I begin with two housekeeping notes. First, while I abhor the “click bait-and-switch,” I still strive to deliver pithy titles. I realize this one will pique some UFO raconteurs’ interest. If this is you, know that this is a skeptical piece of renunciation and not a salacious UFO story. If you stay for it, you can’t say I didn’t warn you. Second, the technical meaning of the acronym UFO is unidentified flying object. This object could be a thrown hubcap or an unconventional aircraft one is seeing for the first time. We all know this isn’t its popular meaning, it’s common usage. In what follows, UFO is synonymous with the phrase “visiting space alien.” Nobody—as far as I know—is into hubcap or aircraft religion. As for visiting space alien religion, people go nuts for it.
A few years back I grew concerned by the number of UFO stories I saw on the Web. Reading several, I realized there was no more heft to the 2020s wave of stories than there had been to the 1970s wave. I quit clicking on the bait. Before long I stopped seeing the stories altogether. Funny how the algorithms made the space aliens “go away”—for me, that is. I’m sure the stories are still following the UFO religionists. In a modern take on Shakespeare, Hamlet says, “There’s nothing either true or false but clicking makes it so.”
It used to be that seeing was believing. Nowadays, seeing the stories is believing. “Polls repeatedly and consistently suggest,” writes physicist and Fermi Paradox scholar Stephen Webb, “that the majority of Americans believe flying saucers exist and are buzzing around Earth.” The Fermi Paradox is simple to state and hard to solve. The gist of it is right there in the title of Webb’s book If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens…Where Is Everybody?
Webb’s statement suggests a couple of things. First, Webb’s “majority” consists of more believers of stories than UFO eyewitnesses. Take all the reported UFO sightings and they don’t add up to anything close to an American majority. Second, it suggests that a lot of people who read this piece won’t like what I have to say. I’m stating it anyway; voices of dissent are a necessary bulwark against the threat of mass delusion.
Am I saying that believing in visiting space aliens is a danger? It depends. Credulous belief in UFO fantasies is innocent enough. Your 10-year-old’s space alien phase is cute. When it’s an adult religion guarded by conspiracy cognition, it’s no longer charming. These days, anything that primes the conspiracy cognition pump is a threat.
As I indicated, I’m alarmed by the number of UFO stories in the news—not by the number of UFOs. This is a number I put at zero. As a techno-realist, I’m convinced that technology is subject to finite limitations. This goes for future technology as well as alien technology. Straightaway, my techno-realism precludes a belief in interstellar travel. If it’s not impossible, it’s got to be impractical for any extraterrestrial civilization. The energy required for interstellar travel at even 1/10 the speed of light is mindboggling.
UFO religion comes with the built-in belief that space aliens have “advanced technology.” If they’re here, then it’s obvious they’ve got it. This is circular reasoning. UFO religionists invoke advanced technology to make “possible” what they pre-decided is true. Arthur C. Clark’s “third law” states that magic and technology are interchangeable terms. This depends on context. Say that Mr. A is an alien from the planet Kepler-452b. Mr. A’s technology is Bob from Earth’s “magic.” With alien magic, UFOs are, to quote Carl Jung, “technological angels” visiting Earth.
I can see a Christian chafing at Jung’s conflation of technology and religion. He’ll see the UFO religionist’s credulity and rescue fantasizing at once. What he won’t see is that his own embrace of visiting angels is similar. If he’s a dyed-in-the-wool religionist, he thinks that other “religions” are superstition. He thinks only his religion is religion. He regards technology magic as a false idol. He avers that only God magic—except he won’t call it magic—is real. In her book, American Cosmic, D.W. Pasulka classifies both UFOs and angels as hierophanies. These are manifestations of the sacred.
For believers, UFOs and their space alien pilots are watching over us from on high. When necessary, they intervene in personal or societal affairs to keep us safe. Often, it’s from each other that they’re saving us. If we didn’t think of one of these “angels” as being biological and having scienced its way to us, we’d see the resemblance. The civilization that sends the angels might as well be God. Michael Shermer states: “Any sufficiently advanced ETI [extraterrestrial intelligence] is indistinguishable from God.”
