a funny thing happened on the way to the library

The favorite theme of the skeptic is, unsurprisingly, “evidence”. Many who like to consider themselves critical thinkers digging around the anomalous like to sniff for “the evidence” for this or that ostensibly extraordinary claim—be it a UFO sighting or your run-of-the-mill paranormality. When they think “the evidence” doesn’t turn up, skepticism is confirmed in its convictions that it’s all normal, Bob. Nothing to worry about. See? Now go back to bed and rest easy…

Well, it’s not so easy, and we have to rouse ourselves from our dogmatic slumber, as Kant was by his reading of the empiricist David Hume, having unwittingly fallen asleep to certain assumptions or requirements that keep the epistemological game up and running—and keep it real. And what’s the real issue here, with “evidence”? What evidence and for what do we need it?

Let’s get right down to the point. So I was on my way to the library one day, to get some books on an assortment of topics that must occupy my mind as I work carefully and philosophically on the issues one must face in the study of the UFO phenomenon, when I was, to put it simply, harassed—threatened even. It was a frightening encounter that reminded me of the sorry sociocultural and economic state of affairs that has taken root in the US (the guy harassing and threatening me was clearly deranged, possibly suffering any number of mental-health crises, and most likely socioeconomically distressed—maybe even homeless).

Curiously, I think you automatically believe me when I recount this story to you; at least I hope you do. But could I supply you with “evidence” of or for what occurred? Maybe. There might have been videos in the subway car; but as I didn’t react at all to the guy (I ignored him using my earphones as convenient alibi), what would they have shown but me standing there, ignoring someone who might have been shouting and menacing in my general direction (a soundless video is only suggestive). There may be some who were present in the car with me who would be willing to corroborate my testimony (a mildly frightened woman was clutching her belongings as she stared, bemused, at the seething contortion of a man ostensibly aiming his anger my way). But by and large you simply have to take my word for it that something rather (mildly) anomalous happened to me. And since I was cut off from the world by my earphones (turned up to surround me with the comforting sounds of obscure 18th-century composers’ music—a “bassoon” cantata by Graupner, if you know him), for all I know my frightening impressions could have been totally misguided: I may have been wrong about the events I would subsequently go on to recount as my brush with the ugliness which is the LA subway experience in a city—one among so many—dying under the crushing weight of American sociopolitical collapse.

In many cases of UFO encounters, all we have is (human) witness testimony. But the fact is that for the vast majority of all our experiences, for the vast majority of what we say we encounter in daily life—all we have is our own personal witness testimony, possibly corroborated by someone else (or a few others). So if asked to produce “evidence” that something or other actually happened, we’d doubtless be hard-pressed to come up with it. What then distinguishes my everyday reports of relatively (or putatively) mundane goings on from those of a UFO encounter, or of the experience of paranormality (and let’s throw that in while we’re having a general discussion of the epistemology of evidence)? Let’s see.

So I report that I was harassed and threatened. But what was the actual experience that led me to report this? In other words we must take account of the elementary fact—which is a subtle realization—that even a report that “X happened” is already interpreted. It’s already attributive. It’s already “theory-laden” as the philosopher of science might say (Russell Norwood Hanson was particularly bothered by this fact, long ignored in the epistemology of science at the time he set his mind to thinking critically about the foundations of our sciences in the 1950s and 60s). Right out of the gate I am already trying to make sense of—to interpret—the experiences I have or am having. Indeed the attributive dimension is constitutive of the experience—it cannot be eliminated. What the experience itself is, is partly already constituted by its interpretation. Attribution happens along with the experiences to which we make attributions (we might go a step further into the heady realms of philosophy and argue that there is a kind of dialectic at work, but let us not get too involved too quickly). What “really happened” is something of an evanescence, a kind of myth with which we operate, when in truth the truth is a product of different attributive interpretations negotiating the form of an event. It’s an agreement, almost democratic in nature. It never ends.

