Broca's Brain - Carl Sagan [31]
The Bermuda Triangle “mystery” has to do with unexplained disappearances of ships and airplanes in a vast region of the ocean around Bermuda. The most reasonable explanation for these disappearances (when they actually occur; many of the alleged disappearances turn out simply never to have happened) is that the vessels sank. I once objected on a television program that it seemed strange for ships and airplanes to disappear mysteriously but never trains; to which the host, Dick Cavett, replied, “I can see you’ve never waited for the Long Island Railroad.” As with the ancient-astronaut enthusiasts, the Bermuda Triangle advocates use sloppy scholarship and rhetorical questions. But they have not provided compelling evidence. They have not met the burden of proof.
Flying saucers, or UFOs, are well known to almost everyone. But seeing a strange light in the sky does not mean that we are being visited by beings from the planet Venus or a distant galaxy named Spectra. It might, for example, be an automobile headlight reflected off a high-altitude cloud, or a flight of luminescent insects, or an unconventional aircraft, or a conventional aircraft with unconventional lighting patterns, such as a high-intensity searchlight used for meteorological observations. There are also a number of cases—closer encounters with some highish index numeral—where one or two people claim to have been taken aboard an alien spaceship, prodded and probed with unconventional medical instruments, and released. But in these cases we have only the unsubstantiated testimony, no matter how heartfelt and seemingly sincere, of one or two people. To the best of my knowledge there are no instances out of the hundreds of thousands of UFO reports filed since 1947—not a single one—in which many people independently and reliably report a close encounter with what is clearly an alien spacecraft.
Not only is there an absence of good anecdotal evidence; there is no physical evidence either. Our laboratories are very sophisticated. A product of alien manufacture might readily be identified as such. Yet no one has ever turned up even a small fragment of an alien spacecraft that has passed any such physical test—much less the logbook of the starship captain. It is for these reasons that in 1977 NASA declined an invitation from the Executive Office of the President to undertake a serious investigation of UFO reports. When hoaxes and mere anecdotes are excluded, there seems to be nothing left to study.
Once I spied a bright, “hovering” UFO, and pointing it out to some friends in a restaurant, soon found myself in the midst of a throng of patrons, waitresses, cooks and proprietors milling about on the sidewalk, pointing up into the sky with fingers and forks, and making gasps of astonishment. People were somewhere between delighted and awestruck. But when I returned with a pair of binoculars which clearly showed the UFO to be an unconventional aircraft (a NASA weather airplane, as it later turned out), there was uniform disappointment. Some felt embarrassed at the public exposure of their credulity. Others were simply disappointed at the evaporation of a good story, something out of the ordinary—a visitor from another world.
In many such cases we are not unbiased observers. We have an emotional stake in the outcome—perhaps merely because the borderline belief system, if true, makes the world a more interesting place; but perhaps because there is something there that strikes more deeply into the human psyche. If astral projection actually occurs, then it is possible for some thinking and perceiving part of me to leave my body and effortlessly travel to other places—an exhilarating prospect. If spiritualism is real, then my soul will survive the death of my body—possibly a comforting thought. If there is extrasensory perception, then many of us possess latent talents that need only be tapped to make us more powerful than we are. If astrology is right, then our personalities and destinies are intimately tied to