EricTheRed
Paranormal Maven
What explains the gulf between skeptics and believers with regard to the UFO question? As a lifelong active skeptic who has fairly recently jumped the fence to some degree, I may or may not have some insight into the mindset and rhetoric of skepticism. I'm writing this to better equip those of us who think that there is some genuine mystery to the UFO question to engage in more effective dialogue with skeptics, whose numbers are on the increase.
First, let me way that I think the skeptic movement is largely a force for good, despite its glaring problems. We live in a culture in which poor thinking habits are the grim and depressing norm. The problem is so pervasive we're like the proverbial fish not knowing it lives in water. Organized skepticism, a somewhat new-ish cultural formation going back only 2-3 decades, was a development that had to happen. We'll have an exceedingly hard time adapting to changes if we can't reason, if we don't understand that evidence is important, if can't see our own biases.
Never before in American history have we seen a mass movement, however small, that has the correction of bad thinking and irrationality as its main agenda. I think it needs to be acknowledged that regardless of how effectively it is combating unreason (e.g. young earth creationism), or how well it functions as a para-educational institution that upgrades thinking in ways that our public institutions are not, or whether it's contributing solutions to the more immediate issues of the day, it's becoming less acceptable in many quarters to get away with stupidities that passed unnoticed not long ago. How much of this can be attributed to the growing skeptical infrastructure--a half dozen small nonprofits, city and state chapters, hundreds of campus chapters--is hard to say of course. Charlatans, fundamentalists, hoaxers, and cranks of all stripes can now very quickly find themselves in a rather harsh spotlight. My hat is off to the skeptics. (When this might translate into smarter politicians is anyone's guess.)
However, if you've been fighting in the skeptic trenches long enough and you start to turn skepticism back onto itself, onto the organizational structures, rhetoric, frameworks, assumptions and practices of the movement, the edifice might not look quite as sturdy as it may have before. I'll spare you my fuller critique of organized skepticism and instead focus on how it's likely failing its members and society with regard to the UFO enigma.
Since I've gone from being a scoffing skeptic to the view that we're dealing with a real mystery, and one that might best be explained by looking beyond human invention, I feel as though I can speak with some authority on the skeptic mindset. (Whether my comments are insightful, new or useful is up to the reader to decide.) I now understand the errors I believe I was making before I had a clearer understanding of this particular branch of the paranormal. If my mistakes are common within skepticism, and lately in exchanges with skeptics on the UFO question I'm getting confirmation (confirmation bias?) that they are, then I hope that advocates for treating the UFO issue with serious scientific interest will gain some insight into how to deal with dogmatic debunkers. So, here's are a few observations about how many skeptics go wrong with UFOs:
1) If you learn about the UFO phenomena is from Skeptic and Skeptical Inquirer magazines, you've been misled. The primary way this happens is that if your exposure to the UFO field is only through these magazines, you can't possibly ever learn enough to make an informed judgment about the subject. These magazines cover a lot of ground, only a little of which is devoted to UFOs. And, if every UFO case you encounter in the pages of Skeptic and Skeptical Inquirer is neatly wrapped up with a skeptical bow on top, it's quite easy to be programmed into a natural inductive assumption: If UFO cases A, B, C and D were easily debunked, then it will likely be the same for E, F, and G. And if we can count on that pattern of debunking, what's the point of wading into the silliness any further? "That's what the UFO field is," goes the assumption, "just a bunch of credulous people believing things credulous people believe. Next." You'll never learn about the detailed history of the field, its thousands of reports, its many enigmatic and high-strange cases, the high level people involved in investigations, the scientific interest at the margins, the curious history of UFOs in the US national security state, and more. In sum, skeptics fed on the mother's milk of Skeptic and Skeptical Inquirer will have a poor diet of information.
2) This can create an in-group/out-group bias that can override strict rationality by categorizing believers as cognitively damaged goods, hoi polloi not ordained in the canons of high culture skepticism. Out-group individuals are members of the credulous herd who are essentially unreliable, regardless of appearances or credentials. If you're outside the walls of castle skeptic, you're seen as not sufficiently up to speed on how our perception, judgment and bias can screw us up. As a result the probability of anything you say might be accorded a lower status. You have extra hills to climb until you can prove that you're aware of what our culture has learned about the nuances of error. There's actually a lot of validity to the idea that we're not born good thinkers and that we really need to work hard at it to become better. In the same way I wouldn't want to hire for a classical guitar performance someone whose only exposure to music is the skin flute, you can't expect that everyone is at the same level with regard to their cognitive development. However, the mistake skeptics can make is in not acknowledging or seeing their bias against people who with equal intelligence and rational capacity might yet arrive at a different conclusion than that canonized in Club Skeptic.
