EricTheRed
Paranormal Maven
“We are not saying the authorities are hiding The Truth about UFOs, much less that it is ET. We are saying they cannot ask the question.”[1]
Much remains to be said about mainstream science’s failure to treat the UFO subject as a serious topic of interest. Questions about why this is the case range over psychology, institutional dynamics, cultural politics, history, and the epistemology and sociology of science. In other words, there is no singular explanation for the negation of the UFO subject.
This in turn suggests a major priority for UFO researchers: The writing of a comprehensive account of mainstream dismissal. Such an account should address questions like:
-What kinds of bias are at work?
-How does language create misunderstanding?
What rhetorical devices distort understanding?
-How much do ideological and philosophical assumptions play a part in masking the threat to human autonomy, identity and competence if vastly superior intelligences could be confirmed?
-How, relative to UFOs, does Enlightenment reason cease to become a practice of truth-finding and instead become an ideology and mystification by justifying hidden bias, bounded information, and human ego?
-Can we identify any patterns among skeptics historically that suggest the dominance of non-rational factors at points in their debunking careers? How reliable have debunkers really been?
-What does the history of science reveal about the treatment of new paradigms, anomalous results, and challenges generally to mainstream thinking? And, how does the UFO topic compare with this history?
-What does psychological research say about how we respond to perceived threats to worldviews? Might this apply to dogmatic skepticism?
If scrupulously argued, if backed by sufficient research to back its hypotheses about mainstream UFO negation, it could be a landmark book, a game-changer for both an educated audience as well as key academics and scientists who might play the role of ‘door-opener’ for others.
In the hope that I might help along this project a tiny, tiny bit, I’d like to present what I take to be two (recent) examples of epistemologically suspect skepticism.
The Anomalous Disk
On Sept. 22, 2014, the Mirror Online ran an article about witnesses to a “fast-moving disc-shaped object.”[2] There were “several” witnesses. One said,
The object in the picture looks very much like a lenticular cloud. But lenticular clouds are stationary.
So, what was it?
Before that can be discussed, any serious investigator would first have to research the possibility of a hoax. But, for the sake of argument let’s assume that no hoaxing was involved.
The article goes on to quote Karen Masters, a “senior lecturer in the institute of cosmology and gravitation at The University of Portsmouth.”
Masters pulls out the distance objection, and to her mind that settles it. Whatever it was, it can’t in principle be anything ET. To some extent she’s utterly reasonable in dismissing the ET hypothesis on this basis. Unless one spends some significant time really thinking about the vast distances of space, you won’t really appreciate the power of the distance objection.
For perspective, let’s say you boarded a 747 traveling around 550mph, and this 747 was capable of leaving earth’s gravity (somehow) and traveling through space at the same speed. It would take you over a million years to go 1 light year. Let that sink in for a moment. That’s many times longer than human civilization has existed. 48,000 human generations would transpire before you reached this distance, and the first 99% of generations would be utterly lost to human memory.
1 light year is an incredible distance, one that I don’t know if I can really grasp. The Hubble telescope has found objects 13 billions light years away. That floors me.
However, that’s not and cannot be the end of the discussion. We simply don’t know what technical advances a highly advanced civilization might achieve. Just as one light year stretches our imagination, just as a million years in time defies understanding, so too does a mere 250 years, or 10,000 years, or a million years of human technical and scientific advance. We’ve had a number of paradigmatic upheavals in science. What others might be in store? What is physically possible and what is not?
On the one hand it’s folly to simply throw any possibility into the future as if the future were some magical source of possibility, able to get us over any hurdle we can imagine. Many physical systems either behave in predictable fashion or within understood ranges of probability. The more one is knowledgeable about science, the more one can develop an appreciation for the “hardness,” the inflexibility, of various physical laws and probabilities, and therefore the more one feels confident in assigning probabilities to what might be possible in the future.
But even with this in mind there are still two large openings in the cracks of this kind of narrow scientific skepticism. One, already mentioned, concerns what we don’t know—the future may have technological and scientific surprises in store for us.
