Lonely Planets

ious that this fellow was finding cosmic significance in a frequency that is

  “universal” because of an engineering convention, and one that is not in fact globally applied. When it comes to the New Age, it’s all too easy to set

  up straw men and blow them down. Dismissing or ridiculing all beliefs and perceptions associated with a New Age spiritual consciousness on the basis

  of the most silly examples is a common practice among skeptics, and one

  that reveals some loose thinking on the other side of the crystal mantra.

  Scientists don’t like it when we are portrayed as unidimensional,

  robotic, spiritually insensitive, tight-assed, honky geeks.† Straw men

  can be used, just as inappropriately, to knock down our philosophy.

  You could quote biologist Richard Dawkins saying that faith is an evil

  that should be stamped out just like smallpox. You could point to the

  aid and comfort some American skeptics have given to the Chinese gov-

  ernment’s brutal, murderous campaign against Falun Gong. All houses

  of philosophy have rooms built of straw.

  The most extreme UFO believers and debunkers are caught in a feed-

  back loop in which each side validates the other’s existence. Overzealous

  efforts to discredit UFO reports help to reinforce the wide perception of

  scientific skepticism as intolerant and narrow-minded. Believers accuse

  debunkers of being in on a conspiracy, which leads to more hysterical

  debunking, and so on.

  Debunking, unfortunately, must be done case by case. Unfortunately,

  there are a lot of cases. If the Reverend Sun Myung Moon can marry

  five thousand people at once in Madison Square Garden, why can’t we

  do a mass debunking? Some attempts have been made, but many of the

  arguments are quite weak. They generally amount to “If they are real

  aliens, why don’t they act as we would expect aliens to act?” and rest

  on assumptions about the nature of alien technology, society, motiva-

  tions, and so on. In some cases, the skeptics, just like the believers, have

  *Short for “New Age.” Rhymes with sewage.

  †We’re not all honkies.

  Have You Seen the Saucers?

  353

  clearly made up their minds in advance. Each community is quite sure

  it is saving the world from the other.

  The whole debunking concept, when applied to other people’s belief

  systems, as opposed to specific reports of events or phenomena, is

  antiproductive. It doesn’t lead to greater understanding. The term itself

  does not connote an effort to win over or convince those who don’t

  agree with you. It’s meant to show them to be the idiots they really are.

  “Your beliefs are bunk” is a trifle condescending.

  Some people who see themselves on the science side of a science/anti-

  science divide develop their own strain of credulity, accepting anything

  published with the stamp of scientific approval as automatically authen-

  tic. Organized skepticism is always in danger of an ironic slide into its

  own form of dogmatism. The UFO debunkers know what they expect to

  find. This makes me think twice about debunking reports. After I think

  twice, I usually agree with them. Much debunking of specific claims has

  been done carefully, thoroughly, and convincingly. But many scientists do

  have a strong ideological commitment to keeping UFO reports within a

  certain class of phenomenon. If a UFO report turned out to be evidence of

  actual alien spacecraft, and aliens who do not follow our rules, a fright-

  ening tear would be rent in the fabric of our worldview.

  T H E R E ’ S A H O L E I N M Y P H I L O S O P H Y

  I grew up hearing a lot about UFOs from my parents and their friends,

  and from reading Asimov and Clarke and communing with the science

  fiction crowd—all people who loved to think about alien life and space

  travel, and who would have welcomed real alien contact more enthusi-

  astically than anyone else. Yet the dominant view was that UFO believ-

  ers were generally quite deluded.

  That is not a controversial statement even among UFO believers, most

  of whom seem eager to distance themselves from those other UFO believ-

  ers, whom they regard as really flaky. But are all of them deluded? Sagan and Asimov and my dad thought the answer was yes.

  They were my authorities and one of their commandments was to

  question authority. So I had to question them, even while questioning

  whether this was always a good idea. At various times I’ve forced

  myself to rethink my stance on UFOs. Not wanting to just form my

  opinion based on authority, or received knowledge, I’ve had to ask

  myself if we might all somehow be deceived on this issue.

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  L o n e l y P l a n e t s

  Science says, “Without objectively verifiable evidence, assume that it

  doesn’t exist.” But it is more accurate to say, “Without such evidence,

  we can’t say whether it exists.” We must be careful not to become lazy

  and let our skeptical mind-set become a closed one.

  We have a certain view of how aliens will and will not behave and

  manifest their presence here. We get huffy when these imagined rules of

  interplanetary etiquette (of necessity based on projections of ourselves)

  are not followed. Skeptics complain that the aliens reported by UFO

  enthusiasts don’t act like real aliens. Real aliens would not spend that

  kind of money on space fuel (energy is money). They’d stay home and

  improve things in their own systems. Real aliens wouldn’t be interested

  in kidnapping humans and examining us or stealing sperm and eggs.

