Under the title, “This event is not for skeptics”, Rick Rojas of the Los Angeles Times reported on the convention and its audience. As he describes it, many of the attendees reported having “alien abductions”, and some think they are alien-human hybrids. Many of them view aliens as godlike, benign omnipotent protectors who beckon to them in the night using bright lights. Typical of them is 61-year-old Cynthia Crawford, who

sold sculptures of aliens, said there was no reason to fear contact by extraterrestrials. She said she has a spiritual connection to her alien guides who have made medical ailments disappear and once manifested a crisp $20 bill. She told others they should experience the same. “Send the light and the unconditional love, and they will come to you,” she told one young man. “When you start seeing our star family—oh my God—you’ll love it”.Another topic discussed at the convention was human-extraterrestrial hybrids. Crawford, who lives near the Superstition Mountains in Arizona, said that she is one of them. The hybrids, she said, often have high foreheads and thin faces with long, skinny noses. Crawford, however, has a round face framed by thick blond hair. “I think I look human,” she said. She turned her head and widened her eyes. “Do you think I look human?”

As the article reports, the UFO fans were particularly intent on being taken seriously by scientists, aping scientific methods with their own “certified field investigator” program (including a genuine MUFON badge!) that required them to carry recording devices, Geiger counters, and a respirator. Thus, as the “certified investigator” David MacDonald is quoted as saying, “We all want to believe, we all want to believe bad [sic], but you’ve got to look at the evidence. You’ve got to come at this like a scientific researcher.” Just like the Bigfooters and other cryptozoologists that Daniel Loxton and I have been researching, they have a huge chip on their shoulder about scientists not taking them seriously—but have a distorted, superficial idea of how science is really done. According to psychotherapist Barbara Lamb who works with “experiencers” (people claiming alien contact), “We do have what we consider evidence, but the scientific community doesn’t want to consider that as evidence. There’s a kind of booga-booga about ETs and UFOs.” According to author and UFO “researcher” Richard Dolan, “Just below that level of snicker, snicker is fear.”

That may be a comforting thought to the UFO fanatics, blaming our skepticism on fear that they might be right. But the answer is much simpler: to be taken seriously by scientists, they can’t just imitate the scientific method, they must actually follow the scientific method. As Loxton and I point out in our upcoming book on cryptozoology, the prescription for being taken seriously as scientists includes:

1. Stick to testable evidence and scientific hypotheses. If the evidence is against what you want to believe, you must reject your hypothesis, not the evidence. As Richard Feynman said, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”

2. Toss out nearly all the evidence from personal experience and “eyewitnesses“. As Michael Shermer has pointed out in his books, most of the accounts of “alien encounters” are clearly example of tricks of the mind, from normal dreams to waking dreams to hallucinations. And as Elizabeth Loftus has pointed out many times, “eyewitness testimony” is virtually useless in science since human brains are so easily fooled into believing something they didn’t actually see, or enhancing their memories of an event after it is over.

3. Focus on tangible physical evidence that might stand the test of scientific scrutiny. Of course, no such evidence exists, so they fall back on ad hoc rationalizations about why various conspiracies of governments or powerful individuals or scientists have suppressed and destroyed the evidence.

4. If you want to be taken seriously by scientists, subject your best evidence to peer review for publication in reputable journals. However, since they have no solid evidence, they fall back on the usual strategy of creationists, cryptozoologists, and other pseudoscientists: hide from the scientific community and preach to the converted, then blame their situation on scientific persecution—even though they never bother to submit their ideas in the first place.

Of course, I don’t expect them to follow any of this advice, since these belief systems are deeply ingrained and give them a quasi-religious sense of comfort and meaning in their lives. In such circumstances, no amount of evidence or rational explanations for their beliefs will make a difference.

But while we may laugh at the people who would spend big money to attend an entire weekend at a hotel in Irvine listening to other true believers, there is some disconcerting news about the population in general. As Bader et al. (2010) pointed out in their book Paranormal America, the Baylor Religion Survey found that 47% of Americans in the survey said that extraterrestrials absolutely exist (12%) or probably exist (35%). Similar statistics have been obtained by other surveys, showing that belief in UFOs is held by roughly half of the American population. Bader et al. (2010) showed that the paranormal is the norm, since more than half  of the American population holds some sort of paranormal beliefs, whether they be ghosts, psychics, UFOs, Bigfoot, astrology, or whatever. This population has been fed a non-stop diet of UFO support from Spielberg movies to dozens of pseudo-documentaries on formerly scientific TV channels like Discovery Channel and TLC. Meanwhile, how much do they hear or read about the evidence against UFOs? Aside from a handful of books, there is almost no UFO debunking in the movies, TV or other pop culture. Criticizing UFOs is not sexy and doesn’t sell tickets or entice viewers but promoting UFOs has a guaranteed audience. Nor is there much effort to teach critical thinking, or to expose people to the fallacies of arguments, or to the ways in which human “experience” can be false or misleading. In light of the non-stop diet of “woo” fed to the American public and the lack of any counter-programming, it’s surprising that the number isn’t even more balanced toward the “woo” than it already is!

In light of this depressing state of affairs, I think I’ll go to a movie this afternoon as a distraction. Perhaps Cowboys and Aliens….

