Two Dogmas of Empiricism: Beyond Institutional Skepticism of UFOs

So, it’s been a minute as they say: I’ve finally landed back home after having been abroad for about four months, from Europe to the Middle East, and then back again. I realize that I still owe my readers my concluding review of the SCU’s July online conference, which I will indeed be posting soon, but I thought that, in the interim, I really owe interested readers (and now I think I’ve gained one more, bringing the total to four) something to chew on. So, here is that something…

 About a month or so ago I wrote up a response to this piece that appeared in the ostensibly radical rag, Jacobin. I thought the article (to which I am responding, below) rather well written but poorly reasoned—but not for lack of trying. My estimation of it is that it draws on the well-entrenched institutional prejudices that are still, well, rather entrenched. UFOs (and even UAP) are still a “hard sell”, it would seem, to many academics—that there’s a real something to UFOs, quite despite the Grusch allegations and ensuing media firestorm we found in the wake of those hearings and that Debrief article, and the Coulthart interview (and then the recent Jesse Michaels thing, which I’ll admit to turning off after about 30 or 40 minutes—it just smells of the same old sensationalism and edutainment profiteering that is best avoided like an alien plague; I just can’t stand this crap). But then NASA has finally released its report (about which I am much more enthusiastic than some of the more seasoned ufological commentators out there, like Mr. Randle, chronicler of the real stuff of the Roswell Crash, whose “commentary” on the NASA UAP-IST Report wasn’t really a commentary in any sense that this term is used in the venerable tradition of systematic commentaries you find in standard scholarship going back a few thousand years; but then again, the standards I’m looking for are not yet common for the ufologist…).

 The NASA study—and let’s remember that the panel that was commissioned by NASA to do the study isn’t NASA, but an independent working group whose now-published Report constitutes a strategic recommendation to NASA—is really significant, as it now makes it clear that UAP, UFOs, UAV … whatever the hell you want to call them, ought to be taken seriously, studied seriously, and (by implication) given serious funding to do this (well, at least I hope that this latter point is in fact the implication of this panel’s Final Report). While it turns out that, upon reflection on the history of UFOs and government attention to them, this is actually nothing new (I mean calls for government to take the issue seriously and for NASA to get going doing some or all of the research here, has quite a history), something is new here—and that is the recommendation that this study is in-scope for NASA as an agency charged with an open-ended exploration of, well, the cosmos (not to put the point too melodramatically).

 In any case, hopefully, as some kind of institutionalized system for UAP research gets underway, academia will adjust to the fact that there needs to be serious attention to the issue, and that the scholarly community has a mandate to engage UAP not merely according to the category of its “meaning” for human beings and their societies (surely an important topic), but also according to the much more challenging category of the “being” of UAP: the what, the nature, … the things themselves. Though we do have to tackle this question of “high strangeness” (something that the more philosophical disciplines can help us with), science (not much interested in the uncanny) is particularly good at getting involved with the “being”—or what we should call the “ontology”—of the world. Not, surely, in the more fundamental sense (say, the sense that these terms mean for philosophers in the phenomenological tradition), but in enough of a fundamental sense that we can get the show started. For while science is an entry into the “being” of the world, it by no means closes off the issue. Indeed, we are at a kind of crossroads in science, technology and thought more generally, as innovation seems to wane, research programs cling to funding for funding’s sake and ossify (despite dubious “theories” promulgated as explanatory), and the nagging philosophical questions about completeness, unity and meaning continue to bother the sciences. A forgotten scholar of UFOs, Brenda Denzler, reminded readers way back in 2001 of the significance here of UFOs and the various communities devoted to their study. “If I can be accused of having a personal agenda,” she wrote in her sensitive treatment of UFOs and the UFO movement in the U.S., called Lure of the Edge – Scientific Passions, Religious Beliefs and the Pursuit of UFOs, “it is in wanting the reader to come away with a sense of the conflicting and paradoxical dimensions—and, I feel, the importance—of UFOs and the UFO movement in American society.”