  We can’t think of any good reason for them to behave like that. Real

  aliens would surely leave some spare parts or trash or footprints behind

  for us to study. Don’t you know anything about aliens?

  Yet, science faces some special challenges in applying itself to the

  question of intelligent aliens. Our methodology and philosophy assume

  that nature doesn’t care about and isn’t aware of our experiments.

  (Some ufologists assume the opposite.) We don’t really know how to

  study something that knows it is being studied or might not want to be

  studied, or that might even be studying us. All our standards of evi-

  dence and proof—repeatability, multiple witnesses, material evidence,

  and so on—might fail with something that is actively messing with our

  minds, aware of us, and being careful not to be of interest to main-

  stream science.

  Imagine for a moment that aliens were aware of our scientific method

  and were careful not to reveal themselves, perhaps out of compassion.

  You could envision their rules for avoiding our scrutiny:

  Memo to All Space Brothers: Remember that human contact is to

  be avoided whenever possible. They are stuck in the “science”

  phase we went through eons before we went intergalactic. We can

  use this to predict their reactions and avoid suspicion. Under no

  circumstances leave any physical evidence that could be used to sci-

  entifically deduce our existence and extraterrestrial origin. It’s

  inevitable that humans will occasionally detect our activities, and

  this is acceptable as long as they don’t have what they consider t
o

  be a “scientific” case. So if you are detected, make absolutely sure

  that the observation is not replicable, and keep your spectral scram-

  Have You Seen the Saucers?

  355

  blers on. Such occasional cases are puzzling to them and help main-

  tain our secrecy by sowing doubt about all sightings.

  Science has given us criteria for distinguishing the physical from the

  metaphysical. But if a conscious entity is studying us, which box does it

  go in? If advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, the

  boundary between the physical and the metaphysical vanishes again, as

  if science never happened.

  Are SETI aliens, fashioned from logical scientific extrapolations,

  more likely to be realistic than UFO aliens who don’t follow our rules?

  Not necessarily. Despite the undeniable truth of Clarke’s Third Law, in

  our debunking of alien stories we insist that aliens must conform to our

  current notions of evolution, our current understanding of the laws of

  physics, and some extrapolation of our own technological capabilities.

  Because we must extrapolate from the known, and because we cannot

  consider to be real any phenomenon for which there is no scientifically

  acceptable evidence, we are not open to magic. So scientists may not be

  any better qualified than anyone else to predict what aliens will be like.

  Here’s what we don’t always cop to: Our scientific arguments against

  “the extraterrestrial hypothesis” for UFOs depend on a framework of

  assumptions. These are the pesky metaphysical leaks and leaps in our

  airtight worldview—the things we feel we know to be true, but cannot

  prove.

  It wouldn’t hurt our credibility to acknowledge that science has its

  own superstitions. We assume the existence of an objective reality that

  is independent from our consciousness. We assume that our minds do

  not create or affect what we observe. We also assume nature is consis-

  tent and repeatable, and therefore knowable. In all of this I could

  replace “we assume” with “I believe.” I don’t doubt any of this.* This

  set of regulations for nature seems so obvious and reasonable to me

  that it almost seems absurd to question it. But if you dig down deep

  beneath our solid tower of reason, deduction, and provisional truth,

  you see that the whole thing is planted in loose sand, supported by

  received, or intuitively perceived, knowledge.

  I’m a believer because this is the way the world seems. Further, I

  think that most everyone knows that this is the way it is. You can spin

  intellectual counterarguments to your heart’s content, or you can medi-

  *Except, I do believe that our minds strongly influence what we see. I’ll come back to this.

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  L o n e l y P l a n e t s

  tate your way clear out of the galactic disk, but on your way back

  home tonight notice how your every move, breath, and thought is

  steeped in a solid world of consistent phenomena. If this is an illusion, I

  don’t think we can shake it. Maybe John Lilly did, but we can’t all

  swim with the extraterrestrial mind-fishes. Even the Dalai Lama has to

  sit on the can like the rest of us. No matter what you believe, reality is

  something that we directly perceive, and we all operate on the experien-

  tial understanding that the world has external, material solidity.

  Much as we “real alien researchers” would like the UFO phenome-

  non to just go away, we can’t dismiss all UFO reports out of hand. We

  might miss something important. Further, we alienate a large segment

  of the public when we appear to be closed-minded, snotty, and over-

  confident.

  In general it doesn’t really bother me what people believe. I care

  more about how people behave toward one another, and some of the

  nicest people I’ve met have also seemed to have had some of the wacki-

  est ideas. UFO believers and SETI scientists reject each other’s philoso-

  phy, but both rely on the same core argument from plenitude. It’s still

  the best justification for the existence of aliens: With so many stars and

  planets, there just has to be other intelligent life. Why should we be the

  only ones? You will hear this exact same logic and sentiment trumpeted

  from the stage at conferences of both ufology and astrobiology.

