McAfee: Do you think there is any good evidence for alien visitation on earth? What would you say is the most compelling piece?
Sheaffer: No, there is no “good evidence” at all. Nothing is “compelling.” There are a few cases we can’t wrap up completely, usually because of incomplete information, or because of claims containing elements that simply can’t be true. I suppose you could say that they are “solved” as insufficient or inconsistent information. We invariably end up with less “evidence” than one would expect if such dramatic reports were in fact real. There are no hidden nuggets of solid cases, just a lot of claims without solid foundation.
McAfee: UFOs have been seemingly constant throughout history, with tales of unidentified objects going back thousands of years. Do you think it’s possible there is an undiscovered natural phenomenon at the root of many of these?
Sheaffer: It’s not true that UFOs have been “seemingly constant” throughout history, although some authors have “jazzed up” reports in ancient chronicles to make them seem to support that conclusion. The best-known book promoting “ancient UFOs” is Wonders in the Sky (2009) by Jacques Vallee and Chris Aubeck, which looks into over 500 cases of what are supposed to be sightings of unidentified objects in the sky from centuries past. However, careful investigation by researchers Jason Colavito and Martin Kottmeyer show that their descriptions of many of these cases are based on bad translations, secondhand sources, etc. (Look up “Colavito Blunders in the Sky”.) Most of these cases are based on very little information. Combine that with the religious, astrological, and supernatural interpretations contained in these reports, and there is very little objective substance on which to base any claims.
While the possibility of some unknown natural phenomenon cannot be ruled out, I consider it to be extremely unlikely. One thing to remember is that centuries ago, practically anything unusual that happened was given a religious, astrological, or supernatural explanation. Phenomena that we are familiar with today—brilliant meteors and meteor showers, comets, aurorae, etc.—were interpreted in terms of religious events, or as portents of some great calamity. Thus the descriptions we are given may not seem to describe any known phenomenon because their descriptions are colored in terms of the common beliefs of the time.
McAfee: You are a professional skeptic who debunks UFO claims, but do you believe in alien life? If you think it might exist, do you think it could be intelligent and could one day visit us?
Sheaffer: Here we are touching on what I call the prime UFO fallacy: whenever I say to a group of people that I do not believe in alien visitations, almost invariably somebody will object, “What makes you so sure that we are the only intelligent civilization in the universe?” I reply that I never said that, but in their minds this is what they think they have heard. This is the same as asserting: If aliens exist somewhere in the universe, then they must be here now. When stated so directly, it is easy to see how absurd it is. But the prime UFO fallacy is very widely held.
“Believe” is the wrong word to use in talking about alien life. Our universe is unimaginably vast, much more vast than the human mind can comprehend. We know that there are something like a hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone, and at least that many galaxies in the observable universe. That’s a whole lot of solar systems, and based on what we now know we can conclude that many, if not most, of them have planets—some of which are probably similar to Earth. We know that life was able to evolve here on Earth, given a few billion years. So it would be absurd to conclude that this could not happen elsewhere.
However, most people have simply no idea of the size of the universe, or of the insane amounts of energy required for accelerating (and decelerating) space ships to near light speed. See chapter 8 of my book Bad UFOs for a full discussion of this. It would be just as difficult for ETs in some distant solar system to reach us as it would for us to reach them. So no, I do not expect to see any visitors from deep space just suddenly appearing in our vicinity.
McAfee: What do you think of sleep paralysis as it relates to alien abduction claims? Do you think this natural medical condition could explain a large number of those alleged experiences?
Sheaffer: Beyond any doubt, sleep paralysis plays a role in UFO abduction belief. The Harvard psychologist Susan A. Clancy shows this in her book Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens. Throughout history, people have been interpreting dreams and nightmares as experiences from some “other realm” of existence—angels, demons, witches, whatever. Today, that “other realm” is interpreted by many people as experiences involving UFOs and aliens.
McAfee: Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Sheaffer: The late British Fortean skeptic Hillary Evans wrote, “It is safe to say that no anomalous phenomenon has generated so rich an anomaly-cluster as the flying saucer.” In addition to simple UFO sightings, we have the men in black, UFO crashes, military and intelligence conspiracies, NASA conspiracies, alien abductions, crop circles, alien autopsies, alien-human hybrids, cattle mutilations, etc., and the list just continues to grow. Neither Bigfoot nor Nessie, nor ghosts or angels, come even close.
During the mid- and late twentieth century, our culture became steeped in science fiction. Stories of rocket ships and space travel were commonplace. You can find stories of abductions by space aliens very much like contemporary accounts in the Buck Rogers comics as early as 1930. Then at the close of World War II, we not only had Cold War concerns about possible advanced weaponry developed in secret by either the United States or Soviet Union, and rockets began to actually travel into space. It is no wonder that in an environment such as that, people were prone to misperceive ordinary objects seen in unusual circumstances as alien spacecraft coming to earth to keep watch over our use of nuclear weapons—or perhaps even to conquer us!
McAfee: If aliens did visit Earth, do you think the world governments would try to hide that information from everyone else? Why or why not?
