Status As A Field
Further information: List of ufologistsUfology has generally not been embraced by academia as a scientific field of study, even though UFOs were during the late 1940s and early 1950s the subject of large-scale scientific studies. The lack of acceptance of ufology by academia as a field of study means that people can claim to be "UFO researchers", without the sorts of scientific consensus building and, in many cases peer review, that otherwise shape and influence scientific paradigms. Even among scientifically inclined UFO research efforts, data collecting is often done by amateur investigators.
Famous mainstream scientists who have shown interest in the UFO phenomenon include Stanford physicist Peter A. Sturrock, astronomer J. Allen Hynek, computer scientist and astronomer Jacques F. Vallée, and University of Arizona meteorologist James E. McDonald.
Read more about this topic: Ufology
Famous quotes containing the words status and/or field:
“Anthropologists have found that around the world whatever is considered “men’s work” is almost universally given higher status than “women’s work.” If in one culture it is men who build houses and women who make baskets, then that culture will see house-building as more important. In another culture, perhaps right next door, the reverse may be true, and basket- weaving will have higher social status than house-building.”
—Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen. Excerpted from, Gender Grace: Love, Work, and Parenting in a Changing World (1990)
“The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)