“The UFO Evidence: Burdens of Proof”
by Jim Giglio and Scott Snell
Board Members,
National Capital Area Skeptics (NCAS)
(Opinions are the writers’ own,
not necessarily those of NCAS.)
Let’s start where any scientific debate over the UFO evidence ought
to start, with the 1968
University of Colorado report to the Air Force. That project
examined the evidence that had accumulated since 1947; it was,
and remains, the largest scientific study ever conducted in
relation to the UFO issue. The principal conclusion was narrowly
focused and stated with considerable precision:
Careful consideration of the record as it is available to us leads us
to conclude that further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be
justified in the expectation that science will be advanced thereby.
It should be noted that the report did not state that the hypothesis
of extraterrestrial visitation had been conclusively disproved, only
that the evidence accumulated up to that time in relation to the
issue had contributed nothing to science and showed no sign of
contributing anything in the future.
How well has that conclusion stood the test of time?
Examine the sighting report that Richard Dolan (Commentary 1) regards
as typical and informative. The report was submitted to the
National UFO Reporting Center
in 1999 and refers to an event that allegedly occurred in 1976 near
Hydes, Maryland:
it was dusk that day. we saw this round craft come out of the
northeast over the horizon. it was slowly rotating counter clockwise.
white lights only, were on the outer edges. it moved slowly, maybe 30
to 40 miles per hour. it came directly over us. we were on a horse
farm, laying on the front lawn just after dinner. this craft was just
below the sunlight that was left in the sky. we could not see any
details. when it came over us, it stopped. then separated into four
smaller craft. then at the blink of an eye, they shot over the
horizon. each ship went directly north, south, east and west
respectively. there was absolutely no sound from this craft. we
learned the next day that there were sightings over peachbottom
atomic plant that day. the same direction that our craft came from.
to this day, we have never spoken about this to anyone, not even
between ourselves. there were 6 of us. two music teachers, a medical
lab tech, a texas instruments tech, police officer, a kindergarten
teacher.
As scientific evidence, this statement has numerous “red flags”
hanging all over it. The writer, supposedly a professional, seems not
to want to bother with the standard capitalization rules for English
sentences. The statement is only semi-coherent, with sentences
describing various aspects of the incident tumbling over each other
in a rush; with 23 years to think about the incident, it ought to
have been possible to organize the description into a coherent
narrative. (S)he reports that no details of the object could be seen,
yet states that it was 1000 feet in diameter and traveling 30 or 40
miles per hour. How these size and speed determinations were made is
unspecified, nor is there an explanation for an inability to resolve
details when it was possible to determine size and speed.
Accepting the size and speed estimates leads to another problem. Hydes,
Maryland is located near a number of heavily-traveled highways and
air transportation corridors. Near-by observers should have numbered
in the thousands and generated numerous newspaper headlines; we are
referred, instead, to some alleged sightings at a nuclear power plant
located a considerable distance away.
Mr. Dolan informs us that this kind of report is typical. He’s quite
right; it is typical, but as scientific evidence it’s
worthless. Individuals and organizations adhering to the notion of ET
visitation accumulate reports like this by the thousands and periodically
present them to the public to support their position. There’s a
logical fallacy at work in this constant piling-up of reports, the
fallacy that large amounts of bad evidence somehow add up to good
evidence. They don’t. You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear,
nor can you make one out of 10,000 sow’s ears. The Colorado
investigators were right; despite their volume, reports such as this,
which had contributed nothing to science as of 1968, have yet to
contribute anything in the intervening 33 years.
The fact that Mr. Dolen gives credence to this flawed statement
illustrates an aspect of the UFO issue that ought to trouble
proponents of the notion that this issue is a serious scientific
problem. We refer to an apparent unwillingness, on the part of far
too many of these proponents, to apply even a modicum of critical
thinking to such reports.
One of us (Scott) recently attended a UFO conference. At this event,
a physicist widely considered to be a technically adept investigator
(who shall remain nameless) gave a presentation in which he described
his analysis of photos showing peculiar lights over the night skyline
of an Arizona city. He showed the audience how he had compared the
lights of the city in the two different photos that the witness
claimed had been taken only a few moments apart. There was no
question that the city lights had changed markedly. Test photos taken
for comparison showed that one was taken sometime before 11 PM and
the other taken sometime afterwards, despite the witness’s claim that
both were taken in quick succession at about 8 PM. (At about 11 PM,
skyline lighting changes significantly as businesses and homes turn
off their lights for the night.) The investigator then asked the
witness for the photographic negatives. He learned that the two
photos were actually from different rolls of film,
separated by several other frames, some showing only the skyline, some
showing only the peculiar “UFO” lights (This aspect of the report is
striking in its resemblance to the Colorado report’s
Case #7.
