The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [87]
And if the signal did repeat, would you then announce it to the press and the public? You would not. Maybe someone’s hoaxing you. Maybe it’s something you haven’t been smart enough to figure out that’s happening to your detection system. Maybe it’s some previously unrecognized astrophysical source. Instead, you would call scientists at other radio observatories and inform them that at this particular spot in the sky, at this frequency and bandpass and all the rest, you seem to be getting something funny. Could they please see if they can confirm? Only if several independent observers - all of them fully aware of the complexity of Nature and the fallibility of observers - get the same kind of information from the same spot in the sky do you seriously consider that you have detected a genuine signal from alien beings.
There’s a certain discipline involved. We can’t just go off shouting ‘little green men’ every time we detect something we don’t at first understand, because we’re going to look mighty silly - as the Soviet radio astronomers did with CTA-102 - when it turns out to be something else. Special cautions are necessary when the stakes are high. We are not obliged to make up our minds before the evidence is in. It’s permitted not to be sure.
I’m frequently asked, ‘Do you believe there’s extraterrestrial intelligence?’ I give the standard arguments - there are a lot of places out there, the molecules of life are everywhere, I use the word billions, and so on. Then I say it would be astonishing to me if there weren’t extraterrestrial intelligence, but of course there is as yet no compelling evidence for it.
Often, I’m asked next, ‘What do you really think?’
I say, ‘I just told you what I really think.’
‘Yes, but what’s your gut feeling?’
But I try not to think with my gut. If I’m serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble. Really, it’s okay to reserve judgement until the evidence is in.
I would be very happy if flying saucer advocates and alien abduction proponents were right and real evidence of extraterrestrial life were here for us to examine. They do not ask us, though, to believe on faith. They ask us to believe on the strength of their evidence. Surely it is our duty to scrutinize the purported evidence at least as closely and sceptically as radio astronomers do who are searching for alien radio signals.
No anecdotal claim - no matter how sincere, no matter how deeply felt, no matter how exemplary the lives of the attesting citizens - carries much weight on so important a question. As in the older UFO cases, anecdotal accounts are subject to irreducible error. This is not a personal criticism of those who say they’ve been abducted or of those who interrogate them. It is not tantamount to contempt for purported witnesses.* It is not, or should not be, arrogant dismissal of sincere and affecting testimony. It is merely a reluctant response to human fallibility.
[* They cannot be called, simply, witnesses - because whether they witnessed anything (or, at least, anything in the outside world) is often the very point at issue.]
If any powers whatever may be ascribed to the aliens - because their technology is so advanced - then we can account for any discrepancy, inconsistency or implausibility. For instance, one academic UFOlogist suggests that both the aliens and the abduct-ees are rendered invisible during the abduction (although not to each other);