Her evidence for this bizarre story? It came allegedly a “retired unnamed engineer” from the government contractor EG&G (now part of URS Corporation). No one asked the obvious question about what a retired aerospace engineer would be doing examining bodies, or how he would know they were genetically and surgically altered. In fact, we didn’t even know the structure of DNA until 1953, so there is no way someone could do “genetic engineering” in the 1940s. And if the “teenagers” were genetically engineered by the Soviets using Mengele, they would have to have grown up remarkably fast in the two years from 1945 when Soviets occupied Berlin until 1947, when the Roswell incident took place. In addition, this supposedly all took place over 64 years ago, and this alleged “engineer” would have to be at least in his 30s to have the training and experience to hold such a job. If you do the math, he’s in his 90s or older. Doesn’t that strike anyone as suspicious? Doesn’t that fail the “smell test” of credibility for most people? When Jacobsen was questioned skeptically by interviewer Terry Gross of the radio program Fresh Air on NPR about the problems with the “engineer” story, all she could say is “I don’t think he is lying to me.”

Apparently, no one bothered to look into her credentials, but Jacobsen has a history of “crying wolf” before in order to get publicity. For example, there was the incident in 2004 where she mistook 14 Syrian musicians on a Northwest Airlines flight from Dallas to Los Angeles for terrorists, then she caused hysteria with her 3000-word piece on the web that demonstrate the worst aspects of xenophobia and bigotry and paranoia. The entire piece is about these Middle Eastern men talking in Arabic, with Arabic writing on their clothes, who have odd-shaped packages, and have to go to the bathroom once in a while. From this, her paranoid thinking generated a story that was published without fact-checking, and wasted a lot of taxpayer dollars while the TSA had to check their manifests, and announce that the mysterious “terrorists” were just Syrian musicians on the way to another gig. Shouldn’t that information have made the people interviewing her about her new book  a bit suspicious that she had an overactive imagination and tendency to exaggerate and write about her paranoid fantasies without fact checking?

The entire mainstream media gave it saturation coverage and uncritical repetition of its claims, and even the normally sarcastic Jon Stewart listens to her outrageous assertions without mocking her, and endorses the book. Even sadder is that a book with such bizarre ideas was promoted for its sensationalism, and almost no one gave her a real challenge on the implausibility of the whole story. The New York Times ran a book review which mostly recounted the book’s detailed research into the legitimate military uses of Area 51 (mostly nuclear testing and spy planes), then recited her outrageous claims about the Soviet aliens without much analysis. It’s sad enough that the formerly scientific cable channels like Discovery Channel and TLC (which once meant “The Learning Channel”) now run mostly pseudoscientific garbage documentaries about UFOs, aliens, Bigfoot, Atlantis, psychics, and the paranormal. It no longer surprises me when the major figures of the media, especially Oprah Winfrey, promote woo on their shows. But I looked and looked and found only a few truly skeptical reviews, including one by Dr. Athena Andreadis on her website and also on the Huffington Post (a site that, unfortunately, posts a fair amount of woo itself, especially in religion and medicine). About the only oasis of critical reasoning was the harshly negative reviews on the book’s Amazon.com site, which list a host of factual errors starting in the first chapter.

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. Survey after survey show that a high percentage of Americans believe in the paranormal, including UFOs, aliens, Bigfoot, and psychics. The Baylor Religion Survey found that about 23% of Americans actively read the UFO literature, and 17% believed they had actually seen a UFO. Other polls have claimed that as many as 80% of Americans believe the government is hiding information about UFOs, 64% think that aliens have contacted humans, and 50% think that aliens have abducted humans. II don’t know whether Americans are truly this deluded, but it’s tough to dispute it with the consistency of most polls, or the sales of hundreds of book titles on UFOs and aliens, or the huge web presence of alien conspiracy buffs.

What can be done about it? Do we need better science education, or just basic training in critical thinking? I leave this to you, the readers, to weigh in on your thoughts.

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On Saturday, February 5, 2011, my audio book producer John Wagner and I took a break from endless hours of my reading aloud (with John editing out my countless mistakes) my next book, The Believing Brain, which ironically includes chapters on UFOs, aliens, and conspiracy theories. Ironic because for this break John and I took what we thought would be an uneventful tour of the beautiful new National Museum of Nuclear Science and History in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

This is definitely a museum well worth visiting for a comprehensive tour of all things atomic. It was originally opened in 1969 as the Sandia Atomic Museum, but then changed in 1973 to the National Atomic Museum to include a broader history of the peaceful use of nuclear energy, and finally morphed into the new building that now houses the collection, which includes replicas of the Fat Man and Little Boy bombs (see photograph), along with a B-29, a B-52, an F-105, an A-7, an Atomic Cannon, a Titan II Rocket, a Minuteman Missile, a Jupiter Missile, a Thor Missile, and hundreds more smaller items inside the museum building itself, including these two amusing early uses of atomic energy for “health” purposes:

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1. The Spectro-Chrome Device, “invented around 1911, was used in the practice of Spectro-Chrome therapy. The inventors believed that every element exhibits a certain color. Ninety-seven percent of a human body is made up of four main elements: oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and carbon. The color waves of these elements were thought to be blue, red, green, and yellow respectively. Illness was thought to occur when one or more of these colors became out of balance, either too dim or too brilliant. The Spectro-Chrome Device treated the afflicted part of the body with the proper amount of color and light to restore balance in the body. Once balance occurred, the patient should recover.” The operative word here is “should”.

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2. The Revigator: “This large pottery crock was lined with Radium ore. Instructions on the jar suggest that you fill it every night with water and drink an average of six or more glasses daily. After its discovery by Pierre and Marie Curie in 1898, Radium was considered a ‘cure-all’ until the early 1920s.” The operative word here is “crock”.

We were also quite impressed with the array of nuclear-tipped missiles, including these two (see below), one of which had been in space and survived the reentry. Can you tell which one?

