Historian Greg Eghigian wrote in August 2021 that "over the last fifty years, the mutual antagonism between paranormal believers and skeptics has largely framed discussion about unidentified flying objects" and that "it often gets personal" with those taking seriously the prospect that UFOs are extraterrestrial in origin dismissing those who consider UFOs to be worth studying as "narrow-minded, biased, obstinate, and cruel" while the skeptics brushed off "devotees" as "naïve, ignorant, gullible, and downright dangerous". Such "mudslinging over convictions is certainly familiar to historians of religion, a domain of human existence marked by deep divisions over interpretations of belief", and science too has found itself engaged increasing amounts of "boundary work" (which is "asserting and reasserting the borders between legitimate and illegitimate scientific research and ideas, between what may and what may not refer to itself as science") with regard to UFO questions. Eghigian points out our current "stark divide did not happen overnight, and its roots lie in the postwar decades, in a series of events that—with their news coverage, grainy images, celebrity crusaders, exasperated skeptics, unsatisfying military statements, and accusations of a government cover-up—foreshadow our present moment".
Historian Greg Eghigian wrote in August 2021 that "over the last fifty years, the mutual antagonism between paranormal believers and skeptics has largely framed discussion about unidentified flying objects" and that "it often gets personal" with those taking seriously the prospect that UFOs are extraterrestrial in origin dismissing those who consider UFOs to be worth studying as "narrow-minded, biased, obstinate, and cruel" while the skeptics brushed off "devotees" as "naïve, ignorant, gullible, and downright dangerous". Such "mudslinging over convictions is certainly familiar to historians of religion, a domain of human existence marked by deep divisions over interpretations of belief", and science too has found itself engaged increasing amounts of "boundary work" (which is "asserting and reasserting the borders between legitimate and illegitimate scientific research and ideas, between what may and what may not refer to itself as science") with regard to UFO questions. Eghigian points out our current "stark divide did not happen overnight, and its roots lie in the postwar decades, in a series of events that—with their news coverage, grainy images celebrity crusaders, exasperated skeptics, unsatisfying military statements, and accusations of a government cover-up—foreshadow our present moment".