There’s a lot of stuff I don’t believe in. God. Bigfoot. James van Praagh’s soul (or anybody else’s soul, for that matter, but especially this guy). But UFOs were what I had in mind when I first started mulling this over, so let’s stick with them.
I don’t believe that aliens from any other world have ever visited this planet. There may well be intelligent life out there somewhere, simply given the vastness of the universe and the vast number of star systems which could possibly give rise to it – but that same vastness makes it seem unlikely that they’ll be dropping by to indulge their deep and abiding fixation with the human anus anytime soon, or travel quadrillions of miles across the black just for the privilege of crashing into our desert.
Furthermore, there are many curious facets of the human brain which are known to providing confusing experiences, and leave people with the impression that something really weird has been occurring.
Pareidolia makes us find patterns, particularly human faces, in random noise – three dots and a curved line can make a universally recognisable smile shape, which shows how little information is needed to trigger the face-recognition processes in our brain. Look hard enough at numerous of burnt patches of cheese sandwich, and of course you’ll find Jesus eventually.
Sleep paralysis gives the impression of being awake but unable to move, and can be combined with the kinds of dreamlike hallucinations that often come with being barely conscious, to make for some seriously unnerving experiences. It’s been observed happening while there definitely weren’t any aliens around, and it can be effectively treated by certain medications, which you wouldn’t think would be enough to scare away any supernatural monsters who might genuinely be visiting you in the night.
And then there’s the unreliability of eye-witness testimony, which is particularly relevant here, and really weird things like inattentional blindness… In short, there’s going to have to be some rather more persuasive evidence put forward before an actual alien visitation becomes the most likely explanation for the observed facts, given all the ways our brains are quite happy to screw with us. But, obviously aliens aren’t an entirely implausible concept. There’s no way I can prove they’re not zipping around all over the place; they’re just not the first place I turn to for answers.
As a skeptic, then, when I hear that somebody’s claiming to have seen a flying saucer hovering over their house, perhaps my reaction ought to be along the lines of: “Although there’s probably a more mundane explanation, this could be fascinating if it turns out to be true. I hope this person investigates further, perhaps assisted by the relevant local authorities, to gather more data – there’s a slim chance that, if this data supports the initial hypothesis, we could be on the brink of discovering a new, world-shattering phenomenon.”
But it’s not.
In fact, the most recent time I heard somebody claiming to have seen a flying saucer hovering over their house, my reaction was more like: “Oh great, another idiot’s been confused by the Moon.”
But then, snark and mockery accomplished, I thought about it a bit more seriously, put on my skeptical hat to look at the matter, gave it due consideration, and decided to be as fair and rational as I could.
My next, more carefully reasoned reaction, then, was: “Goddammit, it’s the fucking Moon, people, how dense can you be?”
Now, this was a little unfair of me. Although Venus is more commonly mistaken for a much closer light source, the Moon can still look surprisingly unlike the Moon, and more like something hovering in the air not all that far away. If there’s not much light, and things are blocking your view, and if you’re not expecting to see the Moon where you’re looking, it’s not impossible that an intelligent brain could fail to make that leap, under certain circumstances.
But I was still quite happy to dismiss the claim out of hand, without any interest in following the story to see whether any more compelling evidence turns up later. My initial assessment was quite enough to satisfy me. It’s the Moon, or a low-flying plane, or Superman, or something boringly mundane and everyday like that.
But isn’t that just as closed-minded as the people who go the other way? The ones who leap to the conclusion of “Aliens, it must be aliens, they’re here to silence me because I know too much!!!” based on just as little analysis? Isn’t my so-called “skepticism” really just as dogmatic and ideological as the ideas of people who choose to believe that, of all the thousands of sightings of strange and unexplained things, just one of them could actually be something from another world?
No. It isn’t.
My default position – the one I’m in now, and will be until I encounter something new which changes things – is that there are no aliens anywhere close enough to bother us. Just like Jesus, Santa, vampires, the underpants gnomes, and Uri Geller‘s humanity, I’m still waiting for some evidence of their existence before I change my mind and give them any serious consideration.
