50 Popular Beliefs That People Think Are True

by Harrison, Guy P.

  According to a Gallup poll, 24 percent of Americans, 21 percent of Canadians, and 19 percent of Britons believe that “extraterrestrial beings have visited Earth at some time in the past.”2 A study by the National Council on Science and Technology and the National Institute of Statistics and Geography calculated that as much as one-third of the US population and 38 percent of Mexicans think that alien spaceships visit us.3

  Although UFO belief is embraced by many millions of people worldwide, this does not necessarily mean that there is something bizarre going on above us that involves intelligent beings from another world. One often hears the “where there's smoke, there's fire” reasoning applied to the UFO issue. But we know that millions of people can believe in things that are 100 percent wrong. For example, millions of American adults—nearly 20 percent of the US population—think that the Sun revolves around the Earth!4 It wouldn't matter if 100 percent of Americans believed that; the Earth would continue to orbit the Sun. Never allow yourself to be too impressed by a belief's popularity. Reality is not determined by a majority vote. If some people can be wrong about a claim, then it's possible everybody could be wrong about it. Even if everyone on Earth believed in alien visits, that alone would not prove it. Only good evidence can do that. And good evidence is the one thing missing in the UFO phenomenon. After more than five decades of enthusiastic interest and investigation, we have nothing more than stories. I am not suggesting that anyone should belittle believers or dismiss all claims without a second thought. But if we strip away the hype and unjustified assumptions, it turns out that the vast majority of UFO reports describe precisely what that abbreviation was supposed to mean in the first place: unidentified flying objects. The failure to identify something as a plane, a satellite, a cloud, a flare, a balloon, Venus, or a remote control toy blimp simply does not justify jumping to the fantastic conclusion that it therefore must be an alien spacecraft. I think of most UFO belief as the intelligent design of the sky. Creationists/intelligent design believers point to the inability of today's biologists to answer every question about life and then draw extraordinary and wholly unwarranted conclusions. Many UFO believers duplicate the same error when they point to the fact that astronomers, the Air Force, the FAA, police, and so on cannot or will not identify every object in the sky to their satisfaction. The absence of readily available explanations is seen as evidence that an intelligent being created life or that unidentified objects must be spaceships. But this is flawed thinking; not knowing means not knowing. It may be distasteful because everybody loves closure. But sometimes we just have to be grown-ups and swallow a bit of frustration. There will always be unanswered questions, and inventing fictional solutions is not the best way to react to them. Don't forget, I'm a guy who would sacrifice body parts in order to make first contact and hitch a ride with extraterrestrials for a sightseeing tour through the M16 Eagle Nebula and beyond. But I understand how important it is to keep my hopes and fantasies properly corralled so that they don't compromise my skepticism and critical thinking skills. I think fantasy is wonderful, but I still want to live in the real world. The urge to believe should never overwhelm the need to think. And the lack of satisfying answers to everything should never excuse us to swap reason for made-up answers.

  Most people underestimate how easy it is to misinterpret “things” we see in the sky. For example, an airplane approaching you from a distance can appear to hover even though it may be traveling at a high rate of speed. This might lead to the incorrect conclusion that “it can't possibly be a plane.” Furthermore, some large planes can hover and then fly away. The unique twin-engine V-22 Osprey, for example, is capable of flying at speeds of more than three hundred miles per hour as well as hovering in one spot. An Osprey flying at night might move in ways that confuse an unaware ground observer into thinking that it couldn't be a plane or a helicopter. In addition, many military aircraft can eject flares that float down slowly on small parachutes to illuminate the ground below. Many planes and helicopters also use flares as defensive countermeasures to confuse or redirect heatseeking missiles that may be targeting them. I have seen video of countermeasures on fixed-wing aircraft that rapidly spiral away from the aircraft on independent trajectories. Several flares launched rapidly from a jet at night at high altitude could be very difficult to correctly identify from the ground, especially if the supersonic jet that deployed them is already long gone. Many military planes and helicopters can also release chaff—numerous tiny bits of metal, plastic, or glass—as a countermeasure to defend against missiles that home in on targets using radar. Under some conditions, a cloud of these tiny objects might reflect light in ways that could mislead someone on the ground into thinking it is something it is not.

  I proposed the possibility of flares from military aircraft being responsible for some UFO reports to Mark “Gunner” Lewis, a former US Marine avionics technician who spent many years in and around combat aircraft. He said he could easily imagine people who are already inclined toward UFO belief confusing countermeasures for starships. “[Countermeasure flares] make a distinct pattern,” he explained.

  From a distance, far enough for the engines and propellers not to be heard, they may appear as slightly elongated lines or ovals. But I am guessing at that. They can be fired in a more staggered pattern as well.

