetize your efforts. What do you do?
Historically, your avenues were limited. There was entertainment—science fiction movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind 1977) or E.T. 1982), purportedly nonfiction books like Chariots of the Gods? 1968) or The Mothman Prophecies 1975). There was journalism, sometimes serious but mostly sensationalist. There were conferences and festivals where you could make money with attendance fees and UFO-themed merchandise.
The final and far less common route was to get someone, preferably someone with a lot of money, to pay you to study the subject.
In 1995 that someone was the Nevada businessman Robert Bigelow. He had already been funding various individual UFO researchers, but that year he decided to set up his own research organization, the National Institute for Discovery Science NIDS). He invited several luminaries of UFO research to participate, including Hal Puthoff, Jacques Vallée, and John Mack. Not simply a UFO organization, NIDS also probed the question of whether there is life after death. Its hotline and later website) would take your reports of mysterious black flying triangles, but it also solicited reports of cattle mutilations and visits from entities”—essentially ghosts.
In a rather odd government decision, the Federal Aviation Administration told pilots who wanted to report a UFO sighting that they should direct it to NIDS.
In 1996, NIDS started focusing on a place called Skinwalker Ranch. A nondescript cattle operation in northeastern Utah, the property was owned by the Sherman family, who for a year had been telling amazing tales of UFO sightings, cattle mutilations, and visits from mysterious entities. It was the trifecta, and so Bigelow bought the ranch and installed a full-time team of NIDS researchers.
この記事は Reason magazine の December 2022 版に掲載されています。
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この記事は Reason magazine の December 2022 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
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