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Where's all the Physical Evidence for UFOs?

5/25/2016

1 Comment

 
     When asked about UFOs during a live-audience Q&A session at St. Petersburg College in 2009, Neil Degrasse Tyson, the ever-popular science educator and astrophysicist, took the opportunity to lay out his standard of evidence for a scientific appraisal of UFOs. (1)  His answer reveals a great deal about the the way that we approach the evidence for UFOs - and all anomalous phenomena - in public discourse.

    After a pot-shot alien joke to establish his light-hearted tone, Tyson took a well-worn route amongst science educators and stressed the unreliability - even worthlessness - of eyewitness testimony, and insisted on physical evidence as a prerequisite for scientific study. With the crowd in stitches, he begged all future abductees to “snatch something off the shelf” at their next examination - an ashtray, to use his example - before scientists could take any interest in their stories. 

​Tyson’s opinion seems to be that the only true test for the reality of UFOs involves a physical specimen and a lab-based analysis. Bringing an alien ashtray to the lab, according to Tyson, could not fail to reveal a wealth of information about UFO abductions that the abductees themselves could not. The scientific value of such a specimen is accepted as a given: “it’s not about eyewitness testimony at that point, because you have something of alien manufacture, and anything you pull off a flying saucer that crossed the galaxy is going to be interesting.”


    Tyson’s line of reasoning makes the epistemological assumption that physical evidence is inherently more valuable than eyewitness testimony, in any abundance. It is an assumption seemingly taken for granted by all science educators and many university scientists. (2)

    But this assumption cannot be justified epistemologically. Insisting on physical specimens as a prerequisite for scientific inquiry is a wholly arbitrary way of establishing a standard of evidence, and it precludes scientists from ever establishing the truth status of many anomalous and perfectly mundane experiences. More importantly, it distracts us from seriously engaging with scientific and epistemological questions like, “what’s the claim we’re trying to prove?” and, “what counts as evidence in its favour?” or, “what counts as evidence of its falsification?” These important questions are left unanswered when we insist on the old “show me the evidence” routine, and they will never be addressed until we give it up. 


Physical Evidence for UFOs?

    Perhaps the most obvious rebuttal to Tyson’s statement is to point out that we have lots of physical evidence for UFOs, and that none of that evidence seems to matter. The late Dr. Roger Leir has removed 16 different “alien implants” from the bodies of alleged abductees, and had them tested at some of the world’s most prestigious labs, including Los Alamos National laboratory, and the Material Sciences lab at the University of Toronto. Many of these tests returned some very puzzling results that have yet to be explained. (3)

    Ted Philips, a citizen scientist with the Centre for UFO Studies (CUFOS), spent years collecting physical traces from alleged UFO landing sites, and published his findings in a public CUFOS report in 1975.(4)  Philips documented 561 cases involving dehydrated soil, irradiated ground, scorched vegetation, and many more puzzling effects. A study directed by Physicist Peter Sturrock of Stanford University, published in book form in 1999, brought a wealth of new physical trace cases to the attention of the scientific community. (5) 

    To my knowledge, none of these cases have received more than cursory comment from debunkers, and certainly not from Dr. Tyson. 

    Why? Because physical evidence is not the silver bullet that science educators make it out to be, and insisting on it is merely another strategy for avoiding engaging with the evidence that we do have. Tyson’s arbitrary standard of evidence is a knee-jerk answer to the question never asked: what kind of evidence would prove the existence of something we can’t explain? This question requires a great deal more thought than most skeptics give it in their insistence on something - anything - physical. 


The Limitations of Physical Evidence

    Physical evidence can’t always tell us as much as we often assume, and it’s not the ideal form of proof for many types of claims. Rather than being the golden standard of scientific inquiry, it’s more fitting to think of physical evidence as one of many possible proofs available to the inquiring mind, and of laboratory analysis as one of many tools in the scientist’s arsenal. There are of course many forms of evidence -  observational, experimental, and anecdotal, to name a few - and their importance in any given case will vary with the nature of the claim.
​  
  The value of physical materials as a basis for new claims about the universe is highly dependent on the nature of the claim itself, and for many types of claims, the value is actually quite low. 