The second has to do with extra-rational considerations, extra-rational in the sense of creativity and value and motivation. Solving the immense distance problem of space travel is also an engineering problem—a problem that requires creative problem-solving. It’s also a sociological/psychological problem—one that concerns the values and motivations of an intelligence unknown to us, and not predictable in principle by any scientific theory. Saying that “they” wouldn’t have any reason to come to earth presumes knowledge no one has.
In other words, an alien intelligence might very well have the motivation to travel enormous distances. They might also have creative ways of building the capacity to do so. For instance, intelligent scout probes/robots could be sent out in large numbers and high rates of speed for the purpose of setting up ‘way stations’—refueling and habitation ports that could safely house biological travelers in the future. Each way station in turn could create and launch yet more probes in an exponential process. (Please note: I know this isn’t a new idea.) Alien civilizations might readily have found a way to secure their own embryos for far-future birthing in artificial wombs once an hospitable planet was located.
My point then is that one of the biases of mainstream science involves ignoring non-cognitive factors that could, in theory anyway, provide possible solutions to the distance objection.
The Ironic Anti-Empirical Turn
Whether some UFOs are of ET origin is an empirical question. And as such any attempt to explain all UFO sightings a priori (that is, before the actual evidence is considered) as misidentifications, is by definition—given the assumption that the ETH is not at all a physical impossibility—pseudo-science.
Enter Matthew Sharps, professor of psychology at California State University at Fresno, writing in, among all places, the May-June 2014 issue of Skeptical Inquirer.[3]
In brief, Sharps’ argument is that because we have evidence that psychological factors can bias interpretation of perception, “UFOs exist, but not in reality; they take their form in the creative and imaginative spaces of the human mind.”
Could a little Sriracha sauce make that implicit fallacy any sharper on the tongue?
To repeat, Sharps is claiming that the sufficient and even necessary explanation for any UFO sighting that the witnesser believes defies conventional explanation and might be ET, is psychological in origin. Did that saucer performing extraordinary maneuvers, seen by both your flight crew and passengers, shut down your aircraft’s electrical equipment? Don’t worry, it’s ultimately all in your head. Whatever you saw must, by definition, be some advanced aircraft, or maybe a meteor. Something conventional. It can’t even in theory be an alien intelligence because we know that people believe what they want to believe. That’s what the evidence says! It’s science!
That’s actually not scientific, it’s ideological—ideological skepticism. Just because some people in a laboratory settingmay misidentify ambiguous objects as ET due to psychological factors, it doesn’t logically follow then that every possible ET UFO seen by someone can’t be ET. To determine that, you’d have to research the empirical evidence of that UFO.
How did the editors of Skeptical Inquirer not catch this? They share his anti-UFO bias, mostly likely.
There are several clues as to how Sharps might have acquired his bias, or at least part of it. Understanding his case might shed light on other ideological or dogmatic skeptics. It would interesting to ask him how much he has read of UFO case histories. If he replied with something similar to ‘very little’, we’d potentially have a good single-case study of how bias, uninformed scientific intuition, and the influence of popular culture can distort the interpretation of the UFO phenomenon overall. (And, come to think of it, this case invites the creation of a sociological study.[4])
First, he recounts at the beginning of his article an odd sighting of his own, which begins
The other small object, in clear negation of current laws of aerodynamics, went straight up.”
He goes on to give a perfectly plausible and no doubt true explanation of seeing the planet Venus along with two small aircraft near the Fresno airport. After his short but adequate explanation, he writes “I don’t know that this is the source of all those vertically flying aliens on the UFO programs, but I strongly suspect that it is.”
It’s not hard to see how a scientific-minded person could—justifiably, within the bounds of his or her limited experience—go from a personal experience like this, inject the all-too-true stereotype of the true believer into the mix, and come away thinking that one’s weird-ish airplane sighting was just the kind of thing the credulous UFO believer would champion as “proof.” In fact, we know this happens, but there’s also excellent reason to think this doesn’t account for all sightings.
Sharps goes on to discuss several psychological factors that research shows can bias the interpretation of perception. One grouping of such psychological factors has to do with ‘subclinical’ symptoms:
Note how the various paranormal claims show up in the same car, all wearing the same funny suits. That is, they’re all part of the same mix of bogus claims. UFOs, Bigfoot, the 2012 Mayan “prophecies,” they’re essentially the same underlying phenomenon—ambiguous observational evidence. Their only differences really reside in how human psychology distorts perceptions and presents them back to us in personalized guises of the extraordinary.
