In the decade of the sixties of the last century a substantial fact happened to understand the evolution of ufology, two bastions such as NICAP and Dr. Joseph Allen Hynek did not end up accepting the close encounters with UFOs and their crew members despite the multiple episodes that were occurring worldwide. And all because this type of incidents and their display of absurdity and incoherence endangered the stability of the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH) before the public opinion and especially before the scientific community. A communiqué from the famous group stated: "NICAP neither accepts nor rejects this type of reports". But in the face of the strength of the evidence of such incidents, finally both sides had to admit, however reluctantly, that these cases, however anomalous, were an intrinsic part of the UFO phenomenon. And this made other kinds of theoretical approaches begin to gain strength in the ufological territory, with Jacques Vallée and John Keel at the forefront. From those key years onwards, aliens lost some of their prominence, at least in the eyes of the scholarly community. Subsequently, the contributions of Michel Monnerie, Jerome Clark, Freixedo and others, managed even more to corner the idea that the flying saucers were only ships of sheet metal and screws piloted by excellent scientists arrived from unknown planets. However, after decades of ostracism, and in the heat of the so-called Pentagon's UFOs, the extraterrestrials have come back to life. The history seems to want to restart from scratch, completely ignoring, as in the past, the cases of landings and close experiences with UFOnauts. Nowadays, for some, only pilot sightings and radar detections are important (without assessing whether they could belong to phenomena other than flying saucers). But what many of these HET advocates ignore is that the same promoters of this resurgence of "extraterrestrials" are not convinced of this approach, and openly point out that the UFO phenomenon is related to paranormal and fortean facts of all kinds as well as to the human psyche, leaving the door open to an implicit admission of the same precepts defended by paraufology (a term that agglutinated the most heterodox ideas within the study of UFOs). Therefore, a new turn of the screw is expected soon, which will leave us in the right place in the investigation.
JOSE ANTONIO CARAVACA
