This paper is about the elusiveness of evidence for anomalous events. I will speak of UFOs because this is the subject most familiar to me, but the underlying theme concerns problems of knowing the unknown and unaccepted, and the same arguments will apply more or less equally well to other anomalies. My recent preoccupation with evidence results from a crisis in my long-time study of UFOs. It is not a crisis of faith, because I am still convinced that an irreducible residue of unknowns remains after all the conventional cases are winnowed out of the mass of reports, and that these unknowns hold their status not because they are merely unidentified, but because they possess a robust strangeness that seems beyond conventional solution. The crisis is rather one of confidence, a sense that I have taken too much for granted, been too naïve in what I have accepted, neglected too many subtleties and pitfalls in a landscape I thought I knew. I suffer from disquiet and embarrassment—disquiet that I am more uncertain than I realized, and embarrassed that I—and my fellow ufologists—overlooked weaknesses we had a responsibility to notice.
The stimulus for my concern has been the recent success of skeptics in shooting down some high-profile UFO cases that
once seemed unassailably strong. Within the past two years or so they have provided a conventional explanation for the
1997 Phoenix Lights, a case with thousands of witnesses, including the governor of Arizona, and highlighted in Leslie
Kean’s best-selling book, UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record . They succeeded again
with the 1996 Yukon “giant mothership” case, advertised in a popular TV show as one of the “ten best” UFO reports of
all time. Most troubling of all was an article in the Skeptical Inquirer by James McGaha and Joe Nickell that offered
a solution for the “Incident at Exeter,” a 1965 classic that J. Allen Hynek
considered an exemplary close encounter of the first kind, and a case that most ufologists counted on to stand
forever. I certainly thought so, since I included it in my 2010 book as high on my short list of favorite—and
genuine—UFOs s1Bullard, Thomas E.: The Myth and Mystery of UFOs (Topeka: University Press of Kansas, 2010), 35-38..
The ufological community has largely ignored this string of successes. After all, explaining cases is what skeptics do, or try to do. Many of their past attempts have provided more laughs than enlightenment, or at most gave cause for exasperation, but the skeptics get it right now and then. Reasonable ufologists accept that most UFO reports describe conventional events mistaken for something strange, and even a few classic cases are bound to fall apart from time to time thanks to new information or renewed examination. For many ufologists proof is no longer an issue, but an afterthought. They feel certain that the existence of UFOs was established years ago and an extensive body of high-quality unknowns provides ample proof; now the mission is to understand the meaning of UFOs, which usually means understanding what our alien visitors are doing here. The loss of a case or two, even a significant one, means nothing in this larger picture. We have plenty more good cases on file and new ones coming in all the time, so why pay any attention to the pitiful gnawing of the opposition?
My feelings are considerably more uneasy. Today’s skeptical attacks on UFOs belong to a different breed than the woeful Air Force concoctions of the 1950s or the armchair pontifications of Harvard astronomer Donald Menzel. The modern skeptics bring rigorous and informed criticism to their arguments and highlight inconvenient facts that ufologists overlook or ignore. This new caliber of skepticism is nothing to laugh at; when it’s on target, it kills. And their aim seems increasingly true. When ufologists trust to numbers they pin their faith on a version of the “bundle of sticks” fallacy, a false belief that many weak cases combine to build better evidence than one strong case. The fact remains that the argument for a unique and significant UFO phenomenon depends on the existence of at least one genuine UFO. We do not have alien bodies or a piece of indisputably otherworldly technology. What we have are reports, some of them undeniably impressive but still the anecdotal evidence that scarcely counts as evidence at all among scientists. Supporting evidence may come from correlations and patterns among independent testimonies, or from photographs and radar, but the uncertainties of human eyewitness testimony, human memory, social and cultural influences, and fallibilities even in instrumental support eat away at the purported solidity of the best UFO evidence. These are the very sorts of faults that the skeptics uncover with increasing success.
The combatants square off with ufologists convinced that they hold proof of unconventional objects flying in the sky. These cases describe more than mere lights in the night. They have the support of multiple reliable witnesses and instrumental confirmation, the objects display unconventional strangeness and no conventional solution can explain them. These cases are worth standing up to defend as concrete examples of a real UFO phenomenon. On the other side the skeptics maintain that with the right information they can explain every UFO no matter how strange it appears on the surface, while the ufologists’ practice of substituting new “unknowns” for failed cases simply ignores the ominous trend that if one case after another has fallen in the past, all others will topple in their turn. The verdict then has to be that not even one unconventional UFO really exists and all the claims of ufology, from objects in the sky to alien abductions, evaporate into a cultural “castle-of-clouds” belief just like the skeptics have always maintained.