    Take the claim that there is life on Mars, for example. In this case, we could reasonably expect a simple and unambiguous proof in a physical specimen. Life, at least as we understand it, bears certain unmistakable signs in its physical makeup, and even the smallest sample would suffice to find them: a tuft of hair, or a piece of bone. There are other claims, however, for which physical evidence would not allow such unambiguous conclusions.

    Let’s satisfy Tyson’s standards and say that someone did snatch an alien ashtray in the midst of an abduction experience, and carried it back for laboratory analysis. If the claim was that a race of extraterrestrials had taken the witness aboard a spaceship, then an ashtray would be of little value in establishing the truth of it. The most that any lab study could possibly conclude is that it was in fact manufactured (i.e., that something had created the ashtray), and further, that the ashtray does not match the composition or design of any known manufacturers.

    This conclusion would not, however, be proof of alien visitation, let alone abduction. There is no test that could positively identify a new civilization on the basis of an ashtray, or any isolated specimen, alone. One could always argue that the ashtray was a deliberate hoax, or some lost artifact from a long-defunct (human) manufacturer. 

    Furthermore, no sample can be identified without something to identify it with. We’ve yet to find or study any extraterrestrial beings, and therefore have no information on which to base our criteria for something being definitely alien in origin. With nothing to match the sample to, we couldn’t possibly identify a specimen as anything at all. 

    Besides, what elements could an ashtray possibly contain to match it back to an undiscovered civilization? As far as we know, all matter on other planets is composed of some combination of the same elements we’ve identified here on earth, and we have no reason to think another species would manufacture objects of radically different composition. Even if we did retrieve an alien artifact, it probably wouldn’t contain anything to rule out the possibility that it was made here on Earth. 

    Demanding physical evidence, in this case, would have the effect of privileging “mundane” explanations: if the specimen was, in fact, constituent of something known and ordinary, the analysis would probably provide definitive proof. But if the specimen was, in fact, something extraordinary, the most any analysis could possibly do would be to reach no conclusion at all. The specimen would remain forever unidentified, much like Dr. Leir’s alien implants, and debunkers would go on insisting that it’s probably just something man-made.


Sampling the Intangible

    The problem with physical evidence is not just that it can be ambiguous when obtained. In other instances - as in the study of energy fields, behaviours, and most psychological phenomena - direct, physical evidence is often impossible to obtain at all. Imagine asking Jane Goodall to provide physical evidence that chimpanzees exhibit social bonding. Would we be forced to conclude that chimpanzees are mindless beasts when she inevitably failed to place something in a petri dish? Of course not. It would be wrong in this case to conceive of the subject in a strictly material framework, and it would be fruitless to seek out physical proof. 

    Many anomalous experiences are similarly difficult to place within a material framework. Many are thought to occur solely in the minds of the witnesses, involving no external stimuli whatsoever. Others are thought to be composed of something other than matter. Ghosts, for example, are typically thought to be immaterial, or ethereal beings: perhaps something from another dimension. But whether they’re holograms, illusions, or disembodied souls, one would not be justified in expecting them to leave tangible proof of their passing through.
​
    But is it not fitting to think of UFOs as a primarily physical phenomenon? Not really. UFOs are often seen as structured objects, and they occasionally appear on radar, and leave physical traces in the environment. However, some UFOs don’t show up on radar, even when their presence is confirmed by other physical means. Other UFOs don’t even take a consistent form, but appear instead as amorphous blobs of light. Many UFOs are reported to blink in and out of existence, rather than propel themselves away, and others are visible only to certain witnesses, and unnoticed by other would-be observers. 

    These features have led thinkers like Carl Jung, Jacques Vallée, and John Mack to remark that UFOs are strangely both physically “real” and subjectively constructed in the minds of observers. (6) In other words, they may be caused by some objective, real-world stimuli, but they don’t come to us from elsewhere, as other stable, physical objects. Rather, they manifest themselves according to the subjective thoughts and experiences of their witnesses, in the place, time, and form that is appropriate for the immediate sighting.  
​
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Carl Gustav Jung (1875 to 1961) was the first to question the physical stability of the UFO phenomenon.
 