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Then something really weird happened. As John and I were strolling along the exhibits talking about this and that, I wondered out loud if they had any examples of the sand that was turned into glass in the Trinity atomic bomb test explosion on July 16, 1945 at White Sands, New Mexico. Just then the museum docent who had kindly joined us to offer more detailed narratives to accompany the printed plaques, explained that they did, indeed, have a display of said sand-to-glass fusion, and there it was, beautiful in its horrific creation. We chatted it up with the docent for a time, at which point I asked if it is possible to go to White Sands and see the glass in situ. She said, “no, it has all been taken away.” I said, “who took it away, and where is it?” She responded rhetorically: “Right, who took it, where, and why?” I repeated the question and she repeated the rhetorical answer.

“Uh, what are you saying? Someone secreted it away?” “Yes, right, it’s gone and no one knows where,” she explained unhelpfully. “But someone must know,” I pleaded.

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At this point she hinted that there are many government secrets still surrounding nuclear weapons. Of this I am quite certain, since governments do keep secrets in the interests of national security, but she seemed to be speaking of a different sort of secret. I probed for more examples of such secrets. “When you go outside,” she offered, “you will see a B-29 bomber, like the one that dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Look at the serial number on the tail. It says 451748. But if you go inside the cockpit and look behind the pilot seat you will find another serial number for that plane: 451749.”

“Okay, so someone messed up,” I suggested. “After all, the people who spray paint numbers on planes are probably not the engineers who design and build planes for Boeing. So what?”

“Well, I looked into that matter myself when I was restoring the plane,” she continued breathlessly, “and it turns out that plane number 451749 disappeared over the South China Sea in a mysterious explosion in the early 1950s. Supposedly one of the bombs armed itself inside the B-29 and then detonated itself.”

“Is that possible?” I queried, wondering just where this story was going but suspecting it was about to take a dramatic turn into conspiratorial waters.

“Have you ever heard of a bomb arming itself and then detonating itself?” she queried. I had to admit that I hadn’t, but I also signaled to her that I didn’t know much at all about bombs and what they are capable of doing, but then suggested that I could certainly imagine how the same people who spray paint the wrong serial number on the tail of a plane could easily screw up while arming a bomb and cause it to explode. Human error happens not infrequently in operating complex machinery.

“Well, I’ll tell you—that doesn’t happen,” she countered my feeble objections. “That plane was shot down or intentionally destroyed.” Okay, shot down. Intentionally destroyed. By whom, enemy fighter planes or an anti-aircraft missile over enemy territory? “No, it was destroyed by our own government.” Why? “Because the crew saw something.” What? What did they see? “Remember, this was not long after Roswell….”

Okay, here we go, we’re on my turf now! Aliens, UFOs, Roswell, New Mexico. The alien encounter in 1947. The crew, she said, probably had a UFO encounter of some sort, and they were silenced. “Wow, that’s incredible,” I enthused. “How can I look into this further?” At this point my erstwhile conspiratorialist grew quiet, warning me in a voice too fervent by half: “You can try but I wouldn’t get my hopes up. I made some calls myself and finally got a hold of a two-star general, who told me ‘I don’t know what happened and you don’t either.’”

“What did you take that to mean?,” I pushed. “He was telling me that if I didn’t drop my investigation of what really happened to plane number 451749, that Men-In-Black would come pay me a visit,” she explained unhesitatingly and with enough dramatis that I would get the message myself.

So…there it is. That’s all I know from my brief visit and having conducted no further investigations. If anyone reading this knows, or knows someone who knows…or who has a Friend-of-a-Friend who knows someone who knows what happened to B-29 plane number 451749, I would really like to know myself. And if there are any M.I.B. out there planning to come visit me, bring an extra pair of those cool black sunglasses for me.

Deception is one thing, self deception is quite another. This week TED.com has posted my new TED talk, delivered at the last TED conference, in which I present material from my forthcoming book on the neuroscience of belief, tentatively entitled The Believing Brain, a central theme of which is how we are so easily deceived and how we deceive ourselves. Here is a brief summary of the thesis of the talk, although because it is so visual I strongly recommend watching the TED video.

Souls, spirits, ghosts, gods, demons, angels, aliens, intelligent designers, government conspiracists, and all manner of invisible agents with power and intention are believed to haunt our world and control our lives. Why?

The answer has two parts, starting with the concept of patternicity, which I define as the human tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise. The face on Mars, the Virgin Mary on a grilled-cheese sandwich, Satanic messages in rock music. Of course, some patterns are real: finding predictive patterns in changing weather, fruiting trees, migrating prey animals and hungry predators was central to the survival of Paleolithic hominids.

The problem is that we did not evolve a baloney-detection device in our brains to discriminate between true and false patterns. So we make two types of errors: a Type I error, or false positive, is believing a pattern is real when it is not; a Type II error, or false negative, is not believing a pattern is real when it is. If you believe that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is just the wind (a Type I error), you are more likely to survive than if you believe that the rustle in the grass is just the wind when it is a dangerous predator (a Type II error). Since the cost of making a Type I error is less than the cost of making a Type II error, and since there’s no time for careful deliberation between patternicities in the split-second world predator-prey interactions, natural selection would have favored those animals most likely to assume that all patterns are real.

But we do something other animals do not do. As large-brained hominids with a developed cortex and a “theory of mind”—the capacity to be aware of such mental states as desires and intentions in both ourselves and others—we practice what I call agenticity: the tendency to believe that the world is controlled by invisible intentional agents. That is, we often infuse the patterns we find with agency, and believe that these intentional agents control the world, sometimes invisibly from the top down (as opposed to bottom-up causal randomness). Together, patternicity and agenticity form the cognitive basis of shamanism, paganism, animism, polytheism, monotheism, and all modes of Old and New Age spiritualisms.

