UNSCIENTIFIC BEHAVIOR
BY BELIEVERS IN EXTRATERRESTRIAL UFOS

Many people claim that UFOs are craft piloted by extraterrestrials, and that science will back up their beliefs. But many of these people believe in "facts" that are totally unscientific, and use unscientific reasoning and methods:

Unscientific Behavior in UFO Sighting Cases

• They want the extraterrestrial hypothesis to be true.

  UFOlogists always assume that any reported UFO is an extraterrestrial spacecraft until it is shown to be something else. In some cases, they continue to believe the UFO was extraterrestrial in nature after an identification has been found for it.

  Any research intended to prove a particular result is biased. It is bad science. Research should be done to find the actual truth, whatever it is, not to prove one particular truth.

  All of the UFO "researchers" on the Discovery Channel and History Channel shows are definitely biased toward the extraterrestrial hypothesis - so much that their research cannot be anything but bad science.
  Why UFOs are not identified
  Recognizing Bad Science

• When they hear about a UFO, they think extraterrestrial spacecraft, not something unidentified.

  The funny thing is, if a UFO is ever found and shown to be an extraterrestrial spacecraft, it ceases to be a UFO. It becomes an IFO - an Identified Flying Object.
  UFO is not ET

• Many of them believe in occult pseudosciences.

  They believe in such occult concepts as dowsing, lay lines, automatic writing, séances, psychic activity, extrasensory perception, telekinesis, and residual energy fields, and "use" them to "investigate" UFO sightings. This is nothing but bad science.

• UFOlogists ask witnesses questions designed to find out if the UFO was extraterrestrial.

  By doing this, instead of asking questions to get an unbiased description of the observed event, they miss a lot of data relevant to the actual identity of the object. They also cause the witnesses to wrongly believe that they saw something extraterrestrial.

• They go right from A to Alien.

  They usually go directly from A to Alien without first investigating B through Z. Instead of first checking for all possible prosaic explanations, they jump to the conclusion that an alien spacecraft is responsible for whatever they are investigating.
  Recognizing Bad Science

• They use the nonexistent "Process of Elimination."

  The process of elimination was a creation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in his Sherlock Holmes series of novels. But it is valid only when an entirely known, finite set of possibilities exists. In cases where one or more of the possibilities are unknown to those investigating, the process of elimination is useless. So eliminating the known possibilities does not prove the presence of an alien spacecraft.
  Bad Reasoning

• They choose well-known points of origin for the aliens they posit to exist.

  The common places they usually choose are Mars, the Pleiades, Sirius, Orion, Polaris, and Zeta Reticuli. All but the last one are prominently found in every astronomy book. None of them are very likely places to find life:

  1. Mars is quite unlikely to support any advanced form of life because of its small size and thin atmosphere. The low gravity accounts for the thin atmosphere.
  2. The Pleiades is a very young cluster of short-lived ultraviolet stars. Conditions are very poor for life.
  3. Sirius is a young, short-lived, ultraviolet star with a white dwarf for a companion. The companion star comparatively recently went through a red giant phase, changing conditions in multiple ways as the star swelled to red gianthood twice, then released ionizing radiation as a Wolf-Rayet star, and then cooled to a white dwarf in a few hundred thousand years. If the system had any life before, it probably does not have any now.
  4. Orion is a very large area of the sky. It is not a specific location. And much of it is the Orion Nebula, an unstable star-forming region.
  5. Polaris is a least-hospitable system, with a giant Cepheid-variable star, and multiple stars in orbits that would cause extreme temperature changes in the climates of any possible planets.
  6. Zeta Reticuli 1 and 2 form a double star system, which means days without darkness during part of the year of any planet orbiting one of the sunlike stars. Temperature swings would be extreme.

     Note that Zeta Reticuli was linked to the Hill Abduction case in 1961 when someone matched Betty Hill's remembered diagram to the arrangement of stars in the area of Zeta Reticuli.

• When a UFO case is solved, they refuse to believe the solution.

  Examples:

  1. They refuse to believe that the Roswell debris was a secret US device to spy on the USSR.
  2. They refuse to believe that the Aztec NM case was a scam played on Frank Scully.
  3. They refuse to believe the Barra Da Tijuca, Brazil photos and the Trinidade Island photos were faked.
  4. They refuse to believe that misadjusted RADAR sets caused the Washington National sightings.
  5. They refuse to believe the Lakenheath-Bentwaters case was caused by the same RADAR error that caused the Washington National sightings.
  6. They refuse to believe that Lonnie Zamora saw a manned hot air balloon at Socorro in 1964.
  7. They refuse to believe that the Rendlesham Forest case was a cover up for a spy satellite film drop carrying info on the ongoing Iran Hostage Crisis.
  8. They refuse to believe the Maryland National Guard dropped the flares that caused the lights at Phoenix AZ in 1997, even though the group admitted doing it as part of a training exercise.

     They likewise refuse to believe that the flight that crossed the state earlier in the evening was a formation of five CT-144s flying at 19,000 feet.

