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Colleges should embrace UFOs as a field of study

UFOs should be a legitimate field of college study, says an anthropology professor from western New York State. What do think?
Written by John Dodge, Contributor

Could a bachelor of science in UFOs be in your future? If an anthropology professor from western New York has his way, you could have that option. By the way, UFOs stands for unidentified flying objects.

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credit: pisopradio.com

In an interview in the Buffalo News, professor Philip Haseley of Niagara County Community College is dead serious and why the hell not:

“It happens to millions of people [around the world],” he said in the Buffalo News article. “It’s about time we looked into this as a worthy area of study. It’s important that the whole subject be brought out in the open and investigated.”

In Googling UFOs, New York State appears to be something of a hotbed of UFO interest. There's Hasely's group, the Western New York Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) as well as nyufo.com to fire the passions of the Empire State's UFOers. MUFON is a nationwide network of chapters and western New York appears to be one of them.

Some might argue that UFOs hardly qualify as pure science, but if college curriculum designers held to that notion, religion and philosophy courses would have to jettisoned. In short, Haseley's support for college study of UFO shouldn't be controversial.

Rather, it just should be and could help scientifically explain sightings and rule out the false positives. Maybe, they're all false positives! We won't know until we look them scientifically.

We've been sending radio signals into space for years and so far, no intelligent being near as we can tell has pinged us back. That's according to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI) whose mission is to reach out to whatever intelligent life might be out there. From SETI's about page:

"Finding evidence of other technological civilizations however, requires significant effort. Currently the Center for SETI Research develops signal-processing technology and uses it to search for signals from advanced technological civilizations in our galaxy."

Indeed, SETI's mission is difficult so not why enlists some help. Maybe radio waves sent deep into space won't be the first to contact with intelligent life that doesn't live on earth. It could be somebody sitting in their back yard on a summer day, beer in hand.

Interest in UFOs is huge and includes luminaries such as Nancy and Ronald Reagan, Laurence Rockefeller and T.E. Laurence. Haseley is onto something.

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This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com

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