UFOs: The Public Deceived

"Yes, there are, of course, many UFOs and that’s uncontroversial. What is controversial is the claim that what we are looking at, in some cases, are visitors from other worlds. Many people believe that. Some even believe they’ve been abducted by alien visitors. My second book choice, a favourite of mine, is UFOs: The Public Deceived by Philip J. Klass. It was published back in the mid-1980s, and it’s a trawl through some of the great claims of ufology such as the Delphos case, the Travis Walton case, and cases involving airline pilots who have reported seeing quite extraordinary things in the skies. Klass looks very carefully at the evidence, and, in many cases, successfully debunks the suggestion that what was observed was in fact some sort of flying saucer or piloted vehicle from another world. I particularly like a story involving a nuclear power plant. Back in 1967, a power station was being built. The security guards reported seeing an extraordinary light hanging over the plant on several nights. The police were called, and they confirmed the presence of the light. The County Deputy Sheriff described ‘a large lighted object’. An auxiliary police officer stated that he saw ‘five objects, they appeared to be burning, an aircraft passed by while I was watching, they seemed to be 20 times the size of the plane’. The Wake County Magistrate saw ‘a rectangular object that looked like it was on fire’. They figured that it was about the size of a football field, and very bright. Newspaper reporters showed up to investigate the object. They then attempted to get closer to it in their car, but they found that as they drove towards it, it receded. No matter how fast and far they drove, they never got any closer. Eventually they stopped the car, got out, and the photographer looked at the object through a long lens on his camera. He said, ‘Yep, that’s the planet Venus alright’. It really was the planet Venus. Everyone had just seen the planet Venus. It seems extraordinary that these things happen. Here we have a case in which you have police officers, a magistrate, trained eye-witnesses. And there was even hard evidence in the form of an unidentified blip on the local air traffic control radar screen. All of this evidence together, you might think, confirms beyond any doubt that there really was some mysterious object hanging over that nuclear power plant. But the fact is, there wasn’t, despite these numerous eyewitnesses, this multiple attestation. The observers stuck their necks out. They were brave enough to make bold claims, so they clearly thought they were observing something extraordinary, and there was even some hard evidence (the radar blip) to back up the claims. Nevertheless, that turned out to be a coincidence. This case illustrates that you should expect, every now and then, some remarkable claim like this to be made, despite the fact that there’s no truth to it whatsoever. People are duped, they are deceived, they are subject to hallucinations in quite surprising ways. The mere fact that claims like this are made every now and then is not good evidence. He discusses some of the obvious cognitive biases that may be involved. We are prone to various kinds of optical illusion. One of the most interesting points that he makes is that what some ufologists say in support of the belief that there are bizarre piloted objects floating around the atmosphere, is that, whilst many of these claims can be explained, and many have been debunked, there’s a tiny, hard core that are not explained. It’s that tiny hard core that they think provides good evidence for the presence of such craft. However, we know that this 1967 observation could easily have gone down in the annals of ufology as one of the great unexplained cases. It could easily have been part of that hard core. It was only through the fact that we got lucky and the photographer attempted to chase the UFO and then looked at it through his long lens that we now know the truth. If that hadn’t happened, this would now be another of those great unsolved cases, and it would be trumpeted as powerful evidence for the presence of strange piloted craft in our skies. But, of course, even if it hadn’t been debunked, it really wouldn’t have been strong evidence. For we should know that these kinds of cases are going to crop up every now and then anyway, and so, if we know that, we should know they are not really evidence at all for these extraordinary claims."