Yesterday a friend sent me an article from Sentinel News by Charles Magrin entitled, "A Real Phenomenon, A Cultural Taboo," that revolves around the question of why the scientific community doesn't take UFOs more seriously, and asked, "What do you think of his argument?"
I encourage you to read the essay in its entirety, but to summarize, Magrin's reasoning seems to boil down to four main points:
- UFOs (or, as we're now supposed to call them, UAPs) are rejected as visitations from extraterrestrial intelligences because to accept them would overturn our place as the smartest species in the known universe. "[T]he phenomenon cannot be accommodated without unsettling the very foundations of the modern political order," Magrin writes. "It challenges sovereignty, anthropocentrism and the monopoly on defining reality. It is not disturbing because it is false, but because it challenges our frameworks of understanding."
- There's an active governmental coverup of the actual evidence for visitation. Magrin gives a number of examples of various inquiries into UAPs by the United States government that were either classified as top secret and filed away or else scotched, and quotes UAP investigator J. Allen Hynek as saying, "The investigators seem to have been directed to find a conventional explanation for each case, no matter how far-fetched it might have been."
- Belief in extraterrestrial intelligence is part of the cultural system of many Indigenous peoples, and for us here in the United States to accept that it's real would "challenge Christian monotheism." Inevitably, the Dogon people came up, a claim which I addressed in a previous post here at Skeptophilia. *heavy sigh*
- We can't handle incredulity, and "aliens coming here in spaceships" is just too far outside of our worldview even to consider.
To me, the only one that deserves serious consideration is #2. The government clearly does cover things up in cases where it involves national security, or (as we're currently experiencing) in cases where to expose the truth would result in putting the president and many of his top staff members in prison for life. Could the United States government be hiding evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence? It's possible, although given how many times we've had impassioned testimony from "whistleblowers" like David Grusch and promises by Trump and others to come clean about alien visitations, all of which have amounted to zilch, I'm perhaps to be excused for feeling dubious.
As far as the rest of his reasons, I'm calling bullshit.
Starting in the fifteenth century, science has pushed deeper and deeper into what's called the Copernican Principle -- that we not only aren't the center of the universe, we're not really the center of anything. In fact, our position, both literally and figuratively, is nowhere special. From what we can see looking out into space, the universe appears to be homogeneous and isotropic -- approximately equal matter/energy density everywhere, and pretty much the same no matter which direction you look. The idea that there's a gigantic conspiracy on the part of scientists to preserve our central place in the universe is a ridiculous claim, given that it's the scientists who have shown that the Earth isn't the center of the Solar System, the Solar System isn't the center of the Milky Way, the Milky Way isn't the center of the Local Group, and so on. (And, incidentally, that humans are just another animal in the vast tree of life, all originating from a common single-celled ancestral species.)
Magrin also makes a quick slide from talking about people who doubt UFOs/UAPs to those who doubt "NHIs" -- "non-human intelligences." This brings to mind astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson's quip that we should "remember what the 'U' in 'UFO' stands for... If something is unidentified, then that's where the conversation should stop. You don't then go on to say 'so it must be' anything." While I think that Tyson is being a little categorical here (mostly for humorous effect), he's got a point. Maybe the conversation shouldn't end, but we need to be very cautious about swinging from "we don't know what this is" to attributing it to whatever our favorite explanation is. Sure, continue to investigate, continue to examine the evidence, and -- as Carl Sagan put it -- "Keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out." The problem is that the UFO enthusiasts have a tendency to want us to go from an abject statement of ignorance to an abject statement of certainty.
Plus, I think Magrin is being disingenuous, here. There are a couple of other much better reasons why scientists are hesitant to jump on the UFO/UAP bandwagon. The first is straightforward and obvious; there simply is no hard evidence that's available to study. Whether this is because the government is hiding it is immaterial; you can't expect a scientist to espouse a particular model if there's no data there to analyze. What "evidence" we do have, in the form of grainy photographs, blurred video clips, and various first-hand accounts, does not meet the minimum standard of what science accepts as sufficient.
Second, hoaxers and liars abound. Oh, how I fucking hate hoaxers. There's a spectrum of belief, from the gullible on one end (believe even if there's no good evidence) to the cynical on the other (disbelieve even if there is good evidence). I've made the point here before that I think we should all aim for the midpoint, skepticism -- believing if and only if there's reliable evidence, and keeping your mind open otherwise. The problem here is that we're all human, scientists included, with the natural proclivity to get completely fed up if we're fooled over and over. The prevalence of hoaxers (or, less culpably, people making reports of UFOs/UAPs where it turns out they've misinterpreted perfectly natural phenomena) has understandably tilted a lot of scientists' needles toward the "cynical" side of things. It's not a good thing; and the best astronomers out there (David Kipping comes to mind) stubbornly resist having their emotions swamp their rational faculties in either direction, whether it's their excitement over the possibility of extraterrestrial life or their frustration over how many times the purported evidence has turned out to be a bust.
And that touches on another thing that Magrin conveniently ignores; the vast majority of scientists would love to have their prior understanding overturned. This is a common misapprehension amongst laypeople; that the scientific establishment is devoted to guarding the status quo like crazy, and will destroy anyone who dares to challenge the edifice we already have. In fact, exactly the opposite is true. Can you imagine how the scientific establishment would react if there was incontrovertible evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence? Or Bigfoot, or ghosts, or telepathy, or precognition, or any of a dozen other fringe-y claims? They wouldn't be trying to suppress it; they would be trampling over each other to be the first to submit a paper to Nature about it. Actual overturnings of the dominant scientific paradigm are rare, but when they occur, it's how careers are made, how tenured professorships are achieved, how Nobel Prizes are won. Consider the names we all remember, science nerd and layperson alike; Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Mendel, Einstein, Schrödinger, Bohr, Hubble, Matthews & Vine, Watson/Crick/Franklin, Rubin, Hawking. They were not afraid to challenge the prior understanding, and what they accomplished secured their reputations amongst the greats of scientific history.
Anyhow, as far as Magrin's claims, I'm predictably unimpressed. Okay, maybe the government is up to shenanigans with respect to UFOs/UAPs, and "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," as historian William Wright famously said. The problem is, absence of evidence isn't evidence of anything. So as I've said before, I'll happily turn into a True Believer once I have hard data to base it on. But until someone brings out a chunk of an alien spacecraft, I'm solidly in the "dubious" column.
