UFO enthusiasts might be out of a job soon. During a conference to discuss the future of UFOs, Dave Wood, chairman of the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena (Assap), said that Ufology, or the study of Unidentified Flying Objects, “will be a dead subject” in ten years. That’s not good news for E.T. groupies, especially in these dark economic times.

Could Ufology be getting killed off by the government in a measure to suppress information –  “the truth,” as some would say?

Conspiracy theorists would hope so, but apparently not. The real reason for Ufology’s bleak future lies in the steady decline of UFO sightings over the years. For Assap alone, its reported UFO cases have gone down a whopping 96% since 1988. Other UFO organizations have fared worse, with more than 70 organizations closing their doors since the 1990s.

At this rate there might not be any dedicated observers to verify or discredit new UFO cases. And instead of helping to capture that smoking gun, that little bit of verifiable evidence that aliens have visited our planet or are among us, technology has contributed to Ufology’s fall.David Clark, a UFO adviser to the British National Archive, blames the internet. He says: “The reason why nothing is going on is because of the internet. If something happens now, the internet is there to help people get to the bottom of it and find an explanation.” So the internet has become skeptics’ primary investigation tool. If a reported sighting of something extraterrestrial pops up on Youtube, experts from around the world can chime in on why it’s fake or not of alien nature.

But surely, UFO enthusiasts won’t lie down without a fight, right? Wrong. Many enthusiasts have looked at the little evidence that exists to prove the existence of aliens, and have concluded that maybe they’ve been wrong all along.

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