• When someone says UFOs are not extraterrestrial, they accuse him of conspiring to hide the truth.

  UFO believers have a paranoid idea that government officials and people hired by them are trying to keep people from finding out about extraterrestrial activities.

• UFOlogists think air traffic controllers have to identify all flying objects

  They are too busy trying to keep those objects from crashing into each other to do that. Air traffic controllers see unidentified aircraft all the time. But they assume they are aircraft using visual flight rules (VFR), or are military or private aircraft that are being controlled elsewhere.

• They assume air traffic controllers won't report UFOs for fear of being fired.

  When controllers couldn't identify flying objects, they assumed they were private or military aircraft not on the controller's radio frequency. They then directed other air traffic away from those objects. They are too busy to gather data on unidentified aircraft for other purposes.

• UFOlogists assume RADAR gives a TV view of what is flying in the sky.

  RADAR also shows multiple reflections, ground objects, dump trucks, birds, bugs, and weather targets. RADAR screens show "unidentified" targets all of the time.
  Why UFOs are not identified

• UFOlogists assume that witnesses know what they are talking about.

  They believe all of the witness statements concerning the size, distance, speed, or altitude of the object. But the human vision system is incapable of determining any of these values from any object more than 30 feet away that is seen against the sky.

  Most of these "data" are the result of assumptions made by the witness about the size, distance, or identity of the object. Then, using these statements, UFOlogists tend to eliminate the real cause of the sighting because it was the wrong size or the wrong distance away.
  Human Perception and UFOs

• Many of them believe everything they read in tabloids.

  This includes the photo of "heaven, taken by the Hubble Telescope" (actually a photo of Santa's Workshop, home, and barn lifted from Santa Claus - the Movie) and the "captured UFO" (actually a photo of the Minneapolis Metrodome inflatable top the time it was weighed down into the arena by snow). Tabloids print anything that will sell magazines.
  How the Press Mystifies UFOs

• They use hypnosis to regress UFO witnesses, and especially people with "missing time".

  Too often, the hypnotist wants an extraterrestrial result, and asks leading questions. This implants the idea in the subject that he did have an extraterrestrial encounter, when in fact, something entirely different actually happened.

• They believe a UFO story in the face of negative testimony from others.

  Several cases come to mind:

  1. A woman claimed that a UFO abduction occurred from a New York City apartment. But many people were in the area at the time of the claimed abduction. Many of them were looking in the direction of the apartment building, and they did not see the UFO.
  2. A man in a camping area of a park claims he was burned by the exhaust blast from a landed UFO, one of two UFOs present in the park area. But there were many other people in the recreation area at the time of the event. None of them saw any of the UFOs or heard the exhaust blast. Also, the burn pattern on the shirt was on both the front and back of the shirt, as though it was not on the man when it was burned.
  3. The page author was out watching for UFOs one night during the 1973 wave of UFOs in his area. He saw nothing in the sky around him except an airplane, stars, and the planet Mars bright on the eastern horizon. The next day, people to the west of him reported UFOs that appeared to be over the author's position at the time he was there. So either the UFOs were Mars or stars, or they were very close to the witnesses (e.g. fire balloons launched by pranksters). The UFOlogists said the aliens selectively made their craft visible to some, but not others.
  4. In the Frank Edwards case (10/12/1961), the UFOlogists would prefer to believe the report by a witness who says he saw it from directly below and the lights were going in a circle, rather than the author of this page, who saw an advertising plane with letters on an electric sign hung under the wings. The letters were moving from wingtip to wingtip as the plane flew slowly over the drive-in theater where the author was watching a movie at that time. It passed directly over the page author. The drive-in was in a direct line with the line-of-sight direction reported by Edwards when he saw the UFO.
• They believed a woman was a space alien because, as a child, her mother told her she was an alien.

  That woman was in fact an illegal alien, brought into the US by her mother from Mexico when she was an infant. But she herself believed she was a space alien, because she had never heard of the definition of an alien as being a person who is a foreign citizen.

  In a similar vein, the page author's brother (as a child) asked him how to tell a space alien from a normal person. He had seen the ad about aliens having to report to the Department of Immigration and Naturalization in January of each year, and the only kind of alien he had heard about was a space alien (seen in the Saturday morning cartoons).

• They believe the "men in black" are trying to silence witnesses and steal photos and evidence of UFOs.

  It has now been shown that most of those "men in black" were actually tabloid reporters trying to increase the mystery of the case (to sell more magazines) and get the evidence for the publishers.

  One witness reported a green wire coming out of the sock of a "man in black" and going into a dark patch on his skin. This was probably a "wire" - a listening device. The green wire would be the antenna, and the dark patch was probably adhesive to hold it in place.

Beliefs in Unscientific Physics and Power Sources

They invent new laws of physics and imaginary power sources.

• They believe that UFOs can control cars or other devices by remote control.