So, what does the above say about Sharps’ bias with regard to the UFO question?
1. The stereotype of the UFO true believer[5], which is unfortunately backed by plenty of real life examples, can become the symbol that encapsulates all students of the UFO phenom. In thinking about this topic, the dogmatic or uninformed skeptic imagines this stereotype as the only kind of mind who might actually take the ETH seriously.
2. I’m not sure if it’s been formally identified in scientific study, but Sharps is clearly committing some kind of fallacy. The most obvious fallacy is non sequitur—it doesn’t follow that because there exists a tendency in a laboratory setting for people with subclinical conditions to falsely attribute meaning to something, that this extends to all people who entertain the ETH hypothesis on the basis of their own sightings. They might not have these subclinical symptoms. And, obviously, it could also be the case that in either case, with symptoms or without, there could be something extraordinary and non-human behind some UFO cases.
3. Sharps references UFOs on television—another source of bias. Interviewees on these shows, whether researchers or witnesses, might be perfectly credible, but these shows are never designed to meet scientific research criteria. Often, their analytical quality is crap. However, if these shows are one of your primary sources for UFO information, and if you haven’t exposed yourself to the history of UFO research in any significant way, it’s easy to see that within this bounded information reality that it would be rational to dismiss the whole field as likely nonsense.
4. Hoaxes and fakes, not uncommon in the paranormal field, can easily bias someone into believing that the UFO field can’t have any reality behind it. Because if evident hoaxes and fakes can convince people, then who is to say that any witness is reliable? Perhaps anyone who makes a UFO claim of an extraordinary nature would be the same kind of person who would fall for a hoax?—or so goes the thinking.[6]
So, a reading of Sharps’ article raises the possibility that the above 4 things could serve as sufficient biases to explain how he arrives at the fallacy of thinking that since some people may incorrectly assume ET for psychological reasons, that all people do.
When Sharps writes “I have shown that beliefs in aliens and in their supernatural cronies (such entities as Bigfoot, ghosts, and the Loch Ness monster), have their origins in purely psychological factors.”
Actually, he’s shown no such thing, at least with regard to UFOs, since whether UFOs are ET or not, depends not on his laboratory findings, but whether UFOs are actually ET or not. That’s an empirical question you can’t answer by testing people in a laboratory. You have to gather actual evidence for that.
[1] Wendt, A., Duvall, R. (June, 2008). Sovereignty and the UFO. Political Theory. p 612.
[2] Adams, S. (Sept. 22, 2014). UFO spotted over south coast - and Met Office says it is definitely NOT a cloud. Mirror Online. Accessed from UFO spotted over south coast - and Met Office says it is definitely NOT a cloud - Mirror Online
[3] Sharps, M.J. (May-June, 2014). UFOs and cognitive science: a case study: two psychological principles create UFOs and their alien pilots: interpretation of what we have seen and cognitive dissonance in our investment of those interpretations. Skeptical Inquirer. p 52-.
[4] Hypothesis: In the absence of significant reading in the better UFO literature (we’d have to get clear in some definitions here of course—“significant” and “better UFO literature”), scientists will dismiss the validity of the ETH for UFOs. Those who have read significantly will be more likely to accept the ETH as a potential explanation. It would also be useful to survey each group’s exposure to popular culture media impressions of UFOs, aliens, and science fiction for their respective mediating influences. If proponents of scientific study of UFOs want to break through the current logjam of dismissal, this kind of study and others like it would certainly help.
[5] Please understand, I’m not denying that those who have experienced UFOs that defy conventional explanations are entitled to a kind of certainty over what they’ve seen. I wasn’t there, and some of these witnesses might very well have encountered observational evidence such that if all the right scientific equipment were in place, we’d have some high quality scientific evidence. But, what gets counted as scientific evidence—empirical evidence—in our culture, requires more than personal testimony, as good as that testimony might be. There’s a notional contrast that should be drawn between ‘legitimate’ sightings of this type, and the person who lacks to some significant degree the critical capacity to make correct judgments, exhibits great bias, believes without evidence, can’t separate his or her own musings from the evidence at hand, etc.
