Calgary Skeptic’s Society Blog

Among my favourite paranormal subjects is alien visitation. It’s such a fun topic, and it makes for great movies! While I do believe that there are aliens out there somewhere, I think the notion that they’ve been visiting us is utterly ridiculous.

This article is part one of two – later this week I’ll discuss the explanations for alien abductions.

UFOlogy is the mythology of the space age. Rather than angels … we now have … extraterrestrials. It is the product of the creative imagination. It serves a poetic and existential function. It seeks to give man deeper roots and bearings in the universe. It is an expression of our hunger for mystery…our hope for transcendental meaning. The gods of Mt. Olympus have been transformed into space voyagers, transporting us by our dreams to other realms.

–Paul Kurtz

Every sighting of an alien spacecraft has one of two explanations – it’s either a hoax or it’s a mundane object being mistaken for a UFO. The latter is far more common, but here are a few examples of both….

Hoaxes

I won’t spend too much time discussing hoaxes, since for one they are easy to find online, and for another the purpose of skepticism is not to prove something wrong – it’s to examine the evidence and land at the most plausible conclusion.

Earlier this year in Phoenix, Arizona, the police received several phone calls from people insisting there were UFOs drifting above the city. The witnesses described flickering red and white lights, moving pretty quickly. The cops dispatched a police helicopter to investigate – the helicopter took video footage of the lights, which you can see on Youtube.  In April, a man came forward and admitted that he had attached red and white road flares to helium balloon, and lauched them from his backyard. You can see the full article here.

In August 2007, a man admitted creating these videos on his MacBook Pro. A professional computer graphic artist, the man originally created the videos and released them as research for a feature film he was working on.

 Most photograps of UFOs are hoaxes - modern photo editing techniques make it very easy to fake UFO pictures. Picture hoax techniques including digitally modifying photographs, or simply throwing an object up in the air and snapping a picture of it. 

A Case of Mistaken Identity

By far the more common source of unidentified flying objects is mistaken identity – often, people see lights in the sky, or an odd shape in a picture, and immediately assume aliens. On the contrary, however, floating lights and strange-looking aircraft are incredibly common and much more likely.

People often describe UFOs using its distance and speed - “it was about a mile across, twenty-five miles above the earth, and moving probably 60 miles an hour”. Determining an object’s size, speed, and distance is nearly impossible when it’s moving through the sky – there’s no point of reference, nothing to compare it to, nothing to show a scale. Any comment regarding the object’s movement or size is useless – without reliable tools to measure it, you can’t get an accurate picture.

Some common items people have mistaken for UFOs include airplanes, strange cloud formations, flocks of birds, car headlights from a distance or reflected off of something, garbage flying in the wind, insects, meteors, and weather balloons.

Combating UFOlogists

The most common logical fallacies believers in alien visitations commit are:

• False Dichotomy: “It’s either something I recognize, or it’s aliens” – couldn’t it be something you don’t recognize? For example, a weather balloon or an odd cloud formation?
• Argument from Ignorance: “I don’t know that it isn’t aliens, so it must be aliens” – this is the same argument most often used by creationists in trying to prove God’s existence. You can see why this is an insufficient argument here and here and here.
• Confusing Evidence with Anecdotes: as far as I could discern in my hour or so of online research (both on true believers’ sites and skeptical sites), no sighting of an alien spacecraft has been positively, one hundred percent proven. The “evidence” that true believers spout is merely a hodgepodge of eye-witness accounts, the accuracy and truthfulness of which are extremely questionable. Anecdotes are not evidence for a phenomenon.
• Failing to employ Occam’s Razor: Occam’s Razor states that “the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible”. When someone assumes an unidentified flying object is a visit from an alien, that introduces tons of new assumptions – not the least of which is that aliens actually exist, something that as yet (though speculated) has not been proven.

Stay tuned for an upcoming post about alien abductions!