3) Another bias of skepticism, understandable in a way, is to roll all paranormal and pseudo-science claims into the same joint to be smoked. Ghosts, young earth creationism, homeopathy, psychic predictions, UFOs--they are, according to this bias, all part of the same fabric of credulity and foolishness. While it's true that a relatively small and finite number of biases and fallacies underlie many false notions, that doesn't mean that they are all equally improbable. To the extent that we can look toward current theory for helping us make sense of or assign probabilities to various extraordinary claims, not all claims are created equal. For instance, there's no current theoretical basis in mainstream science for thinking psychic powers to be true at all. (That seems right to me, although I could be wrong.) However, with UFOs on the other hand there's no strict reason theoretically why UFOs couldn't be of ET origin. Evolution is a real process, it most certainly happens elsewhere in the universe, and there are huge numbers of life-capable planets. Great interstellar distances are an ace in the skeptics deck of cards, but they don't have a full hand of them. In sum, the skeptic can be biased in treating all paranormal claims as equally foolish, ungrounded in evidence, etc., ignoring how the large the variance might be in terms of theoretical possibility. This bias might manifest as unconsciously assigning an equivalence between, lets' say, monkeys flying on magic carpets and UFOs of ET origin. (--Is it partly because UFOs have been classified as "paranormal," with all that word's invidious associations in skeptic and scientific circles?)
4) Perhaps the trickiest bit of internalized programming that many skeptics have yet to deconstruct for themselves is the bias bound up with the skeptic catchphrase "extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence" in the context of UFOs. The bias arranges the chessboard into checkmate for the debunker even before the game has begun. There are two parts to this.
1. The bias automatically assigns a status of high improbability to the possibility of UFOs of non-human origin. The probability estimate the skeptic uses rests in part on current scientific understanding of the constraints of physics. We can't send a Saturn V to Alpha Centauri in any reasonable human timeframe. If there are ETs, reasons the skeptic, they'll be subject to the same physical constraints we are. The skeptic's bias in this instance is the bias of induction. That is, the skeptic over-relies on current scientific understanding, which is really all he/we can do rationally. But, how can we know that take to be true right now won't be overthrown in the future by a new discovery? The history of science is, of course, strewn with overthrown theories and paradigms. How can we be sure that our sense of what's possible vis-a-vis space travel won't be also? What happens when you add 500, 10,000, or a million years of technical advancement beyond our own? Might there be huge scientific discoveries awaiting us? So, the skeptic may be open to the charge of hasty generalization.
2. The other probability error rests on a hidden assumption--that UFOs of non-human origin are not here already. Naively speaking, it's a 50/50 chance--they are here or they aren't. But the skeptic begins with, and I suspect truly believes, the assumption that UFOs of non-human origin are not here. It's the skeptic a priori, his presupposition as to how the skeptic world works. In my experience this seems to be an unconscious bias, one that the skeptic covers over by saying "If there was evidence I would accept it." You have to be open minded even when in actuality you aren't. On this assumption a central error is born: Any unusual sighting ultimately has a mundane explanation. The skeptic is confident that if enough information were available every UFO case, no matter how high-strange, would find meet its skeptic Waterloo and be revealed to be misperception or a hoax, etc.
However, what if you assume UFOs of non-human origin are already here? Then, any new sighting might upon further analysis turn out to be a UFO of non-human origin. And suddenly the game of debunking isn't so easy.
Here's the tricky part. If you're a skeptic who utterly rejects the probability that UFOs of non-human origin are here, you're sort of stuck. Cases of dual eyewitness and radar tracking won't convince. Group witnessing and physical trace cases won't convince. Let me rephrase. Cases like these won't convince to the same degree of having a UFO of non-human origin in your scientific lab (nor should they-but...more on this in an sec.), but neither will they convince the skeptic that there's anything worth talking about or investigating necessarily. Strange UFO sightings can't possibly be anything more than human errors waiting for skeptical deconstruction. Once a skeptic has committed to this hidden probability commitment, you get the Phil Klasses and Michael Shermer's of skepticism, and all their mimicking camp followers.
If skeptics can be gotten to the equal probability perspective, at least here it's possible to argue for the seriousness of scientific investigation into UFOs. How to do this? Serious UFO investigators and advocates for investigation need to more often couch and qualify their statements in the language cautious scientists would use.