Agenticity carries us far beyond the spirit world. The Intelligent Designer is said to be an invisible agent who created life from the top down. Aliens are often portrayed as powerful beings coming down from on high to warn us of our impending self-destruction. Conspiracy theories predictably include hidden agents at work behind the scenes, puppet-masters pulling political and economic strings as we dance to the tune of the Bildebergers, the Rothchilds, the Rockefellers or the Illuminati.

There is now substantial evidence from cognitive neuroscience that humans readily find patterns and impart agency to them, well documented in the University of Bristol psychologist Bruce Hood’s new book SuperSense (HarperOne, 2009). Examples: Children believe that the sun can think and follows them around and they often add smiley faces on sketched suns. Adults typically refuse to wear a mass murderer’s sweater, believing that “evil” is a supernatural force that imparts its negative agency to the wearer (and, alternatively, that donning Mr. Rogers’ cardigan will make you a better person). A third of transplant patients believe that the donor’s personality is transplanted with the organ. Genital-shaped foods (bananas, oysters) are often believed to enhance sexual potency. Subjects watching geometric shapes with eyespots interacting on a computer screen infer that they represent agents with moral intentions.

“Many highly educated and intelligent individuals experience a powerful sense that there are patterns, forces, energies, and entities operating in the world,” Hood explains. “More importantly, such experiences are not substantiated by a body of reliable evidence, which is why they are supernatural and unscientific. The inclination or sense that they may be real is our supersense.”

We are natural-born supernaturalists.

First, you’re not going to convince a ghost believer by saying “We have no evidence that ghosts exist, nor is there any plausible hypothesis by which they might exist.” No ghost believer in history has ever heard that, said “Aaahh,” smacked themselves in the forehead, turned over a new leaf, and gone forth with a new perspective on reality. Logically, you have just as much evidence that ghosts don’t exist as they have that ghosts do exist. So it’s a weak argument. Thus, no good can come from starting off by contradicting their belief. The only thing it accomplishes is to establish an antagonistic tone.

Presumably, if they’re comfortable with a belief in ghosts, they’re also comfortable with a belief in other types of supernatural beings. Most people are religious, so this opens up the door of plausibility to angels and demons. Most people have some belief in psychic powers at some level, so this permits the introduction of mind projections, telepathy, and so on.

We always want to look for common ground, rather than for points of conflict. One thing that nearly everyone can agree upon is that none of the above phenomenon have any scientifically established known properties. There is no accepted, established body temperature for demons. There is no firm set of proven behaviors for a ghost. We cannot capture an astrally traveling being, perform a blood test, and prove that it’s an astral traveler. No supernatural being has a single known, accepted, concrete property. Most believers probably have their own general idea of what a ghost might look like and do, but everyone will acknowledge that different witnesses report different experiences.

So when someone expresses their belief that something they saw was a ghost, it’s perfectly reasonable to ask how they were able to rule out other possibilities. If you saw the apparition of your grandfather standing at the foot of your bed, how were you able to identify it as your grandfather’s ghost, rather than a demon trying to trick you? A psychic somewhere putting that vision into your head? Vibrational energy from your grandfather persisting around some of his belongings? A projection from your own subconsciousness? An angel of a yet-to-be-born person, using some image from your mind as a way to manifest itself? We don’t know what properties any of these things might have, thus there’s no way you can logically compare the details of your experience to them to determine what it was you saw. The spirit of your grandfather might be the most emotionally comforting option, but it might be important to find out if a demon is trying to trick you; so the mind should be open to that possibility too.

The more intelligent someone is, the more likely they may be to intellectually realize that there are other possibilities. A person who acknowledges that they do not know the cause of their experience is closer to the truth than a person who insists upon one specific, unsupportable conclusion.

Of course, this same logic applies to those who see something in the sky and identify it as an alien spacecraft. Consider the other possibilities: A vehicle from an unknown population of beings who live at the bottom of the ocean, or a craft from a subterranean race. Those are two possibilities that don’t require the assumption of the problems of interstellar travel having been solved. Perhaps the Earth even has its own race of beings who live in the sky, possessing all kinds of unfathomable aeronautical secrets. What would be the properties of one of their vehicles, and what would be the properties of an extraterrestrial spacecraft? How were you able to match up your observation to one, and to exclude the other? You can’t, since neither has any known properties; and so the only right answer is “I don’t know what it was.”

Notably, at no time have I advocated telling the person that they’re wrong, or that they misinterpreted what they saw, or that they imagined anything. Maybe that’s what happened, but I wouldn’t have any way to know that. I expect that in nearly every honestly reported case, the person did see something, even if was something mundane that for some reason manifested itself in a spectacular way. I find that introducing the suggestion that they were wrong or imagined something simply causes antagonism, and rarely leads to enlightenment.

One need not abandon one’s belief in ghosts or UFOs to take an important step on the journey to critical thinking. If a person can acknowledge, for the first time, that “I don’t know, therefore I know” fails the test of logic, they’ve improved their ability to interpret our world. Imagining what they’ll learn next is an exciting prospect indeed.

I’m a big fan of SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intellience) and I think their search program constitutes the best chance we have of making contact. In fact, on a recent Saturday I was rained out of my normal 4-hour bike ride, so I read SETI scientist Seth Shostak’s new book, Confessions of An Alien Hunter (published by National Geographic), a brilliant and fun read. Seth has a fantastic sense of humor and in his book he presents some of great one-liners to use when dealing with UFOlogists, alien abductees, and the saucerites. For example:

Regarding the time it would take to traverse the vast distances between the stars, which would be millions of years (it will take Voyager II 300,000 years to reach a nearby star), Shostak notes: “That’s a long time to be squirming in a coach seat.”