Avoiding Materialist Assumptions

    If this dual conception of the UFO phenomenon is accurate, then we can hardly justify demanding physical evidence as proof of its existence. What if the activity we see is only an illusion, and its objective, physical appearance is completely different? What if there is no physical component to the sighting at all? What if, as many debunkers maintain, most anomalous sightings are purely hallucinatory in nature, and have no physical stimulus outside the brain? To prove any of these things, we would need to be open to subjective, psychological evidence, as well as the kinds of observations that come through in eyewitness reports. Building a research program on the basis of physical evidence alone would be failure by design. 

    Besides, without a good theory on what’s causing the reported experiences, we have no idea what we should be looking for. Expecting to find an extraterrestrial muffler, or an ashtray, as Tyson does, is only a reasonable standard if UFOs are in fact of E.T. origin, and operate in the purely material capacity that we assume them to. If they turn out to be anything else, the standard would be impossible to meet - much as it is now - and scientists would be wrongly convinced that they were justified in dismissing the phenomenon. 

    The same physical standard of proof cannot be applied equally to all disciplines, and it must be dejected from its privileged position as the golden standard in anomalistic research. We can’t justify waiting around for that alien ashtray. If we’re going to take a scientific approach to the UFO question, we’ll need to reconsider what it is we’re looking for, and question whether physicality is an appropriate measure.


- Jason Charbonneau





(1) Neil Degrasse Tyson, “Dr. Neil Degrasse Tyson on UFOs,” YouTube video, 11:35, posted by “Camelot Radio,” July 7, 2011, accessed May 8, 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSJElZwEI8o. And for the full video: Neil Degrasse Tyson, “Cosmic Quandaries with Dr. Neil Degrasse Tyson,” YouTube video, 1:28:00, posted by “St. Petersburg College,” May 7, 2009, accessed May 24, 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAD25s53wmE. Tyson’s answer to the question on UFOs begins around 55m. 

(2) For a few examples, see Michael Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and other Confusions of our Time, (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2002), 48; Carl Sagan Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996), 69; Terence Hines, Pseudoscience and the Paranormal (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003), 257. From Shermer: “without corroborative evidence from other sources, or physical proof of some sort, ten anecdotes are no better than one, and a hundred anecdotes are no better than ten. Anecdotes are told by fallible human storytellers”; and from Hines: “if eyewitness reports are unconvincing evidence for the reality of UFOs as extraterrestrial visitors, some sort of physical evidence could certainly settle the case.”


(3) Steve Colbern, “Analysis of Object Taken from Patient John Smith,” January 25, 2009, accessed May 16: http://www.openminds.tv/wp-content/uploads/John-Smith-Implant-Analysis.pdf. The object in this report was shown to possess trace elements of iridium (something typically only found in meteorites), and to emit a range of radio waves while still inside the body.

(4) 
For selections from the original catalogue, see Paul Fuller, “Ted Phillip’s Physical Trace Catalogue,” project1947.com, accessed May 25, 2016: http://www.project1947.com/47cats/phillips.htm

(5) ​Peter Sturrock, The UFO Enigma: a New Review of the Physical Evidence (New York: Warner Books, 1999).

(6) 
See for example; Carl Jung, Flying Saucers: a Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky (New York: MJF Books, 1978); John Mack, Passport to the Cosmos (White Crow Books, 2011), and; Jacques Vallée, “Jacques Vallee - Thinking Allowed - Implications of UFO Phenomena,” YouTube video, 28:06, posted by “JoseEarly,” November 16, 2012, accessed May 4, 2016: https: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ETMzkhBQ6w
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Flying Saucers are NOT Real

4/14/2016

1 Comment

 
    The famous Canadian UFO researcher, Stanton Friedman, did a documentary in the early 1990s called “Flying Saucers are Real,” an homage to Donald Keyhoe’s UFO classic, The Flying Saucers Are Real (1950). The title seemed as basic and straightforward a statement as any advocate of UFO research could make. But while I’m certainly an advocate for UFO research, I’d like to argue the opposite: flying saucers, or the disc-shaped craft that supposedly carry extraterrestrial visitors from far away planets into our atmosphere, are a figment of our social imagination. They are not real. 