  Although not a countermeasure, a field illumination flare might confuse civilians, and noninfantry related military, for that matter. This type of flare, when deployed, puts out enough candle power to rival an entire football stadium of lights. It is designed to illuminate a battlefield for several minutes and cause the enemy to lose their night vision. There are different colors for different applications. The unusual thing about these flares is that they are suspended by miniparachutes. The heat rising from the flare lifts the chute like a hotair balloon, keeping it aloft. This intense light could act in many odd ways. It could appear to hover in one place and then disappear as it extinguishes. It could spiral and or bounce around at altitude. Being carried by thermal drafts or shear winds can make it look as if it were moving under power. I have seen some “UFO” video and recognized them as these types of flares.

  Do I believe that people can be misled or, if predisposed, confuse countermeasures for alien spacecraft? My answer would be yes. With the intent to hoax and access to field flares, I think I could do a great job of making a “UFO sighting.” I think anything from fireflies to the orbiting space station can be an alien craft for those who look for it.5

  IT'S RAINING UFOs

  Here's something else to think about: Every day some four thousand tons of rock and dust from space burn up in our atmosphere.6 Sometimes this rain of debris creates brief displays of light that might be misinterpreted by whoever happens to be looking up at the time. And don't forget the way our minds work. When we see multiple points of light in the dark, it can be a natural and subconscious response to connect those dots and create a larger, solid object where there is none. Then we have all the celestial bodies that account for many UFO sightings. Venus, for example, can be very bright in the evening and has fooled people into thinking it's a close spaceship rather than a faraway planet. When you don't know what you are looking at in the sky, size and distance are difficult, if not impossible, to determine. The reason we can accurately estimate the size of birds and planes when we see them is only because we already know the size of birds and planes. The next time someone tells you he or she saw a strange gigantic green and orange light in the sky, explain this to them.

  I'm slightly embarrassed to admit it, but I was fooled by the Moon. You may have noticed that a full Moon in the early evening can sometimes look extraordinarily large and dramatic when it's low and close to the horizon. Later, however, it seems to be back to normal full-Moon size when it's high in the night sky. Several years ago I actually chased this gigantic Moon with my camera and tripod in the hopes of capturing a spectacular image. Speeding around in my car, looking for the perfect spot to shoot from, I had high hop
es for capturing the mother of all Moon photos. But I ended up frustrated, disappointed, and bewildered by pictures that showed nothing but a small Moon. I later learned that I had fallen victim to a well-documented Moon illusion. It's just a trick of the mind and eye, one that cameras don't fall for. If I couldn't even get the size of the full Moon straight in my head—even though I knew exactly what I was looking at—then I know I have no business making confident estimates about the size of some unidentified object I might see in the sky. Finally, add to all this the fact that every now and then some mischievous person launches a balloon with lights or flares attached just to see how many people fall for it and think it's a spaceship. Be on guard when you look up; it's an optical minefield up there.

  DON'T FORGET HOW MEMORY WORKS

  We all would be better off if we understood more about how our brains can mislead us when it comes to seeing and remembering. Perhaps, then, visual miscues and memory mistakes wouldn't trip us up so often. But this necessary knowledge can be harsh. Sometimes after learning what scientists have discovered about the workings of the human brain, I want to curl up in the fetal position and cry. Much of what I had assumed about the way in which we perceive the world around us has turned out to be far off the mark. For example, we don't actually “see” anything. What really happens is that the mind processes patterns received from the optic nerves and then the mind creates pictures of what it decides the scene being stared at is—or should be.7 And memories? Forget about it.

  A 2011 study found that more than half of the public, 63 percent, think that memory works like a video camera.8 However, as mentioned in chapter 1, our brains do not record what we see, hear, and experience; and memory is not a simply playback of the recording. That's not even close to what happens when we remember things. There is not some sort of organic high-tech audio-visual record and playback system in your head. The way in which human memory actually works is more like having a little old man who lives inside your skull and tells you stories about what you saw or experienced in the past. But every time he tells you one of these stories about your past, he changes it by leaving out some parts and adding other parts that never happened. He might even decide to change the order of events, which means that the storyline in your head won't match reality. The old man in your head does this because he decides it's best for you to remember it that way. He alters your memories in ways he believes make them more sensible and more useful to you. Usually he's right, most of our memories do need to be edited and condensed to be functional. But sometimes this process causes problems, like in courtrooms, for example, where many innocent people have been sent to prison based on the inaccurate memories of witnesses. This is one more reason to be skeptical when considering eyewitness accounts of UFOs, ghosts, Bigfoot, angels, and so on, no matter how credible and sincere the person telling the story may be.

  WHAT GORILLA?

