1)
More than 90% of all sightings of “unidentified
flying objects” are sightings of lights in the night sky.
2)
Trained investigators can easily identify up to
95% of all sighted flying saucers as conventional objects.
3) Where
identification is not possible, it is invariably due to lack of information, not to information that cannot be “explained”
conventionally.
4)
Sources of nocturnal lights which have given
rise to such sightings include: planets (especially Mars and Venus) and bright
stars (30% of all cases); advertising planes (20% of all cases); commercial and
military aircraft (18%); bright meteors, meteor fireballs, and satellite
re-entries (10%). Daylight reports of flying saucers are much rarer; they are
almost always due to aircraft or weather balloons.
5) There
have been several official and unofficial scientific studies of flying saucer
reports, including a symposium sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science in December
1969. All such studies have come to the same fairly obvious
conclusion: there is not a
shred, not the tiniest fragment, of hard physical evidence that the planet
earth has ever been visited by a vehicle or other spacecraft manufactured on
another world or piloted by creatures from another world.
6)
Claims that real evidence does exist, but is
kept top secret, cannot be taken seriously. How can anyone seriously believe that any government agency and the
whole scientific establishment could have successfully kept such a secret for 64
years— through twelve different presidential administrations?
Science! vs.
Pseudoscience!
SCIENCE: The literature is written for scientists. There
is peer review, and there are rigorous standards for honesty and accuracy.
PSEUDOSCIENCE: The literature is aimed at the general
public. There is no review, no standards, no pre-publication verification, no
demand for accuracy and precision.
SCIENCE: Reproducible, reliable results are demanded;
experiments must be precisely described so that they can be duplicated exactly
or improved upon in sensitivity and volume of cases or events.
PSEUDOSCIENCE: Results cannot be reproduced or verified.
Studies, if any, are always so vaguely described that one can't figure out just
what was actually done or how it was done.
SCIENCE: Failures are searched for and studied closely,
since incorrect theories can often make correct predictions by accident but no
correct theory will make incorrect predictions.
PSEUDOSCIENCE: Failures are ignored, excused, hidden,
lied about, discounted, explained away, rationalized, forgotten, and avoided at
all costs.
SCIENCE: As time goes on, more and more is learned about
the physical processes under study.
PSEUDOSCIENCE: No actual physical phenomena or processes
are ever found, noticed or studied. No progress is made; nothing concrete is
learned.
SCIENCE: Individual defects, idiosyncrasies and blunders
of investigators average out— do not affect the real “signal” under study.
PSEUDOSCIENCE: Individual defects, idiosyncrasies and
blunders of investigators provide the only "signals" ever seen— the
average is zero.
SCIENCE: Convinces
by appeal to the evidence, by arguments based upon logical and/or mathematical
reasoning, by making the best case the data permit. When new evidence
contradicts old ideas, they are abandoned.
PSEUDOSCIENCE: Convinces by appeal to faith and belief. Pseudoscience in almost every case has a
very strong quasi-religious element: it tries to convert, not to convince.
You are to believe in spite of the facts, not because of them. The original
idea is never abandoned, whatever the evidence.
SCIENCE: There are no conflicts of interest; the
scientist has no personal financial stake in any specific outcome of his
studies.
PSEUDOSCIENCE: Everything
in pseudoscience seems to generate something for sale; look for courses in
how to remember past lives, on galactic diplomacy (sic.) Books about
extraterrestrials and cover-up, and teaching how to hunt for ghosts, how to
become a prophet, how to... you name it, you got it... but pay up first.
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