Editing UFOs An International Scientific Problem (section)

== Summary and Conclusion ==
Returning now to more positive considerations, let me stress that my own
studies of the UFO problem have forced me to the conclusion that it is an
international scientific problem of potentially enormous importance.
In my view, the hypothesis of an extraterrestrial origin for UFOs
appears (via argument by elimination of many alternative hypotheses) to be
the most satisfactory hypothesis to account for the impressive body of obser-
vational evidence that has been accumulated over the past two decades of UFO
sightings. Space has not permitted my confronting here the many obvious
challenges that such a position properly evokes; I have confronted some of
those elsewhere in cited references. Others are simply unanswerable in terms
of presently available information. That's scarcely a new situation in the
history of science.

If there is admitted to be even a very slim possibility that UFOs are
extraterrestrial surveillance devices of some type (and I incline to that
view at present, as do many other serious students of the UFO problem),
then it should be obvious that a very energetic scientific investigation
of that possibility ought to be launched. Instead, to date, world scien-
tific opinion still leans predominantly in the direction that UFOs con-
stitute a "nonsense problem", a bothersome host of reports of misidentified
natural phenomena. However, one finds that the spokesmen who most strongly
emphasize that view are (with almost no exceptions) quite uninformed as to
the real nature of the UFO evidence. Ridicule and official mishandling of
the problem have kept the true nature of the UFO evidence well out of sight.
As one American writer recently quipped, "The American public is not telling
the Air Force the truth about UFOs." This has been true on a global scale, -□
while the mass of evidence has grown steadily greater.

New, independent, vigorous UFO investigatory programs are sorely needed. q
Investigators in countries other than the U.S. may have a superior opportu- g
nity to make progress towards clarification of the UFO problem because they u
will not be working against the long-standing prejudices so visible in
official U.S. handling of the subject. Thus, I urge that programs such as &
the newly created Canadian UFO investigation at the University of Toronto
be instituted in other countries in all parts of the world, to delve vigor-
ously and imaginatively into the fascinating and potentially world-shaking rn
problem of the Unidentified Flying Objects.
UFOs are, in my opinion, the greatest international scientific problem o
of our times.

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