There’s no more to the visiting space alien’s biology or to his scienced travel than the blowing of smoke. We know as much about alien biology as we do about angel biology, which is to say nothing. We know as much about space alien saucer flight as we do about angel flight: again, nothing. How do I know this? I don’t—not with 100% certainty. This isn’t the “fail” the UFO religionist thinks it is. Nobody on the planet has been everywhere all the time to have seen everything that’s ever taken place on it. Admitting this doesn’t mean I get to turn around and put anything I want in one of the places I’ve never been.
This invokes Bertrand Russell’s teapot orbiting Neptune thought experiment. (The gravitational locus varies from paraphrase to paraphrase). Here’s a mock conversation to illustrate the teapot analogy. Person A says, “Prove there isn’t a teapot orbiting Neptune.” Person B responds, “Nobody can do that.” Person A concludes, “Aha, then you admit there might be a teapot!” In the narrowest sense, Person B does admit this; if he didn’t, he’d be guilty of intellectual dishonesty. But the “might” into which Person A forces his teapot supposition is so narrow that it might as well not exist. It’s more of an academic “might” than a real “might.”
I say with 99.9999…% (imagine as many 9s as you like) certainty there isn’t a teapot orbiting Neptune. I’d bet my life on it. As for the sun’s rising tomorrow, I can’t say with 100% certainty that it will, though I’d bet my life on it too. Nobody alive knows that the sun will rise tomorrow, yet nobody is losing sleep thinking it won’t. My point is that while nothing is 100% certain, much is so likely that, for our purposes, we can treat it as certain. I’ll admit that the sun is a safer bet than the visiting alien bet. Still, I’m going to say with something like 99.9999% certainty that space aliens are not visiting Earth.
Evidence for the teapot and for the alien body is the same: nonexistent. One story is an abstract thought experiment while the other hits us at a visceral level. A teapot is an inanimate object that doesn’t offer much for us to engage with. A space alien may be friend or foe. The space alien story puts skin—even if it’s green—in the brain game. With the fervor of one marooned, we work a .0001% chance into the teeming fantasy universe of Star Wars or Star Trek. Except these aliens aren’t light years away, testing Han Solo or Captain Picard. When they’re not abducting Bob, they’re dismantling cows and flattening wheat.
Here’s how I arrive at my thumbnail figure of 99.9999%. First, I take my knowledge of the laws of nature and of astronomical distances. (This knowledge is there for anyone up for reading a few books on astronomy and astrophysics). Second, I take having lived 59 years without seeing a single UFO even though I live in “UFO country” as a kind of “eye test.” Third, I trust science to be forthcoming with what it knows about the phenomenon. (It’s an informed—not a blind—trust I have.) Fourth, I know that humans are mythmaking beings. We construct narratives that are both entertaining and helpful with sociocultural processing. These narratives often center on tensions between people and their technology and governments. The combined weight of these four items is enough for me to say that visiting space aliens aren’t likely. Unlike a religious dogmatist, I’ll amend my figure in light of confirmatory evidence. Such evidence must pass scientific rigor. I’m not an anti-UFO religionist; I’m a skeptic.
But what about “Roswell”? Am I going to dismiss the event at the heart of UFO religion, its Bethlehem, if you will? This is exactly what I’m doing, and I can guess how the UFO religionists reading this are going to take it. I’ll outline the pattern of the skeptic/UFO religionist dance. I say, “there’s no evidence to suggest the Roswell event was a crashed space alien craft.” The UFO religionist says, “There’s no evidence because, duh, there was a coverup.” I ask, “What evidence do you have for the coverup?” The UFO religionist says, “There’s no evidence because the cover uppers hid their tracks. Duh.”
This is what chasing a moving target looks like. By insisting on evidence, I deoxygenate the UFO religionist’s claim. He resuscitates it with a coverup conspiracy theory he thinks vouches for it. By again insisting on evidence, I deoxygenate his vouching coverup conspiracy theory. He in turn resuscitates it with what he thinks is the vouching coverup of the coverup.