As for the lack of tangible evidence for UFOs: “Physical evidence — a taillight or knob from an alien craft — is in short supply.”

UFOlogists claim that they have tens of thousands of UFO sightings, as if this is a good thing, but Shostak notes that this actually argues against UFOs being ET, because to date not one of these tens of thousands of sightings has materialized into concrete evidence that UFOs = ETIs. It’s counterintuitive, but more sightings equals less certainty because with so many saucers zipping around we would have captured one by now, and we haven’t.

Shostak notes that crop circles are a very poor means of communication because they represent only a few hundred bits of information, 1,679 bits in the most complex crop circle to date, which is less than a paragraph of text! If ETIs are advanced enough for interstellar space travel, why resort to using wheat fields, which are only ripe a couple of months a year, and then the crop-circle communication is quickly mowed down by angry farmers!

As for alien abductees, Shostak points out that Whitley Strieber’s book, Communion, launched the modern alien abduction movement. And guess what Strieber does for a living? He is a SciFi/fantasy/horror writer! Actually, I knew this already because I met Strieber in the green room at Bill Maher’s ABC show, Politically Incorrect, and Whitley and I were chatting it up over coffee and granola bars in the green room before the show when I asked him what he did when he wasn’t writing about being abducted by aliens. He told me that he writes science fiction, fantasy, and horror novels. The show was over right there in the green room! What else is there to say to a guy who writes this stuff as fiction, then slaps a “nonfiction” label on the book jacket?

At first I wasn’t sure if he was pulling my leg or what. I knew Jim to be a reasonable guy, not given over to the supernatural. Moreover, he was the UFOlogists’ favorite type of witness: A pilot. (Because, as we all know, pilots cannot be mistaken about anything seen in the sky.) But I also knew that Jim could be pretty darn stubborn once an idea got into his head. I realized he was quite serious, and from what he said, a lot of people in the neighborhood were equally serious about it. Well, quite obviously, I had to see it.

So he took me outside into the dark, and what a surreal experience that was. He simply said “Let’s go,” and had the mannerism of every expectation that we’d see the UFO. Like it’s always right there for the taking.

As we walked down the little street in his condo complex, he greeted a couple of neighbors standing by the dumpster. “You’ve got to stand right here,” he said, indicating the area in front of the dumpster where his neighbors, cocktails in hand, were already watching. The line of sight was straight back up the street we’d just come down. About a hundreds yards away the street dead ended into a cross street lined with carports along its far side. Beyond the carports were some trees and other regular neighborhood stuff. Far in the distance was a range of low hills, which I knew from experience, though they were not visible in the darkness. The sky was a little murky, there were very few stars visible, and no moon. The condo complex did have streetlights, but they were relatively dim and did not really affect our visibility much.

Jim and his neighbors described the UFO to me. It would always appear as a little squadron of two or three lights, bigger than stars, but not very bright. They would simply appear out of nowhere at the end of the street, above the trees. They’d hover around for a moment, and then shoot off to the left. The UFOs would appear and do their thing once perhaps every few minutes, and would keep doing it for as long as you wanted to watch. The neighborhood had been in contact with their local newspaper, but nobody had seen an article yet. I also gathered that the UFOs only appeared at night.

The woman neighbor believed someone was trying to tell us all something. Her husband was quite curious about what they were and had been trying all sorts of theories that didn’t pan out, everything from cars driving along the hills in the distance to airplanes to laser projections in the clouds. He liked the laser projection theory best, but even it did not fit the observation very well. Jim didn’t seem to have a theory. He accepted the UFOs calmly. I’m pretty sure he believed they were alien spacecraft and just didn’t want to say so. But whatever his idea was, he seemed satisfied with it, and kept it to himself.

We watched and watched. A few times someone said it didn’t usually take this long.

Soon my enthusiasm waned, and I was ready to head back inside.

And then the damnedest thing happened. Two lights, dull gray or orange, appeared in the sky instantaneously. One was above the other and slightly to the left. They wavered for perhaps five long seconds, just slowly moved side to side ever so slightly, in perfect unison. And then, before I had a chance to study them, they shot to the left, like they were launched from a sling, and were out of sight in probably half a second.

So I stood there with my jaw hanging open, wondering what they hell they could have been. The security guard drove up, paused and hung out his window and chatted with Jim and the neighbors. “Seen our friends again?” They shot the bull, I marveled at what I’d seen.

That night I thought and thought and thought. I had a theory. The next morning I looked outside, and solved the mystery. I discussed it with Jim. And later that night, we confirmed it.

In this narrative I’ve given you, I think, all you need to know to figure out what the UFOs were. You know as much as I did on the night I saw them. What was the theory I came up with?

Pye even had a DNA test done on the skull, which confirmed that it was boringly human (read the complete analysis here):

The sample taken from the Starchild Skull (SCS-1) has mtDNA consistent with Native American haplogroup C, as revealed through two independent extractions performed on fragments of parietal bone.

So I got an email from Mr. Pye after the episode came out, and it was clear that he disagrees with my conclusions, to put it mildly. His email was quite lengthy, and I won’t attempt to reproduce the whole thing. He did make a few valid points,  and a lot of invalid ones. For example, I mentioned that the skull had been found in a cave:

A MINE TUNNEL, NOT A CAVE. WE’VE BEEN CLEAR ABOUT THAT FACT FROM DAY ONE. THERE IS NO EXCUSE FOR THIS MISTAKE BY NOVELLA OR ANYONE ELSE.

