Extra! Extra! UFOs Are Real! From Sensationalist Reporting to Pseudoscience Communication

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Extra! Extra! UFOs Are Real! From Sensationalist Reporting to Pseudoscience Communication

Author: Alexandre Schiele – Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Canada

Did the media, in the short span of two years, successfully took on one of the most powerful organizations in the world, revealed one of the most damning conspiracies, shed light on the extent of the Deep State and finally pressed it into confessing its secrets? In 2017, former Blink-182 band member Tom Delonge created To the Star Academy (TTSA), a commercial corporation with the purported aim of furthering UFO disclosure through the medium of science fiction. On 16 December 2017, a New York Times article disclosed that the US Government secretly funded the Defense Department Advance Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), officially discontinued in 2011, which had come in possession not only of genuine UFO footage but also of suspected UFO material. On 3 August 2018, a subsequent New York Times article disclosed that the US military’s official dismissal of UFOs was a deliberate cover-up, and that it continued to secretly track and monitor the phenomena. Their one and only source: Luis Elizondo, former AATIP director and now TTSA spokesperson. In April 2019, Politico, among others, revealed that the US Navy was drafting new UFO reporting guidelines. From 31 May to 5 July, History Channel broadcast a TTSA coproduced documentary miniseries: Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation. On 17 September 2019, the US military confirmed that it was not only in possession of UFO footage, but that it actively monitored and tracked UFOs. CNN, among others, jumped to the conclusion that UFOs were both real and a potential threat to national security. Yet, the military only confirmed its tracking and monitoring of “unidentified aerial phenomena” in restricted airspace. This talk aims to raise a crucial issue: by willfully ignoring the uses and abuses of science in the wider mass media system, science communication practitioners have already undermined their very purpose.

The author has not yet submitted a copy of the full paper.

Presentation type: Insight talk
Theme: Time

Pseudoscience communication in mass media: Science communication emulation or mass media paradigm?

Author: Alexandre Schiele – Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Canada

In the past decade pseudoscience communication, characterized as non-fiction mass media content drawing condemnation from experts in related fields (Feder 2017), has become a fixture of cable television globally, and, more problematically, even of science channels: science communication programs on television account for a fraction of the audience; debunking programs, which purposely deconstruct pseudoscience claims using the scientific method, are few and far between, always in reaction to the most problematic pseudoscience claims in mass media (Lamberts & Grant 2016). Because few analyses of pseudoscience TV documentaries have been conducted (Black 2012; and Loxton 2015), this talk will present a systematic analysis. However, it will not discuss the present situation, but understand its roots by going back to the first instance of a deliberately produced pseudoscience communication series in the United States. Over the course of its original run between 1977 and 1982, the 144 episodes of In Search Of… were broadcast to every American tv set, at a time when there were only four national networks, and were received with much critical acclaim. At the same time ran a U.S. produced science communication series, although only lasting 13 episodes in fall 1980, was also received with much critical acclaim: Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. Both series were rapidly broadcast in other countries, and continue to enjoy reruns globally, becoming models for future series. Positing an audience overlap in 1980 United States, this talk will present the results of a systematic media analysis of the similarities and differences of topics, formats, narrative strategies, participants… to determine whether pseudoscience and science communication series follow different paradigms or constitute a single paradigm. This talk will demonstrate the existence of a paradigm governing (pseudo)science TV documentaries, and offer recommendations to improve the science TV documentary format, and limit its use for pseudoscience communication purposes.

The author has not yet submitted a copy of the full paper.

Presentation type: Individual paper
Theme: Time

Science/pseudoscience TV series, a comparison

Author: Alexandre Schiele – University of Quebec at Montreal (UQAM), Canada

Since the end of World War 2, science education, science mediation and science communication has been the order of the day. With the growing importance of science and technology within our societies, in all fields, it was posited that reason, science and a scientific mind were among the major conditions for continuously growing economies and continuously rising living condition. Science and scientists had a powerful voice, while everything and everyone that was deemed outside the mainstream, including pseudoscience and cranks, were confined to the fringe. Alternative values and ideas existed and strived, but they were mainly relegated to escapist fiction, and, for their most part, depreciated. However, in the past two decades or so, pseudoscience and cranks have gained a foothold in the mainstream and have now become a staple of mass media, even on historically science-orientated networks. For sure debunking still exists, but it is increasingly confined to the fringe: pseudoscience and cranks have not only become established fixtures of primetime television, they are less and less denounced, criticized or even confronted. Simply put, cranks now present their ideas without contradiction while the success of these shows bring in a steady flow of revenues if they secure a contract with a major. The result has been the marginalization of shows that even simply draw on science as a mean of entertainment.

In order to better understand this puzzle, which is unfortunately too often avoided by science communication, the object of this talk will be the comparison of the structure of a highly successful pseudoscience TV series on a mainstream network, Ancient Aliens, running continuously since 2009, to that of recent and more traditionally science-oriented TV series also playing on mainstream networks. Understanding their success may contribute to the improvement of science communication and to the counteracting of mainstream pseudoscience.

Presentation type: Individual paper
Theme: Society
Area of interest: Investigating science communication practices

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