Whatever historians of the far-distant future are able to say about the reality of UFOs in the twentieth century [she continues], I feel sure that they will look upon ufology as one of the more interesting fields of inquiry in our era. Why? Because I believe that Western thought is now at a crossroads, and part of the drama of the crossroads zeitgeist is being played out in the UFO community. (p. xvi)

Denzler goes on to point out the conflicts and paradoxes of science itself, as a product of a particular “Enlightenment” tradition that in fact promises its own form of salvation for humanity—shaded with the irony, as we now well understand in the twenty-first century, that it, too, has a rather dark side, as the smoke of wildfires rises and blots out the afternoon sun for many, or sudden deluges submerge others, daily reminding us of the reality of anthropogenic climate change. What ufology embraces, or has embraced, contains a portion of what science rejects, so ufology stands before the ostensibly “rational” sciences as a kind of dark mirror, ambiguous to be sure, but realer all the same because of it, reflecting back to science something it is frightened to take up as object of inquiry. In many ways ufology has dabbled in the zone of the forbidden, but as we know from Freud, Lacan and even Hegel before them, that forbidden core is already something repressed in the very heart of science itself—something the sciences, for ideological reasons, cannot name, cannot own, cannot accommodate, cannot, finally, integrate. Thus the passage from ufology to a science of UAP, as what is being proposed for NASA, is a road both treacherous and potentially rejuvenating—an opportunity to reconsider the very meaning of “science” in the face of a multi-dimensional phenomenon that exceeds the strict divisions of scholarship in the twenty-first century (and didn’t you laugh as well, or at least chuckle a bit, when NASA paused to emphasize that “multi-dimensional” doesn’t mean multiple dimensions).

So I attempted, futilely as it turns out, to submit a somewhat patient rejoinder to the Jacobin piece I’d read. It was apparently not the kind of thing they’re looking for. Or I am not really the kind of writer they’re looking for (and how can one tell?). So, I thought it might be a good idea to publish a version of it here, before I consider sending it along elsewhere. (Blogs are good—and therefore dangerous—for the impatient.)

I now include the piece I submitted, unaltered, below…

UFOs have recently taken the media – and apparently the government – by storm. Yet, most of what we see in the press, and even in more philosophically perspicacious magazine journals like Jacobin, hovers in the region of an apparently balanced skepticism that offers readers a force field against the fakery of pseudoscience, which the study of or serious concern with UFOs would otherwise suggest. I’d like to intervene here – and approach UFOs from an entirely different standpoint, which I call “transcendental skepticism”. It is, I propose, a better standpoint to adopt than the mainstream skepticism of the typical UFO piece one encounters in the mainstream press, because, quite simply, it thematizes the tacit ideological dimensions of this “skepticism” – found even in these pages.

My point of departure, then, is a recent article that appeared here in the Jacobin, penned by philosopher Ben Burgis. The piece attempts (yet another) critique of the recent, and quite frankly shocking, congressional oversight hearing where a seemingly credible former intelligence official, David Grusch, made apparently incredible claims of government cover-ups allegedly involving: crashed UFO retrievals; recovered “nonhuman biologics” piloting them; and covert UFO “reverse engineering” programs. Wild stuff.

All but missing from Burgus’ article, of course, was the X-Files theme music playing in the background: the usual– and cheap–way to discredit anything UFO that typically accompanies supposedly “rational” responses to the UFO stuff. While Burgis wants to “step back” and take a breather with empiricist philosopher David Hume, I want to step back from Burgis, and other defenders of rationalism, and take a look at the unexamined and institutionally overdetermined “skepticism” (along with some kind of implicit empiricism) that provides a rhetorical cushion for Burgis’ apparently rational critique, and many others like it that have blossomed in the wake of these recent – admittedly astonishing – UFO stories.

First we should get clear on what Burgis gets right in the piece, written in a crisp style that manages to pull out the critical thinking 101 stops to good effect. Beyond the special effects, though, we ask: what of substance is really going on here?

Burgis is correct in pointing out that Grusch’s allegations are accompanied by, as he says, “no public evidence that should make us take” these claims seriously – neither in the original Debrief article that first broke the story, nor in the subsequent congressional hearing that has everyone in a twist. And he is correct in pointing out that all we got in that July hearing was a kind of appeal to (Grusch’s) authority: it’s the “trust me” tactic, Burgis observes, from an insider allegedly privy to the classified information on which the claims testified to are based.

So this is where Burgis’ critique really begins, and quite rightly: in the absence of publicly accessible evidence, all we have are claims by an official of supposed credibility that there is evidence demonstrating a wide array of UFO-related U.S. government dealings. Evidence which the public can’t access. Period.

Where does this leave us? What should our rational response to these allegations really be? That’s the basic question of the article, in the end.

For Burgis, what’s at stake here is precisely trust in our public institutions – something that, it would seem, is already under attack in American political life these days (and has been for some time). As Burgis’ article’s title says: “UFO crashes almost certainly aren’t real. But the government itself is responsible for public distrust”. Presumably, by allowing Grusch, as apparently credible as he is, to air before Congress his wild allegations, with no possible publicly available evidence to back it all up, public trust is thereby eroded. And since “UFO crashes almost certainly aren’t real” this public spectacle is a very, very bad thing. And, surely, “UFO crashes” can’t really be real, right?