Surely though, something “objectively true” happened, you might insist. At some point there is no negotiation—as in when someone is injured or killed. Or when what we like to think of as physical forces and effects are in play (gravity after all is not just attributive; it is factual: you will without assistance fall from an elevated window out of which you might step). That is surely true, but those events are poor indicators of what we are truly interested in, the matter subjectively considered: the attribution of moral or social or any other kind of responsibility. The fact is that the world really has two perspectives that don’t coincide in any unambiguous way: “what happened” may be given in the seemingly neutral terms of events in coordinate space and chronological time, or in biophysiological space (someone stopped living, was injured, and so on), and these accounts might have the virtue of being accounts of events for which general agreement might be possible, based on a certain discernible structure of reality given by natural laws over which we would seem to have no absolute control; but what happened has always happened to someone for whom there is a particular perspective—and every such report of anything whatever is always given from a certain point of view. Science therefore is originally a human act, come whatever we may in the course of our researches discover about nature or ourselves. In this way we must accept that all testimony is equal in principle. Whether it is in point of fact veridical, is something, then, that can only be established as a matter of degree—all testimony is of the same epistemic kind. All testimony is created equal (which doesn’t mean it is of equal veridical merit, of course).

Not the actual UAP I saw...

So I saw a UAP last week. Or so I thought. In fact I thought I saw a few. In one incident, I was enjoying a book on my balcony, when I looked over to the distant hills and suddenly noticed a very bright light hovering over the hill (I live just a half-mile in front of the beautiful Hollywood Hills, not far from Griffith Observatory). Or at least I thought it was hovering; in point of fact my visual acuity is rather poor (especially at night), the conditions surrounding my observations were not exactly ideal, and, to boot, I could not really make out the light very clearly. In any case, it began to flash in an on-off kind of way. What was so striking to me was that not only had I not observed this ever before (at least not in that particular area), but the light was so intense, flashing slowly and at the very top of (or just slightly above) the hill, away from the homes nestled lower on its slopes. But I convinced myself it was just a bright flashlight; probably some kids at the hill. It did feel to me, however, as though the light was flashing intentionally to me; I felt in a way almost stunned. But this, too, I attributed simply to the suddenness of the event, and to my own puzzlement. In other words this is most likely one of the many thousands of “nocturnal lights” sightings that can be attributed to mundane causes. But this is only at this stage attributive, or hypothetical: I do not actually know what it was, so I must go only on supposition, in lieu of more investigation (which in any case would not be possible as the event is long over—unless, intriguingly, it recurs). In another incident I was much more startled, the sight much more arresting: a distinct but relatively small green hovering light that moved up and down in a seemingly controlled fashion. In fact I observed it while it made an initial and fairly rapid ascent (presumably from the ground) to approximately the height of a tall palm tree that seemed to be near this strange moving light (though it was hard to say what was located at what, given the effects of spatial perspective: the light could have been hundreds of feet distant from the palm; and as for the altitude the light reached, it couldn’t have been much but I couldn’t exactly say—although I might have bothered to try to do some elementary trigonometric calculations to estimate it—maybe one or two hundred feet?). The light was clearly under control, as its motions were seemingly deliberate. It hovered for a moment, then, just as suddenly as it has ascended, it descended out of sight. It might have made another appearance or two, with equally sudden (and startling) vertical ascension, but eventually it descended and didn’t come back to altitude. My supposition: probably someone’s toy drone. But again, I don’t actually know.

Let’s be clear: Do you believe me that I experienced these events? Do you believe that these events occurred? Do you believe that they occurred in the manner in which I reported them to have occurred? I cannot supply any proof that they did occur; I can only tell you that they occurred to me. I don’t know exactly what these nocturnal lights were, I can only describe to you what I saw and how they behaved. From there, we go with the most likely explanation in lieu of an actual investigation, and that set of likely explanations is determined—how exactly? Using some prior assignment of probabilities to what we think it has to have been, given quite ordinary experience of ordinary things we have encountered in the past. That is, we are making an inductive inference based on a certain presumed set of prior experiences with a set of phenomena with which we are already, again presumably, familiar. But this Bayesian assignment of priors is only as secure as are the presumptive ordinary experiences upon which it is necessarily based. And once we begin to exit the ordinary, we exit that particular parameter space, and so it inevitably follows that our Bayesian priors are not going to be of much use once we so exit that space. But the absolutely most foundational question here, the one not really being asked by the so-called skeptics or debunkers to the UFO phenomenon (or for that matter to the paranormality that every skeptic or debunker loves to hate) is: how exactly do we know we’ve begun that flight from the usual into the unusual, from the ordinary to the extraordinary, if in interpreting the phenomena we are always basing our Bayesian priors on a set of relatively mundane past experiences? I suppose it depends on the character of the experience itself: of the phenomena one encounters. Surely the exact character of the phenomena of one’s experience matters for assessing the relevance of one’s Bayesian priors. But yet we are teetering on the knife edge of a paradox: what must rule our judgment of the matter? What comes first: the priors, or the phenomena themselves? And what do we say when we factor into this discussion the always-already theory-ladenness of our judgments of fact (which the principle of prior probabilities threatens to secure for us as immovable dogma)? There comes a time, of course (as the sober statistician will no doubt inform us), when we must update those priors, based on new information. But the philosopher (who is hard to find in ufology) is quick to respond: easier said than done, my dear lover of probability theory…