Whether you call a tunnel a cave, or a cave a tunnel, is hardly the salient point here, wouldn’t you agree? Is this really what proves the skeptics wrong? Maybe something to discuss over dinner tonight. Or supper.

And, by the way, I’m not Steve Novella. But since I originally misspelled Lloyd’s last name “Pie”, which is indeed a pretty lame error on my part (or on the part of my spellchecker), I’ll excuse this mistake of his.

I also mentioned that the skull is that of a child who was about five years old:

TOTALLY WRONG. THIS IS WHAT WE WERE TOLD BY THE FIRST SPECIALISTS TO ANALYZE IT, SO IT’S WHAT WE REPORTED in 1999. BUT NOT LONG AFTER, FOLLOWING MORE THOROUGH INVESTIGATION BY MORE KNOWLEGEABLE EXPERTS, WE FOUND THERE WAS NO WAY TO DETERMINE ITS AGE AT DEATH, OTHER THAN IT WAS CERTAINLY WELL BEYOND FIVE YEARS OLD.

If you are claiming expertise on skulls, then you should know that it’s quite easy to determine the age of a child from its skull, most obviously by the sutures between the various skull bones. If Pye’s “more knowledgeable experts” were unaware of this, he may need new experts.

TOOTH WEAR, TOOTH ROOT ANALYSIS, AND COMPLETE SUTURING INDICATE THAT THE STARCHILD DIED WELL BEYOND THE AGE OF FIVE.

OK, that’s worth looking at. So I went to Pye’s web site for more information about this. Here’s is what Pye’s expert, a Dr. Ted Robinson, has to say on that matter:

Dr David Hodges, a radiologist, stated that the suture lines were open and growing at the time of death. Dr. David Sweet was of the opinion that the skull was that of a 5-6 year old, based upon the dentition in the right maxillary fragment. Though some specialists who looked at the skull disagreed, I have always supported Dr. Sweet in his belief that this was the skull of a 5-6 year old child.

To me, this does not seem to support Pye’s statement of the child’s age, but I welcome any correction to my understanding. My personal recommendation to Pye would be to drop this line of argument, since even his own experts disagree with him.

But anyway, the child’s age is not really the issue here. Exactly what disease or abnormality the child may have been afflicted with is not even at issue (Pye and Robinson both point out problems with the hydrocephaly diagnosis: Most experts seem to agree with it, but there are certainly other possibilities). What’s at issue is Pye’s claim that the skull is an alien hybrid.

So I told him great, present the evidence of this you found compelling, and I’ll help you win Randi’s million dollars. Well, first he pointed me again to his DNA analysis

WHICH PROVED IT IS MOST LIKELY A HUMAN-ALIEN HYBRID.

and, again, sorry but I found no such conclusion in the analysis; see the link to it above if you think you can find something in there that I missed. A number of the attempts to get results from the sample were not successful, as is common in DNA analysis, especially with older samples like this skull. Pye said:

THAT SECOND, FAR MORE ACCURATE TEST SHOWED THE STARCHILD HAD A HUMAN MOTHER AND A NON-HUMAN FATHER BECAUSE ITS MITOCHONDRIAL DNA WAS EASILY RECOVERED ON THE FIRST ATTEMPT, INDICATING VERY LITTLE IF ANY DEGRADATION OF THE BONE (WHICH COULD BE EXPECTED WITH BURIAL IN A MINE TUNNEL). MEANWHILE, SIX ATTEMPTS TO RECOVER THE NUCLEAR DNA FAILED. IN 2003 WE COULD NOT PROVE THE FATHER WAS ALIEN, ONLY THAT HE WASN’T A NORMAL HUMAN THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN RECOVERABLE ALONG WITH A PROVEN HUMAN MOTHER.

Actually, this does not indicate that the father was “not a normal human.” What the analysis actually says is:

Single amplifications for fragments containing the diagnostic mutations for Native American haplogroups A, B, C and D[2] did not reveal a known Native American haplogroup, however, the extraction did not amplify consistently. A single amplification of a fragment of the mtDNA first hypervariable segment (HVSI) between np 16210 and np 16328 was sequenced using a cycle sequencing procedure with ABI Big-Dye 3.1 chemistry and analyzed on an ABI automated genetic analyzer. The sequence obtained revealed a transition relative to the Cambridge reference sequence at np16273. This sequence did not match either any personnel with access to the ancient DNA facilities or a sequence obtained from Mr. Pye. Subsequent amplifications of this fragment were not successful and the sequence could not be confirmed. Attempts to amplify fragments of the amelogenin gene located on the X and Y chromosome[3] were uniformly not successful.

“We couldn’t get consistent results from the sample” does not mean “the father was not a normal human”. But Pye has one more tool up his sleeve:

The make-or-break test of the Starchild’s viability is an expansive (3-4 months long) and very expensive ($250,000) DNA test that will reveal most of the Starchild’s genome, more than enough to say where it falls against humans, chimps, gorillas, and soon Neanderthals. I don’t think you or Randi are going to front that money for a test.

Pye is correct that I do not intend to personally finance any future delusional explorations, and he is correct that James Randi does not pay the expenses of everyone who wishes to mount a challenge to win the million dollars. I smelled a common charge by promoters of the paranormal, that it is irresponsible for skeptics to not volunteer to bear the burden of disproving every random implausible claim that comes in over the transom. I blew my nose this morning, and the product that came out is alien in origin. You should pay $250,000 to have it analyzed. If you don’t, you’re not a good skeptic.