  I’ve found something else that scientists and ufologists have in com-

  mon, something wonderful that is widespread among diverse commu-

  nities with vastly different approaches toward alien life: a sense of

  humor. Certainly, some take themselves and their beliefs too seriously,

  but there is wide recognition, on all sides, of the absurdity of the sub-

  ject matter, and an ability to laugh about it. This could be a good start-

  ing place for scientists and ufologists to meet. If I ever ran a joint

  SETI/UFO conference, inviting a constructive dialogue between skep-

  tics and believers, I would make the first and last session of every day a

  comedy session.

  G O F I S H

  The last day of my third writing retreat in the San Luis Valley coincided

  (not by coincidence) with the Leonid meteor shower, which was predicted

  to be spectacular that year. I went out to a dark place for an all-night

  meteor picnic. Occasional low clouds wafted through all night, but the

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  sky was mostly clear, not in the way it is sometimes “clear” in Denver or

  anywhere on the Eastern seaboard where I grew up, but so intensely dark,

  bright, and varied that it seemed close, deep, and enveloping. The meteors

  began bursting at a whole new level—behind the slowly drifting cloud

  curtains but far in front of the piercing stellar backdrop. All of this activ-

  ity above me at different levels increased the feeling of depth, reminding

  me that the sky is also a landscape that we live within.

  The only sounds were the crackle of my little fire, and occasional

  packs of coyotes yipping across the valley. I lay back and watched as

  the thin remnants of an ancient comet swiped across Earth’s orbit, and

  little bits of its dusty debris trail slammed into our atmosphere, shower-

  ing sparks across the sky. Each bright streak revealed the unreal speed

  with which things fall from space. Seventeen thousand miles per hour is

  the absolute minimum, and these suckers were going a great deal faster.

  A meteor shower is the only time you can actually see anything move

  that fast, getting a visual, visceral sense of orbital velocities in our solar

  system. This is how the carbon in our flesh originally found its way to

  Earth 4.5 billion years ago—as cometary dirt and dust flashing down

  through the skies of a world ripe for life.

  I grilled a steak and watched all night. The sky show was great but I

  still didn’t catch any UFOs. No aliens, but at least the quest for aliens

  got me out there. It was beautiful down there in the valley, taking a nice

  cold meteor shower out under the wheeling galaxy. In this way I sup-

  pose ufology is like fishing, worthwhile even if you don’t catch a thing.

  Cons, Piracies, Conspiracies

  21

 
; Help me believe in anything

  Image unavailable for

  I want to be someone who believes.

  electronic edition

  —COUNTING CROWS

  Image unavailable for

  Space may be the final frontier, but it’s made in a

  electronic edition

  Hollywood basement.

  —RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS

  T H E C A S E O F T H E F A C E

  It’s important to remember that conspiracy theories are not always

  wrong. Things that sound crazy sometimes aren’t. A good friend of

  mine grew up in Argentina. When he was a teenager there during the

  1970s, some swore that people were disappearing without a trace. For

  a while his family, and most everyone they knew, dismissed this as

  wacky paranoia. Now we know about Argentina’s Dirty War when the

  fascist government “disappeared” thousands of liberals, intellectuals,

  and suspected or potential dissidents. This really happened, but some

  who first tried to call attention to it were dismissed as crazies. From

  this we should not conclude that every bizarre theory is true, but we

  should at least briefly consider the possible truth of things that sound

  crazy if a lot of people believe they are happening.*

  Some of the alien conspiracy theories get pretty bizarre, and some of

  them are quite comical. There’s a sort of Zippy the Pinhead appeal to

  *It’s also a good time for us to remind ourselves of what can happen when protecting security over freedom becomes your government’s prime imperative.

  Cons, Piracies, Conspiracies

  359

  the alien head symbol and the alien conspiracy story, a joke that is

  funny in part because some people don’t get it.

  I assume you’ve all heard about the face on Mars. You know, this

  guy:

  Image unavailable for

  electronic edition

  You do have to admire this face. It’s been braving the elements much

  longer than Mount Rushmore, the Easter Island heads, or even the Old

  Man of the Mountain in Franconia Notch, New Hampshire, which sur-

  vived for 30,000 years before crumbling into rubble on May 2, 2002.

  Of course, erosion is much slower on Mars than in New Hampshire.

  It’s so dry that if you were a face on Mars, you could sit for billions of

  years, staring at the sky and thinking slow rock thoughts while your

  wrinkles were gradually scoured away by the thin, dusty gales. Your