By the time I’m insisting on evidence for the coverup of the coverup, we’re on the slippery slope to infinite regress. “Getting to truth” comes down to who tires of the back-an-forth first; in theory it could be coverups all the way down. Pyrrhonian skeptic Sextus Empiricus described infinite regress in the 2nd Century AD. “What’s brought forward,” Empiricus writes, “as a guarantee on the matter under consideration is in need of a further guarantee. And that one is in need of another, and so on to infinity.”
In the end, I take lack of evidence to be suggestive of absence of the phenomenon in question. Notice I didn’t say proof of absence. The UFO religionist sees lack of evidence to be suggestive of evidence of a coverup of the crash. If I press him, he sees lack of evidence of a coverup as evidence of a coverup of the coverup. Occam’s razor (the Principle of Parsimony) favors the answer with fewer multipliers. For me there’s no evidence because there’s nothing for one to evince. For him, there’s no evidence because there was a coverup and a coverup of the coverup, ad infinitum.
The Roswell crash folklore survives in this several times-resuscitated form. UFO religionists have come to lean hard on this theory-saving device. For them it’s become a “conspiracy without the theory.” I borrow the term from conspiracy scholar Micheal Shermer. Coverup—like rigged—becomes the conspiracy religionist’s hocus-pocus word. It’s delivered with the same intonation as duh. It becomes a “self-evident truth” that the UFO religionist keeps at the ready. With the magic word coverup, he places a protection spell around his cherished belief.
It used to be that to say there was no scientific evidence for a belief or theory was a death knell for it. This is no longer true. Today there’s a conspiracy theory that governments pay scientists to play dumb. Or worse, governments threaten scientists to suppress confirmatory evidence. Spill the beans on Roswell, and lose your research funding, job, or reputation. Is there any evidence for this extortion? Of course not. What self-respecting extortionist leaves traces? Reasoning in this vein, the Fermi Paradox—also known as the Great Silence—must be a pretense. Scientists make a show of puzzling over the “absence” of visiting space aliens. Behind this, they cover their positive knowledge of the green and grey visitors.
You’ve read my take—a summary of it, in any case—on UFO religion. If you don’t want to believe a word I say, that’s great. It means you’re a skeptic! I know you’ll weigh the evidence for yourself—with disinterested, scientific rigor. I know you’ll be just as skeptical when the next David Icke comes around telling you that Elon Musk is a space alien. If you do get taken in, it might be because the alien Musk story is more entertaining than what I’ve got. Or it’ll be because the alien Musk story further “confirms” things you already believed. Anyway, all I’ve got on my side is boring old skepticism: the steady rain on UFO religion’s parade.
To finish, we return to the question: does interest in space alien stories do harm? Not when it treats the stories as entertaining science fiction. I enjoy The Martian Chronicles and War of the Worlds as much as anyone. I’m sure we agree there’s nothing wrong with this. But what if I start talking about how these works depict real events? What if I say that governments and militaries covered up these events? What if I say that men in black suits bullied scientists into saying that Mars is lifeless? You’ll think I’ve gone round the bend—and you’ll be right.
I’ve already said that anything that reinforces conspiratorial cognition is a danger. What’s worse is anything that undermines the public’s trust in science. Peddlers of false narratives lick their chops every time trust in science appears to take a hit. This makes it easier for them to gaslight science to deflect its criticism of their own false claims.
Philosophers wrangle over the finer points of the concept of truth. This has nothing to do with whether there’s a REALITY beyond this or that fabulist’s story. There is. Step outside of the news cycle for a week if you dare, and it’ll begin to reclaim your mind. UFO religionists are right about one thing. Space aliens are coming to us through advanced technology. It’s called a Liquid Crystal Display (LCD). This is the “enchanted glass”—Francis Bacon’s term—through which we engage with TV, Web, and social media.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