Late one evening sometime in the 1970s, my father was heading to his architecture classes over at Drexel University in Philadelphia when all of a sudden, he says, this glowing object, football-shaped, caught his attention. As it flew through the night sky, he was mesmerized, stunned. But he was late for classes and the mundane soon broke him from his heavenly observations. Regretfully he lost sight of the object, but managed to get to class. Later he found out that, indeed, others had saw something that night: it was all over the local news the next day. A meteor? Nothing definite was confirmed. Who knows? Although we could try to find out more: whether anyone did a follow-up investigation of the event, and so on (I have not myself yet checked into the matter). My father cannot produce evidence that this event happened; but cannot say that he knows what exactly it was that he saw, either. Although he can cite the fact that a new story broke, corroborating his account of something or other that appeared anomalous to some. But it remains a mystery. It remains, that is—at least for him—a UFO.

Sometime also in that marvelous decade, two of my father’s aunts were engaged in their summer weekend ritual, taking a trip down to Atlantic City for a fun getaway sixty or seventy miles southeast of Philadelphia. They liked to drive very late at night to beat the traffic that would otherwise paralyze travel in the mornings and afternoons. During the summers the Atlantic City expressway can in daytime be a slowly moving parking lot for sixty odd miles of confined road. As they pushed the metal on their 70s era car (a Pontiac or something), breaking out of the pitch black of the night was this rapidly moving and intensely glowing object—a light?—that seemed to be headed directly for them. They were utterly terrified, screaming out for their lives. It flew right over their car, silently but forcefully making its way elsewhere into the night. And that was it. It didn’t hover and so they only got a fleeting view of it as it dashed quickly away and out of sight. It’s unknown what “it” was. No evidence could be produced for the incident as actually having occurred. It is just the testimony of two people who say they saw something, and something very strange, very frightening.

In another incident, much later (in 2007 or so), my grandmother (whom I sadly lost suddenly in 2017) was reading to my very young cousin in a small back room on the second floor of the family house in Philadelphia (bought in 1921 for about a thousand hard-earned dollars). On one subsequent evening in 2010, while we were sitting out back in our postage stamp yard, enjoying wine and each other’s company, my grandmother told me that as she read to my little cousin (barely one or two years old at the time) she noticed through the window something very strange out in the sky: she says she saw a craft, hovering there, with a number of brilliant lights surrounding it. A classic UFO form. I asked her to describe it more, and all that she could say was that it was as clear as anything she had ever seen. It was just, of a sudden, there, silently hovering, clearly visible to her and the bemused little child to whom she was reading a bedtime story. I was dumbfounded by the account, especially since my grandmother never talked of such things (being very religious her thoughts were more theological than technological). I can still see her face, her look of deep puzzlement as she told me this incredible tale. Is that what she saw? Well, what did she see? Apparently she told almost no one else (not even my aunt, the little boy’s mom, could recall this story). It was a very curious event which I can no longer inquire about, since my grandma is no longer with us and my cousin was too young to recall it now. It must evaporate into the forever dark reaches of lost personal memory, but I am left convinced she did see something, since she’d have no reason to fabricate or prevaricate. Indeed she seemed to tell the story wholly unprovoked. I will never forget it…