We have, then, two issues which the article has to disentangle. On the one hand, there’s the issue of the veracity of the allegations: Grusch tells us (and we have every reason to at least believe this) that he’s supplied the material evidence substantiating his whistleblower claims to various Inspectors General – who presumably are now conducting their own investigations. On the other hand, there is the question of whether Grusch’s credibility as an intelligence official should have any epistemic bearing on our acceptance of his allegations: should we trust this government official and what he’s alleging about government coverups, and what those coverups are all about (i.e., UFOs)? Since none of the evidence which could possibly substantiate Grusch’s allegations is publicly available – it’s all classified, we’ve been told – we can’t possibly evaluate any of the evidence independently. Period. So where does that leaves us?

Logically, this should require agnosticism regarding the veracity of that evidence: since there’s no independent access to it, we can’t evaluate it, so we can’t form a specific judgment about it. Yet, that’s not quite the position Burgis takes. And it’s not the position that he thinks anyone ought to take, rationally speaking. What, however, fills the vacuum of evidence here, and gives us something more to stand on regarding the fact that Grusch’s allegations deal with, well, … UFOs? I mean, anyone can allege anything, and then turn around and say “... yes, but the evidence to substantiate what I’m saying can’t be accessed or released to you”. If we’re talking about angels dancing inside of interdimensional portals in my bedroom, I really don’t have to wait for that “evidence” to be released, because it’s not something that the evidence is really going to bear out. Right?

So what in fact fills the evidential vacuum for Burgic is, of course, the usual skepticism that is always applied, a priori, to every UFO claim. And this is where Burgis – and many others – are wrong. Yes, it’s common and accepted in mainstream discourse to discount UFOs as pseudoscience, quackery, and so on. But as Burgis flies under the banner of rationalism, which cares about truth not dogma, let’s see where the UFO skepticism – which is institutionalized by now – is just more (para-rational) dogma pretending rationalism.

To begin with, Burgis easily conflates UFOs with aliens and alien spacecraft. Insisting on returning to the the term ‘UFO’ as opposed to adopting the term ‘UAP’ as preferred today, Burgis forgets that the terms were switched precisely to avoid the conflation between these unidentified aerial phenomena and the hypothesis that some of them might be nonhuman vehicles. The truth is we just don’t know what UAP are – but, as the government has admitted, and as NASA has supported, given the evidence that has so far been collected, we can’t a priori rule out that hypothesis. And why would we want to? Science isn’t in the business of telling us what must be true (that’s dogmatism); it’s in the business of trying to explain what we don't know or don’t understand. And we don’t really understand what’s going on with some UFOs.

And what about that spaceship hypothesis? Well, aside from generational spaceships – a possibility sometimes invoked in mainstream academic papers examining the so-called Fermi Paradox or the related Drake Equation, a possibility certainly consistent with known science – our actual knowledge of physics doesn’t actually rule out interstellar travel in any way. Burgis, like many others, confuses practical and theoretical possibility, and then compounds the problem by repeating the mistaken view that only faster-than-light travel can pull the trick off. Since relativity, we’re told, rules out faster-than-light travel, aliens just can’t get here.

Here Burgis reproduces a common misunderstanding of relativity that conflates special and general relativity, and so he is unable to consider the general relativistic solution to the problem, and offer this to his readers. Since at least the 1930s, it was realized by Einstein and Rosen that general relativity allows for counterintuitive connections not just “between” remote points in spacetime, but, even more strangely, through spacetime itself. Einstein and his colleague Rosen called this a “bridge”, and it eventually led to the concept we all know as a “wormhole”.  Much later in the 1990s, a surprising solution to the basic equations of general relativity was found by the Mexican theorist Alcubierre that sets up a kind of pressure difference – again in spacetime itself – that can be exploited for travel purposes. Very fast travel. So, despite what Burgis and many others think, it is theoretically possible to employ not special but general relativity to pull off the right spacetime-bending tricks to get around the extreme distances involved in actual interstellar travel. It’s just that finding the right engineering to realize these theoretical possibilities as usable technologies is quite beyond human reach at present. (The irony here is that Carl Sagan himself was the inspiration for the development of the “wormhole” idea: Sagan reached out to his friend, Nobel Laureate Kip Thorne, to see if there was a theoretically plausible mechanism for rapid interstellar travel that he could use for the SETI novel he was writing – Contact. Turns out there is.)

