A question was recently put to me as to whether or not I believe in UFOs or any extra-terrestrial contact. At first my initial response was that “I am not authorised to answer that question”. Appreciating that I was speaking to a tougher crowd than I had anticipated I dropped any attempt at humour almost immediately.
So where to start?
UFO. First, we must remember what the “U” stands for in UFO. There is a fascinating frailty of the human mind that psychologists know all about and it’s called the argument from ignorance. This is how it goes:
Somebody sees lights flashing in the sky.
They’ve never seen them before
They don’t understand what it is.
They say: “a UFO”
“I don’t know what it is”
“It must be an Alien visiting from another Planet”.
I think it’s fair to say that if one does not know what it is, that is where one’s conversation ought to stop. You don’t then say that “it must be” anything. This is a very common thought that I partake in and I believe it comes from our burning to have to know stuff and therefore we are uncomfortable in our ignorance. You can’t be a scientist, philosopher or simply a human being if you are uncomfortable with ignorance because we live on the boundary of what is known and unknown in the universe. Unlike Journalists who always write about how “scientists now have to go back to the drawing board”, as if scientists are sitting there with their feet on their lobby room coffee tables with t-shirts that read “Masters of the Universe” only to then kick their coffees onto the floor in complete shock that somebody had discovered something. Whereas in reality empiricists are always at the drawing board. If you’re not at the drawing board then you are not making discoveries. You are something else.
The public, it seems, has this burning need to have to have an answer to the unknown and so you go from an abject statement of ignorance to an abject statement of certainty. We know, not just from research in psychology but from simple empirical evidence, that the lowest form of evidence that exists in this world is eyewitness testimony. This is scary because this is some of the highest forms of evidence in a court of law. Yet, we know from primary school that this is not reliable. I can remember, in my primary school science class, doing an experiment in which we all lined up next to each and the person of the far left was told to say something to their neighbour. This message would then be passed down the line until it reached the person on the end. At the end of the experiment, the person at the end of the line was saying something that was almost completely different to the message in which the very first person initially said. So it wouldn’t really matter if you saw a flying saucer. In science (even with things that are less controversial than a flying saucer), if you went into a lab or any respectable seminar in any subject and said: “you gotta believe me because I saw it” you’d be sent home and asked to return when you had some tangible evidence. This is because human perception is rife with ways of getting things wrong.
We don’t like thinking of ourselves as being rife with mistakes. We have high opinions of human biology when in fact we should not. I’ll give you an example. We have all enjoyed optical illusions at some point or another. This is not what they should be called. I might suggest that they be renamed to brain failures because that is what they really are. It is a complete failure of human perception. All it takes is a few sketches that are cleverly done and your brain can’t figure it out. We are poor data retaining devices. That is why we have such a thing as science because we have machines that don’t care what side of the bed they woke up to in the morning, don’t care what they said to their spouse that day and don’t care if they missed their morning dose of caffeine. They will get the data right.
So, maybe you did see visitors from another part of the galaxy. We need more than your eyewitness testimony and in modern times we need more than your photograph. It seems with all the UFO pictures that are out there that photo-shop must have some sort of UFO button today.
I’m not saying that we haven’t been visited. I’m saying that the evidence brought forwards thus forth does not satisfy the standards of evidence that any scientist would require for any other claim that you are going to walk into the lab with.
We’d even get confused about objects of our own culture. I reach into my pocket and pick out a device called the IPhone. Our own culture produced this. 60 years ago people would have resurrected the witch burning laws if I had got this phone out in church and this is from our own culture!
The community of amateur astronomers in the world are constantly looking up. When they walk out of a building they immediately look up. UFO siting’s are not higher among the amateur astronomers than they are among the general members of the public, in fact they are lower. This might have something to do with the fact that they know what they are looking at. There was a UFO siting reported by a police officer, because if you’re wearing a badge your eyewitness testimony is automatically greater than everyone else’s. This officer was tracking this UFO because it was swaying backwards and forwards in the sky. He was in the police car chasing this UFO. Later it turned out that this UFO was in fact Venus and that the police officer was driving on a curved road.
So here’s what I recommend. Next time your abducted and you’re on the slab (because they always have the need to do the sex experiments on you) you say to the Alien “Hey, look over there”. When the Alien looks “over there” you quickly snatch something off of the shelf and put in your pocket and then lay back. Then you come back and say “look what I got, I liked stole the ashtray off of the shelf of the flying saucer”. You need to then bring this to the lab because it’s no longer about eye witness testimony because you finally have something of Alien manufacture and anything you pull of a flying saucer that has crossed the galaxy is going to be interesting.
beyond the Edge of reason 