[6] It may even be the case that psychologists are especially prone to a particular kind of type 1 error: Rejecting the true neutral null hypothesis that UFOs could be ET, in favor of the false hypothesis that they can’t be ET due to overestimating the scope of some psychological explanation.
Much remains to be said about mainstream science’s failure to treat the UFO subject as a serious topic of interest. Questions about why this is the case range over psychology, institutional dynamics, cultural politics, history, and the epistemology and sociology of science. In other words, there is no singular explanation for the negation of the UFO subject.
This in turn suggests a major priority for UFO researchers: The writing of a comprehensive account of mainstream dismissal. Such an account should address questions like:
-What kinds of bias are at work?
-How does language create misunderstanding?
What rhetorical devices distort understanding?
-How much do ideological and philosophical assumptions play a part in masking the threat to human autonomy, identity and competence if vastly superior intelligences could be confirmed?
-How, relative to UFOs, does Enlightenment reason cease to become a practice of truth-finding and instead become an ideology and mystification by justifying hidden bias, bounded information, and human ego?
-Can we identify any patterns among skeptics historically that suggest the dominance of non-rational factors at points in their debunking careers? How reliable have debunkers really been?
-What does the history of science reveal about the treatment of new paradigms, anomalous results, and challenges generally to mainstream thinking? And, how does the UFO topic compare with this history?
-What does psychological research say about how we respond to perceived threats to worldviews? Might this apply to dogmatic skepticism?
If scrupulously argued, if backed by sufficient research to back its hypotheses about mainstream UFO negation, it could be a landmark book, a game-changer for both an educated audience as well as key academics and scientists who might play the role of ‘door-opener’ for others.
In the hope that I might help along this project a tiny, tiny bit, I’d like to present what I take to be two (recent) examples of epistemologically suspect skepticism.
The Anomalous Disk
On Sept. 22, 2014, the Mirror Online ran an article about witnesses to a “fast-moving disc-shaped object.”[2] There were “several” witnesses. One said,
"I don't believe in UFOs, but when I saw this I didn't know what it was.
"It didn't look like a cloud, and it was moving very fast. It was a grey, disc-like shape, which I know sounds like a stereotypical UFO, but that's what it looked like.
"I don't know much about military craft, but this was very fast-moving and very odd to see.”
Another witness said,
"My initial thought was it was an aeroplane, but it was just moving too quickly.
"I was the only one that saw it but was quick enough to take the picture.
"I definitely believe in UFOs and am very interested in science fiction, and often look up at the sky in the evening wondering if there is anything or anyone else out there."
"It didn't look like a cloud, and it was moving very fast. It was a grey, disc-like shape, which I know sounds like a stereotypical UFO, but that's what it looked like.
"I don't know much about military craft, but this was very fast-moving and very odd to see.”
Another witness said,
"My initial thought was it was an aeroplane, but it was just moving too quickly.
"I was the only one that saw it but was quick enough to take the picture.
"I definitely believe in UFOs and am very interested in science fiction, and often look up at the sky in the evening wondering if there is anything or anyone else out there."
The object in the picture looks very much like a lenticular cloud. But lenticular clouds are stationary.
So, what was it?
Before that can be discussed, any serious investigator would first have to research the possibility of a hoax. But, for the sake of argument let’s assume that no hoaxing was involved.
The article goes on to quote Karen Masters, a “senior lecturer in the institute of cosmology and gravitation at The University of Portsmouth.”
'Given the pictures show a dark object against a daytime sky, it's clearly not an astronomical object.
"Many UFO sightings are the planet Venus, but this one can't be that.
"The distances in space are so vast that it's just not possible for aliens to be visiting Earth, so any interpretation suggesting this is an alien spacecraft is clearly wrong.”
"Many UFO sightings are the planet Venus, but this one can't be that.
"The distances in space are so vast that it's just not possible for aliens to be visiting Earth, so any interpretation suggesting this is an alien spacecraft is clearly wrong.”
Masters pulls out the distance objection, and to her mind that settles it. Whatever it was, it can’t in principle be anything ET. To some extent she’s utterly reasonable in dismissing the ET hypothesis on this basis. Unless one spends some significant time really thinking about the vast distances of space, you won’t really appreciate the power of the distance objection.
