The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [88]
American police procedure concentrates on evidence and not anecdotes. As the European witch trials remind us, suspects can be intimidated during interrogation; people confess to crimes they never committed; eyewitnesses can be mistaken. This is also the linchpin of much detective fiction. But real, unfabricated evidence - powder burns, fingerprints, DNA samples, footprints, hair under the fingernails of the struggling victim - carry great weight. Criminalists employ something very close to the scientific method, and for the same reasons. So in the world of UFOs and alien abductions, it is fair to ask: where is the evidence - the real, unambiguous physical evidence, the data that would convince a jury that hasn’t already made up its mind?
Some enthusiasts argue that there are ‘thousands’ of cases of ‘disturbed’ soil where UFOs supposedly landed, and why isn’t that good enough? It isn’t good enough because there are ways of disturbing the soil other than by aliens in UFOs - humans with shovels is a possibility that springs readily to mind. One UFOlogist rebukes me for ignoring ‘4,400 physical trace cases from 65 countries’. But not one of these cases, so far as I know, has been analysed with results published in a peer-reviewed journal in physics or chemistry, metallurgy or soil science, showing that the ‘traces’ could not have been generated by people. It’s a modest enough scam compared, say, with the crop circles of Wiltshire.
Likewise, not only can photographs easily be faked, but huge numbers of alleged photographs of UFOs have without a doubt been faked. Some enthusiasts go out night after night into a field looking for bright lights in the sky. When they see one, they flash their flashlights. Sometimes, they say, there’s an answering flash. Well, maybe. But low-altitude aircraft make lights in the sky, and pilots are able, if so inclined, to blink their lights back. None of this constitutes anything approaching serious evidence.
Where is the physical evidence? As in satanic ritual abuse claims (and echoing ‘Devil’s marks’ in the witch trials), the most common physical evidence pointed to are scars and ‘scoop marks’ on the bodies of abductees - who say they have no knowledge of where their scars came from. But this point is key: if the scars are within human capacity to generate, then they cannot be compelling physical evidence of abuse by aliens. Indeed, there are well-known psychiatric disorders in which people scoop, scar, tear, cut and mutilate themselves (or others). And some of us with high pain thresholds and bad memories can injure ourselves accidentally with no recollection of the event.
One of John Mack’s patients claims to have scars all over her body that are wholly baffling to her physicians. What do they look like? Oh, she can’t show them; as in the witch mania, they’re in private places. Mack considers this compelling evidence. Has he seen the scars? Can we have photographs of the scars taken by a sceptical physician? Mack knows, he says, a quadriplegic with scoop marks and considers this a reductio ad absurdum of the sceptical position; how can a quadriplegic scar himself? The argument is a good one only if the quadriplegic is hermetically sealed in a room to which no other human has access. Can we see his scars? Can an independent physician examine him? Another of Mack’s patients says that the aliens have been taking eggs from her since she was sexually mature, and that her reproductive system baffles her gynaecologist. Is it baffling enough to write the case up and submit a research paper to The New England Journal of Medicine”? Apparently it’s not that baffling.
Then we have the fact that one of his subjects made the whole thing up, as reported by Time magazine, and Mack didn’t have a clue. He bought it hook, line and sinker. What are his standards of critical scrutiny? If he allowed himself to be deceived by one subject, how do we know the same wasn’t true of all?
Mack