The most disturbing thing about what happened to Alexander Wendt’s TEDx video this week is that the curators of the TED Talks brand aren’t stupid. Dial up any of the presentations in their voluminous online collection and you’re going to learn something, from international trailblazers like Jane Goodall and Bill Gates, or up-and-coming unknowns with big and provocative ideas.

How viable can a progressive forum for ideas be anymore if it ranks UFOs with cooties or phrenology?/CREDIT: medium.com

But after TEDx “flagged” Wendt’s 12-minute lecture “Wanted: A Science of UFOs” even as it reluctantly, belatedly, posted the clip Tuesday on YouTube, you have to wonder if, like SETI’s Seth Shostak, these normally judicious arbiters of what progress is and is not haven’t disqualified themselves from the most astonishing conversation of our age. “Claims made in this talk,” they warned in the video cutlines, “only represent the speaker’s personal understanding of UFOs which are not corroborated by scientific evidence.”

Did you get that? The judges just pleaded guilty. I’m smelling a trend.

A quick scan of the YouTube comment thread shows an overwhelming majority of readers are wondering if TEDx is becoming obsolete. Not that popular opinion expressed by largely anonymous writers couldn’t be dismissed as cheap-shot brain farts from the hoi polloi. But what everyone’s picking up on here is that TEDx’s haughty disclaimer was forecast years ago by the condemned man himself, Wendt, and fellow academician Raymond Duvall. They laid it all out in the journal Political Theory, in a groundbreaking article called “Sovereignty and the UFO.”

Wendt, a political science professor at Ohio State, and Duvall, same field at the University of Minnesota, berated the science establishment for subjecting the UFO issue to a research embargo.

“UFOs have never been systematically investigated by science or the state, because it is assumed to be known that none are extraterrestrial,” they wrote in 2008. “Yet in fact this is not known, which makes the UFO taboo puzzling given the ET possibility … The puzzle is explained by the functional imperatives of anthropocentric sovereignty, which cannot decide a UFO exception to anthropocentrism while preserving the ability to make such a decision. The UFO can be ‘known’ only by not asking what it is.”

Wendt’s TEDx lecture, which he delivered to its Columbus chapter in November, was a bare-bones version of that 12-year-old argument. But he opened it with something neither he nor Duvall had access to back then – Pentagon-certified videos of F-18 airmen chasing UFOs that had interrupted military training exercises, evidence that played a huge role in prompting the Navy last year to update its pilot reporting rules. After jabbing establishment science for its myopia and hypocrisy, Wendt went on to advocate a networked study of the phenomenon using ground-based automatic-surveillance stations doing round-the-clock all-sky surveys.

“The first responsibility of academics is to tell the truth. And the truth is, we have no idea what UFOs are, and no one in a position of power or authority is trying to find out. That should surprise and disturb us all,” he concluded. “And I think raises the question of whether the people should try to find out themselves first instead.”

Wendt says this week’s controversy goes back to last year, as he was planning to accept an invitation to weigh in on the “ancient aliens” fuss. New to the lecture scene, he consulted with a media trainer for pointers. She happened to be a TEDx-Columbus member, and she was impressed enough by his arguments to encourage him to apply to discuss UFOs in the prestigious TED-sanctioned venue.

What Wendt didn’t anticipate on the front end was resistance by the local TEDx leadership to the material; after all, even the Defense Department now admits the challenge is real and problematic. “Originally, they were going to kill the talk altogether,” he says. But with his contact’s persistence, they relented and allowed him to proceed.

Weeks passed, and the lecture never popped up online. When Wendt asked what was up, she told him TEDx officials didn’t want to release it because it violated the guidelines.

“Be wary of speakers promoting new age beliefs, including concepts such as quantum consciousness, Gaia theory, archaeoastronomy, and drug-induced spiritual epiphanies. Speakers can be honest about their beliefs, but should not use the stage to promote them” — From TEDx Guideline No. 3/CREDIT: recoveryconnection.com

“Science is a big part of the TED universe,” those guidelines state in part, “and it’s important that TEDx organizers sustain our reputation as a credible forum for sharing ideas that matter. It’s not always easy to distinguish between real science and pseudoscience, and purveyors of false wisdom typically share their theories with as much sincerity and earnestness as legitimate researchers.”

That’s a fair concern if you’re wide awake and paying attention to current events. But “real science” is informed, not dogmatic, and this unforced error makes you wonder if TEDx is even living in the 21st century. The Technology, Entertainment, Design speaker culture that originated in Silicon Valley in 1984 either doesn’t know, or doesn’t care, that a new group of serious investors, entrepreneurs and techies banding together to conduct UFO field research has its roots in, well, Silicon Valley.

“I think, if they watched the video, clearly they just didn’t get it, they couldn’t get through their own preconceptions about what’s real and what’s not, and I don’t understand their reasoning at all,” Wendt says. “My previous work would’ve predicted this. If there’s no science proving any of this, it’s because people like them won’t let us do the science. That’s really the irony of the whole thing, and all I’m saying is, let’s do the science.

“But I think the wind is changing. I really have a feeling that there’s a lot of stuff happening and the whole tide is turning. So this (TEDx disclaimer) is really a rear-guard action by advocates of the taboo, who will be the losers of history in the end, I think.”

More than 14,000 views in four days, a respectable debut. Wonder how many TEDsters were in on the decision to disavow Wendt’s video. Hm. Well, their decision just created legions of new critics questioning TEDx’s relevance. And that’s just one more damn thing I never thought I’d live to see.