5) The "scientific evidence" trap is another mistake. In skeptic rhetoric, for something to constitute "scientific evidence" means a couple of things. It can be replicated. And it's empirical. Since we can't control UFOs, we can't replicate encounters in controlled settings to make sure what we saw was real, had x, y, z qualities, and so forth. The dogmatic skeptic might rule out any hypothesis of UFOs as having a non-human origin just on this basis. But this would be naive unscientific on its face. We may only see one gamma ray burst from a single source, for instance, but this doesn't mean we can't observe its characteristics.
"Empirical" in the context of UFOs and dogmatic skepticism is often used as a trump card. If an encounter with a UFO doesn't produce something that can be handed over to the physics lab at Harvard, then it can either be dismissed and/or chalked up to misidentification. Or, it's simply not of any scientific interest.
This naive empiricism leads to a reductio ad absurdum. Eyewitness accounts get downgraded to complete worthlessness, since--you guessed it--they aren't "empirical." However, this is where the thinking of the dogmatic skeptic ends. He fails to recognize that eyewitness testimony is also used at the very heart of even "bench science," where if reporting of results depends in any way on human involvement, either by witnessing events or taking measurements or recording results, the very same charge about the failings of eyewitness testimony may be leveled. This is why, of course, we try to duplicate results in science. But beyond this, the skeptic fails to understand that eyewitness testimony is not only a modality used in crime scenes or in cases of the paranormal. We continuously and unavoidably use eyewitness testimony almost every second of the waking day, whether confirming that what we're typing on our keyboard is actually showing up on our screens, or whether the money we believe was spent on groceries was actually spent, or whether when we say we have a cat living in our house we actually do. Eyewitness testimony is the trusted basis on which the world works, and it works in most cases.
This particular skeptic bias of "scientific evidence" brackets UFO testimony into a unique class of unreliability, treating testimony tacitly accepted in thousand different ways throughout life as magically suspect in the context of UFOs.
So, there you have it, my first take on what it looks like to have been a somewhat dogmatic UFO skeptic, only to find that perhaps there is something to this phenomenon after all. I'm as puzzled by it as anyone I've heard on The Paracast.
First, let me way that I think the skeptic movement is largely a force for good, despite its glaring problems. We live in a culture in which poor thinking habits are the grim and depressing norm. The problem is so pervasive we're like the proverbial fish not knowing it lives in water. Organized skepticism, a somewhat new-ish cultural formation going back only 2-3 decades, was a development that had to happen. We'll have an exceedingly hard time adapting to changes if we can't reason, if we don't understand that evidence is important, if can't see our own biases.
Never before in American history have we seen a mass movement, however small, that has the correction of bad thinking and irrationality as its main agenda. I think it needs to be acknowledged that regardless of how effectively it is combating unreason (e.g. young earth creationism), or how well it functions as a para-educational institution that upgrades thinking in ways that our public institutions are not, or whether it's contributing solutions to the more immediate issues of the day, it's becoming less acceptable in many quarters to get away with stupidities that passed unnoticed not long ago. How much of this can be attributed to the growing skeptical infrastructure--a half dozen small nonprofits, city and state chapters, hundreds of campus chapters--is hard to say of course. Charlatans, fundamentalists, hoaxers, and cranks of all stripes can now very quickly find themselves in a rather harsh spotlight. My hat is off to the skeptics. (When this might translate into smarter politicians is anyone's guess.)
However, if you've been fighting in the skeptic trenches long enough and you start to turn skepticism back onto itself, onto the organizational structures, rhetoric, frameworks, assumptions and practices of the movement, the edifice might not look quite as sturdy as it may have before. I'll spare you my fuller critique of organized skepticism and instead focus on how it's likely failing its members and society with regard to the UFO enigma.