Sufficiently rapid interstellar travel, then, is not ruled out by physics: it’s possible but immensely challenging technologically (there’s even a whole mainstream field in physics devoted to this). What this means, rationally, is that only some UFOs could be nonhuman vehicles since no physics rules it out. However, the real question is whether the evidence for UFOs that we do have, independently of what Grusch claims, really counts towards the hypothesis that some UFOs are nonhuman vehicles. This is where Burgis’ argument is, again, the typical one. It’s a conversational argument based on a convenient observation about what the prior probabilities are supposed to tell us here: that it’s much more likely that UFOs are all mundane than that they are not – that is, on balance (and here David Hume joins the party) the probability of an extraordinary hypothesis being true is much less likely than that an ordinary one is (i.e., that UFOs are all mundane phenomena of one sort or another). In other words, we have the Sagan dictum again: “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” – and we just don’t have that extraordinary evidence, right? Ergo, “UFO crashes almost certainly aren’t real”.

Well, if we don’t have that “extraordinary evidence” then we should obtain it, according to the dictum. But how can we if there is a consistent drumbeat in mainstream media and elsewhere that says “there’s nothing here”? This is another confusion on the part of just about everyone who repeats Sagan’s overused (and little examined) dictum in connection with UFOs: if the science isn’t (or won’t be) done, we’ll have no evidence at all – let alone of the “extraordinary” kind that we supposedly need. If everyone is convinced UFOs are mundane, and no one does the science because of that prior conviction, then in logic we call this situation a tautology. And it’s a trap. In particular it’s a trap that reliance on naive Bayesian arguments about prior probabilities won’t get you out of, and indeed might lead to in the first place. As my friend and colleague, former NASA scientist Kevin Knuth tells me – who is himself trying to break through academic dismissal of UFOs – this situation is exactly the one that we program our learning algorithms to avoid: getting stuck at local optima which we know work well. We have to program the algorithms, he says, to deliberately walk away from these local optima in order to explore the larger possibility space. Otherwise the “learning” algorithm, well, won’t learn anything. Why can’t we scientists do the same, he wonders?

Ironically, what this tautology does – perhaps unbeknownst to Burgis and other rationalist defenders of science against pseudoscience – is to slowly and perhaps subtly erode our trust in the very institution of science which the dictum, and past figures like Carl Sagan, want to protect. If all science does is to stay in the familiar zone of local optima, how will it progress? It has progressed, so presumably it can’t be afraid to explore. Historical consistency bolsters trustworthiness.

So yes, let’s talk about trust for a moment – and responsibility. In particular, who has responsibility for upholding and preserving trust in the institution of science? By failing to distinguish between the myth and the mystery from the factual reality of UFOs (which is far more subtle a problem, needing serious science), Burgis and other rationalists quite ironically perpetuate a mystification that for almost 90 years has hampered attempts to bring science to bear on the subject. It’s this level of persistent ignorance mixed with unexamined beliefs about rationality that really explains why we don’t know much scientifically about UFOs. While Burgis takes Grusch to task for corroding trust in government by passing on supposedly tall tales from the X-files, he and other writers like him fail in their duty to promote trust in the one institution that can help settle the matter: science. If public intellectuals writing enlightened pieces in the Jacobin and elsewhere, cautioning against pseudoscience, conspiracist quackery or delusional thinking, fail to grasp the need for unbiased – and undogmatic – scientific inquiry, aimed at breaking through the myth and mystery to the reality of UFOs, as complicated as that reality is likely to be … then who is the responsible party here?

Maybe Burgis and other writers can’t be faulted. Like many ostensible spokespersons for “reason” who like to hint that UFO research is really “pseudoscience” (one can think of any number of opining journalists in mainstream media of late), Burgis perhaps operates with his own myths or stereotypes or school textbook caricatures of science and “the scientific method” – and with his own History Channel version of something called “ufology”, which is supposed to be the (pseudo)science of these phenomena.