The stories I am recounting are as it were on a journey, ascending the ladder of immediacy, of that kind of clarity and distinctness that renders the experiences, as Descartes put it centuries ago, self-evidently true—true not, of course, in attribution or interpretation (of what the objects or phenomena were) but true in actual objective presentation. True as a phenomenon per se. We may not be able to rule out entirely misperception, but for sightings that witnesses (credible ones) say was (as they often will do) “clear as day” or was “as apparent to me as you are sitting here before me—that clear” they attain the very same evidentiary-epistemic status as the rest of our relatively mundane goings on we report to each other on a daily basis with little to no skeptical recoil. Indeed, by any general standard we cannot categorically rule out misperception or misidentification for more of what we experience each and every moment of the day than we would like to think. Thus with my first tale, we must admit as real phenomena that there was at least a man, in a subway car, contorted enough emotionally, psychologically, physically to be angrily causing something of a commotion that afternoon as I tried to make my way, very simply, over to the library to retrieve my research books. With the many hundreds of credible witnesses describing over and over again in as much detail as is possible for such seemingly incredible sightings and encounters as they have experienced—not only does a clear pattern emerge phenomenologically (a scientifically significant fact in itself), but we also have as little skeptical recourse to fall back on as for anything else we experience (whether supposedly anomalous or not), except those Bayesian priors tutored under circumstances that would seem in these more anomalous instances to challenge, if not wholly supersede those priors. That is, all we would have is hypothetical as opposed to specific skepticism: a skepticism tutored by what we think, a priori, the world must be like (something that is a function of prior experiences and the most likely uncritical and unanalyzed interpretations we have already adopted for them), rather than as the world is presenting itself within one’s experience presently. I hope I have made the epistemological paradox that rears its head (right at the heart of the phenomenon of putative anomalous experience) very painfully clear. If we’re not careful, vigilant and honest about the character of experience itself, we risk getting trapped in the immobility of that wisdom proffered in the Book of Wisdom itself...

The thought that there is “nothing new under the Sun” (it is from Ecclesiastes) is a problem that is of course not confined to Judeo-Christian thought. It is a problem of thought as such: the problem of the recognition of actual difference, of the truly new or different that comes crashing into the supposedly ordinary course of our experience. This problem is always waiting in the wings. And it has to do with assimilation. Thought tends to assimilate what is encountered, it tends to join to what has already been encountered to what is being encountered—thus making the new or different a development or alteration of something already internal to itself. Nothing new. This is the little lie of thinking: We think as if what presents itself to us is only a development of something already given to us, thus obscuring the fact of difference itself. Yet we must acknowledge that, philosophically considered, we cannot take thought to be absolutely different from (and remain so) what presents itself to us in experience which we then are able to think. What is thought is already the operation of the things thought internal to us the thinker, but it is not the essence of what is thought that is presented to us, just its phenomenal manifestation as a something-present. Essence is what is determined only after appropriation, not just assimilation of the thing in thought. To appropriate is to make a thing your own, to possess in terms of mastery. To master is to know how to control, to intervene, and this is what we have come to mean by science: knowledge by appropriation of the thing. True knowledge yields scientific knowledge of how to determine, to govern, to control and create; it is as much craft as it is conceptual.

So let us be clear: a true skeptic is asking for knowledge by appropriation, which is scientific knowledge of the thing, whereas we are left confounded by our knowledge by assimilation which does not easily allow the anomalous qua anomalous to appear to us. The skeptic then is mostly wrong in tripping over or getting hung up on the fact of the manifestation of the phenomenon as such (however supposedly anomalous it is)—which manifestation, in those instances of credible witnesses reporting incredible things, is coequal with every other experience in life: is true as the phenomenon one says it is (an angry man in a subway, a structured craft flying or hovering in place overhead). Rather the work of the true skeptic is the work every ufologist should be engaged in, and which should not appreciably differ in its essential aspects from the work of a true skeptic who wants to know the truth: the work of moving beyond the stage of assimilation to the stage of appropriation, from mere conceptualization to analytical understanding of the nature of the phenomenon in detail. In other words both skeptic and ufologist should not differ that there are the phenomena being credibly reported; and both should agree we don’t know in detail what the phenomena are as we are able to appropriate very little of it. The only difference between skeptic and ufologist is a difference in epistemic range: the one (the ufologist) is willing to grant that there are some phenomena that escape the grip of the familiar (and hence must tutor new Bayesian priors, rather than being tutored by them), that therefore elude the Bayesian priors, whereas the skeptic as such cannot or simply will not make that jump out of the familiar, to countenance a range of possible interpretations that put the phenomenon potentially outside the horizon of purely human-centered or humanly-appropriated (or appropriable) fact. For in truth what no “skeptic” seems prepared to accept is the possibility of a real nonhuman subjectivity gesturing towards their own forms of appropriation, of scientific understanding. Such has already been decided upon: it is not possible and so it cannot therefore exist.

