Lessons from the UFOs

The truth is down here.

Update: It feels indulgent, even inappropriate, to be discussing aliens and UFOs at a time of heightened global conflict and bloodshed. But it is always important to be able to separate persuasive evidence from hearsay, logical thinking from fantasy. If anything, those skills are even more precious in times of strife. —CSP

In this column I focus on things that lie at the outer limits of human perception, and nothing defies human perception quite so extravagantly as UAPs—“unidentified aerial phenomena,” the updated term for the sightings or alleged objects formerly known as UFOs. Somehow, UAPs manage to be spotted everywhere without ever coming clearly into view. And somehow they manage to grab endless media attention without every satisfying the who-what-where-when-why details of any sensible news story.

A few weeks ago, a much-hyped, two-hour Congressional hearing featured former U.S. Air Force intelligence official David Grusch testifying luridly about “crash retrieval” and “reverse engineering” of alien tech. The proceedings were full of rehashed claims but zero credible evidence that humans have been visited by ETs.

In response to public pressure and interest, NASA convened a UAP Independent Study Team. After more than a year of work, the group recently issued its first report. (It’s an ironic turnaround, given that Congress terminated NASA’s SETI program in 1993, labeling it “tabloid” science, and banned the agency from supporting searches for alien intelligence.) Meanwhile, social media and news outlets keep feeding the public’s seemingly limitless appetite for this topic. [Note: This paragraph has been edited to correct the chronology.]

So what have we learned from all this probing into the gray areas of UAPs? The NASA report carefully hedges: “At present, analysis of UAP data is hampered by poor sensor calibration, the lack of multiple measurements, the lack of sensor metadata, and the lack of baseline data. Making a concerted effort to improve all aspects is vital, and NASA’s expertise should be comprehensively leveraged as part of a robust and systematic data acquisition strategy within the whole-of-government framework.”

Translated into normal, conversational language, that statement turns into the famous scientific mantra: “MORE RESEARCH IS REQUIRED.”

To be fair, that statement also takes entirely reasonable position. Anomalous reports deserve investigation, and NASA is in a good position to gather the data establish the procedures for rigorous analysis. Meanwhile, NASA’s caution didn’t stop the clickbait reporter from declaring it a “jaw-dropping announcement,” or the UFO true believers from declaring that the report is just one more layer of the big coverup.

To me, this is where the UAP story gets most interesting: not as an investigation of puzzling radar blips and flashing lights, but as an exploration of human obsessions and fallibilities. Approached this way, there really are useful things to learn from the UAPs, based solely on what we know right now.

Down the Rabbit Hole

I’m hardly the first to approach this topic from a psychological perspective. More than half a century ago, Carl Jung famously analyzed UFOs as a result of “projection-creating fantasy” in his book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies. What’s new this time around is the context. To paraphrase political philosopher Joseph de Maistre, every age gets the UFOs it deserves. The ways we respond to UFOs (er…UAPs) says a lot about current attitudes toward scientific expertise and government authority—and, in particular, about the challenge of investigating a genuinely profound question when so many people have already chosen their preferred answer.

Here are four major lessons I take from the latest round of obsession over UAPs.

Lesson 1: No expert is expert at everything. Test pilots aren’t necessarily experts at radar imaging systems. Harvard astrophysicists aren’t necessarily experts at meteorite dynamics or deep-sea explorations. And most eyewitnesses are terrible at estimating things like distance, size, and speed for unfamiliar objects seen without much context. True expertise is a valuable resources and everyone, including experts in other fields, should recognize it as such.

Lesson 2: Everyone is susceptible to wishful thinking. Who doesn’t likes a dramatic story with world-changing implications? Most people want to find alien life. Scientists want to find alien life. I would love to find alien life! Many people are also energized by the thought of a government conspiracy or cover-up. That’s another narrative that transcends cultural, economic, and cultural divisions.

UFO conspiracy theories are often associated with the anti-government right, but some of the most vocal proponents of UFO investigations have come from the left, such as the late Sen. Harry Reid. Jimmy Carter saw a UFO. Hillary Clinton is intrigued by them. I was discussing UFOs at a block party in my deep-blue section of Brooklyn. A couple neighbors popped by eagerly, then immediately lost interest when I explained that I did not think there was a huge conspiracy. With enough wishful thinking, even prestigious academics will begin to see what they want to see. (Maybe especially prestigious academics.)

Lesson 3: It’s easy to go astray when there is no reward for being careful, and a big reward for being reckless. A while back, The New York Times published a story under the mock-innocent headline “Why Are We All Talking About U.F.O.s Right Now?” Three weeks later they followed with “U.S. Has No Explanation for Unidentified Objects and Stops Short of Ruling Out Aliens.” Even the self-proclaimed paper of record understood, correctly, that they could get away with a little pinch of clickbait. Meanwhile, detailed analyses of image glitches in aircraft radar get buried in skeptics magazines and technical

When The New Yorker ran a big feature on Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb and his arguments that Earth has been visited by an extraterrestrial spacecraft, the author ended with a nostalgic ode to alien-huckster Erich von Däniken. No matter, there was backlash. And speaking of Loeb, his dogged pursuit of the idea that the interstellar object ‘Oumuamua is an alien artifact may have rankled his colleagues, but it has hardly hurt his career. Far from it: He is now a best-selling author, and the beneficiary of extensive private funding for his Galileo Project. Harvard University seems none the worse for the attention, either. (The university previously weathered years of controversy surrounding John Mack, head of the psychiatry department at Harvard Medical School, who endorsed and promoted the stories of alien abductees.)

Lesson 4: Catch-phrases are no substitute for critical thinking. I feel a little embarrassed even to call this a “lesson,” since it seems so self-evident. Anyone who has waded into a debate about UFOs and UAPs, though, knows how frequently people present these catch-phrases as profound, debate-ending truths: “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” “The authorities all denounced Galileo, too,” or “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

Each of these catch-phrases reduces a complex idea to a simplistic talking point. The scientific method depends not just on falsification but on falsifiabilty. If you believe that alien visits are being concealed by a perfectly constructed global conspiracy, then, no—you are not being scientific. The popular conception of Galileo as a helpless, persecuted truth-teller is mostly a myth. And Carl Sagan’s dictum about claims and evidence is sound in principle, but it requires some agreement about the meaning of “extraordinary” in each case. To the many people who take the existence of UFOs as a given, the unwillingness of most scientists to accept grainy video and third-hand testimony simply shows how deep the conspiracy goes.

Even from his lofty position as the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard, Avi Loeb buys into the Galileo myth, and puts his own spin on Sagan’s words. Loeb notes (quite correctly) that scientists are often quite selective about which types of evidence they seek. He notes (true again) that the scientific search for extraterrestrial life has often been dismissed as low-priority, no-priority, or downright ridiculous. Then he comes to a conclusion that is both self-serving and remarkably clarifying: “Extraordinary evidence requires extraordinary funding.”

See? I told you there was a lot to learn here.