The choices back then were itemized into eight categories, none of which included extraterrestrial spacecraft. If that's what you thought, you'd have to check "Other," which 9 percent did 66 years ago. The largest category - "No answer/Don't know" - drew 33 percent, which finished ahead of "Imagination/optical illusions/mirage" (29 percent), hoax (10 percent) and four other single-digit options.
Asking if someone 'believes' in UFOs is like asking if they believe in radar data/CREDIT: empowernetwork.com
As the years rolled by and the polling continued with its flawed and fuzzy wording, Americans who believed UFOs were "real" - and of course the true indentifieds are "real," we just don't know what the hell "real" is - yo-yo'd around 50 percent. In 1966, Gallup reported 46 percent stroked the "real" box, followed by 54 percent in 1973, 57 percent in 1978, and 49 percent in 1987. But the most notable demographic was education level; the more book-learnin', the higher the "real" percentage. In 1978, at 66 percent, college graduates checked "real" more often than high-school grads (57) and grade school (36). By 1987, the numbers were beginning to slide, although the categories were different. Fifty-six percent in the "attend college" bracket checked "real," followed by 44 percent in the "no college" demo.
This week, a Huffington Post/YouGov poll was released under the headline "48 Percent of Americans Believe UFOs Could Be ET Visitations." But, again, at least for De Void, the poll's key assertion was this: "College grads in this category show up at 37 percent while 53 percent of those who went to college but didn't graduate are among the UFO-ET believers."
Believers. Ugh. That word again. And most didn't even graduate college.
More precisely, in this case, the statement posed to 1,000 American adults was this: "I believe some people have witnessed UFOs that have an extraterrestrial origin." Thirty-seven percent of college graduates agreed, while 45 percent didn't buy it. In fact, only 30 percent of Americans with post-graduate experience agreed; 58 percent with advanced degrees checked no. The reason this matters can be found in "Sovereignty and The UFO," a must-read essay from Ohio State professor Alexander Wendt and University of Minnesota professor Raymond Duvall, which appeared in a 2008 Political Theory journal. The authors argue UFOs pose a threat to anthropocentrism - to which academia is most definitely a charter member - and that institutions traditionally on the vanguard of testing radical new ideas are, in fact, guilty of protecting and perpetuating their own sovereignty. "... The difficulties of such resistance cannot be overstated," they write. "Those who attempt it will have difficulty funding and publishing their work, and their reputations will suffer."
Despite this ostensible regression in higher education's impact on American opinion on UFOs, Friedman says readers should also consider the ambiguity theme to the HuffPost/YouGov's stats in the college-grad category. Eighteen percent checked the no opinion/don't know box, dramatically less than the 33 percent who didn't know in 1947. Combine that 18 percent with the 37 percent who - well, OK, look, you can do pretty much anything with numbers. And the polling questions are inconsistent, if not downright meaningless. And it's obvious that tenured scholar-luminaries like Lord Martin Rees, the United Kingdom's Astronomer Royal, don't have to pay attention to them anyway. Last year, in an article partially headlined "Only Kooks See UFOs," Rees razzed UFOs "because if aliens had made the great effort to traverse interstellar distances to come here, they wouldn't just meet a few well-known cranks, make a few circles in corn fields and go away again." And in a shot across the bow of potentially free-thinking heretics, the erstwhile Royal Society President Baron Rees of Ludlow warned, "No serious astronomer gives any credence to any of these stories."
"Only kooks see UFOs," repeated Friedman from his home in Canada. "How can he say that? Where'd he get that from? Where's that polling data? If you study the attitudes on UFOs by the community of academic scholars, you'll find they almost never know anything anyway."
Certainly Lord Rees' contempt for dissenting opinion reinforces the Wendt/Duvall theory. But why not settle this thing once and for all? Let's poll all the kooks and well-known cranks to see if Rees really knows his stuff. The dude obviously knows who they are.
0 comments:
Post a Comment