For perspective, let’s say you boarded a 747 traveling around 550mph, and this 747 was capable of leaving earth’s gravity (somehow) and traveling through space at the same speed. It would take you over a million years to go 1 light year. Let that sink in for a moment. That’s many times longer than human civilization has existed. 48,000 human generations would transpire before you reached this distance, and the first 99% of generations would be utterly lost to human memory.
1 light year is an incredible distance, one that I don’t know if I can really grasp. The Hubble telescope has found objects 13 billions light years away. That floors me.
However, that’s not and cannot be the end of the discussion. We simply don’t know what technical advances a highly advanced civilization might achieve. Just as one light year stretches our imagination, just as a million years in time defies understanding, so too does a mere 250 years, or 10,000 years, or a million years of human technical and scientific advance. We’ve had a number of paradigmatic upheavals in science. What others might be in store? What is physically possible and what is not?
On the one hand it’s folly to simply throw any possibility into the future as if the future were some magical source of possibility, able to get us over any hurdle we can imagine. Many physical systems either behave in predictable fashion or within understood ranges of probability. The more one is knowledgeable about science, the more one can develop an appreciation for the “hardness,” the inflexibility, of various physical laws and probabilities, and therefore the more one feels confident in assigning probabilities to what might be possible in the future.
But even with this in mind there are still two large openings in the cracks of this kind of narrow scientific skepticism. One, already mentioned, concerns what we don’t know—the future may have technological and scientific surprises in store for us.
The second has to do with extra-rational considerations, extra-rational in the sense of creativity and value and motivation. Solving the immense distance problem of space travel is also an engineering problem—a problem that requires creative problem-solving. It’s also a sociological/psychological problem—one that concerns the values and motivations of an intelligence unknown to us, and not predictable in principle by any scientific theory. Saying that “they” wouldn’t have any reason to come to earth presumes knowledge no one has.
In other words, an alien intelligence might very well have the motivation to travel enormous distances. They might also have creative ways of building the capacity to do so. For instance, intelligent scout probes/robots could be sent out in large numbers and high rates of speed for the purpose of setting up ‘way stations’—refueling and habitation ports that could safely house biological travelers in the future. Each way station in turn could create and launch yet more probes in an exponential process. (Please note: I know this isn’t a new idea.) Alien civilizations might readily have found a way to secure their own embryos for far-future birthing in artificial wombs once an hospitable planet was located.
My point then is that one of the biases of mainstream science involves ignoring non-cognitive factors that could, in theory anyway, provide possible solutions to the distance objection.
The Ironic Anti-Empirical Turn
Whether some UFOs are of ET origin is an empirical question. And as such any attempt to explain all UFO sightings a priori (that is, before the actual evidence is considered) as misidentifications, is by definition—given the assumption that the ETH is not at all a physical impossibility—pseudo-science.
Enter Matthew Sharps, professor of psychology at California State University at Fresno, writing in, among all places, the May-June 2014 issue of Skeptical Inquirer.[3]
In brief, Sharps’ argument is that because we have evidence that psychological factors can bias interpretation of perception, “UFOs exist, but not in reality; they take their form in the creative and imaginative spaces of the human mind.”
Could a little Sriracha sauce make that implicit fallacy any sharper on the tongue?
To repeat, Sharps is claiming that the sufficient and even necessary explanation for any UFO sighting that the witnesser believes defies conventional explanation and might be ET, is psychological in origin. Did that saucer performing extraordinary maneuvers, seen by both your flight crew and passengers, shut down your aircraft’s electrical equipment? Don’t worry, it’s ultimately all in your head. Whatever you saw must, by definition, be some advanced aircraft, or maybe a meteor. Something conventional. It can’t even in theory be an alien intelligence because we know that people believe what they want to believe. That’s what the evidence says! It’s science!
That’s actually not scientific, it’s ideological—ideological skepticism. Just because some people in a laboratory settingmay misidentify ambiguous objects as ET due to psychological factors, it doesn’t logically follow then that every possible ET UFO seen by someone can’t be ET. To determine that, you’d have to research the empirical evidence of that UFO.
