Skepticism Can Keep UFO Believers Honest

A healthy dose of skepticism can be a very good thing. With all the lunatics that course through the fringes of any group, applying critical thinking skills most certainly helps to sift through the nonsense and find the core of an issue. Whether it's those Primitive Baptists in the Kentucky mountains kissing rattlesnakes or those alleging aliens abducted them, skepticism, healthy doubting, is good. Skeptics can help keep someone honest.

One of the chief problems with the UFO-Alien Abduction phenomenon is that Experiencers often make untestable statements. They state their hypothesis in terms that cannot be tested. One cannot form a test for something along the lines of,"I know it's true because I experienced it." A testable hypothesis would come in a form like; "I was at the corner of 5^th and Elm when the UFO was spotted."

This could be a testable statement. With a specific location stated, one could check with authorities to see if radar picked something up in that general location. A time of the sighting would also help in testing someone's allegation. Some of the most difficult claims to test are those that happen in the privacy of one's home. No one is there but you and there is only your word that "something" happened. So, experiencers have to try to state their experiences in terms that can be tested.

Skeptics often dismiss claims of UFOs and allegations of alien abductions. Skeptics often do this out of a set of presuppositions emanating from a worldview that simply has a too rigid paradigm. They dismiss the entire UFO-Alien Abduction phenomenon as they would the existence of God-it just cannot be, therefore your claims are false. Some of the reasons skeptics dismiss this phenomenon are sometimes more ludicrous than the allegations those making the claims of UFO-Alien sightings make. Here are just a few:

If UFOs are real they would have been spotted on Astronomer's equipment - By this logic it would have to be stated that no aircraft at all exists, like a jumbo jet carrying your loved ones from one point to another, because astronomer's equipment do not "see" airplanes either. Their equipment is not designed to see objects flying in the Earth's atmosphere. They do not see planes, jets, weather balloons, or even birds. They see celestial bodies and objects in space. However, to say that astronomers do not see UFOs would be in error.

John Walson, an amateur astronomer, has seen some very strange objects in space. He connected a simple, commercially available camcorder to a commercially available telescope. He has connected all of this to a television set and can watch on TV what his telescope is "seeing" and what his camcorder is recording. He's even had neighbors come over and watch this thing live. He can zoom the telescope in and out from a handheld device while watching deep space and near earth objects. You can see what he's recorded on a documentary called Interstellar by Jose Escamilla.

UFOs aren't real because they are never spotted on radar - UFOs are routinely spotted on radar and there are radar tapes to prove it. One thing I did not know is that the military was not entirely taken by surprise by the Roswell Incident. Previous to the alleged crash at Roswell, Lt. Col. Phillip Corso reported in his book, The Day After Roswell, that military radar had been tracking unknown objects in the Roswell area traveling at speeds no known earth aircraft could fly.

Radar recordings of UFOs are very common. There are more than 490 radar reports of UFOs in a catalogued report. You can access several resources such as The National Investigations of Aerial Phenomena at http://www.nicap.org/. There is also Richard Hall's Volume II, The UFO Evidence: A Thirty-Year Report. For decades during which radar has been in operation on earth, UFOs have been tracked going at unearthly speeds and doing aerial feats no human could survive under present technology.

UFOs are hallucinations that only the weak see - There is no evidence, according to Harvard-trained psychiatrist, John Mack, M.D., that those who witness this phenomenon are mentally ill. In fact, here is a list of those scientists who do not dismiss UFOs as hallucinations: [1]

Robert M. Wood, Doctor of Physics, 43 years at McDonell Douglas Corporation, "The Extraterrestrial Hypothesis Is Not That Bad." - http://www.ufologie.net/htm/woodrm91.htm

William Bramley, "Can the UFO Extraterrestrial Hypothesis and Vallée Hypotheses Be Reconciled?" - http://www.ufologie.net/htm/bramleyw92.htm

Pierre Guérin, astrophysician, "A Scientific Analysis of Four Photographs of a Flying Disk Near Lac Chauvet (France)." - http://www.ufologie.net/htm/guerinchauvet01.htm

