Talk about UFOs is usually not taken seriously, being considered a bit of a fantasy. However, in one of the Australian universities this topic will be awarded an academic degree
The University of Melbourne this Saturday will award Australia's first PhD in UFO, the study of unidentified flying objects, to Martin Plauman, a student in the Department of Culture and Communication.
Science fiction lovers will not keep themselves waiting and, most likely, those who did not remember his name will very soon begin to joke, calling him: "Doctor Who?" (Dr Who?).
Mr. Plauman is writing a book on the topic, which is expected to be released in November. He has no personal experience with UFOs and therefore shares a healthy skepticism about their existence.
Often times people mistake comets, airplanes or birds for UFOs, he says, but when he meets someone who claims to have seen something strange, he rightly accepts the likelihood of such an event. One man he met in Melbourne claimed to have been abducted by the Martians. "They look like something really happened to them," Plauman said. "When you first meet a 'kidnapping victim' you are in some confrontation with yourself because they are trying to come to terms with it … it stays with people for a long time."
The last kidnapping allegation in Melbourne was 15 years ago; Kelly Cahill claimed she was abducted by strange creatures in Narre Warren, according to Plauman. His UFO research took him to places of interest: Roswell, New Mexico, USA, where a flying saucer crashed there in 1947; Wiltshire, England, where wheat crop circles are related to spacecraft tricks, Latin America, last source to report UFO sightings. Basically, people in these places develop their own belief system in these events.
"In the Andes, Chile, I was shown a rock that they claimed was stepped on by an alien and left his footprint."
Mr. Plauman's interest in UFOs arose out of boredom. As a child, he was in the hospital for a long time, and his parents brought a book about UFOs to distract him. “She captured my imagination,” he said.
His interest waned and he began to study physics. But that same interest was reawakened when Plauman saw books on UFOs at the house of his friend, a physics student. “Looking at them, I realized that they concealed a whole world,” he said. "There were rules, ideas and history that were not given the proper attention, so my enthusiasm returned and I thought I wanted to take a look at this history."