The disruptive effects of UFOs were recognized at the time. In a letter to the chair of the House Armed Services Committee written in 1966, Representative Gerald Ford criticizes the Air Force’s dismissal of a plethora of Michigan sightings, writing: “We owe it to the people to establish credibility regarding UFO’s.” The Condon report not only worked to restore public confidence in the military, but also concluded that, with regard to the sensational treatment of UFOs by the media, “ whatever effect there has been has been bad.” Shortly thereafter, a critic of ufology observed that “several generations of teenagers had grown up believing in UFO, ETH [the extraterrestrial hypothesis], and the governmental conspiracy. If the government could lie about flying saucers then it could lie about anything. The UFO propagandists of the 1950s undoubtedly contributed to the growing credibility gap between the government and the people.”
Although this observation exaggerates the effects of the UFO discourse, it reiterates the link I’m making between outerspace and agency in the 1950s and 1960s: ufology was doing something; it wasn’t just spinning an outlandish conspiracy tale. At the very least, it was publicizing an outlandish conspiracy theory that used outerspace and the possibility of extraterrestrial visitations to challenge military and scientific hegemony. Indeed, Tom Englehardt suggests that, precisely because it was “beyond the pale,” flying saucer society was able to attack the government without being accused of communism. From the perspective of the dominant culture, ufology was silly. Nonetheless, precisely because it was outside the constraining equation of truth with security and identifiability, ufology was free to focus on the unknown, to indicate the limits of governmental authority and validate the experiences of witnesses without necessarily claiming that it could identify or establish the object of their experiences.
– Aliens in America (1998), pp. 41-2