    Let me be clear: I absolutely believe that there is something wholly unexplained in the UFO data. Unexplained, or Unidentified Flying objects are undoubtedly a part of our reality, and they are more than worthy of scientific interest. I also acknowledge that many of these objects are described as being disc or saucer shaped, and could therefore justifiably be referred to as “flying saucers.” I’m even open to the notion that these “saucers” may be carrying alien beings.

    I’m merely trying to argue that the concept of the flying saucer, and all that we assume about its pilots and origins, is a human creation based on a narrow, and arbitrary sampling of global UFO reports. The flying saucer label does not represent the wider UFO phenomenon, and even excludes many of the sightings we’d consider true airborne anomalies. We need to stop using the term, “flying saucer” as a substitute for UFO, UAP, or other more neutral terms, if not drop it from our vocabulary altogether. 


The First Flying Saucers

    So where did this term come from, and why do we use it in the first place? Its history is actually quite short, given the long history of UFOs. People have seen things in the sky they could not explain for at least as long as they’ve been capable of recording them, but “flying saucers” are a product of the post-war era. Ufologists have discovered that people saw metallic, disc-shaped craft at least as far back as the turn of the twentieth century, but we had no name for these objects at the time, and no obvious category to place them in. As a result, they weren’t often recorded, and they weren’t widely discussed. 

    This all changed when an American businessman and pilot named Kenneth Arnold saw what he thought were a fleet of unusual aircraft over Mount Rainer, Washington in June 1947. Arnold described the craft he saw as “delta-shaped,” and claimed only that their movement resembled that of a saucer skipping over water. Media reporting on the incident, however, twisted his words, and dubbed the objects “flying saucers.” 

    Despite the inaccuracy, the term stuck, and it even spawned a few imitations. Just two weeks after Arnold’s sightings, the Roswell Daily Record broke the infamous story of the Roswell crash. “No Details of Flying Disk are Revealed,” ran the sub headline. From then on, “flying disc,”and “flying saucer” have been treated interchangeably. 

    The concept of the flying saucer was solidified in the popular imagination after a few key photographs made it to the media: one over New Jersey in 1952, and two from a farm near McMinnville, Oregon in 1950. The McMinnville UFO photographs are among the most famous ever taken, and are considered today as emblematic of the UFO phenomenon. ​
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One of the two famous McMinnville UFO Photographs, 1950, now considered emblematic of the greater UFO phenomenon.


    The image of the spinning, metallic disc quickly made it ways into popular culture. Flying saucers were featured in magazines and comic books everywhere, and even shown on the big screen. 1951’s landmark science-fiction film, The Day the Earth Stood Still, had the aliens landing in spinning, silver discs. In Forbidden Planet (1956), set in a far away future, even the humans flew flying saucers. The sleek, domed saucer became a symbol of the space-faring civilization, and hung around for a very long time in popular culture. 

    It’s true, many of the early UFO reports of the late 1940s involved disc-shaped craft (“like two inverted saucers” was a common description), but others didn’t. The famous Maury Island sighting of 1947, the same month as Arnold’s, involved doughnut-shaped craft dropping molten metal from their hulls. The craft that supposedly abducted the Hills in 1961 was described as being in the shape of a pancake, with two little wings on either side. And many sightings over the years, including one over an Italian football stadium in 1954, involved cigar-shaped craft hanging motionless in the air. (1)

    The term “flying saucer,” and the mythos that came to surround it, was a media creation, one that began in the wake of Arnold’s sighting and never quite went away.


Where have all the Flying Saucers Gone?

    That the term lingered for so long is even more surprising in light of the more recent trend towards seeing more complex types of craft. The officers that chased a UFO across two states in 1966 said that the object was shaped like an ice-cream cone, with a lop-sided, rounded top. Betty Cash and two passengers were stopped in the middle of a highway in 1980 by a hovering, diamond-shaped craft. Thousands of people in the Hudson Valley area in the 1980s and 90s reported triangular or boomerang-shaped objects, and in 2012, a mother and daughter in rural Wisconsin saw a brilliant, lampshade-shaped object fly over their neighbour’s home. (2)

    Still other sightings involve objects that aren’t obviously craft - or objects, for that matter - at all. Dr. J. Allen Hynek’s collected hundreds of reports of “nocturnal lights,” or points of light in the sky hardly discernible from a star if not for their movement.(3)  Many UFO sightings, then and now, fall into this category. To call such a thing a “flying saucer,” or even a “flying craft,” is more than a bit presumptuous.

