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Today I want to talk about an article from 2010. Why? Because it shows that not a thing has changed in the claims made by alien visitation advocates. (For that matter, in any brand of woo or snake oil promotion.) Their process is to refuse to do the work that leads to new explanations, and this article is a great illustration of that.
The article is here and it’s by lifelong UFOlogist Leslie Kean, and she’s talking about her book UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record. The book pretends to be revelations from top government officials who have discovered that aliens are real and the government knows all about them; in fact it’s just more familiar old UFO stories told by a number of her UFOlogist colleagues — some of whom were veterans, thus supposedly justifying the book’s pretentious title. She relies heavily on the old “pilots are unlikely to be mistaken” trope, which is a smart ploy, as the general public tends to find it extremely persuasive. To my knowledge, all of the cases in her book have long since been explained — and no aliens turned up and her pilot friends were wrong.
Aviation historian James Oberg had savagely (and rightly) criticized her book, and this article was her response to his criticism. He pointed out the flaws in “pilots are unlikely to be mistaken” and even cited research done by J. Allen Hynek who found that pilots are actually more likely to be mistaken about things in the sky than non-pilots:
Hynek found that the best class of witnesses had a 50 percent misperception rate, but that pilots had a much higher rate: 88 percent for military pilots, 89 percent for commercial pilots, the worst of all categories listed. Pilots could be counted on for an accurate identification of familiar objects — such as aircraft and ground structures — but Hynek said "it should come as no surprise that the majority of pilot misidentifications were of astronomical objects."
And Hynek was certainly not one to side with the skeptics.
Kean opened her article with what she probably intended as an attack on Oberg by revealing his well-known public background:
…He is a founding fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI, formerly CSICOP), a group whose aim is to debunk UFOs and any other unexplained phenomena that challenge our familiar ways of thinking.
And of course she was hilariously wrong in her description of CSI’s purpose and at the goal of scientific skepticism. The old “aim is to debunk” charge is commonly used by those whose own flimsy claims fall apart under any scrutiny, as Kean’s always have. The purpose of skepticism, which is really just the scientific method, is to improve our knowledge. When someone sees a UFO and they insist on believing it to be a visiting alien, they are not doing science and not learning anything new. The scientist (or the skeptic) would continue the investigation, continue looking for possible explanations and testing them to see if they match the evidence. When I heard about famous haunted house stories when I was a kid, I didn’t know that there’s a process I could have followed to learn more and find out what was actually going on; I simply stopped at the popular “It was a ghost” explanation. That’s what Kean and most other UFOlogists do as well; they simply stop looking for explanations and stick with the conjecture they like. They don’t take the next step, they don’t do the work, and thus their knowledge never improves.
The old “skeptics refuse to accept ideas that challenge their worldview” idea is an old joke, it is so comically wrong. Most working scientists will never make a major discovery. But if they could, it would make their entire career. Nobel Prizes are won by researchers who look at new ideas that challenged what we thought we knew before. Kean’s criticism is exactly backwards; finding new ideas that can withstand scrutiny is exactly what all working researchers do. It’s why they’re paid. In Kean’s mind, where nobody dare challenge The Dogma, grantors and scientists hope to learn nothing. It’s such a childish idea, and yet it continues to be one of the foundational pillars of science denialists.
You fail to take into account the immense "unusual craft recognition" that Pilots receive. It's a number of hours with lots of zeros. Of course there's no other number before those zeros.
‘Unexplained’ Cases—Only If You Ignore All Explanations
by Robert Sheaffer
(Reprinted from The Skeptical Inquirer, March/April, 2011. Revisions made January 16, 2017.)
https://www.debunker.com/texts/kean.htm