UFOs and the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis

Dave LeBoeuf
Original source  | fair use notice

In the United States, "Do you believe in UFOs?" is an often heard question whenever the subject of unidentified flying objects is brought up.
An answer of "yes" is bound to insinuate that one believes in "flying saucers", as it has been an unfortunate cultural vagary to conflate the two terms in an obviously misleading fashion. "UFO", a classification term coined by Edward Ruppelt, first director of the Air Force's Project Blue Book, is just that--an unidentified flying object; and qualifying an aerial phenomenon, as a UFO does not imply any adjunct speculation regarding its origin.
In its most conservative, technical sense, the qualification of some anomaly as a UFO is a functional qualification, indicating a lack of sufficient empirical and (as is often assumed) explanatory information about the anomaly in question. The connotation of "flying saucer", on the other hand, does not need very much in the way of elaboration. Here we have a term coined by the press in June of 1947, in reference to Kenneth Arnold's figurative description of what he allegedly saw from the cockpit of his private plane.

So, it is only after taking note of this important semantical distinction that we can properly divorce the subject matter of "UFOs" from that of "flying saucers", and then begin to evaluate the various hypotheses that are forwarded to account for UFOs.

To begin with, there is not (and there will not be) any one hypothesis that will eventually explain all UFOs. The reason is simple: we have no reason to believe that UFOs are of any singular nature. UFOs are not a set or class of identical phenomena--after all, they are UFOs! Since it is widely accepted (from both the scientific establishment and civilian UFO organizations) that 90-95% of all reported UFOs turn out to be conventional phenomena, we should consequently expect that the remaining 5% of reported cases to be unidentified simply because of a lack of sufficient information--a probabilistic breakdown of the likely explanations of these "unidentified flying objects" should logically match the categorical percentages of our vast numbers of Identified Flying Objects (IFOs). Statistically, we should anticipate the likelihood of genuine UFOs to fit into our various categories of IFOs (i.e. meteorites, misperceptions of Venus, helicopters and other conventional aircraft, ball lightning, hoaxes, etc.). But one thing that must be kept in mind from such a perspective is that an extremely low percentage of UFO sightings are ever officially reported, as the existence of a culturally induced "ridicule factor" inhibits many witnesses from coming forward. Speculations vary, but it has been estimated that for every UFO sighting that is reported, anywhere from 15 to 50 are not. (I personally feel that such estimates are not out of the ballpark as I have come across, as a case in point, about a dozen friends and co-workers who, after learning that I am interested in UFOs, have nonchalantly told me of sightings that they have had; most were multiple-witness sightings; none were ever reported).

As is usually the case when trying to scientifically "pin down" a phenomenon that isn't testable in a controlled setting, our theories on the nature of various UFOs are never conclusive. They remain hypotheses with probabilities attached--formal and informal probabilities that are contingent upon hosts of factors, such as laws of mathematics and statistics, available empirical data, and consensus from a community of scientists (with all the factors that such a consensus itself is contingent upon). In fact, such a probabilistic view of theorization is representative of a major current (and by all signs the major current) in philosophy of science--namely pragmatism, whereby a notion that is abandoned (for a variety of epistemological and conceptual reasons that I won't get into here) is that scientific "laws" can be certain to exist in a strict and ultimate sense. This applies to all theories and all sciences, even the most seemingly irrefutable "hard" sciences. [Hence, for example, Occam's Razor favors Einstein's general Theory of Relativity and modern Quantum Physics over Newtonian mechanics with regards to defining space, time and causality. We don't, however, say that Einstein is "right" and Newton "wrong", or that Einstein finally discovered the real "laws" of nature. For although classical mechanics is not as accurate and precise as the new physics, it nonetheless "works" instrumentally for our everyday commonsense perceptions of the world.]

So although one may naturally be inclined to qualify all UFOs as conventional phenomena (given sufficient information), the possibility remains that some UFOs may be genuine anomalous phenomena. And it is my distinct impression that the majority of physical scientists who directly involve themselves with the UFO phenomenon to a significant degree do believe there is a very good chance that some UFOs are a heretofore unknown natural phenomenon--a genuine anomaly.

