Contactee - Response To Contactee Claims

Response To Contactee Claims

Even in ufology — itself subject to at best very limited and sporadic mainstream scientific or academic interest — contactees were generally seen as the lunatic fringe, and "serious" ufologists subsequently avoided the subject, for fear it would harm their attempts at "serious" study of the UFO phenomenon. Jacques Vallée notes that "No serious investigator has ever been very worried by the claims of the 'contactees.'"

Carl Sagan has expressed skepticism about contactees and alien contact in general, remarking that aliens seem very happy to answer vague questions but when confronted with specific, technical questions they are silent:

Occasionally, by the way, I get a letter from someone who is in “contact” with an extraterrestrial who invites me to “ask anything.” And so I have a list of questions. The extraterrestrials are very advanced, remember. So I ask things like, “Please give a short proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem.” Or the Goldbach Conjecture. And then I have to explain what these are, because extraterrestrials will not call it Fermat’s Last Theorem, so I write out the little equation with the exponents. I never get an answer. On the other hand, if I ask something like “Should we humans be good?” I always get an answer. I think something can be deduced from this differential ability to answer questions. Anything vague they are extremely happy to respond to, but anything specific, where there is a chance to find out if they actually know anything, there is only silence.

Some time after the phenomenon had waned, Temple University historian David Michael Jacobs noted a few interesting facts: the accounts of the prominent contactees grew ever more elaborate, and as new claimants gained notoriety, they typically backdated their first encounter, claiming it occurred earlier than anyone else's. Jacobs speculates that this was an attempt to gain a degree of "authenticity" to trump other contactees.