Clash of Titans
So that’s where the scientific debate is stuck – pretty much where it has been for 62 years, since Kenneth Arnold saw the first officially-recognized UFO on June 24, 1947. To every new UFO incident empiricists tend to say “See that? Told ya.” But rationalists continue to believe that all UFO sightings are misperceptions or lies.
I may be only individual in America who is a member both of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), America’s foremost organization for the study of UFOs, and the Skeptics’ Society. I have attended national conferences of both organizations. All the conference speakers at both conferences consisted of speakers with post-graduate degrees -- mostly PhDs -- from American universities. The difference was, at the Skeptics Society the speakers had earned their degrees in the same field they were lecturing about. At the MUFON conference, this was not true for any speaker, because it is impossible to earn an advanced degree studying UFOs in the United States. The speakers at the national MUFON conference had all earned their advanced degrees in other fields, including electrical engineering, aerospace engineering, physics, astronomy, history, and medicine.
MUFON and the Skeptics Society actually have much more in common than they realize. Both claim to be devoted to an empirical approach to understanding reality, but the Skeptics Society is rational in its heart of hearts. That is to say, the Skeptics are more inclined to believe they already understand the most important laws of physics, and therefore the universe. This allows them to dismiss out of hand any phenomenon that does not conform to their laws, like UFOs.
The PhDs who lecture at MUFON conferences, on the other hand, aren’t so sure. Having studied the UFO phenomenon, brimming with astounding, inexplicable reports, UFOlogists tend to be humbler about their own state of knowledge. It is at MUFON you are more likely to find hard core empiricists – people who may not be able to explain their facts, but who are devoted to collecting them nevertheless.
But this epic debate about evidence is not an equal battle. The rationalist skeptics suffer from some built-in weaknesses in their arguments, and for the last 30 years or so the empiricists have been winning. Polls consistently show that a majority of those who have an opinion – usually about a 2 to 1 majority – believe that UFOs are real.
Of course, this does not prove the majority is correct. This is not a dispute that can be resolved through polling. UFOs are either real or they are not. Opinions do not matter in the final analysis. Rationalists believe that only a tiny minority of the population is truly rational, and this explains the unwelcome poll results.
All Or Nothing at All
While I would agree that only a tiny minority of the population are truly rational – it’s me and about three other people, and you know who you are – I’m also convinced that the rational skeptics have other, fatal weaknesses in their case. Most obviously, the rational skeptics have to prove that all UFO sightings are misperceptions or lies, even the sightings that involve multiple simultaneous witnesses. If even one UFO sighting is a real object not of this Earth or time, then the rational skeptics are wrong. The empiricists, on the other hand, can be wrong 99 times out of 100 and still prove their case if even a single UFO turns out to be of extraterrestrial or extra-temporal origin.
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