Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions - James Randi [41]
The French and the Scandinavians reported, without too much effect, some UFO matters in the early 1940s, but until a private pilot named Kenneth Arnold came along with an account of seeing a formation of metallic-looking, "saucer-shaped" disks above Mount Rainier, Washington, in 1947, the matter was a mere curiosity, of concern only to a few journalists. The term "flying saucer" was coined, and soon photos, highly embellished reports, and interviews on the subject were in the newspapers and on the radio daily. A total of 122 sightings were reported to the U.S. Air Force in that year alone, and the annual number increased until 1952, The Year of the Great Saucer Flap, when a grand total of 1,501 UFOs were reported.
Understandably, some citizens were disturbed. It was a period of Cold War intrigue, and a nervous populace demanded explanations. The powers-that-be refused to make any comments other than to dismiss the reports as mistakes made by untrained observers. That was not enough for the curious, and when the Air Force announced in 1950 that Project Blue Book was under way to study reports of UFOs officially, there was great anticipation that revelations would follow. But the study's conclusions were not the ones expected.
In 1965, the year the Air Force issued a summary of its findings, we find this breakdown of the 887 sightings documented:
Note that less than 2 percent of the total number of sightings remain unidentified. The believers will point with great pride to this residual number and call it highly significant. But again, a lesson has been missed. In any statistical study there is a point at which "noise level" enters the picture. To use a rough analogy, your home sound system has an inherent noise level—for instance, the natural hiss of the tape player—that is always there no matter what improvements are made to suppress it. Does that mean you cannot have excellent results? Of course not. There are established minimum levels for all such "noise"—whether it be in sound, optics, radiation, or actual numbers—where the information-to-noise ratio is quite sufficient to be able to ignore the smaller amount. In the sound reproduction from a tape, one simply cannot notice the noise if it is low enough; in the flying saucer business, 1.8 percent is a very low residue indeed.
Furthermore, we must not commit the error of assuming that the 1.8 percent labeled "unidentified" are "unidentifiable." It is very possible that about 28 percent of that 1.8 percent will eventually be explained as of astronomical origin, about 24 percent will be shown to have been aircraft, and so on.
Getting into the UFO business is easy enough. A little study of the procedure for attracting the media, and adopting the style of the established UFO "experts," will serve nicely. One must be prepared to accept everything easily without any effort to check the facts, and the resulting wonderful stories will be hyperbolized and expanded by the media automatically. Indeed, bad reporting is almost the only reason belief in UFOs persists. A little research results in books that are less exciting but more factual than the one written by John Godwin about the Mantell case, to be discussed. Since the entire UFO matter has been so well and thoroughly handled by others, I will refer my reader to two books: The World of Flying Saucers by Donald Menzel and Lyle Boyd, and UFOs—Explained by Philip J. Klass. I recommend them both highly.
The NBC-TV network, with its unfailing instinct for public bad taste and its complete abandonment of integrity in two dozen programs entitled "Project UFO," concentrated on several unrelated UFO reports, representing them as related cases we have seen, instrumented and detailed space ships in full color and roaring sound on the basis of "a bright light