At this point, a listener to the talk might have expected the
investigator to conclude that this was not a reliable case to proceed
with. The witness’s story did not jibe with the photographic facts,
and the contents of the interim photos suggested experiments in trick
photography. But the listener would have been wrong. The investigator
touted this as “missing time discovered through photo analysis” (For
the uninitiated, the “missing time” phenomenon is a standard
component of alien abduction stories; it occurs when someone notices
that the time on a clock or watch is considerably later than
expected; the abduction event that supposedly occupied this time is
somehow erased from memory.)
When questioned as to his conclusions, the investigator stressed that
“…the witness is a very credible, respected member of her
community. She would not have lied about it.” Apparently this
investigator had never read Colorado case 7; that hoaxer was a
retired military officer with an “irreproachable” reputation. The
investigator also apparently never heard of Occam’s Razor, the
principle which states that, other factors being equal, one chooses
the simpler of two competing explanations for an observation.
When one is investigating a UFO incident in the expectation that it
might provide evidence that our planet is being visited by ET’s (a
most extraordinary hypothesis), a high level of critical thinking
should be strenuously applied. But in the two examples of “pro-UFO”
evidence seen here, this does not appear to be happening. Mr. Dolen
supports the flawed statement quoted above, and the audience at the
conference was generally accepting of this perfectly ludicrous photo
analysis. Acceptance and support of this kind of thing by adherents
of the “pro” viewpoint, as if it were serious science, leads the
skeptic to wonder, “If this is the good, credible evidence, what does
the bad, non-credible stuff look like?”
Actually the two kinds look very similar, because the UFO issue can
no longer (post Colorado report) make a strong claim to being a
scientific issue at all. It shows, instead, numerous signs of being a
social phenomenon, driven by the print and electronic media, and
there is strong evidence that this has been the case all along.
Go back to the beginning, to the Kenneth Arnold sighting. The
phenomenon described by Arnold was a group of boomerang-shaped
objects that moved like saucers skimming across a water surface. But
the report was garbled in initial press reports, leading readers to
believe that the alleged objects were saucer-shaped. Subsequent
reports, amplified by cinema and television, spread the “saucer” or
“disc” image of UFOs to people all over the world. And while many
different shapes have been reported for UFOs over the years, the
majority of reports have been of saucers or discs, a clear indication
that witnesses are seeing what they expect to see, and reporting what
others accept as the norm.
There is also compelling evidence that the appearance of UFO
occupants, as widely accepted among “contact” adherents, arose out of
a particular episode of a television series. Barney Hill, who was
allegedly abducted by beings from a UFO in the early 1960s (the
initial case of this type), went into therapy and was hypnotized in
the course of his treatment. Under hypnosis, Hill described the eyes
of his abductors as “speaking.” This peculiar phrase had been used by
an extraterrestrial character in an episode of the ABC-TV series “The
Outer Limits,” which had aired only days before Hill’s hypnosis
session. The episode was “The Bellero Shield;” the alien portrayed
was bald, essentially featureless in face and body, and had
swept-back eyes, just as Hill sketched under hypnosis. Although other
early reports of UFO occupants varied significantly from Hill’s
(probably inspired by other stereotypical alien images), his
description is the one that has saturated popular culture via the
media.
In 1975, NBC-TV broadcast a dramatization of Hill’s experience in a
made- for-TV film called “The UFO Incident.” Many millions of people
watched this allegedly true story and learned what aliens are
supposed to look like. A couple of years later, Steven Spielberg’s
“Close Encounters of the Third Kind” became one of the most popular
motion pictures ever made, depicting beings similar to those in
Hill’s description. Public perception of the “standard model” alien
was further influenced by the cover of the 1987 best- selling book
“Communion,” an allegedly true account of alien contact, which
sported the expected image. Had Barney Hill’s hypnosis session taken
place earlier, or had the ABC network scheduled the “Bellero Shield”
later, we would in all likelihood have a different “standard model”
alien.
Let’s go on to another kind of evidence, one that is piling up into a
rather convincing accumulation. That’s the evidence relating to the
impossibility of reported UFO behavior under limitations imposed on
us by a number of well-tested physical principles. The scientific
consensus on these limitations has become more solid over time,
making the notion that our planet is being visited by ET spacecraft
less and less convincing. (We’re assuming here that our hypothetical
ET’s are conceptualized as physical beings traveling in physical
machines from place to place in the here-and-now universe that we see
around us. Concepts of “light beings”, “interdimensional portals”, or
“higher vibratory planes” we relegate to the realm of the
pseudomystical.)
Crudely stated, the limitations that concern us are:
No object travels faster than light (the Einstein speed limit).
No object can be made to move without forcing some other object to
move in the opposite direction (Newton’s 3rd law of motion).
