Take Back The "U"

  In the middle of an interesting report on the aftermath of the Texas UFO sightings, Sam Ogden of Skepchick.org reports this little tidbit.

"I sat across the aisle from some fellow Texans on the plane ride home from Florida who were very vocal that the reversal by the air force was proof that the government is covering something up."

  This, my friends, is the definition of ambivalence. I love to be right; I hate the credulity. It's a powerful sensation, akin to choking myself to death with delicious cookie dough.

  Folks, it's time we did something ridiculously pedantic as we paddle upstream in the flood of blind belief. We've got to take back the word "unidentified." We've got to stop letting true believers conflate the term with “alien.”

  Here's how we do it. If someone observes a UFO, and then either attempts to gather evidence and make a determination of what it was, or calmly accepts that it can't be precisely identified, then they can call it unidentified. If they’re going to leap to an otherwise unsupported conclusion as to the object's outer spaciness, we have to insist that they use a word like alien or extraterrestrial that clearly indicates the (desperately crazy) conclusion they’ve drawn.

  I'm not nearly so delusional as to think that this semantic quibbling will change the minds of anyone in the woo-niverse, but it might just rescue an innocent word from misappropriation by the tinfoil hat crowd. That's a worthy enough goal all by itself.