Page 18 - The 'X' Chronicles Newspaper - February 2023 Edition

18 UFO Mania Is Out Of Control
UFO Mania Is Out of
Control.
Please Stop.
Sorry to disappoint you, this
science writer says, but there’s
zero evidence of aliens.
Continued from Page 17
What this view does is create a kind of
epistemological can’t-miss landscape in
which anything is possible. Because of
the quantum thing. But if anything is
possible, then nothing is disprovable.
And if it ain’t disprovable, it’s arguably at
the very outer limits of what science can
deal with. Other than to say that a dog
walking into a box and coming out as two
cats is unlikely.
The alien explanation for UFOs requires
a massive infrastructure of presumptions,
not least of which is that the aliens,
whatever their motivation, have found a
way to get here. Deep space is deceptive,
because it is generally transparent and we
see things that are incredibly distant. The
nearest star is about 25 trillion miles
away, and although this sounds like
hyperbole, it is, in fact, the correct
number. So to do space travel you really
need warp drive. And there is no such
thing as warp drive.
Okay, now there is no such thing, but as
we get better and smarter, we might
figure it out, and the aliens who are
billions of years older than us may have
solved warp drive long ago. This is
speculation, though. It’s not based on
anything at all. It’s what scientists refer to
as arm-waving.
You know the dictum that “extraordinary
claims require extraordinary evidence.”
This is a gatekeeper rule of sorts: Your
belief is welcome into the community of
science provided it is backed by
evidence, and provided that the evidence
is solid and commensurate with the
novelty of the claim.
Most amazing, stunning, mind-boggling
new concepts are wrong. The bolder the
idea, the more likely it will evaporate in
the harsh glare of scientific sunshine.
Like cold fusion. That doesn’t mean bold
new ideas are always wrong. Einstein’s
theory of relativity was a bold new idea
that was not universally embraced for Let’s cut to the key question: Are
many years, indeed not until astronomers
went to tremendous lengths to measure
the displacement of starlight as it passed
near the sun during a total eclipse. That
was the extraordinary evidence. And a
century later, scientists are still prodding
the theory to see if there are any soft
parts.
The unhappy reader thinks: This guy is
refusing to think outside the box. And
that’s a fair criticism. Science writers
tend to linger in the box, and that can lead
them to miss important developments.
The pandemic comes to mind.
We wrote a story in The Post on Feb. 22,
2020, saying this thing was probably
going to be a pandemic. That was fairly
early in the crisis, and sobering news. But
the pandemic turned out to be much
worse, more lethal, more protracted and
certainly more disruptive than anything
we imagined in those early weeks. None
of us had lived through a pandemic of
this magnitude (the 2009 influenza
pandemic kind of fizzled). We didn’t see
the scale of the disaster in advance
because we had no template for it. Maybe
that was a moment when some outside-
the-box thinking could have helped.
Indeed, some intellectual humility must
come into play in these debates about
UFOs and other contentious topics. One
of the first things you discover in science
journalism is that the best scientists tend
to be transparent about their
uncertainties. This is partly because much
research is conducted on the edge of the
known, in fuzzy territory. But it’s also
because scientists tend to view
knowledge as provisional.
we alone? The plaintive tone of
that question tells you how much
we want the answer to be “no.”
Unfortunately, there’s only one
solid answer: “We don’t know.”
While covering the pandemic over the
past year and a half, the statement I’ve
heard most from scientists is “We don’t
know.” When will the pandemic be over?
“We don’t know.” Why do some people
get really sick or even die after a
coronavirus infection and others don’t
even get the sniffles? “We don’t know.”
Where did the virus come from, exactly?
“We don’t know.” This is not a failure of
science; it’s what makes science so
effective. The good scientists don’t start
with the conclusion.
One thing I discovered while reporting
my book is that people who believe in
ideas that I found extremely improbable
were not crazy or uneducated. Nor
uninformed. They did research too. They
just processed information differently.
They had different sources of
information. They used different factors
and probability estimates in their mental
equations as they searched for answers.
So their answers were different from
mine. They could be right. I could be
wrong. (But I’m right.)
Inside-the-box thinking has some
considerable virtues, though. The biggest
problem facing the United States in the
summer of 2021 is not that too many
people refuse to think outside the box, but
that too many people think that what’s in
the box isn’t true.
(Continued on Page 19)