But anyway, Pye’s “Starchild” project gave Skeptoid material for part of a week, and in thanks I’ll let Pye express what he really wanted to say. These are a couple more paragraphs from his email to me:

OVER THE COURSE OF THIS CAMPAIGN I HAVE BEEN AMAZED BY THE INCREDIBLE FEAR STRUCK INTO THE HEARTS OF ALL KINDS OF SCIENTIFIC RESEARCHERS BY THE PEER PRESSURE OF COLLEAGUES, AND OF COMING UNDER THE SCRUTINY OF “DEFENDERS OF THE FAITH” LIKE YOU. YOU AND YOUR “SKEPTIC” ILK ARE NO DIFFERENT IN YOUR OWN WAY THAN THE INQUISITORS OF BYGONE RELIGION. THE GARBAGE YOU ALL SPEW KEEPS REAL SCIENCE FROM MOVING FORWARD IN ANYTHING BUT TINY STEPS THAT EVERYONE CAN TOLERATE AT THE SAME TIME. UNFAIR AND RELENTLESS CRITICISM OF NOVEL, AGGRESSIVE RESEARCH KEEPS EVERYONE LOOKING DOWN AT THE GROUND, ONLY MAKING SURE THE NEXT STEP FORWARD IS SAFE AND SECURE, INSTEAD OF LIFTING EYES TO THE FAR HORIZON TO SEE WHAT MIGHT BE ACHIEVED WITH A SINGLE BOLD STRIDE FORWARD.

I DO UNDERSTAND HOW THIS WORKS. YOU AND I ARE ON DIFFERENT TEAMS, IN A WAY, TEAMS LOCKED IN A STRUGGLE TO HAVE OUR VIEWS PREVAIL. WE BOTH WANT TO “WIN,” AS IT WERE, TO HAVE OUR VIEWS BE THE ONES THAT OTHER PEOPLE BELIEVE ALONG WITH US. THERE IS NO WAY YOU CAN GIVE CREDENCE TO THE THINGS I SAY, NOR CAN I ALLOW YOU TO PUT OUT SUCH TRIPE ABOUT ME AND MY WORK WITHOUT AT LEAST ATTEMPTING TO SET THE RECORD STRAIGHT. YOU HANDLE IT YOUR WAY, I’LL HANDLE IT MINE.

LET ME CONCLUDE BY POINTING OUT ANOTHER EGREGIOUS ERROR IN YOUR DISCUSSION OF THE FAMOUS “CONEHEAD” SKULLS OF PERU. HUNDREDS OF THEM ARE HELD IN VARIOUS MUSEUMS IN PERU AND AROUND THE WORLD, AND YET YOUR SIMPLISTIC ANSWER IS THAT EVERY ONE OF THEM CAN BE EXPLAINED BY THE COMMON PRACTICE OF HEADBINDING. YOU UTTERLY FAIL TO MENTION THAT THESE UNIQUE SKULLS HAVE BRAIN CAPACITIES THAT ARE ON AVERAGE TWICE AS LARGE AS NORMAL HUMAN BEINGS (HUMANS AVERAGE 1400 CC WHILE CONEHEADS AVERAGE BETWEEN 2800 AND 3000 CC). THUS, YOU LEAVE OUT THE MOST CRITICAL DIFFERENCE BECAUSE THE ACT OF HEADBINDING DOES NOT, AND NEVER CAN, EXPAND BRAIN CAPACITY OF HUMANS, CERTAINLY NOT MORE THAN DOUBLE SUCH CAPACITY. IN SHORT, YOU TOTALLY IGNORE THE KEY DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THEM AND HUMANS, MAKING IT SEEM LIKE ANYONE IS STUPID FOR SUGGESTING THE CONEHEADS MIGHT IN ANY WAY BE UNUSUAL.

THEY DEFINITELY ARE UNUSUAL, AND I HAVE BEEN SAYING FOR TEN YEARS THAT THEY COULD PROVE TO BE AS UNIQUE AS THE STARCHILD SKULL. YET IN THOSE TEN YEARS I AM UNAWARE OF A SINGLE CERTIFIED SCIENTIST OF ANY STRIPE HAVING THE NERVE TO BUCK THE ESTABLISHMENT AND CALL FOR THE GENETIC ANALYSIS OF A CONEHEAD SKULL. THIS, IN MY OPINION, IS ANOTHER IN THE LONG LINE OF TRAVESTIES PERPETRATED BY THE COWARDLY GROUP YOU SUPPORT AND KEEP IN LINE.

IF YOU TRULY WERE A SKEPTIC, YOU’D QUESTION WHY A DNA ANALYSIS OF THE CONEHEADS HASN’T BEEN ATTEMPTED, OR IF IT HAS, WHAT WERE THE RESULTS? I SUSPECT THAT’S AN ANSWER YOU WANT TO AVOID EVERY BIT AS MUCH AS YOU WANT TO AVOID WHAT THE STARCHILD SKULL MIGHT BE.

My Kleenex is still sitting there; WHY HAS NO DNA ANALYSIS BEEN ATTEMPTED??? It’s a conspiracy against science!

Okay, so a cheap Halloween mask is no substitute for the real thing, but given the quality of the evidence presented by UFOlogists and alien abductees — blurry videos, grainy photographs, and stories about things that go bump in the night — proof of close encounters of the third kind remain masked in our collective psyches. So, until contact is actually made, we are left with speculation on what aliens would actually look like.

My explanation — that the chances of an ET turning out to be a bipedal primate are close to zero — is not one shared by all scientists. None other than Richard Dawkins wrote to Josh Timonen, the videographer who filmed and produced this piece (as well as the spoon-bending video we presented last week and the others still to come):

I would agree with him in betting against aliens being bipedal primates and I think the point is worth making, but I think he greatly overestimates the odds against. Simon Conway-Morris, whose authority is not to be dismissed, thinks it positively likely that aliens would be, in effect, bipedal primates. Ed Wilson gave at least some time to the speculation that, if it had not been for the end-cretaceous catastrophe, dinosaurs might have produced something like the attached.