How did the editors of Skeptical Inquirer not catch this? They share his anti-UFO bias, mostly likely.
There are several clues as to how Sharps might have acquired his bias, or at least part of it. Understanding his case might shed light on other ideological or dogmatic skeptics. It would interesting to ask him how much he has read of UFO case histories. If he replied with something similar to ‘very little’, we’d potentially have a good single-case study of how bias, uninformed scientific intuition, and the influence of popular culture can distort the interpretation of the UFO phenomenon overall. (And, come to think of it, this case invites the creation of a sociological study.[4])
First, he recounts at the beginning of his article an odd sighting of his own, which begins
“I was out on my patio after dark. To the west, there was a large, brilliantly glowing disc-shaped or spherical light.
However, when I sat down in a chair, the brilliant sphere changed.
The bright globe of light became indented, in a C-shape like a crescent moon, but with encircling horns. For all the world, it looked like a spherical spacecraft, perhaps something like a Star Wars Death Star, which had opened its hangar doors to admit exploratory shuttlecraft.
And to the right of the object, two small glowing objects (the shuttlecraft?) were clearly visible. As I watched, one of them approached the larger object and then disappeared. (Did it enter the Death Star's force field for admission to its hangar?)
However, when I sat down in a chair, the brilliant sphere changed.
The bright globe of light became indented, in a C-shape like a crescent moon, but with encircling horns. For all the world, it looked like a spherical spacecraft, perhaps something like a Star Wars Death Star, which had opened its hangar doors to admit exploratory shuttlecraft.
And to the right of the object, two small glowing objects (the shuttlecraft?) were clearly visible. As I watched, one of them approached the larger object and then disappeared. (Did it enter the Death Star's force field for admission to its hangar?)
The other small object, in clear negation of current laws of aerodynamics, went straight up.”
He goes on to give a perfectly plausible and no doubt true explanation of seeing the planet Venus along with two small aircraft near the Fresno airport. After his short but adequate explanation, he writes “I don’t know that this is the source of all those vertically flying aliens on the UFO programs, but I strongly suspect that it is.”
It’s not hard to see how a scientific-minded person could—justifiably, within the bounds of his or her limited experience—go from a personal experience like this, inject the all-too-true stereotype of the true believer into the mix, and come away thinking that one’s weird-ish airplane sighting was just the kind of thing the credulous UFO believer would champion as “proof.” In fact, we know this happens, but there’s also excellent reason to think this doesn’t account for all sightings.
Sharps goes on to discuss several psychological factors that research shows can bias the interpretation of perception. One grouping of such psychological factors has to do with ‘subclinical’ symptoms:
“Those normal people who tend toward beliefs in unknown creatures tend toward subclinical, nonpathological symptoms of attention deficit. Those who believe in ghosts tend toward subclinical, nonpathological depression. Those who tend to believe in pretty much everything tend toward subclinical dissociation…”
“Nonpathological dissociative tendencies may produce conditions under which everyday stimuli may take on supernormal properties. Individuals with SCD tendencies may believe in anything, be it ghosts, UFOs, Bigfoot, or the 2012 Mayan apocalypse that didn't happen. These tendencies may further incline them toward the perception of pictures purported to be those of Bigfoot and aliens as the real things, rather than as hoaxes or as unclear, ambiguous photographs of everyday items”
“Nonpathological dissociative tendencies may produce conditions under which everyday stimuli may take on supernormal properties. Individuals with SCD tendencies may believe in anything, be it ghosts, UFOs, Bigfoot, or the 2012 Mayan apocalypse that didn't happen. These tendencies may further incline them toward the perception of pictures purported to be those of Bigfoot and aliens as the real things, rather than as hoaxes or as unclear, ambiguous photographs of everyday items”
Note how the various paranormal claims show up in the same car, all wearing the same funny suits. That is, they’re all part of the same mix of bogus claims. UFOs, Bigfoot, the 2012 Mayan “prophecies,” they’re essentially the same underlying phenomenon—ambiguous observational evidence. Their only differences really reside in how human psychology distorts perceptions and presents them back to us in personalized guises of the extraordinary.
So, what does the above say about Sharps’ bias with regard to the UFO question?
