It’s time to take UFOs seriously. Seriously.

It’s time to take UFOs seriously. Seriously.

Alexander Wendt is one of the most influential political scientists alive. Here’s his case for taking UFOs seriously.

So in an attempt to force a UFO conversation into the public discourse, I contacted Alexander Wendt, a professor of international relations at Ohio State University. Wendt is a giant in his field of IR theory, but in the past 15 years or so, he’s become an amateur ufologist. He wrote an academic article about the political implications of UFOs in 2008, and, more recently, he gave a TEDx talk calling out the “taboo” against studying UFOs.

Wendt is about the closest thing you’ll find to a UFO expert in a world in which ufology isn’t a real science. Like other enthusiasts, he’s spent a lot of time looking at the evidence, thinking about the stakes, and theorizing about why extraterrestrials would visit Earth in the first place.

In this conversation, which has been lightly edited for clarity, we discuss why scientists refuse to take UFOs seriously, why he thinks there’s a good chance ETs are behind the aircraft in those videos, and why he believes the discovery of extraterrestrial life would be the most significant event in human history.

Wendt has also been on Skeptiko ->

Dr. Alexander Wendt examines the implications of consciousness science for the social sciences.

The lesson stayed with me, it’s okay to borrow models from other fields, but it’s a good idea to reassess how you’ve applied them when those interdisciplinary models change. Today on Skeptiko we look at a paradigm busting interdisciplinary approach to the social sciences by way of Dr. Alexander Wendt from the Ohio State University and his new book, Quantum Mind and the Social Sciences:

Alex Tsakiris: Why is consciousness important to Social Science?

Dr. Alexander Wendt: Well, not everybody would say that it is. I think most of my colleagues ignore consciousness or just take it for granted and would say that it doesn’t necessarily add anything to the kind of explanations that social scientists typically develop. On the other hand I do think that it is implicit in almost all explanations social scientists come up with…

Alex Tsakiris: What are some of the ways in which these assumptions about consciousness are implicit in the assumptions we’re making when we look at political groups or the social sciences in general?

Dr. Alexander Wendt: The key argument that I make is that… anything that has to do with the mind; that has to do with intentional phenomena–beliefs, desires, even the unconscious… imply consciousness. And in the social world, if you think about the kinds of things social scientists are interested in like states for example in my own field of International Relations, these are collective intentional phenomena. These are collective states of mind. They have no material existence out there. You can’t see them from space or anything. So they’re all implicated or dependent upon us being conscious as well. To put it in a different way, if human beings were just robots with no consciousness I don’t think we would have intentional states of mind. We wouldn’t have minds at all. And there wouldn’t be states. There wouldn’t be churches or corporations or anything like that.