Courtney Buterbaugh has written the necessary companion piece to my article Borrowed Credibility, and I'd urge you to read it.

If my essay asked who gets to speak for experiencers as disclosure unfolds, hers asks the harder, closer-to-home question: within the experiencer community itself, whose accounts have been taken seriously, and whose have been dismissed? The answer is uncomfortable and it is consistent. Linda Napolitano, Kelly Cahill, Elizabeth Klarer. Women with corroborating witnesses, credentials, detailed accounts, pathologized, mocked, branded hysterical. Travis Walton, Calvin Parker, George Adamski. Comparable or weaker evidence, treated as credible, granted monuments and book deals.

The hysteria trope did not bypass UFOlogy. It sits at the center of it. And as we push back against the figures from outside the community now angling to position themselves as authorities, we also have to be honest about whose voices have been allowed to define this field from within.

Reading this, I kept having the strange feeling that I could have written it myself. Every argument, every example, the specific anger at the specific shape of the dismissal. Which is, I think, its own data point about how widely and deeply this pattern is felt by the women living inside it.

Courtney's analysis of the credibility gap, and its specific debt to the way medicine has refused to believe women about their own bodies for generations, is sharp, well-sourced, and overdue. Read her.