UFO skeptics claim that there’s little or no credible evidence that any UFO event can be interpreted as an alien spaceship doing its alien flying thing, boldly going on Planet Earth where no extraterrestrial has gone before. However, the fact that there exists such a thing as the UFO extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH), six decades (and then some) on must suggest that there is some really real evidence in support of that UFO ETH belief, belief supported by opinion polls over many, many years.
Introduction
Many ideas or fads, be they in the sciences or the arts, don’t last long – theories come and theories go and actual clothing fashions and trends in pop music change yearly. What’s ‘in’ and what’s ‘out’ is often pretty fickle. A lot of what was popular in 1947 (the birth year of the modern UFO era) has fallen by the wayside now - but, interestingly enough, not the UFO ETH. The UFO ETH is as popular as ever, maybe even more so now than in 1947 (or shortly thereafter – it took a while for the ETH idea to come to the fore), not that popularity equates of necessity to something factual. If a billion people believe a stupid idea – like an invisible friend who art in heaven – it’s still a stupid idea.
However, over six decades on, despite all the professional and amateur sceptics and the universal naysayer, the government denials, scientists professing the ‘no evidence’ mantra, the ‘giggle’ factor and the ‘silly season’ publicity, fodder only fit for the tabloids, the UFO ETH is alive and well thank you very much. Something must be driving this. Perhaps, at least for many of the great unwashed, there is some signal in the noise – some sort of evidence (albeit not physical enough to be acceptable to many professional scientists) that’s swaying the general public into believing that aliens are not only here, but here and now.
Of course it is not sufficient enough for visiting aliens and their interstellar craft (UFOs if you will) to just theoretically exist (since there’s no actual physics or engineering preventing this) – there’s got to be some kind of actual evidence – and it exists in spades as we shall see.
A History Lesson
The UFO ETH only exists, early 1950’s onwards, because for the first three to four years of the then ‘flying discs’ or ‘flying saucers’ phenomena, starting in the late 1940’s, ‘saucers’ or ‘discs’ were assumed to be terrestrial in origin – secret Soviet devices (to the Americans); secret American devices (to the Russians). When those ideas became untenable, the obvious conclusions were that UFOs was all in the mind (some sort of Cold War hysteria); misidentifications, hoaxes, hallucinations, etc. But that became as equally untenable as solid case after solid case came in and proved to be unexplainable by any and all acceptable terrestrial possibilities. By elimination – well according to Sherlock Holmes, ‘when you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth’ – one was forced to at least consider the ETH a plausible alternative to the initial ‘manufactured by’ terrestrial hypothesis.
Once it became crystal clear that UFOs were not a national security issue, but a scientific issue, well what better way for those charged with investigating UFOs as a national security issue to bail out by having them investigated as a scientific issue instead? And so was contracted out a so-called ‘scientific investigation into UFOs’ to the University of Colorado
The illogic of the scientific mind was made crystal clear in the ultimate debunking of the UFO ETH. The University of Colorado Scientific Study
The Problem with Obtaining and Verifying UFO Evidence
The trouble with UFOs is that they won’t stand still! You can’t put them under a microscope, poke and prod them, or study and measure them at your leisure like you can most phenomena. You can’t predict in advance where and when and for how long they will appear.
Scientists and Evidence: The Double Standard
The majority of scientists, especially physical scientists, usually poo-poo the UFO ETH with a there’s ‘no evidence’ mantra. But such scientists leave themselves wide open to the double standard.
A prime example of how some scientists have their cake and eat it too is with respect to religion. There’s absolutely no evidence for any deity, yet many scientists have no trouble accepting on faith and having a belief in a deity (or deities) sight unseen by anyone and everyone. No one verifiable has seen the monotheistic deity and all the polytheistic deities are apparently, according to scholars, entirely mythological. Go figure. This essay could just as easily been constructed around a theme of ‘God: Show Me the Evidence!’
But there are valid cases within science of scientists not only ‘having their cake and eating it too’. Scientists need more than 20 fingers and toes to list all of the there-is-no-evidence-for- these-way-out-theories in science that ultimately had to wait years, decades, longer even for experimental confirmation. If scientists had put these in the too hard basket, or dismissed them with a ‘I just don’t believe it - it can’t be therefore it isn’t’ attitude, well we’d still all believe all manner of things that ain’t necessarily so, in fact aren’t so.