  Nothing can control any device by remote control without that device having a remote-control receiver built into it by design. Some science fiction authors in the 1950s did not understand this, and wrote stories where enemy agents had remote control machines that could take over the control of any device (such as an airplane). Even the 1980s TV show Knight Rider showed a form of remote control without a receiver. Many UFOlogists apparently believe those stories.

• Some claim that UFOs can use microwaves to steal or divert power.

  A device cannot emit any kind of energy without an energy emission process that belongs to that device. There is no way anyone can remotely command it to emit power without some kind of remote-control receiver built into the device itself.

  One UFOlogist claimed that aliens caused his car battery to drain by beaming microwaves through the headlights. Actually, he forgot to turn off the headlights and drained the battery.

• Many of them believe in a source of "free energy" that can be used to power space flight.

  There are some sources of energy in space, but they are found only near stars. Very little energy is found in the vast space between stars.

• Some believe that crystals, mercury, and pyramids are sources of energy.

  None of these are inherent sources of energy that can be tapped and used. Some crystals are piezoelectric, meaning that they can produce electricity when squeezed, and that they will change size or shape when electric charges are placed across them. But this is just changing one form of energy into another, not creating new energy.

  Other crystals are chemically active, as is mercury. The energy was stored in them when they were made. But they give off their energy only once, when the chemical reaction occurs. There is nothing mysterious about this.

  There is nothing mysterious about pyramids. The ancients built them because they were the only thing they knew how to make very big that would not fall down.

  But none of these are sources of energy that can be used to power anything more than a hearing aid (mercury batteries). There is nothing about them that could power a spacecraft.

• They believe that if something spins fast enough, it loses gravity and can lift off the ground.

  Some variants of this have a spinning rotor with gyroscopes spaced around the rim spinning. The idea was that the precession effect would lift the rotor.

  None of these work. The physics of these devices show that they have no overall lifting effect. Instead of translational lift off the ground, they cause twisting within the rotor that causes it to push down harder in the center and lift up at the rim. This just tries to bend the rotor.

  This idea originated when a "contactee" assembled a motor and an eccentric weight inside a case. When the device was placed on a bathroom scale and turned on, the reading on the bathroom scale decreased until it read zero. But this was an effect of the vibrations from the eccentric weight on the particular mechanism inside that particular scale. It did not actually decrease the weight of the device.

• They believe that a disk shaped aircraft is more efficient.

  When the US Air Force was paying for the development of the Avrocar, the engineers discovered quite quickly that this was not true. They could not even get it to hover in a stable manner more than a couple of feet off the ground.

  The only circular aircraft that successfully flew was the Chance-Vought V-173, and it needed vertical and horizontal tail fins to stabilize it. It was an attempt to make a compact aircraft able to take off and land on aircraft carriers. But the invention of the jet airplane quickly made it obsolete.

• They want to believe in a powered craft, rather than a released prank.

  In most cases, they prefer to believe in the presence of a large vehicle which is able to exert great amounts of power to make violent maneuvers, rather than believe that the sighting was of a small fire balloon released by a teenager and moving at the mercy of the wind.

• They believe that antigravity is possible.
  They believe that time travel is possible.

  The latest theory on what causes gravity makes antigravity impossible. Antigravity would require flying faster than light in the time dimension. But since this would also be moving forward in time, it would not appear to be antigravity. And it would require more energy than exists in the universe.

  Since, according to the latest theory, everything moves at the speed of light (mostly through the time dimension), such travel is impossible.

Unscientific Behavior in Ancient Astronaut Cases

• They totally misinterpret the meanings of ancient artifacts.

  When seen through their ancient-astronaut-eyes filter, everything looks to them like the product of ancient aliens. They think that humans either would not think of making these things, or would not be able to make them as they were made.

  As an example, the little gold "airplanes" found in South America are more likely models of flying fish.

• Instead of believing in God's power, they believe the Ark of the Covenant was an energy weapon provided by space aliens.

  They would prefer to believe in anything else, rather than believing that God is the Supreme Being. They hate God's rules of behavior, so they would prefer that God not exist.
  Unscientific Behavior By Atheists

• They believe that the "lost" books were removed from the Bible because they tell of extraterrestrial encounters.

  Most of the books that were not included in the Bible were Greek plays, forgeries portrayed as undiscovered books mentioned in the Bible, incomplete documents, or not related to religious belief.
  Unscientific Behavior By Atheists

• They believe that all of the angels, demons, and other entities reported in religious experiences by people in ancient times were really extraterrestrials.

  The strange part of this is that they would prefer to believe the beings were space travelers rather than being actual encounters with entities having to do with religion.

• They believe the ancients had ways of perfectly fitting huge stones together

  Instead, the stones may have abraded or cold-flowed to make the joints much tighter than they were originally.

• They believe that only a powerful alien spacecraft could move megalithic blocks into place.

  One man in Florida, using only the lifting, transport, and cutting tools he made himself, singlehandedly built a megalithic garden park on his land. He did it just to show that it could be done. But he did have huge stone blocks delivered by truck from the quarry (officials wouldn't let him block roads to move blocks with his tools).