The skeptic, then, is bound by the paradox of the new I have here attempted to foreground, and, if left unanalyzed, will only serve to continue the intellectually debilitating impasse that inhibits the truth growth of human knowledge. For true scientific creativity is a creative act of the mind (as Einstein well knew), leaping to meet the phenomena of experience, but subtle enough to work within the region of the liminal in which our judgment of what there is is forced to act not in determining the phenomena to be what we already have categories available on hand with which to assimilate the unknown to the known (a procedure that we already know is always guaranteed by the very uncritical habits of thought which philosophy seeks to perturb), but is an act of what Kant called reflective judgment in which we are forced to determine new categories not yet in use for what is not yet known. Again, to paraphrase my friend Bryan Sentes’ (of Skunkworks) brilliant realization: we must consider that, in those small percentage of genuine UAP incidents, what we are dealing with is a radically aesthetic object in Kant’s sense, not a purely natural one (in which categories of understanding are readily available to assimilate an object into the realm of the known—indeed we may define the natural in this purely epistemological way, foregrounding our humble position of original ignorance of all things: the natural is what is assimilable by our existing categories of understanding, rendering anything outside of their purview a mere temporary epistemic embarrassment).

I will have much more to say by about the epistemology of skepticism, and the associated but different phenomenon of debunkerism, but let these reflections constitute for now my initial foray into what should be a much more subtle accounting of the nature of evidence, and how it plays into the question of disclosing the reality of the phenomenon. I hope we have seen how we are, as a matter of fact, dealing with two evidentiary registers: the one concerned with the simple establishment that a certain phenomenon or other actually occurred, and the other concerned with an entirely different issue: how the evidence (the reports, testimony, and so on) of an anomaly should actually get interpreted, or how it should be explained and understood. Just even getting the skeptic to admit that there is an actually anomalous phenomenon is hard enough; but then arguing over the interpretation of that admittedly anomalous content (of experience, reports, and so on) is where things begin to quickly fall apart, for we discover that, in fact, for the a priori skeptic, the interpretation comes before the evidence, and in fact the act of looking at the evidence turns into an act to dissolve the anomaly into an ordinary phenomenon, which suggests that, for this skeptic, there really was no real anomaly to begin with.

Hopefully, we now can see that, embedded in this seeming act of due-diligence and critical thinking (another favorite trope of the skeptic and debunker), there is a more profound epistemological paradox that threatens to disable the future progress or growth of knowledge—a threat we have seen played out countless times in the history of science (with the phenomena of meteors striking the earth from outer space, or the theories of plate tectonics and evolutionary biology). I suppose the historical-critical argument that’s on the table now (and many of us are putting this argument flat out on the table) is that, with the UFO phenomenon, we are precisely in this very situation now. We are at the limina, so to speak, of scientific knowledge. If I am right, and there is this paradox lurking here, then there is no strictly rational procedure to get from one side of the liminal boundary to the other. There is just a leap. Not of faith, but of theory and (one ultimately hopes) experiment. But getting to the stage of the theory of the UFO phenomenon requires us to leave behind not only the insidious, uncritical habits of thought preventing our authentic encounter with the new, with difference (and I have argued that this is a perpetual defect of thought as such, and has nothing to do with UFOs or the paranormal per se), but also those accumulative metaphysical dogmas of materialism and spiritualism which keep thought neatly divided along unsustainable disciplinary-conceptual lines. We have, do we not, a great wealth of data and information already present and waiting for theory (and maybe for experiment) to examine; but we have no idea of how to proceed—except perhaps in piecemeal fashion. But what if we return to the foundations of any science, to the simple relations between phenomena as they manifest to us in the experience of the UFO (or even of the so-called paranormal), confirmed in the main whenever they form a definite structure or pattern (and hence indicative of some kind of as-yet unknown laws)? I have proposed, at least as an initial functional-operating strategy, taking the standpoint of a certain positivism. Let us now return to that theme, and see if we can deepen our employment of this doctrine.

What we look for, in the end, is a modicum of that brilliant naivety accomplished on Helgoland by Heisenberg, with his systematic tables displaying the crucial thing: the relations between observables. Let us proceed with a neutral, and a very naïve, frame of mind...