Now without meaning to accuse scientists of pure hypocrisy, there are lots of current concepts in science that have absolutely no evidence to support them, yet are taken quite seriously by physical scientists. A partial list would include concepts like the Multiverse (there are more than one universes within the overriding cosmos); the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum physics; particle physic’s string theory; the Higgs Boson; the possible existence of ten or eleven dimensions; the Ekpyrotic (two string theory [mem]branes colliding and accounting for the origin of the) Universe theory; and, shock-horror for those interested in SETI (that’s the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence), the total lack of any under-the-microscope, hardcore evidence whatsoever for any intelligent life forms other than intelligent terrestrial life forms. Yet it is acceptable for scientists to research these areas without being subject to having their sanity questioned. I fail to see why the UFO ETH is an exception to this. Even forget the UFO ETH – just the UFO phenomena full-stop is off limits. Be that as it may, it is.
There are other case histories from the annals of science regarding ‘the nature of the evidence’ that have parallels with UFOs – physical phenomena that don’t stand still. You can’t poke and prod, put under the microscope, examine at your leisure and which are unpredictable in space and in time various phenomena. Ball lightning comes to mind; ditto Transient Lunar Phenomena (TLP); and you can’t rewind the clock and prepare for (instruments at the ready) and witness the one-off Tunguska event.
There seems to be a double standard for evidence here. UFOs have a ‘giggle factor’; ball lightning and TLP do not, yet both have theoretical underpinnings that make their existence plausible. In the case of UFOs, it’s the Fermi Paradox – that’s the ‘where are they, if they exist they should be here’ observation.
Here are a few more realities that scientists once rejected as having no evidence.
The Sun went around the Earth – there was no evidence for any other configuration.
Our Universe could not be anything but static. The Universe could be neither expanding nor contracting. Einstein however knew the Universe should be contracting because of the attractive force of gravity. To counter that, and keep the Universe static, he and the scientists of his times believed in a ‘cosmological constant’, a repulsive force to exactly counter gravity’s pull. Einstein later called that his greatest blunder since there wasn’t any actual evidence for it. However, that ‘cosmological constant’ has recently resurfaced in the form of ‘dark energy’, so Einstein might have been right after all!
Those cosmic suckers, Black Holes, while existing theoretically on paper, could not actually exist in reality - in practice they were quite the impossible object without any observational evidence to contradict that alleged impossibility.
Despite theory, gravity couldn’t bend light rays – forget it because no observational evidence had ever seen such a thing. Of course that was to change.
No one in their right mind would believe that it was possible that mankind had any actual evolutionary relationship with ‘lower’ life forms. Where’s the evidence? Then along comes Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace, and the rest, as they say, is history.
That matter could actually consist of indivisible bits called atoms; well that atomic theory was nonsense, even if it did date back to the ancient Greeks, since there was absolutely no shred of evidence to support it.
That ‘island universes’ were actually independent conglomerations of stars and not nebulous entities part and parcel of our own Milky Way Galaxy was deemed highly improbable by experts for lack of any observational evidence.
Catastrophism in geology was considered a no-no for much of the time since it began as a legit part of earth science. All evidence in geology (especially landforms) pointed to a gradual softly-softly, slowly-slowly, process. Violent events need not apply to explain things. Tell that to the dinosaurs! Of course we know better today. Catastrophism has taken its place and role playing in the geologic scheme of things.
Speaking of geology, the idea of continental drift was once considered preposterous pie-in-the-sky stuff despite observational evidence that the outlines of the continents could be matched like a jigsaw puzzle. Geologists countered that there was no even theoretical evidence for a physical mechanism that could push continents around. Well, there was as it turned out, only we may no longer call it continental drift but rather plate tectonics.
Once upon a time, the concept of nuclear energy was pie in the sky – a subject no scientist would take seriously since there was no evidence for any such an energy source, at least until X-Rays were accidentally discovered. .
Prior to the initial test, there was ‘experts in explosives’ who said that the A-bomb would never work – again, observational evidence proved superior to theoretical ‘evidence’ as to how the real world worked.
Powered flight was once considered impossible because evidence proved that balloons were the only feasible means of air travel.
Rocket travel was utter bilge as there was nothing in space for the rocket’s exhaust to push against. That was just so obvious that no actual evidence was required.
It was impossible for the human body to travel faster than the speed of a (fill in the blank) without suffering fatal physiological consequences, and what human would risk life-and-limb to provide evidence to the contrary?
The sound barrier would never be broken, despite evidence that the crack of the bullwhip was exactly that.
It was considered impossible for stones to fall from the sky – evidence provided by eye-witnesses to the contrary be damned. Today, we incorrectly call them ‘shooting stars’; more correctly meteors, and when then hit the ground, meteorites.
To be continued…
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