One of the (many) challenges facing the movement to get to the true bottom of UAPs/UFOs is that there are a number of very smart people who are spreading a certain kind of ignorance about the issue in the media. The arguments you see from these people usually go along the lines of these: flying saucers can’t be real because the reports from real life make them out to be just like the spaceships aliens drive around in the movies. And aliens can’t be real because the reports always describe them as being just like the aliens we see in the movies.
These smart people say that because our reported real-life aliens bear such a strong resemblance to our fictional aliens, the real-life reports must be fabrications — just people re-packaging movie aliens as a prank. They say we should expect real-life aliens to look more, well, alien. And if aliens and their ships are real and visiting our planet, they should look like something we’ve never imagined before. Something wholly new under (this) sun. That certainly makes rational sense. It’s a good pragmatic approach for those smart, pragmatic people.
The unfortunate thing is that while this obverse perspective on aliens could be true, it is equally possible the reverse perspective of it is true: real-life reports of aliens and UFOs might be so similar to what we see in the movies because that’s what they actually look like.
Not to get on the wrong side of Neil deGrasse Tyson (to name one of these smart people), but it’s pretty easy to imagine that the huge number of reports of unexplained saucer-shaped flying objects, and the encounters with small-statured creatures with huge heads and bug-eyes could be reality influencing our fictions just as easily as the other way around. We can acknowledge that there surely is some action by which the real-life reports distort themselves (the first witness says ‘saucer’ and the next witness will also say ‘saucer’ even if it were more cigar-shaped — this is the nature of language) without giving up the idea that the source of these reports isn’t movies, it’s what people have actually seen.
At the heart it’s a chicken-and-egg scenario — both aliens-derived-from-movies and movie-aliens-derived-from-real-life could be true; one leading to the other. Except at the bottom the truth is either the chicken or the egg — it has to be one, it can’t be both. And someday we’ll hopefully know whether it’s chicken-based fiction-influences-reality or egg-based reality-influences-fiction.
The problem I have is that the chicken-based argument gets all the support from the smart rational-minded people I admire. Again, you can see why the smart, rational people come out so strongly for team chicken. On the face of it, that’s the more “rational” theory.
But is it?
I think the ‘rationality’ of the chicken approach is shaped far more by a subjective cultural perspective than by an objective weighing of the evidence. For instance, if the real-life reports of aliens and UFOs were derived from our fictional versions of them, then why not all our fictional aliens? Nobody is worried the alien from Alien is coming to face-hugger us in real life (maybe in our subconscious and our dreams, but at least we don’t worry about that while awake). Nobody thinks there is a wookie out there waiting to befriend them and take them on spaceship adventures. In direct contrast to the ‘pragmatic’ take on this, it seems to me that if real-life reports of aliens were extremely varied, weird, and ‘alien’ then that would make their existence much less likely. That the opposite is true — the real-life reports all bear an uncanny resemblance to each other, over and over again for nearly a century — that’s just eerie. Plus, for fans of Occam’s Razor, it’s also a simpler explanation for the evidence if looked at objectively.
When we look to scientists for (true) answers about UFOs, scientists always give us the chicken-based answer. Why does that happen? Why are scientists seemingly so unimaginative and stubborn? Because scientists are human. We want them to give us a hard-science based opinions about the world but — other than very close work in very narrow fields of empirical study — that’s impossible to do. Scientists, even the best of them, use heuristics and story-based internal narratives to view the world just like the rest of us. The only difference between scientists and all us saps is that the culture assumes scientists have some kind of extra authority because of the supposedly empirical foundations of their opinions. This is so widespread that the scientists themselves come to believe their opinions are grounded in rational empiricism, and thus have more truth in them than other people’s experiences and opinions. But their experience and opinions aren’t science, they are just a science lens through which they view the world.
Now don’t take me to mean that science is all bad. The person who views the world through the science lens does try to hold out a bit more for rationality. And statistics play a much part in the shaping of the science lens than they do for the average person. And, I mean, what else have we got, am-I-right? When you have a million scientists all reinforcing each other with hard data, you best believe that climate change is real, for example.
But for everyday opinions in poorly-studied areas, scientists take data and rational analysis and make the same mistakes all the rest of us do with our experiences: they create a narrative story; and they process new information by fitting it into the story that shapes what they have experienced in the past (though some of their “experience” does include data and research, just not necessarily much on the subject they are weighing in on).
Then scientists — just like the rest of us, and with the same pitfalls as the rest of us — use what they have experienced in the past to do analysis and make predictions about current and future events. Unfortunately for them, unlikely events happen all the effin time. Scientists confidently predicting future events based on past experience are doomed to have their asses handed to them eventually. Science views the world through a lens of what is likely to be true. This often blinds them to unlikely outcomes (or events, as is the case with UFOs).
Again and again the world, the universe, has proven to be a much weirder place than any predictive capacity science has. (Even if we acknowledge that capacity has been ever-improving.) Science as a field needs to not only be open to this weirdness, but on the lookout for it; hunting it down and embracing it. It should be the core of a lot of science. Unfortunately the practice of the current scientific climate is at best to be agnostic and at worst to dismiss weirdness barring extraordinary evidence. Instead of adherence to that old maxim, scientists should revel in the weirdness of the world.
What science’s new maxim should be is: extraordinary claims require extraordinary curiosity. Get out there and study it objectively, scientist.