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.
Continued from yesterday’s blog…
Extraordinary Claims
Lastly, something really needs to be said that there’s one set of standards of evidence for one set of phenomena, and another set of standards of evidence for other sets of phenomena. That is to say, if you want to be extraordinarily sceptical about some things, you claim you need extraordinary evidence to make you see the sceptical error of your ways!
There exists a phrase “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”'. I've seen that mantra in numerous books, articles, on the Internet, etc. I understand it originates from the late and great Carl Sagan. Were Dr. Sagan alive today I'd take my comments to him, but seeing as how he's no longer available, this section of the essay will suffice instead.
Claims require evidence. That's not in dispute. However, the word 'extraordinary' is in the mind of the beholder. What might be an extraordinary claim to you might not be an extraordinary claim to me, and vice versa. Murder is a more extraordinary crime than littering, yet the same evidence (say a security camera film) will convict in both cases. You don't need twice the amount of evidence in a murder trial vis-à-vis being convicted of littering. So, claims, of any kind, require enough evidence to convince anyone with an open mind - no more; no less.
If I, one of the vast majority of laymen, were to make a claim that the double slit experiment beloved in quantum physics provides evidence for the existence of parallel universes, or that a positron (an anti-electron) was actually nothing more than an electron going backwards in time, that would be extraordinary. If a professional scientist, a physicist, were to make those same claims, it’s not extraordinary presumably because physicists know what they are talking about. Yet it’s the same set of claims. They can’t be both extraordinary and ordinary at the same time!
Many of the greatest and now accepted parts of science started out as an extraordinary claim - like quantum mechanics or relativity theory or the fact that the Earth goes around the Sun. But did these claims really need extraordinary (like double the experimental) evidence vis-à-vis other claims that are now equally parts of the accepted science we find in the textbooks? For open-minded people, especially scientists, such claims probably did not require extraordinary evidence. And how in fact do you quantify extraordinary over ordinary evidence? Is twice as much extraordinary or three times or ten times? If someone is really a true-blue skeptic, it might not make the slightest difference, they would always demand more. No amount of evidence is extraordinary enough for them.
Few scientists now dispute the (initially extraordinary) claim of the reality of ball lightning, yet not only is it far rarer than UFO sightings, it has less of a theoretical underpinning than the proposal that some UFOs have an extraterrestrial intelligence behind them. Ball lightning hasn’t been put under a laboratory microscope any more than UFOs have. There are lots of parallels between ball lightning and UFOs for the sociologists of science to ponder. Yet one has credibility, one doesn’t. Why? It makes relatively little sense.
It is said, and there is truth in this, that science and scientists do not have the time and resources to investigate every claim ever made about the natural world. There must be some ways and means of distinguishing reasonable from unreasonable (i.e. – extraordinary) claims. While I don’t have an easy answer to that – though I’ll give one immediately below – I’ll just initially observe that there’s been a lot of seemingly reasonable claims that are now only footnotes in the history of science, and a fair few unreasonable claims that are now part of the bedrock on which our sciences, technology and civilization rests.
However, instead of ordinary vs. extraordinary distinctions, I’d suggest important vs. relatively unimportant claims. Lots of claims, whether proven or unproven, aren’t going to set the world on fire. Others have the potential to make for paradigm shifts in our understanding of the world and the cosmos. The equation UFOs = evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence is such an example. The claim needs to be investigated, yet not requiring massive more investigations than any other sort of scientific puzzle would require.
So, we desire evidence for the extraterrestrial nature of UFOs, not extraordinary evidence since that word ‘extraordinary’ has too much philosophical baggage attached to be meaningful.
To sum up this section, that ultra overused phrase “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” is nonsense. Claims of course require evidence, but the word ‘extraordinary’ is in the mind of the beholder. What’s extraordinary to one is routine, boring, commonplace and downright bloody obvious to another. And speaking of the common phrase, another one is ‘absence of evidence is not the same thing as evidence of absence’, or in this context, absence of evidence for the UFO ETH (which I dispute) is not the same thing as evidence of absence of the UFO related alien here on Earth.
Summary & Conclusions
UFOs vs. evidence for the UFO ETH – there is no absolute smoking gun - yet. I’d be the first to acknowledge that. I’d suggest however that this is a case of where there’s smoke, there’s smoke. The fire has yet to be seen through the smoke. There however has got to be something suggestive about the nature of that smoke to drive lots of people, even some quite intelligent people, to accept the possibility, some say probability, of the UFO ETH. I mean the idea just didn’t pop out of the ether – out of thin air. Something very suggestive is driving it.
But there is a reason. There’s more than enough eyewitness testimony and physical evidence that would satisfy any court of law; any judge; any jury in just about any other set of circumstances to render a verdict of guilty. But the UFO ETH can not yet be rendered guilty, because though there’s not yet to date that smoking gun. There’s lots of evidence – no proof. There’s no absolute under-the-microscope, on the lab’s slab, proof positive of the UFO ETH. If any UFO ETH buff says they have proof, skeptics should tell them to ‘put up or shut up’. If however they say they have evidence in favor of the UFO ETH, ask them politely what it is.
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