    But even in cases where the UFO is seen within 150m - what Hynek would have called a “close encounter” - the object does not always appear as a structured craft. As early as 1969, the French ufologist, Aimé Michel, published the extraordinary account of a physician in Southern France who watched two glowing discs approach the window of his home and merge into one, seamless object. (4) Last April, a Colombian newspaper editor took photos himself of a shape-changing UFO that flew over Bogota and at times took the form of a figure eight. (5) What sense does it make to refer to these aerial anomalies as “saucers?”

    People no longer report saucer-shaped craft with the frequency they once did, and other kinds of UFOs have become more common. It’s to the point now that sightings of traditional discs are vastly outnumbered by sightings of all other types of craft. (6) There is an enormous range of UFO forms, and most of them look nothing like discs or saucers. As part of its regular analysis, MUFON, one of the world’s leading independent UFO research groups, categorizes sighting reports according to the shape of the object seen. Objects are widely distributed across more than 20 different categories of shape, but many more fall into the “sphere” category than any one other. In the month of February 2016, 111 UFOs were classed as “spherical,” whereas only 42 were classed as being in the shape of a “disc.” Other categories include “oval,” teardrop,” “square,” “diamond,” and “chevron.” (7)

    Referring to this whole range of structures as “flying saucers” is more than simply misleading: it is locking us into a single mode of thought, and preventing us from exploring alternative answers to the UFO question. When we refer to an unidentified object as a “flying saucer” or a “flying disc,” we are prejudicing the extraterrestrial hypothesis for UFO origins. Knowingly or unknowingly, we are generating the assumption for ourselves and for others, that “genuine” UFOs are physical spaceships from another planet. Even the weaknesses of the extraterrestrial hypothesis not withstanding, it is unscientific to assume it from the outset, merely as a function of our choice in terminology. If we’re going to leave the door open to alternative theories, we need to use terminology that allows for this. 


Conclusion

    In Flying Saucers and Science, Friedman defends his use of the term, “flying saucer” by claiming that “Flying saucers are, by definition, unidentified flying objects, but very few unidentified flying objects are flying saucers.” (8) Perhaps so. But if flying discs are just a subset of UFOs, then there are many others under this umbrella category that deserve our attention, for all the same reasons. 

    It is unscientific for Mr. Friedman, or any ufologist, to continue using “flying saucer” or “flying disc” to refer to the great range of anomalous aerial phenomena. It’s time to retire these antiquated terms and reconsider how we label what we can’t explain. ​


- Jason Charbonneau


​
Notes:

(1) Richard Padula, “The Day UFOs Stopped Play.” BBC.com. October 24, 2014. http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29342407 (accessed April 14, 2016). 

(2) “MUFON annual report 2012.” Mufon.com. http://www.mufon.com/2012-annual-report---top-cases.html (accessed April 14, 2016 ).

(3) Examples can be found throughout in J. Allen Hynek, The UFO Experience, New York: Ballantine Books, 1972.

(4) Aimé Michel, “The Strange Case of Dr. X” in Flying Saucer Review, special Issue no. 3. September 1969. Noufors.com. http://www.noufors.com/Documents/Books,%20Manuals%20and%20Published%20Papers/Flying%20Saucer%20Review/ (accessed April 14, 2016), 3-15. 

(5) Jon Austin, “Shape Changing UFO Caught on Camera as Newspaper Editor Spots Alien Craft.” mirror.co,uk. May 15, 2015. http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/shape-changing-ufo-caught-camera-5511582 (accessed April 14, 2016).

(6) Micah Hanks, “What Ever Happened to the “Flying Saucer” Shaped UFOs?” mysteriousuniverse.com. December 24, 2015. http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2015/12/what-ever-happened-to-the-flying-saucer-shaped-ufos/ (accessed April 14, 2016). 

(7) Statistics from the “February 2016 UFO Sighting Statistics” email from mufon.com, sent to the author on March 31, 2016.

(8)  Stanton Friedman, Flying Saucers and Science, Franklin Lakes, NJ: Career Press, 2008, 57. 
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