A Commentary by Betty Baxter

NICAP in its day established a Stalinist structure second to anything to be found in old East Germany before the Berlin Wall came down. In bureaucracy alone NICAP at least equaled that of its old enemy, the anti-UFO Condon Committee. Ann Druffell’s recent book Firestorm is the highest expression of the NICAP viewpoint: we hear the rational, scientific voice of the academic class and sociology of the 1960s to the 1980s. Firestorm is a history of the battle royals between bureaucratic organizations more than anything else. With its terribly old-fashioned science and po-faced Maoism of such people as station-master Commissar as Richard Hall and Prussian iron-master Jan Aldrich, the mental level of NICAP was that of the well-meaning bourgeois sixth form master who gave stern warnings about eccentrics and imposters. Loathed and thrown out of court were the “fantasists” such as George Adamski and Howard Menger. In this the UFO “believers” of NICAP were as savage as any of the opposing sceptics. Maoist-style fashen village “interrogations” were carried out by NICAP teams who interrogated UFO claimants as savagely as any “cult.” This was done in name of a science that was already grown obsolete in the very practical minds of the “objective” researchers, who often treated people who had had a most disturbing UFO experience like Pavlov’s researchers treated salivating dogs.

It is to be noted that there are no sections on abductions or alien “presence” in the NICAP records. People who spoke of these things were regarded largely as “noise in the system” a favorite metaphor derived from the engineering and technological trades of the straight-laced lower middle class with little or no sophisticated higher education in Arts, Humanities, and Literature. To people from the Trades School of “practical” universities such words as vision, or imagination, or such phrases as “Culture and Imagination,” or “Concept, Information, and Thought” would be likely to make their eyes glaze over. Such were represented by the physicist James McDonald whose scientifico-mechanistic religion overlapped that of Condon in that both puritans were full of mid-twentieth century Protestant fear that somewhere someone might be getting something for nothing.

The resulting collision destroyed them both.

As far as the USA was concerned, it was another case where the corporate systems analysis “solution” had failed. The rigidity of the elementary science as practiced by NICAP investigators ensured its collapse in the post-Condon Postmodern world. It was perhaps the last great pre-web pre-media UFO organization, when faith in the microscope and telescope were still as firm as that of a Victorian scientist in the butterfly net, specimen-jar, and microscope. Finally, time left this ruined 1950s NICAP architecture behind, devoid as it was of Chaos, Fuzziness, Complexity and Web, Quantum, and information Theory. We pass by the NICAP web site now as we pass by sealed-off and abandoned Tube stations with peeling notices on the walls of twenty-year-old feature films.

NICAP’S web site was practically abandoned some years ago, and to return to it is to enter Miss Haversham’s discarded wedding preparations in Dicken’s Great Expectations. There are cobwebs everywhere, as if over an aborted celebration. Trunks full of countless abandoned case histories read like old Baedekers of the past, and the proud data bases are culturally speaking the very last Victorian railway stations of the mind. These old engine-heads could not make the transfer to an Age where the idea of falsehood was being replaced by the idea of an event not being allowed to happen. In the Postmodern world scales of allowances were replacing facts in a theatre of evolving metaphors.

NICAP had a reactionary methodology, intellectual insularity, and rather provincial mechanical view. This is probably why Ufology has not entered the universities, and has shrunk into itself with little connection to the more modern methods of say, Eric Davies as expressed him in Techgnosis. But amidst the ruins there are some things worth saving, and here we present to the first chapter of a long NICAP document which contains a lot of information many will find useful. We do not know who wrote this, and therefore cannot credit them.

Yes, time consumed NICAP.

The only trouble is that time did not consume the UFO. It appears to violate the most profound psycho-social law in that the number of sightings (in late 2004) are rapidly increasing at a time when the Ufological interest groups are shrinking to the size of local train-spotting and stamp-collecting clubs.

Betty Baxter