Since I've gone from being a scoffing skeptic to the view that we're dealing with a real mystery, and one that might best be explained by looking beyond human invention, I feel as though I can speak with some authority on the skeptic mindset. (Whether my comments are insightful, new or useful is up to the reader to decide.) I now understand the errors I believe I was making before I had a clearer understanding of this particular branch of the paranormal. If my mistakes are common within skepticism, and lately in exchanges with skeptics on the UFO question I'm getting confirmation (confirmation bias?) that they are, then I hope that advocates for treating the UFO issue with serious scientific interest will gain some insight into how to deal with dogmatic debunkers. So, here's are a few observations about how many skeptics go wrong with UFOs:
1) If you learn about the UFO phenomena is from Skeptic and Skeptical Inquirer magazines, you've been misled. The primary way this happens is that if your exposure to the UFO field is only through these magazines, you can't possibly ever learn enough to make an informed judgment about the subject. These magazines cover a lot of ground, only a little of which is devoted to UFOs. And, if every UFO case you encounter in the pages of Skeptic and Skeptical Inquirer is neatly wrapped up with a skeptical bow on top, it's quite easy to be programmed into a natural inductive assumption: If UFO cases A, B, C and D were easily debunked, then it will likely be the same for E, F, and G. And if we can count on that pattern of debunking, what's the point of wading into the silliness any further? "That's what the UFO field is," goes the assumption, "just a bunch of credulous people believing things credulous people believe. Next." You'll never learn about the detailed history of the field, its thousands of reports, its many enigmatic and high-strange cases, the high level people involved in investigations, the scientific interest at the margins, the curious history of UFOs in the US national security state, and more. In sum, skeptics fed on the mother's milk of Skeptic and Skeptical Inquirer will have a poor diet of information.
2) This can create an in-group/out-group bias that can override strict rationality by categorizing believers as cognitively damaged goods, hoi polloi not ordained in the canons of high culture skepticism. Out-group individuals are members of the credulous herd who are essentially unreliable, regardless of appearances or credentials. If you're outside the walls of castle skeptic, you're seen as not sufficiently up to speed on how our perception, judgment and bias can screw us up. As a result the probability of anything you say might be accorded a lower status. You have extra hills to climb until you can prove that you're aware of what our culture has learned about the nuances of error. There's actually a lot of validity to the idea that we're not born good thinkers and that we really need to work hard at it to become better. In the same way I wouldn't want to hire for a classical guitar performance someone whose only exposure to music is the skin flute, you can't expect that everyone is at the same level with regard to their cognitive development. However, the mistake skeptics can make is in not acknowledging or seeing their bias against people who with equal intelligence and rational capacity might yet arrive at a different conclusion than that canonized in Club Skeptic.
3) Another bias of skepticism, understandable in a way, is to roll all paranormal and pseudo-science claims into the same joint to be smoked. Ghosts, young earth creationism, homeopathy, psychic predictions, UFOs--they are, according to this bias, all part of the same fabric of credulity and foolishness. While it's true that a relatively small and finite number of biases and fallacies underlie many false notions, that doesn't mean that they are all equally improbable. To the extent that we can look toward current theory for helping us make sense of or assign probabilities to various extraordinary claims, not all claims are created equal. For instance, there's no current theoretical basis in mainstream science for thinking psychic powers to be true at all. (That seems right to me, although I could be wrong.) However, with UFOs on the other hand there's no strict reason theoretically why UFOs couldn't be of ET origin. Evolution is a real process, it most certainly happens elsewhere in the universe, and there are huge numbers of life-capable planets. Great interstellar distances are an ace in the skeptics deck of cards, but they don't have a full hand of them. In sum, the skeptic can be biased in treating all paranormal claims as equally foolish, ungrounded in evidence, etc., ignoring how the large the variance might be in terms of theoretical possibility. This bias might manifest as unconsciously assigning an equivalence between, lets' say, monkeys flying on magic carpets and UFOs of ET origin. (--Is it partly because UFOs have been classified as "paranormal," with all that word's invidious associations in skeptic and scientific circles?)
4) Perhaps the trickiest bit of internalized programming that many skeptics have yet to deconstruct for themselves is the bias bound up with the skeptic catchphrase "extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence" in the context of UFOs. The bias arranges the chessboard into checkmate for the debunker even before the game has begun. There are two parts to this.
1. The bias automatically assigns a status of high improbability to the possibility of UFOs of non-human origin. The probability estimate the skeptic uses rests in part on current scientific understanding of the constraints of physics. We can't send a Saturn V to Alpha Centauri in any reasonable human timeframe. If there are ETs, reasons the skeptic, they'll be subject to the same physical constraints we are. The skeptic's bias in this instance is the bias of induction. That is, the skeptic over-relies on current scientific understanding, which is really all he/we can do rationally. But, how can we know that take to be true right now won't be overthrown in the future by a new discovery? The history of science is, of course, strewn with overthrown theories and paradigms. How can we be sure that our sense of what's possible vis-a-vis space travel won't be also? What happens when you add 500, 10,000, or a million years of technical advancement beyond our own? Might there be huge scientific discoveries awaiting us? So, the skeptic may be open to the charge of hasty generalization.