No object can move through the atmosphere at bullet-like speeds
without creating a sonic boom (a direct consequence of the Doppler
effect).
Gravity pulls; it can’t be made to push.
Complex living beings don’t survive instantaneous accelerations from
a standing start to thousands of miles per hour, nor do they survive
instantaneous sharp turns at those speeds (direct consequences of
inertia).
Referring to limitation #1, there can be little doubt that if ET’s
are visiting our planet, they would have to do so in vessels
traveling faster than light; sub-light “generation ships” would in
all likelihood be totally impractical (more on that idea below). But
the Einstein speed limit says this can’t be done, so we have to ask:
How well-settled is the idea that nothing travels faster than light?
Very well indeed, actually, and getting better established all the
time. Back in 1947 when the UFO issue first came to prominence,
relativity and Dr. Einstein’s speed limit were only about 50 years
old, and only a handful of experiments had been performed to test
their validity. Since then, we’ve educated several new generations of
physicists, many of whom have worked at “pushing the envelope” of
relativity. Experiments and theoretical studies have proliferated
over this time, but unfortunately no exception has been found to this
fundamental limiting principle of physics. In fact, there’s not even
a realistic hint pointing to the possibility of an exception.
A counter to this argument is the claim that maybe we don’t know all
the physics there is to know. Of course we don’t. But we do
know a lot, and for almost a century now the evidence has been
accumulating that the Einstein speed limit is both intractable and
permanent. Anyone who holds that the limit might be bypassed by some
“new physics” at some time in the future, or that ET’s may already
have developed that physics, has a very heavy and rapidly growing
burden of proof to bear; solid and convincing evidence, not
speculation, is required to support that burden.
Moving on to the other limitations, it should be noted that these all
apply to the standard kinds of behaviors reported for UFOs in the
atmosphere. These behaviors include:
Instantaneous or near-instantaneous accelerations and decelerations
between a dead stop and hypersonic speeds,
Instantaneous turns at those hypersonic speeds,
Absence of the expected sonic booms from these maneuvers, and
Absence of the expected visible indicators of a super-powerful
propulsion system at work (smoke, noise, exhaust blast, etc.).
If we assume that some kind of “mothership” brought these craft here
across the gulfs of space, and that this mothership complies with the
Einstein speed limit (requiring decades or centuries to make the
journey), this assumption avoids limitation #1. Unfortunately it
won’t avoid the other four. To do that, we need such “Star Trek”
notions as impulse drive, inertial damping, or anti-gravity. And
these are contradicted by ideas that are, if anything, even
better-established than the Einstein speed limit, as they are rooted
in nearly 400 years of classical physics.
What we have, then, is a situation where the “pro” evidence consists
almost entirely of statements from witnesses who have observed
unusual phenomena in the sky and cannot identify what they saw, and
whose perceptions and interpretations have been contaminated by
images from the popular culture, while the “con” evidence (or at
least the strongest such evidence) is a body of physical laws
supported by massive amounts of experimental data.
Concerning the “pro” evidence, we know from numerous investigations
of those witness accounts that a substantial majority of them (or
practically all, depending on your source of information) are
explainable as a mix of mundane phenomena observed under odd
circumstances, plus a number of hoaxes. As noted above, the Colorado
report is enlightening on these points. Taking the case studies as a
whole, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that a witness
observing something unusual, even a “trained observer,” has a
near-zero ability to interpret that observation correctly and
describe it accurately. It is also difficult to escape the conclusion
that reliable individuals, pillars of the community with solid
reputations for integrity, pull off UFO hoaxes with surprising
frequency.
Concerning the “con” evidence, it needs to be emphasized that the
various physical principles in question are approximately 100 to 400
years old, supported by enormous numbers of repeatable experiments
and instrumented observations, all subjected to intense scrutiny by
generations of scientific professionals who would like nothing better
than to demolish an important pillar of the scientific edifice. And
these ideas are not just textbook material. Our real-world technology
abounds with applications of these ideas, all developed by engineers
and inventors who must cope on a daily basis with the inconvenient
limitations imposed on them by the physical world and its laws.
Aeronautical engineers would be delighted if they could make gravity
push rather than pull; inconveniences such as wings and fuel-guzzling
engines on airplanes could be dispensed with. The designers of
communications equipment and computers would be equally delighted to
learn that Dr. Einstein’s speed limit could be violated; the
possibilities would be dazzling. But alas, none of this is happening,
and as the evidence accumulates it appears more likely than ever that
it cannot happen, on this planet or any other.
In closing, a final point: The arguments made here are not
conclusive. We cannot say with certainty that our planet is not being
visited. We can, however, note that those who support the idea of ET
visitation have always had a heavy burden of proof, a burden that has
only grown heavier as time has passed. We skeptics, who find this
idea implausible, have a lighter burden, and it gets lighter with
time.