The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [91]
In none of these stories is there anything strongly suggestive of extraterrestrial origin. There is certainly no retrieval of cunning machinery far beyond current technology. No abductee has filched a page from the captain’s logbook, or an examining instrument, or taken an authentic photograph of the interior of the ship, or come back with detailed and verifiable scientific information not hitherto available on Earth. Why not? These failures must tell us something.
Since the middle of the twentieth century, we’ve been assured by proponents of the extraterrestrial hypothesis that physical evidence - not star maps remembered from years ago, not scars, not disturbed soil, but real alien technology - was in hand. The analysis would be released momentarily. These claims go back to the earliest crashed saucer scam of Newton and GeBauer. Now it’s decades later and we’re still waiting. Where are the articles published in the refereed scientific literature, in the metallurgical and ceramics journals, in publications of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, in Science or Nature?
Such a discovery would be momentous. If there were real artefacts, physicists and chemists would be fighting for the privilege of discovering that there are aliens among us who use, say, unknown alloys, or materials of extraordinary tensile strength or ductility or conductivity. The practical implications of such a finding, never mind the confirmation of an alien invasion, would be immense. Discoveries like this are what scientists live for. Their absence must tell us something.
Keeping an open mind is a virtue - but, as the space engineer James Oberg once said, not so open that your brains fall out. Of course we must be willing to change our minds when warranted by new evidence. But the evidence must be strong. Not all claims to knowledge have equal merit. The standard of evidence in most of the alien abduction cases is roughly what is found in cases of the apparition of the Virgin Mary in medieval Spain.
The pioneering psychoanalyst, Carl Gustav Jung, had much that was sensible to say on issues of this sort. He explicitly argued that UFOs were a kind of projection of the unconscious mind. In a related discussion of regression and what today is called ‘channelling’, he wrote
One can very well... take it simply as a report of psychological facts or a continuous series of communications from the unconscious... They have this in common with dreams; for dreams, too, are statements about the unconscious... The present state of affairs gives us reason enough to wait quietly until more impressive physical phenomena put in an appearance. If, after making allowance for conscious and unconscious falsification, self-deception, prejudice, etc., we should still find something positive behind them, then the exact sciences will surely conquer this field by experiment and verification, as has happened in every other realm of human experience.
Of those who accept such testimony at face value, he remarked
These people are lacking not only in criticism but in the most elementary knowledge of psychology. At bottom they do not want to be taught any better, but merely to go on believing -surely the naivest of presumptions in view of our human failings.
Perhaps some day there will be a UFO or alien abduction case that is well attested, accompanied by compelling physical evidence, and explicable only in terms of extraterrestrial visitation. It’s hard to think of a more important discovery. So far, though, there have been no such cases,