2. The other probability error rests on a hidden assumption--that UFOs of non-human origin are not here already. Naively speaking, it's a 50/50 chance--they are here or they aren't. But the skeptic begins with, and I suspect truly believes, the assumption that UFOs of non-human origin are not here. It's the skeptic a priori, his presupposition as to how the skeptic world works. In my experience this seems to be an unconscious bias, one that the skeptic covers over by saying "If there was evidence I would accept it." You have to be open minded even when in actuality you aren't. On this assumption a central error is born: Any unusual sighting ultimately has a mundane explanation. The skeptic is confident that if enough information were available every UFO case, no matter how high-strange, would find meet its skeptic Waterloo and be revealed to be misperception or a hoax, etc.
However, what if you assume UFOs of non-human origin are already here? Then, any new sighting might upon further analysis turn out to be a UFO of non-human origin. And suddenly the game of debunking isn't so easy.
Here's the tricky part. If you're a skeptic who utterly rejects the probability that UFOs of non-human origin are here, you're sort of stuck. Cases of dual eyewitness and radar tracking won't convince. Group witnessing and physical trace cases won't convince. Let me rephrase. Cases like these won't convince to the same degree of having a UFO of non-human origin in your scientific lab (nor should they-but...more on this in an sec.), but neither will they convince the skeptic that there's anything worth talking about or investigating necessarily. Strange UFO sightings can't possibly be anything more than human errors waiting for skeptical deconstruction. Once a skeptic has committed to this hidden probability commitment, you get the Phil Klasses and Michael Shermer's of skepticism, and all their mimicking camp followers.
If skeptics can be gotten to the equal probability perspective, at least here it's possible to argue for the seriousness of scientific investigation into UFOs. How to do this? Serious UFO investigators and advocates for investigation need to more often couch and qualify their statements in the language cautious scientists would use.
5) The "scientific evidence" trap is another mistake. In skeptic rhetoric, for something to constitute "scientific evidence" means a couple of things. It can be replicated. And it's empirical. Since we can't control UFOs, we can't replicate encounters in controlled settings to make sure what we saw was real, had x, y, z qualities, and so forth. The dogmatic skeptic might rule out any hypothesis of UFOs as having a non-human origin just on this basis. But this would be naive unscientific on its face. We may only see one gamma ray burst from a single source, for instance, but this doesn't mean we can't observe its characteristics.
"Empirical" in the context of UFOs and dogmatic skepticism is often used as a trump card. If an encounter with a UFO doesn't produce something that can be handed over to the physics lab at Harvard, then it can either be dismissed and/or chalked up to misidentification. Or, it's simply not of any scientific interest.
This naive empiricism leads to a reductio ad absurdum. Eyewitness accounts get downgraded to complete worthlessness, since--you guessed it--they aren't "empirical." However, this is where the thinking of the dogmatic skeptic ends. He fails to recognize that eyewitness testimony is also used at the very heart of even "bench science," where if reporting of results depends in any way on human involvement, either by witnessing events or taking measurements or recording results, the very same charge about the failings of eyewitness testimony may be leveled. This is why, of course, we try to duplicate results in science. But beyond this, the skeptic fails to understand that eyewitness testimony is not only a modality used in crime scenes or in cases of the paranormal. We continuously and unavoidably use eyewitness testimony almost every second of the waking day, whether confirming that what we're typing on our keyboard is actually showing up on our screens, or whether the money we believe was spent on groceries was actually spent, or whether when we say we have a cat living in our house we actually do. Eyewitness testimony is the trusted basis on which the world works, and it works in most cases.
This particular skeptic bias of "scientific evidence" brackets UFO testimony into a unique class of unreliability, treating testimony tacitly accepted in thousand different ways throughout life as magically suspect in the context of UFOs.
So, there you have it, my first take on what it looks like to have been a somewhat dogmatic UFO skeptic, only to find that perhaps there is something to this phenomenon after all. I'm as puzzled by it as anyone I've heard on The Paracast.
. I also agree that too much emphasis has been on ufology trying to gain the acceptance of the institutions ( scientific and political ) rather than standing on it's own two feet. Regarding MUFON, I think it's compromising the field with it's banner "The Scientific Study of UFOs for the Benefit of Humanity". It's red flag waving at skeptics and scientists begging them to label them all pseudoscientists. Their only defense is to claim that the banner is merely to show their support in the spirit of the scientific process, but they refuse to respond to my requests for comment, and when the Director was on the Paracast show, my question to him on this issue was passed over ( not impressed about that ). In contrast, USI ( my group ) recognizes the value of science but makes no pretentious claims.
