Hey! Tomorrow at 11am Pacific, I’m doing a YouTube Ask Me Anything for “The UFO Movie”, which is coming out on YouTube on Friday. Catch the livestream, or submit a question now and watch the replay later to get my answer!
Today I thought you might like a sense of what my life is like after having produced The UFO Movie. Actually, it’s been this way for quite some time since Skeptoid has been my full-time gig for many years, but the renewed focus on UFOs has drawn a very specific demographic.
The following is a quick Top Ten I’ve compiled of that crap that science writers all get, in this case specific to UFOs. Whenever we publish, we get most of these from our beloved audience:
You get challenged with an old, long-debunked UFO story. Bet you can’t explain that one. Checkmate, skeptics.
I can’t even tell you how often this happens. Of course, a random Internet commenter who doesn’t know me or know what I do would have no way of knowing they’ve brought a knife to a gunfight. They’ll bring up stories they heard last night on HISTORY Channel or Nat Geo as if they’re completely new to me and as unexplainable as the TV show claimed — when I’ve written deeply researched papers on virtually every UFO story ever told.
You’re told you’re cynical, not skeptical.
I’m certainly cynical when it comes to the people who have been promoting UFO mythology, when it’s been shown that they’re knowingly being deceptive. Cynicism is the assumption of dishonest motives; skepticism is the process of requiring a decent standard of evidence before changing our standard theories and models. The two really don’t have much to do with each other. Cynicism is a negative view of people; skepticism is a process for dealing with evidence.
You’re told you don’t have an open mind.
This, of course, is the eternal argument between skeptics and believers. I leave it here: closed mindedness is rigidly clinging to one preferred explanation while rejecting any possible alternatives. (I would argue that insisting any story must be aliens, and cannot possibly be anything else, is closed minded.) Pick a very popular UFO event, like The Phoenix Lights, where the explanation was given the next day and even re-enacted for the TV cameras. It was the UFOlogists, not the skeptics, who refused to accept that new evidence, and who stubbornly insisted on the one they preferred. Rejecting empirical evidence that’s handed to you is not open minded.
It’s time to be skeptical of the skeptics.
I love that this one is always presented as a “gotcha” like it’s super clever and we’ve never heard it before and are left speechless. In fact it’s one that we used to pass around the office and laugh at, but that grew tiresome about 15 years ago.
You’re told that the testimony of military pilots is unimpeachable. You’re not a military pilot, how can you question what they report?
“Pilots are trained observers” is the way this is often presented. If a pilot thinks he saw something with performance characteristics outside of what any Earth aircraft could do, it must be true. In fact the opposite is true. First, ask any flight instructor who works with military pilots what “observation training” is given — as I have, of at least three military flight instructors — and you find the answer is none. None whatsoever. They’re trained to fly their plane and to operate its controls. Even J. Allen Hynek found that pilots (including military pilots) scored the worst at misperception among all the classes of witnesses tested (see his 1978 book The Hynek UFO Report for the full study).
You’re told anyone who has been in the military has honesty and integrity that is unimpeachable. They would never make up these stories.