The Social Construction of Social Problems: Talking with Rishi about UFOs by Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.
The Social Construction of Social Problems: Talking with Rishi about UFOs
By Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.
A few nights ago, Rishi and I were talking over coffee, the kind of long, digressive conversation that moves between philosophy, politics, and the metaphysics of the ordinary. He’s a brilliant young thinker, trained in philosophy and newly curious about ethnomethodology. We have been meeting regularly, exploring how interactionism might anchor his abstract speculations in the texture of lived life. That night he handed me a memo—a tightly reasoned defense of the proposition that Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs) deserve to be taken seriously as an empirical and institutional reality. He accused academic skeptics of intellectual dishonesty, of hiding behind methodological impossibility, of refusing to see what is plainly before us.
I read his argument carefully, admiring its rhetorical power. He invoked Foucault and Kuhn, Popper and Proctor, constructing a sociological case for epistemic suppression. Skeptics, he said, demand evidence they know to be unavailable—classified data, physical artifacts, or declassified documents—and then treat the absence of such evidence as proof that nothing extraordinary exists. “That’s not science,” he wrote, “that’s faith in state secrecy.” It was a deft inversion of the usual hierarchy: the believers cast as empiricists, the skeptics as defenders of power.
As I sat with his words, I realized that what fascinated me wasn’t the question of extraterrestrial visitation but the social organization of his conviction. Rishi had, in effect, offered me a living case study in what Malcolm Spector and John Kitsuse, nearly fifty years ago, called the social construction of social problems. The UFO controversy, stripped of its cosmic imagery, is a perfect example of claims-making in action: people asserting that something is real, urgent, and morally consequential, while others deny or reframe that same assertion. The question is not simply “Are UFOs real?” but “How do claims about UFOs become credible, contested, or dismissed?”
Spector and Kitsuse argued that social problems do not exist as self-evident conditions waiting to be discovered. They become problems through the interactional work of people making claims. The sociologist’s task, they insisted, is not to adjudicate the truth of those claims but to study how they are produced, circulated, and institutionalized. This insight transformed the field. It shifted our gaze from the objective condition—pollution, poverty, crime—to the social process by which these conditions are named, dramatized, and morally charged.
In this sense, Rishi’s memo is not evidence of alien visitation; it is evidence of a moral world in motion. His reasoning displays all the hallmarks of claims-making: an appeal to expert witnesses (fighter pilots, intelligence officers), a critique of institutional authority (the Pentagon’s secrecy), and a moral reframing of skepticism itself as complicity. He writes as a believer in epistemic justice, someone who feels that knowledge is being suppressed by bureaucratic inertia and cultural ridicule. The believers in UFOs, in his narrative, are heretics of the Enlightenment—refusing to bow to the Church of Official Denial.
From my vantage point, trained in ethnomethodology and social psychology, I see another order of reality at work. The belief in UFO suppression is itself a social achievement, a way of making sense of ambiguity and institutional opacity. When information is scarce and power unaccountable, rumor becomes a mode of truth-seeking. As Allport and Postman showed in their studies of rumor transmission, uncertainty generates elaborate narratives that satisfy emotional and moral needs for coherence. Rishi’s memo, though presented as a philosophical argument, is also a moral tale about honesty and deception, courage and conformity. It gives meaning to uncertainty by translating it into drama.
To say this is not to dismiss him. We are all participants in such dramas. When I write about homelessness, addiction, or inequality, I too engage in claims-making. I produce accounts that invite belief, compassion, and moral action. The unhoused man under the freeway becomes a figure of social failure, or of structural injustice, or of sacred suffering—depending on how I frame him. My claims, like Rishi’s, circulate within networks of authority, emotion, and ideology. Sociology, at its best, makes those processes visible.
The ethnomethodological imagination invites us to look at the methods members use to render their worlds accountable. Rishi and I are members of different interpretive communities. I operate in the cautious empiricism of the sociological tradition; he inhabits a post-institutional world shaped by epistemic mistrust. Both of us are trying to make sense of a world where power conceals as much as it reveals. The difference lies in how we treat that concealment. For him, the lack of evidence confirms the presence of secrecy; for me, it confirms the instability of meaning itself.
What interests me as a micro-sociologist is the conversation between us—the turn-by-turn unfolding of an epistemic struggle. He asserts the sincerity of witnesses; I question the transferability of expertise. He sees convergence of testimony; I see discursive diffusion. Our talk becomes a miniature moral order, each of us accountable to our preferred evidential norms. We both display our reasonableness through the grammar of argument. This is the interactional life of claims-making: the embodied performance of conviction.
Howard Becker once said that social problems are moral enterprises. They mobilize outrage, sympathy, fear, and hope. The UFO believer and the homelessness advocate are not so different in that respect. Each is trying to make the invisible visible, to demand recognition for what others ignore. The difference lies not in sincerity but in epistemic warrant—how we anchor belief in publicly available evidence. In an age of deep institutional mistrust, the sociology of claims-making has never been more vital. It reminds us that belief and disbelief alike are forms of social action.
When I told Rishi this, he smiled and said, “So you think the sociology of UFO belief is more interesting than the UFOs themselves.” I nodded. “Exactly. The claims are the phenomenon.”
He laughed, but I could see him thinking. That, for me, is the beauty of such dialogue—not to win the argument but to reveal how our realities are produced in talk, turn by turn, until we forget that we’re making them.
Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D., writes about interactional sociology, moral order, and social justice at “Doing Modernity.” He is also a columnist for Noozhawk and an advocate for Santa Barbara’s unhoused community.
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