Cast in these stark terms, the skeptics’ success is far from trivial. The whole issue is really at stake. If the skeptics can make good on their claim that the mystery in even the best UFO cases is apparent rather than real, then the foundations of ufology crumble and the superstructures of other UFO beliefs fall with it. The loss of classic cases comes as an especial blow. They become classics for good reason—for being of exceptional quality and strangeness, and for having faced repeated challenges and survived them with anomalousness and mystery undiminished. These enduring cases represent the best face forward of the subject, cases to offer critics and doubters, scientists and the interested public alike in response to the question of why accept that UFOs are real and a serious issue. When we lose such cases, we lose the ground we stand on.
At a minimum these successes by the skeptics call for reflection and self-examination. They call for understanding what went wrong in investigations that arrived at a desired conclusion and let the truth slip away. Deeper still, they oblige a return to basic questions about the quality and air-tightness of the UFO evidence, and ultimately to the question of whether the evidence we have is adequate to establish the existence of an unconventional phenomenon at all.
Another question of vital importance is how do ufologists (or anomalists of any stripe) address their various audiences? When we talk to our own, much of what we say is what we ourselves want to hear and we forget the habit of asking demanding questions. Too much preaching to the choir lulls us into thinking our claims are self-evident as well as true, rather than confronting the fact that the people we most want to reach—open-minded doubters, hard but fair critics, and any scientists willing to listen—not only reject most of our accepted wisdom, but take offense that we sound so cock-sure when we have no right to be. We can accept in our own hearts many things we cannot prove. We can talk freely about unscientific evidence among our fellows. What we cannot do is expect the wider world to be so receptive. Our task is not just to make assertions but to prove them, with proof of such integrity that it will persuade or at least confound the opposition. Most of what we know, or think we know, will not suffice. It will belong in a vast gray area of claims and theories meaningful to the already convinced but questionable, even wild and foolish, to adherents of consensus reality. We have to choose carefully the evidential tools of our argument, be rigorous and Spartan in our selection, leaving ourselves nowhere to hide, no smoke and mirrors to confuse the confrontation between our surest facts and the harsh demands of scientific truth. Instead we are often our own worst enemies, our words less likely to persuade than to alienate, until the audience we want to hear us closes us out as a matter of reflex. Problems of whether we should ask scientific questions or choose scientists for our audience loom even further down the road; but like it or not, confess to it or not, it is on the gate of science that most ufologists knock in an insistent but futile effort to gain admission.
What we say about UFOs locates them squarely in the realm of confusion. They are mysterious realities, they are mistaken identities; mechanical in nature, not even physical in any ordinary sense; harbingers of another world, testimonies of human fallibility. An important concept to bear in mind is an analytical dichotomy introduced by Jerome Clark and destined to haunt the course of this paper from beginning to end: He distinguishes “event anomalies,” those reported occurrences that are strange and unknown yet seem to be fully understandable as physical phenomena, from “experience anomalies,” occurrences observable like purely physical events and sometimes seen even by multiple witnesses, yet manifesting a strangeness unlike any conventional phenomenon. They are “visions of the otherworldly, and nothing brings them into or keeps them inside this world in any but an experiential sense” s2Clark, Jerome: Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from Other Worlds (Detroit: Visible Ink Press, 2010), xiii.. The folklorist likewise recognizes “personal experience accounts,” and a closer parallel to experience anomalies, the “memorate,” a narrative cast as a first-person experience of a supernatural event.
For the moment the UFOs discussed here will be unusual aerial sights observed directly by witnesses and presented to an audience that did not share in the experience by means of first-person testimony. To keep it simple these UFOs will be limited to bread-and-butter basic reports that describe purported physical objects. I will not introduce convoluted and controversial matters like abductions or Roswell, nor even high-strangeness elements in basic fly-in-the-sky UFO sightings. No talk about meanings or even aliens will appear, since it would be premature to venture so far out into speculative space when we need to stay here on the ground and consider the fundamental question of UFO existence. Three cases that skeptics have attacked recently will serve as examples to anchor the discussion in concrete reality.