James Oberg, for example, a columnist for "Skeptical Inquirer" and formerly of NASA, has long followed the UFO phenomenon, and though he obviously considers himself a skeptic towards many of the popular notions of UFOs, he laments over the lack of attention given to the phenomenon by physical scientists--it is his opinion that there might be something of scientific worth lying behind some of the truly anomalous UFOs.

Michael Persinger, a neuroscientist at Laurentian University in Canada, has long involved himself both with the UFO phenomenon and other types of "paranormal" phenomena (such as the Fatima sightings), all of which seem to have a similar physical component of some sort of luminous energy display being witnessed by the experiencers. Persinger's "tectonic strain theory", which is currently talked about quite a bit in various UFO journals, etc., bases itself on the premise that something physical is happening, that the people reporting certain UFOs (and probably most, if not all of the so-called "high strangeness cases") are, in fact, seeing an anomalous display of light energy. Persinger's basic argument is that when massive layers of rock underneath the earth's surface are pushed into each other (i.e., tremors or earthquakes), huge bursts of energy rise to the surface, taking the form of a concentrated sphere of light and moving in various irregular patterns--the entire phenomenon lasting anywhere from a few seconds to several minutes. (In the Nova UFO documentary, their interview with Persinger includes an experimental demonstration in which a rock that is roughly one foot in diameter is squeezed by a large compressor until it explodes. A slow motion replay of the experiment is then shown, and what can be seen are a couple of small balls of light of definite shape, moving outward from the rock before dying out--a phenomenon that was not visible to the naked eye.) Persinger has apparently done a computer analysis of about 3,000 UFO sightings and has found that many of them occurred weeks or months before the start of earth tremors, and his theory has gained weight from some Japanese geologists who have provided him with rare photographs of a luminous display moments before an earthquake. Persinger also believes that the luminous energy from these tectonic fractures may cause witnesses who are close to the phenomenon to hallucinate or to temporarily black out. If this is the case, one could easily infer that the Fatima incident and certain UFO abduction reports are cultural variations of the same sort of "space-time transient".

So, how does the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH) fit into all of this? It goes without saying that the ETH is known to capture the imaginations of the public whenever the topic of UFOs comes up; and for many amateur "ufologists", proving that some UFOs are "nuts and bolts" spacecraft from other planets becomes almost a religious crusade. One unfortunate consequence of such naive a priori insistences, by many pop-culture ufologists, that a UFO-ETH connection certainly exists has been the ironic flip side to this misguided position--namely, the a priori dismissal by "UFO skeptics" of even the hypothesis that some UFOs could conceivable be extraterrestrial in nature.

As Karl Popper has forcefully argued, science is a deductive, not inductive, process. A hypothesis is creatively put forward, with accumulated empirical evidence acting to either falsify the hypothesis or substantiate it (at least until a "better" hypothesis eventually overshadows it). Hence, no hypothesis is ever technically dismissed a priori for being "unscientific" or "pseudoscientific". But as sociologists and philosophers of science know, the decisions of many working scientists are not akin to the idealized Bayesian rational-choice scientist, which most people think of as characterizing the decisions and evaluations of scientists.

We know, for example, that NASA's SETI program (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), which is a publicly subsidized project of significant financial and technological investment, has many supporters within the scientific community. The merits and validity of SETI are by no means an uncontroversial topic within the scientific community, but shouldn't we be able to infer from the project's having gotten off the ground (and its continued governmental support) that a sizable number of pertinent scientists believe the SETI program to be a worthwhile venture, with at least some chance of success? [Note the flood of letters in the fall 1991 issue of Skeptical Inquirer in response to a spring issue article on ETI--most of the letters seemed to be generally supportive of SETI; many letters were corrective of an author's error, which, once corrected, greatly increases the speculated fraction of hospitable biospheres that evolve an intelligent species.] Perhaps a definitive answer to this question must await a comprehensive sociological study of the SETI program and its history, but looking at the various arguments for and against SETI does relate directly to the viability of the hypothesis that some UFOs are of extraterrestrial origin. If the idea that an extraterrestrial intelligence not only exists but would be similar enough to us such that we could communicate with it is an eminently defensible position, then just how "far out" is the very idea that a UFO might be extraterrestrial in origin?