TWILIGHT OF THE SKEPTICS

As the Veil of UFO Secrecy Starts to Lift, Some Will Still Refuse to Look

David Bates
Point of Contact
4 min readAug 3, 2023

--

Norwegian artist Edvard Munch’s 1893 painting, ‘The Scream.’ Maybe he just saw a UFO?

Over the last few years I’ve grown accustomed to having frustrating and occasionally heated conversations with UFO skeptics and debunkers, but I had one earlier this week that took my breath away.

But first, a story about a UFO.

The tale is told by J.F. Martel, who co-hosts with Phil Ford the excellent arts and philosophy podcast Weird Studies. More than any other podcast, Weird Studies has served as a valuable tool for me in learning how to grapple with UFOs and, perhaps more to the point, how to think about a world in which UFOs and the paranormal exist.

Weird Studies is not, strictly speaking, a UFO or even an occult podcast; in the 152 flagship episodes they’ve released, only one has been entirely dedicated to the topic. In a few others (including the one released Wednesday) UFOs have come into conversations about other topics.

Over the years, Martel has occasionally described his experience seeing a UFO as a youth while traveling by bus with his classmates and their teacher chaperone. The sighting was, one gathers, quite remarkable.

Long story short: The object, or whatever it was that floated alongside the bus during a night drive, was eventually…

--

--