1. The stereotype of the UFO true believer[5], which is unfortunately backed by plenty of real life examples, can become the symbol that encapsulates all students of the UFO phenom. In thinking about this topic, the dogmatic or uninformed skeptic imagines this stereotype as the only kind of mind who might actually take the ETH seriously.
2. I’m not sure if it’s been formally identified in scientific study, but Sharps is clearly committing some kind of fallacy. The most obvious fallacy is non sequitur—it doesn’t follow that because there exists a tendency in a laboratory setting for people with subclinical conditions to falsely attribute meaning to something, that this extends to all people who entertain the ETH hypothesis on the basis of their own sightings. They might not have these subclinical symptoms. And, obviously, it could also be the case that in either case, with symptoms or without, there could be something extraordinary and non-human behind some UFO cases.
3. Sharps references UFOs on television—another source of bias. Interviewees on these shows, whether researchers or witnesses, might be perfectly credible, but these shows are never designed to meet scientific research criteria. Often, their analytical quality is crap. However, if these shows are one of your primary sources for UFO information, and if you haven’t exposed yourself to the history of UFO research in any significant way, it’s easy to see that within this bounded information reality that it would be rational to dismiss the whole field as likely nonsense.
4. Hoaxes and fakes, not uncommon in the paranormal field, can easily bias someone into believing that the UFO field can’t have any reality behind it. Because if evident hoaxes and fakes can convince people, then who is to say that any witness is reliable? Perhaps anyone who makes a UFO claim of an extraordinary nature would be the same kind of person who would fall for a hoax?—or so goes the thinking.[6]
So, a reading of Sharps’ article raises the possibility that the above 4 things could serve as sufficient biases to explain how he arrives at the fallacy of thinking that since some people may incorrectly assume ET for psychological reasons, that all people do.
When Sharps writes “I have shown that beliefs in aliens and in their supernatural cronies (such entities as Bigfoot, ghosts, and the Loch Ness monster), have their origins in purely psychological factors.”
Actually, he’s shown no such thing, at least with regard to UFOs, since whether UFOs are ET or not, depends not on his laboratory findings, but whether UFOs are actually ET or not. That’s an empirical question you can’t answer by testing people in a laboratory. You have to gather actual evidence for that.
[1] Wendt, A., Duvall, R. (June, 2008). Sovereignty and the UFO. Political Theory. p 612.
[2] Adams, S. (Sept. 22, 2014). UFO spotted over south coast - and Met Office says it is definitely NOT a cloud. Mirror Online. Accessed from UFO spotted over south coast - and Met Office says it is definitely NOT a cloud - Mirror Online
[3] Sharps, M.J. (May-June, 2014). UFOs and cognitive science: a case study: two psychological principles create UFOs and their alien pilots: interpretation of what we have seen and cognitive dissonance in our investment of those interpretations. Skeptical Inquirer. p 52-.
[4] Hypothesis: In the absence of significant reading in the better UFO literature (we’d have to get clear in some definitions here of course—“significant” and “better UFO literature”), scientists will dismiss the validity of the ETH for UFOs. Those who have read significantly will be more likely to accept the ETH as a potential explanation. It would also be useful to survey each group’s exposure to popular culture media impressions of UFOs, aliens, and science fiction for their respective mediating influences. If proponents of scientific study of UFOs want to break through the current logjam of dismissal, this kind of study and others like it would certainly help.
[5] Please understand, I’m not denying that those who have experienced UFOs that defy conventional explanations are entitled to a kind of certainty over what they’ve seen. I wasn’t there, and some of these witnesses might very well have encountered observational evidence such that if all the right scientific equipment were in place, we’d have some high quality scientific evidence. But, what gets counted as scientific evidence—empirical evidence—in our culture, requires more than personal testimony, as good as that testimony might be. There’s a notional contrast that should be drawn between ‘legitimate’ sightings of this type, and the person who lacks to some significant degree the critical capacity to make correct judgments, exhibits great bias, believes without evidence, can’t separate his or her own musings from the evidence at hand, etc.
[6] It may even be the case that psychologists are especially prone to a particular kind of type 1 error: Rejecting the true neutral null hypothesis that UFOs could be ET, in favor of the false hypothesis that they can’t be ET due to overestimating the scope of some psychological explanation.