Richard then presented this page from Wilson’s and Lumsden’s book Prometheus Fire, based on the paleontologist Dale Russell’s evolutionary projection of how a bipedal dinosaur might have evolved into something like us had the dinosaurs not gone extinct.

I then wrote back to Richard:

It seems to me that if something like a bipedal primate (or the equivalent thereof) has a certain inevitability to it because of how evolution unfolds, then it would have happened more than once here. In his book Nonzero, Robert Wright argues that our existence precludes other terrestrial intelligences of our level from arising, but Neanderthals were as close as one can get to a counterfactual experiment, and they had half a million years to themselves in Europe without our interference, and showed no signs of cultural progress whatsoever in that time (tool kits stayed the same, no symbolic art, etc.). So that seems to me a bit of data against that argument.

Richard then responded thusly:

But you are leaping from one extreme to the other. In the film vignette, you implied a quite staggering rarity, so rare that you don’t expect two android life forms in the entire universe. Now you are talking about “a certain inevitability”, and pointing out, correctly, that a certain inevitability would predict that androids should have evolved more than once on Earth! So yes, we can say that androids are fairly improbable, but not necessarily all that improbable! Anything approaching “a certain inevitability” would mean millions or even billions of android life forms in the universe, simply because the number of available planets is so huge. Now, my guess is intermediate between your two extremes. I agree with you that androids are rare, that is indeed suggested by the fact that they have only evolved once on Earth. I agree with you that science fiction, and the alien abduction subculture, have an unseemly eagerness to imagine androids, which you are right to denigrate. But I suspect that androids are not so very rare as to justify the statistical superlatives that you permitted yourself in the vignette. I have discussed such matters in the last chapter of The Ancestor’s Tale. I think Conway-Morris goes too far in one direction, and you go too far in the other.

A point well made, as Richard Dawkins’ points always are, so I would be curious to know what you think. Give us your thoughts on the probabilities of an extraterrestrial intelligence being anything like us in body, shape, form, as well as psychology, communication, technology, etc. It’s a legitimate scientific debate. Tell us what you think.

I’m certainly not the first, or even the most articulate, to challenge his mission of promoting belief in alien visitation. Writing about Roswell last year, I referred to him as an obsessed UFO wacko, but he’s been called worse by others. Anyway he called me petty, ignorant, cavalier, lazy, biased, and an anti-UFO fanatic, so I guess we’re…even?

In his piece titled “Brian Dunning Running for Top UFO Debunker” this week, he called me “a skilled liar…. He deserves “Debunker of the Year” award.” (Why are conspiracy and paranormal web sites ALWAYS white text on a black background? I guess they don’t want them to be easily read by people whose eyes are older than 40 years.) Like Friedman, I do have a mission, but UFOs are hardly an interest of mine. Debunking, as I often say, has little value when done for its own sake. Frankly I don’t much care if someone prefers to think that every light in the sky is an alien spaceship. Debunking is only important, and valuable, when a belief is harmful or stands in the way of real scientific, technological, or humanitarian progress.

Believing that UFOs are aliens is not a particularly harmful belief. Indeed, it may even stimulate interest in aerospace development. But it can be part of a pattern of inability to distinguish useful evidence from poor evidence, and when that spreads to other aspects of believers’ lives, harm can be widespread as they start making important decisions based on bad information.

Everyone lies somewhere along the spectrum of what quality of evidence they’ll accept. Friedman and I seem to be pretty far apart on that spectrum. If I think he is too quick to accept ambiguous or anecdotal evidence as indisputable proof of something as extraordinary as alien visitation, I’ll admit I’m probably extraordinarily hard to be moved from the null hypothesis.

Interestingly, both ends of the spectrum accuse each other of similar irrationality. True believers accuse skeptics of ignoring evidence. Skeptics accuse true believers of believing anything they hear. If I have to be in one crazy end of the spectrum or another, I’ll happily stay in the “null hypothesis” camp. I’m open to any evidence you want to present, but if it’s ambiguous, explainable by known or natural phenomena, anecdotal or otherwise of poor quality, don’t expect me to adopt your beliefs. Even if you have lots of such evidence, mountains of such evidence: As I often say, you can stack cowpies as high as you want, they won’t turn into a bar of gold. Good evidence is composed of good evidence, not lots of bad evidence.

If the evidence is good, I’m easy to convince. Over the decades, I’ve absolutely changed my mind and accepted phenomena that I was certain were baloney. I didn’t believe in diamagnetism until I saw water suspended in a magnetic field at the Lawrence Berkeley labs. I didn’t believe the Judica-Cordiglia brothers could have made some of the space recordings they claimed until I learned about the controls that were in place during their recordings, and learned of some plausible explanations for the recordings. I spent 10 years fighting time dilation, claiming that there was no such thing, simply because I didn’t understand it, until I was finally illuminated. I’m not even ashamed to admit that NORAD’s Santa Claus radar reports had me reconsidering into my early teens.

But so far, I haven’t heard anything from Stan Friedman or any other true believer to encourage me to reconsider the null hypothesis on the Betty and Barney Hill story, or any other alien visitation claim. When something is real, it has properties that can be measured and detected. Even today, we can prove that the 1876 Battle of Little Big Horn took place, because we have the testable archeological proof; there is no reliance on anecdotal stories or hypnotic regression needed. I still await the first such testable shred of evidence of any alien visitation.