dimensions of the pyramids, especially the great pyramid of Gizeh, so that, for example, the ratio of height to width in certain units is said to be the time between Adam and Jesus in years. In one famous case a pyramidologist was observed filing a protuberance so that the observations and his speculations would be in better accord. The most recent manifestation of interest in pyramids is “pyranridology,” the contention that we and our razor blades feel better and last longer inside pyramids than we and they do inside cubes. Maybe. I find living in cubical dwellings depressing, and for most of our history human beings did not live in such quarters. But the contentions of pyramidology, under appropriately controlled conditions, have never been verified. Again, the burden of proof has not been met.
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 the rest of the cosmos. If elves and goblins and fairies truly exist (there is a lovely Victorian picture book showing photographs of six-inch-high undraped ladies with gossamer wings conversing with Victorian gentlemen), then the world is a more intriguing place than most adults have been led to believe. If we are now being or in historical times have been visited by representatives from advanced and benign extraterrestrial civilizations, perhaps the human predicament is not so dire as it seems; perhaps the extraterrestrials will save us from ourselves. But the fact that these propositions charm or stir us does not guarantee their truth. Their truth depends only on whether the evidence is compelling; and my own, and sometimes reluctant, judgment is that compelling evidence for these and many similar propositions simply does not (at least as yet) exist.
What is more, many of these doctrines, if false, are pernicious. In simplistic popular astrology we judge people by one of twelve character types depending on their month of birth. But if the typing is false, we do an injustice to the people we are typing. We place them in previously collected pigeonholes and do not judge them for themselves, a typing familiar in sexism and racism.
The interest in UFOs and ancient astronauts seems at least partly the result of unfulfilled religious needs. The extraterrestrials are often described as wise, powerful, benign, human in appearance, and sometimes they are attired in long white robes. They are very much like gods and angels, coming from other planets rather than from heaven, using spaceships rather than wings. There is a little pseudoscientific overlay, but the theological antecedents are clear: in many cases the supposed ancient astronauts and UFO occupants are deities, feebly disguised and modernized, but easily recognizable. Indeed, a recent British survey suggests that more people believe in extraterrestrial visitations than in God.
Classical Greece was replete with stories in which the gods came down to Earth and conversed with human beings. The Middle Ages were equally rich in apparitions of saints and Virgins. Gods, saints and Virgins were all recorded repeatedly over centuries by people of the highest apparent reliability. What has happened? Where have all the Virgins gone? What has happened to the Olympian gods? Have these beings simply abandoned us in recent and more skeptical times? Or could these early reports reflect the superstition and credulity and unreliability of witnesses? And this suggests a possible social danger from the proliferation of UFO cultism: if we believe that benign extraterrestrials will solve our problems, we may be tempted to exert less than our full measure of effort to solve them ourselves-as has occurred in millennialist religious movements many times in human history.
All the really interesting UFO cases depend on believing that one or a few witnesses were not bamboozling or bamboozled. Yet the opportunity for deception in eyewitness accounts is breathtaking: (1) When a mock robbery is staged for a law school class, few of the students can agree on the number of intruders, their clothing, weapons or comments, the sequence of events or the time the robbery took. (2) Teachers are presented with two groups of children who have, unknown to them, tested equally well on all examinations. But the teachers are informed that one group is smart and the other dumb. The subsequent grades reflect that initial and erroneous assessment, independent of the performance of the students. Predispositions bias conclusions. (3) Witnesses are shown a motion picture of an automobile accident. They are then asked a series of questions such as “Did the blue car run the stop sign?” A week later, when questioned again, a large proportion of the witnesses claim to have seen a blue car-despite the fact that no remotely blue car is in the film. There seems to be a stage, shortly after an eyewitness event, in which we verbalize what we think we have seen and then forever after lock it into our memories. We are very vulnerable in that stage, and any prevailing beliefs-in Olympian gods or Christian saints or extraterrestrial astronauts, say-can unconsciously influence our eyewitness account.
Those skeptical of many borderline belief systems are not necessarily those afraid of novelty. For example, many of my colleagues and I are deeply interested in the possibility of life, intelligent or otherwise, on other planets. But we must be careful not to foist our wishes and fears upon the cosmos. Instead, in the usual scientific tradition, our objective is to find out what the answers really are, independent of our emotional predispositions. If we are alone, that is a truth worth knowing also. No one would be more delighted than I if intelligent extraterrestrials were visiting our planet. It would make my job enormously easier. Indeed, I have spent more time than I care to think about on the UFO and ancient astronaut questions. And public interest in these matters is, I believe, at least in part, a good thing. But our openness to the dazzling possibilities presented by modern science must be tempered by some hard-nosed skepticism. Many interesting possibilities simply turn out to be wrong. An openness to new possibilities and a willingness to ask hard questions are both required to advance our knowledge. And the asking of tough questions has an ancillary benefit: political and religious life in America, especially in the last decade and a half, has been marked by an excessive public credulity, an unwillingness to ask difficult questions, which has