Sheaffer: If aliens actually did visit Earth, I don’t see how it would be possible for any government to hide that fact. Their interstellar craft would have to be much bigger than the small asteroids that astronomers routinely detect. When their craft approached Earth, they would be easily visible to the naked eye. Diligent amateur satellite watchers would detect them very quickly, and would compute their orbit. News of these sightings would quickly saturate the Internet. People would be talking about nothing else. The notion of some government (let alone many governments) hiding secrets about alien encounters is too absurd to take seriously.
THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE
Conspiracy theories involving government cover-ups are incredibly popular (see chapter 15), and concealment of alien life on earth is one of the most commonly seen representations of that. Millions of people believe in alien visitation, and about 30 percent of the American population believes that the government has deliberately covered it up.21 In other countries that number is significantly lower, with only about 17 percent of people in the U.K. professing a belief in alien cover-ups,22 but these beliefs span the globe and have persisted over time. The alien cover-up narrative, which has been bolstered in recent years through fictional media representations found in movies like the Men in Black franchise and television series such as The X-Files, got its start in 1947 after a UFO allegedly crashed in Roswell, New Mexico. That incident was initially reported as a fallen weather balloon, but the government later revealed that a downed U.S. Air Force surveillance balloon, dubbed Project MOGUL, was the source.23 Speculation about an alien crash landing at the Roswell site has continued, despite a countless number of fruitless probes into the event and dozens of previously classified documents being made public. The event has been called “the world’s most famous, most exhaustively investigated, and most thoroughly debunked UFO claim.”24
Alien cover-up beliefs vary from believer to believer, with some suggesting aliens actively work with a number of government agencies around the world and o
thers portraying a more passive relationship. Many believers claim ETs allow people to reverse engineer their technology, which they say explains our rapid advancement (that is actually explained by our ability to communicate and build upon new ideas), and still others have even more complex theories, including that President Dwight Eisenhower actually met with a group of aliens to sign the so-called Greada Treaty in 1954. There isn’t any real evidence for this assertion, and it is based solely on stories put forth by a few individuals and the fact that the president went to a dentist appointment for a few hours, yet people continue to believe it.25 And for those who do insist that the government is hiding alien contact from the citizens of the world, I would only ask what possible reason the extraterrestrials would have for agreeing to such a deal with mere humans. In order to even reach us from the nearest habitable planet, these incomprehensibly intelligent creatures would have to be so far advanced, that any treaty with us would be like the world governments of Earth agreeing with dung beetles not to destroy or disrupt them.
If there is no treaty, and aliens (or time travelers, as some suggest) are actually visiting Earth for strictly observational purposes without leaving a shred of evidence, then the governments of the world would likely be oblivious to it, not complicit in it. I think this idea is most succinctly demonstrated by Stephen Hawking, former Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge and author of A Brief History of Time, who said, “If the government is covering up knowledge of aliens, they are doing a better job of it than they do at anything else.” Frankly, it’s more likely that governments are lying about their own new technologies than about alien life forms traveling from light years away only to hover in our atmosphere and be spotted by random people in arbitrary locations—without leaving any solid proof.
EVIDENCE PUT FORTH
Regardless of a lack of hard evidence, many alien believers still insist that aliens have landed on Earth and that the world governments are engaged in a massive global conspiracy to hide it. Personally, however, I tend to side with Dr. Hawking on this issue in part because I’ve never seen anything that indicates our political institutions are capable of such an enormous cover-up—and the same goes for the notion that the attacks on September 11, 2001, were executed by the U.S. government and that an ultrapowerful Illuminati controls everything, including the economy. These might be fun or intriguing ideas, but, practically speaking, any cover up at that level of complexity is likely to be exposed by one of the many people involved. Thom Tran, a stand-up comedian and former noncommissioned officer (NCO) in the U.S. Army, jokes about the notion that military personnel would be capable of keeping a large-scale secret such as the existence of aliens.
“My problem with the X-Files show is the alleged military involvement in alien cover-ups. There’s always a black-ops team hiding or killing aliens,” Tran said. “You want me to believe that there’s a group of soldiers that knows there are aliens and didn’t tell anyone? We couldn’t keep the Seal who shot Bin Laden from opening his mouth and you think a bunch of privates know there are aliens and kept it a secret? As an NCO I couldn’t keep my Joes from telling their stripper girlfriends the grid coordinates of our next op and you want me to believe they can keep their mouths shut about aliens?”