But when it’s reported that somebody’s seen something weird floating in the sky, this doesn’t shift my position, because it adds no new information to my world. I haven’t encountered anything new that changes anything. People being worried by strange things floating in the sky, which later turn out to be perfectly ordinary, is an entirely unsurprising event. I’ve known it to happen a lot, without a doubt. So when it happens again, and there’s nothing new or different to distinguish it from any of the other times that this exact same thing happened, it makes sense that nothing changes about my position.
It might seem like a believer would approach things from a different but equally valid angle. Another alien sighting might add nothing new to their world in the same way, because they already consider such things well established. But then they have two possible conclusions to be drawn when they hear about such a story:
1. “Aliens! They’ve come for us again! Put your ProbeAwayTM devices on, everyone, I told you they’d come in useful one day!”
2. “Oh great, another idiot’s been confused by the Moon.”
Because even if you’re taking alien spaceships for granted, normal stuff that people mistake for aliens still unquestionably occurs as well.
This is an important point; the mundane is not ruled out by the assumption of the supernatural. Even if there were aliens swooping about all around us, how weird would it be if nobody ever saw some tree branches waving about in the dark and got spooked? Given all the thousands of toasted cheese sandwiches that must get eaten every day, it’d be a phenomenally unlikely coincidence if, over the course of a year, not a single one just happened to acquire a burnt patch that looked a bit Jesus-y – even if you do think that God also does that sort of thing on purpose from time to time.
Because we know that mundane events leading to extraordinary claims can happen, the belief in alien abductions must be based on something more than just a third-hand story being repeated about someone seeing something weird hovering in the sky. Otherwise, you can’t tell which of the above two reactions is most appropriate in any particular case. Most believers, I’m sure, would agree that their conviction is indeed based on something much more concrete than this – but in that case, when they hear another such story, with so little detail, a believer has no reason to reject the first of the above assumptions in favour of the second – they’re both entirely plausible, from within the paradigm they’re using.
When I leap to the conclusion that it’s not aliens, I do so because that’s the only conclusion I have, or need, to explain everything just fine, without invoking any more new entities than I have any reason to. It is only an initial assessment, and I would have to make sure I don’t try to hold it immutable in response to a change in information. If credible news reports started to come through of people actually being beamed up into space, or of large flying objects being confirmed by multiple reliable sources, then we may reach a point where no theory that doesn’t make room for new assumptions can explain what’s being seen, and something involving aliens becomes the most rational thing to believe. A good skeptical approach doesn’t preclude this – the “LALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU” school of reasoning is not one that anyone should aspire to when presented with actual, genuine evidence.
But so far, we’ve not seen any of that. No reason to accept the premise that we’ve been visited by intelligent and kinky alien life has yet been presented to the world at large; anecdotes, passionate I-definitely-saw-somethings, and grainy photos of dustbin-lids are not interesting, or new, and don’t give us a reason to make room for the assumptions you want us to.
I try to keep my worldview as rational a one as possible. If the story is “someone’s seen a bright light in the sky”, then it’s a plane, or a streetlamp, or the Moon, or some other entirely explicable light source. If I ought to change my mind about that, you show me the evidence, and I want something more than stories. You can be a good skeptic – or, if you don’t identify with that term, you can just be a reasonable human being – and simply not give a crap about something like this, until the people demanding to be taken seriously actually bring you a reason why you should.
These particular meanderings developed around an initial nugget of thought that occurred to me while listening to the SGU podcast a couple of weeks ago.
Excellent article. I think you should have filled out the section on Pareidolia rather more though. That’s 99% of the issue.
You see what you want to see. People who see lights at night who are inclined to want to see ghosts, see ghosts. Those who come from ancestor-worshipping backgrounds see long dead spirits of their ancient family. Those who experience religious experiences always do so in their own native religion.
I’ve never heard of a muslim having an experience of the Holy Spirit, or a christian having a realisation of Allah.
Those who have been brainwashed or have a tendancy to see something, always see it in their own culture and supply the whole meaning themselves.
Thanks – all good points you make, and stuff that deserves to be expanded on. Hopefully once I get some long-term plans that I have for this place organised, I’ll be able to start cataloguing some individual articles on a lot of different things like this. Pareidolia in particular is a really important one to be aware of, and numerous interactive examples of it in action shouldn’t be hard to find.
when i heard about the most recent Bigfoot sighting it really got my hopes up…