  Ever heard of inattentional blindness? If not, you better get up to speed on it because things are happening in front of your eyes all the time that you aren't seeing. Wizards, magicians, shamans, and pickpockets figured this out centuries ago. Because of the way the brain functions, we can be shockingly bad at noticing things. For details on inattentional blindness and other important brain phenomena that impact how we perceive reality, I recommend the books Sleights of Mind (by neuroscientists Stephen L. Macknic and Susana Martinez-Conde) and Invisible Gorilla (by cognitive psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons). The authors of Invisible Gorilla are the researchers who conducted the now-famous experiment in which they asked people to count the number of times players on one team passed a basketball in a short film. (If you want to test yourself, don't read any further until after viewing the video.9) The test is challenging, as players circle while passing the ball while another team is doing the same thing. In the middle of the film, a woman in a gorilla suit walks into view, thumps her chest, lingers for a moment in the middle of the scene, and then walks off. The gorilla is on screen for about nine seconds. This experiment has been conducted numerous times with consistent results. About half of test subjects fail to notice the gorilla. It seems impossible, but it's true, half never see a gorilla right in front of their alert mind and open eyes! And it's not a question of intelligence or education. Harvard students fared no better than nonstudents. This is the “illusion of attention,” scary stuff if you think about. It means we can stare directly at an object and miss something very unusual or important that is literally right next to or even passing in front of the target of our attention. We may think we see everything we need to see when something is right front of our open eyes, but often this is not the case. This is how human brains work, and it has obvious implications for many things—including UFO sightings.

  IT CAN HAPPEN TO ANYONE

  Virtually anyone can be fooled by an unexpected object or light in the sky. Philip Plait, a popular astronomer and skeptic, once had his own encounter with UFOs. He was waiting to watch a shuttle night-launch in Florida when he noticed a dozen or so unusual lights hovering in the distance. Even with binoculars he couldn't tell what they were. He eliminated likely objects such as planes or satellites and became increasingly excited until he was finally able to see that they were ducks. Yes, a world-class astronomer who lectures and writes with great passion about the virtues of skepticism—especially when it comes to UFO sightings—was perilously close to thinking a flock of waterfowl was the advance strike force of an alien invasion fleet. For the record, Plait says that, even in the heat of the moment, he never allowed himself to believe that the lights were extraterrestrials, but he does admit to having an “odd feeling” in the pit of his stomach and then feeling vaguely disappointed when the quacking former UFOs flew by. By the way, the birds glowed because of reflected light from bright lights at the launch pad.10 If something like that can (almost) happen to an elite sky watcher like Plait, is anyone safe from being fooled? And just imagine if the birds had not flown his way but changed course and faded out of sight before he was able to identify them. Or imagine if it wasn't a skeptical astronomer observing them but instead was someone with a prior belief in UFOs/spaceships. Most likely it would be very difficult to convince that person that he or she probably only saw something as simple as flares, escaped birthday party balloons, planes, meteors, or a flock of birds.

  I have waded through many books on this subject. One of the more intriguing UFOs-are-spaceships books I have read is UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on Record, by investigative journalist Leslie Kean. I think it promotes unjustified belief in UFOs and would have been much better if the author had balanced it with skeptical critiques of UFO claims. It's still an interesting book though, with accounts of some of the more credible UFO sightings. Kean complains that UFO claims are too often suppressed by governments and automatically dismissed by skeptics. I can't speak for how governments handle UFO sightings, but I certainly disagree that this is the case with most skeptics. No UFO skeptic I know, myself included, would reject a claim of an unusual sighting without first listening and thinking it over. We also don't feel the need to explain away every sighting because we understand that the absence of an explanation is not in itself proof of anything. I believe I'm in sync with the vast majority of UFO skeptics when I say we are open-minded about the possibility of a UFO being an extraterrestrial spacecraft but are not impressed by claims without evidence. Most UFO skeptics tend to be fans of science and would love to discover that we are not alone in the universe. Show us compelling evidence and you will have our undivided attention. Show us a spaceship and our skepticism about visiting extraterrestrials will vanish in an instant.

  The most important point to be made about Kean's book is that it presents an impressive collection of highly credible eyewitnesses, people in positions of authority with professional aviation experience. However, after an initial flash of excitement while reading their stories, it's a quick return to Earth. One only has to remember that fighter pilots, airline pilots, generals,
and aviation officials are human too. And as such they are vulnerable to the same natural mistakes of perception, interpretation, and memory that the rest of us are. An example of this would be police officers. They are trained to look for details that typical citizens would miss, but they still can and do make significant mistakes in seeing and recalling important aspects of events they witness.11 If training, skill, and experience formed an impenetrable fire wall against misperception, illusion, hallucination, and faulty memories, then UFO stories from military and professional pilots would be all the solid evidence we need. But we know that this is not the case.