UFOs, Chemtrails and Aliens

What Science Says

Indiana University Press 2017 Hb, 459pp,notes, bib, ind, $28.00, ISBN 9780253026927

It’s often said that being a fortean is like being a spectator at a tennis match between manic sceptics and rabid believers. This book is not designed for

Fortean Times readers: it’s a fairly random grab-bag of stuff that has caught the authors’ attention, loosely hung around a UFO theme for dyed-in-thewool sceptics in the US to use as ammunition against true believers. The bibliography contains plenty of sceptical writing and a moderate amount of belief-oriented material, but virtually nothing from the middle ground. There is Philip Klass and James Hatcher Childress, Carl Sagan and Zecharia Sitchin, but no Jenny Randles, Andy Roberts or David Clarke, and no sign of Mark Pilkington’s Mirage Men either.

Having said that, it avoids the worst excesses of sceptic literature. There is limited scoffing, although for the foreword they wheel out Michael Shermer, who can’t help talking about UFOs, UAPs and CRAPs (“Completely Ridiculous Alien Piffle”). Prothero and Callahan have done original analysis on the cases they look into, and many of their conclusions are valid and fairly reasonable. It is more the tone in which they are presented that is unhelpful.

Many of the faults of scepticism remain. Prothero goes out of his way to speak against the stereotype of wacky lab-coated scientists, then goes on to confirm the stereotype of science as a monolithic body of privileged knowledge, both in the cringe-worthy subtitle and in his slightly finger-wagging way of writing. There’s the customary expounding of Carl Sagan’s misleading and unscientific axiom ‘Extraordinary Claims require extraordinary evidence’ and the usual wilful misuse of Occam’s Razor.

We are also lectured on how what they describe as ‘pseudoscience’ tries to give claims unwarranted credibility. These include false appeals to authority, credentials and

expertise, special pleading, and

ad hoc hypotheses. Prothero is a geologist, yet talks about extraterrestrials, spacecraft and psychology. He is also happy to assert that the symptoms Betty Cash suffered in the Cash-Landrum close encounter were probably the result of an infection that came on just as she saw a saucer, and can blithely suggest – without a shred of evidence – that a 1989 triangular UFO seen by many people over Belgium must have been a secret experimental stealth plane, 10 years before the US unveiled the first one. The US may well test experimental aircraft over Area 51, but doing so over Brussels is unlikely. I could continue.

This book does feel somewhat out-of-touch, although not as badly as many sceptic tomes. A chapter about unusual clouds and UFOs treats them as if it’s new rather than part of the repertoire of the more analytical ufologists for over 50 years. This has less to do with current knowledge, I suspect, than that Prothero started teaching a meteorology course just before writing the book. The time spent demonstrating that crop circles are man-made is unnecessary (only a miniscule rump of New Agers now claim otherwise), as is the space devoted to the Roswell autopsy story, which . has been so convincingly dead for over 10 years that even the most obsessive UFO enthusiasts steer clear of it. There is an entertaining chapter on UFOs and religion, but S D Tucker’s

Space Oddities covers the same ground far more engagingly, and I doubt there is anyone alive who doesn’t know the rustless iron pillar in Delhi is actually rusting.

Sceptics are increasingly irrelevant to current science communication. Their head-on, authority-based onslaught is seen as dated and ineffective, more about confirming in-group identity than combatting unreason or converting the undecided. These days far more sophisticated and effective techniques are available for encouraging people to use scientific tools to understand their experiences.