In an attempt to overcome the absence of physical proof for alien visitation, many believers point to Dr. Steven Greer’s The Disclosure Project, which seeks to “fully disclose the facts about UFOs, extraterrestrial intelligence, and classified advanced energy and propulsion systems.”26 Unfortunately for those who cling to them, these “research projects” are common in pseudoscience and don’t often provide anything more than testimonies and misinterpreted or forged documents. The Bigfoot Disclosure Project, which is dedicated to revealing government knowledge of the “Bigfoot phenomena,” is another prime example of this tactic used to gain legitimacy among people who value scientific findings. That project includes a number of stories and papers that purportedly show a connection between government agencies, citizen witnesses, and Bigfoot.27 Needless to say, none of this data has even been independently verified or published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
The argument becomes particularly murky when those who insist there’s a government cover-up of alien life on earth use the personal opinion of a government official as evidence. They say, “The corrupt government is covering up alien visitation. We can’t trust anything they say!” And then go on to declare that, because a few representatives of that same corrupt government believe (still without presenting solid evidence) in visiting aliens, they must necessarily be real. One common example of this self-contradicting appeal to authority involves Paul Hellyer, a former Canadian minister of defense, who has suggested that aliens visit earth and in fact live on U.S. Air Force property.28 It’s important to note that, when a politician or elected representative endorses alien visitation as Hellyer has, it’s no different to me than when any other citizen does so. It is possible that the move is motivated by a real belief, but the official’s testimony isn’t authoritative merely because the person is or was employed by some government or another. People who work for the government believe in all sorts of crazy things, just as other people do. And in the case of Hellyer, he specifically stated that he came to his conclusions after watching a UFO special on ABC and reading a book about the subject—not because he had discovered top-secret government documents that he could then reveal. Unless the person has hard evidence of alien visitation, which Hellyer and others have failed to present, then I’m simply not interested.
Because of this lack of empirical evidence, the alien visitation myth, like many other similar supernatural or paranormal claims, hinges almost exclusively on personal sightings and anecdotes. In order to bolster their claims, many alien believers will blend appeals to experience and authority, insisting that pilots and high-ranking government officials’ opinions on the matter are somehow more definitive than the scientific consensus. Personally, however, I trust astrophysicists over pilots on the issue of extraterrestrial life. Pilots can only say they saw something that they didn’t recognize. That doesn’t mean it’s an alien life form—it doesn’t even mean anything, really. It could be the result of a visual illusion, a hallucination caused by high altitude, a military craft from the pilot’s own country or another nation, a unique lighting effect, or any number of things. So, until there is physical evidence, I think it’s safe to assume aliens haven’t been flying alongside pilots in our atmosphere at any point. Steve Lundquist, a former pilot and retired U.S. Air Force officer who served for 20 years, has a TS/SCI (Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmentalized Information) clearance and speaks to skeptic groups about how even the most credible expert witnesses can make simple mistakes. He discusses a mission during which he and others flew from Egypt to Saudi Arabia and saw “an aircraft about 45 miles ahead” that “never showed up on the radar at all.” It turns out, however, that what they were seeing was actually the planet Venus.
“So, why would someone who has such an extensive data-set of information and knowledge at his disposal make such a classic mistake? To put it bluntly, it’s because our brains suck!” Lundquist said, adding that the crew realized their mistake and avoided the embarrassment of filling out a surface-to-air fire report. “The cautionary tale here is not that you should throw out all eyewitness reports of everything. Just take it with a grain of salt, and of course question the conclusions that the eyewitness made based on what they saw.”
VISITATION VS. EXISTENCE
For the sake of clarity, I should state again that I simply haven’t seen any compelling evidence for the claim that extraterrestrials have visited Earth. But saying the data isn’t there to suggest aliens come to our planet is not the same as saying that Earth is the only planet that harbors life. While I don’t believe in intelligent aliens, I do accept that it is statistically probable that life exists elsewhere and will accept it is a reality once it is discovered. In other words, while I consider it likely t
hat aliens exist, I see nothing to be gained by believing in them by default based on my or anyone else’s opinion. I need facts.
Our own existence is evidence that life can arise, so life elsewhere is certainly a possibility, but we don’t know enough about our origins to pinpoint any specific details about how common it is in the universe. I personally think—and I’m sure many would agree—that it’s likely that life in some form exists elsewhere, but speculation and estimates regarding probability do not equal proof of aliens. And if we don’t have solid evidence showing the existence of extraterrestrial life forms in general, we certainly can’t prove there are beings that would have the ability and desire to come to Earth. It’s one thing to form an opinion that extraterrestrials probably exist, but it’s quite another to insist without hard evidence that those aliens are not only capable of interstellar travel, but also that they choose to regularly visit a commonplace planet for the purpose of unseen observation … only to then be spotted by thousands of random people.
While it is a person’s right to believe as they see fit, that doesn’t make all beliefs right and it doesn’t change the expectation of evidence for any particular claim. As such, unsupported and unlikely scenarios, including massive, worldwide extraterrestrial cover-ups and ancient astronaut theories, should be classified as nothing more than speculation, imagination, and gullibility, until proven otherwise. In fact, the alien visitation theory in general is entirely based on conjecture and anecdotal tales. Without hard evidence, believers conclude not only that highly advanced extraterrestrials exist, but also that they’ve developed technology that allows them to defy physics and that they have an active interest in observing us. The alien enthusiasts then proceed to suggest that, even though these aliens have technology we can’t comprehend, people see them all the time in our skies. It really makes me wonder, if advanced aliens visit Earth with the goal of hidden observation, then why are their craft so frequently seen with bright, flashing lights?
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