Carl Gustav Jung, the world famous Swiss psychologist, thinks that UFOs are real and extraterrestrial. - http://www.ufologie.net/htm/jung58.htm

Physician James McDonald studies the multiple radar visual case of Bentwaters, 1956, and establishes the evidence that UFOs are for real, and that the denial by the military and scientific community is a shame. - http://www.ufologie.net/htm/bentwaters56.htm

Presentation at the House Committee on Science and Astronautics Symposium on Unidentified Flying Objects, 1968, by Stanton T. Friedman. - http://www.ufologie.net/htm/friedman68.htm

Statement at the House Committee on Science and Astronautics Symposium on Unidentified Flying Objects, 1968, by Dr. James McDonald. - http://www.ufologie.net/htm/mcdonald68hci.htm

Presentation at the House Committee on Science and Astronautics Symposium on Unidentified Flying Objects, 1968, by Dr. James A. Harder. - http://www.ufologie.net/htm/harder68.htm

UFOs - An International Scientific Problem, Paper Presented at the Canadian Aeronautics and Space Institute Astronautics Symposium, Montreal, Canada, March 12, 1968, James E. McDonald, The University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona. - http://www.ufologie.net/htm/mcdonaldca.htm

The Case for the Extraterrestrial Origin of Flying Saucers, 1995, by nuclear physicist and UFO researcher Stanton Friedman. - http://www.ufologie.net/htm/friedman1.htm

The UFO Challenge, 1997 position paper by Stanton Friedman. - http://www.ufologie.net/htm/friedman97.htm

Ufology in Canada, Stanton Friedman. - http://www.ufologie.net/htm/friedmancanada.htm

The Library of Congress, Science and Technology Division, concluded, during the Carter Administration, that from two to six, at least, other highly-intelligent, technologically-developed civilizations exist right within our own galaxy." [2]

UFO sightings came about as the result of Science Fiction literature - Ancient Sanskrit writings tell of UFOs as far back as 4,000 B.C.

"Fifty years of researching this ancient works", says scholar Dr. V. Raghavan, retired head of the Sanskrit department of India's prestigious University of Madras, "Convinces me that there are livings beings on other planets, and that they visited earth as far back as 4,000 B.C." He goes on the say, "There is a just a mass of fascinating information about flying machines, even fantastic science fiction weapons, that can be found in translations of the Vedas (scriptures), Indian epics, and other ancient Sanskrit text." [3]

Therefore, the contention that this is nothing more than the invention of modern man simply isn't true.

Another reason that is often cited is that it is impossible to travel at light speed. This was the old battle cry of the so-called scientific skeptic. They were so mired in Einsteinian physics that they never considered the possibility that perhaps there was a new law of physics that would allow for traveling at the speed of light or even exceeding it. And, a new law of physics must exist because man has exceeded the speed of light on at least two occasions.

In a New York Times report, two recent experiments proved that exceeding the speed of light is possible. At the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, N.J, in a transparent chamber filled with specially prepared cesium gas, a pulse of light was pushed through the chamber at speeds up to 300 times the speed of light. The results of this test are being peer reviewed in the science journal, Nature.

Another experiment was completed in Italy in which light speed was measured in increments of 5%-7% faster than the normal speed of light. This experiment was only to measure this remarkable feat in short distances. So what do you think Mr. Einstein?

Do we hear Albert rolling over in his grave?

SOURCES:

I Was Abducted by Aliens But They Threw Me Back; Doug Bower, LuLu Press 2007; page 91-93

http://www.content4reprint.com/recreation-and-leisure/entertainment/interstellar-a-film-about-amateur-astronomy-and-the-search-for-extra-terrestrials.htm

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread300556/pg1

http://www.amazon.com/UFO-Evidence-Thirty-Year-Report/dp/0810838818

http://ufo.whipnet.org/creation/india.4000BC.ufo/index.html

[1] (This list is used by permission of its author-permission letter on file, available upon request)

[2] Jimmy Carter: the UFO President; Doug Bower

[3] http://ufo.whipnet.org/creation/india.4000BC.ufo/index.html