The fact is that Burgis is just typical here – and typically unsubtle. It is true that there’s a lot of what by all accounts is best described as “pseudoscience” connected with the issue of UFOs– mainly it’s the stuff written by amateurish “researchers” who have no real scientific background or credibility. Sure, a lot of this is just plain bunk. But what is usually never distinguished between here are the more serious forensic investigations of past UFO incidents, as opposed to the actual scientific work done by robust research programs actively searching for UAP in the present. And the reason why that distinction isn’t made is, well, because we’ve never been serious about studying UFOs in a systematic way – like with academies of science, science departments at major research universities, NSF grants, and the like backing it all up. In the way that the sciences treat anything they take seriously. Which brings us back to the tautology we noted above: UFOs aren’t taken seriously because nobody studies them seriously in science, but nobody studies them seriously in science because nobody takes UFOs seriously…

Historical UFO incidents were (and continue to be) largely unexpected and fleeting events, happening to a range of individuals but for which we only have reports of inconsistent quality. This raises an obvious but very basic question: can you actually have a science here? I think the answer is an honest no – what you can have here is forensics. And that’s a whole other ballgame that’s got a whole different set of rules. And forensics shouldn’t be conflated with science. What most skeptics or champions of “reason” against UFO enthusiasm fail to see is this obvious distinction: classical Ufology, which the mainstream skeptics love to hate, is forensics – not “science”. Many of the more serious investigators of UFOs even seem to get it wrong, as they do forensics with a mix of science and criminology while thinking it’s unproblematically “scientific”. Just take a look at the farce that was the 1969 University of Colorado “Condon Report”.  Maybe this is what critics here mean when they offer their rejoinder that “oh, yes, the scientific community did look into it, but found there to be no real scientific value to UFO; and so, end of the story”. All that this University of Colorado committee did was to perform a forensic audit of UFO cold cases. They didn’t audit any scientific research program set up to study UFOs. In fact, they recommended against setting that up! So, we’ve ended up in that tautology: with no active, ongoing scientific research on the subject – no research programs, no university support or funding, no nothing – we’re convinced all UFOs are uninteresting for science. And that’s where we’ve been for decades.

What has never been set up with any level of seriousness or significant institutional backing in the history of our dealings with UFOs is what actual scientists in the Galileo Project or over in Germany at Würzburg University are doing right now: building the research infrastructure required to capture the relevant data that can begin to adjudicate on the question of how to explain UFOs, and the much more difficult question of whether any of them count as (to quote J. Allen Hynek, the father of American “ufology”) “truly new empirical observations” – observations that would contribute significantly to the progress of science.

If anyone wanted to read the most recent peer-reviewed publications of these groups, they’d learn that this distinction – between mere historical forensics and active science – is now well-appreciated, and helps the young UAP field solidify and move on. To move on beyond the (no less important) layers of cultural myth and mythologization which complicate scientific research; to move beyond the personal mystery in encountering UFOs which has suggestive but not determinative value in a robust scientific understanding of these puzzling phenomena. (Human beings themselves, after all, are sources of important – and scientific – data. Data which shouldn’t be dismissed just because it’s “subjective”.)

Research on UFOs is only now getting serious, organizationally and academically (though there have been previous serious efforts – just examine the references and discussion in the large recently published study on instrumented observations of UAP by Harvard’s Galileo Project referred above). Like with any field (young or well established), we wait for the work to be done, results to come in, analysis to be performed and conclusions to be drawn, and the community to reproduce and verify. Only at this point we can start to have a rational debate, since we’d be debating not whether George Adamski met with space brethren in flying saucers in trips to the surface of Venus, or whether crashed UFOs could be “real”, but whether that UAP report received by our well-designed and well-funded reporting system found corroborating evidence from that active aerospatial UAP research network that’s up and running (and interfaced with the reporting system); and whether that suggestive matrix of anomalous data was also observed by the four or five other research networks utilizing similar instrumented observation system designs. (Astronomers cooperate in networked systems of research exchange – why not for the study of UAP?)

The point is that there’s lots of perfectly general reasons for paying close attention to the things happening in the sky, and lots of very good reasons for setting up lots of well-funded research projects devoted to this – but especially civilian and nonprofit ones, that is (Edward Condon himself seems to have advocated for keeping government out of these kinds of scientific projects). The UAP part of this larger operation is that which hunts for the rarer event: the anomaly. But in order to know what that is, we have to know just about the whole range of goings on in the sky, not entirely outside of the earth but very much near to it and on it. And we need lots of papers like that (now infamous) draft paper by Galileo Project’s Loeb and AARO’s Kirkpatrick that puts bounds on aerial observations by using the physics we know, so we know where and when anomalies start. And we also need lots of papers and studies doing the forensics on the good, credible historical cases – like the well-known Nimitz encounter detailed by one of the witnesses at the July hearing. Like how medical science uses suggestive but anecdotal cases of strange, potentially new diseases to know where to do the science, these historical cases are useful for showing us the sorts of things we should be designing our suites of instruments and research programs to find, as we process all the information we gather from our well-designed observational and experimental UAP networks.

As these UAP research programs actually come online, we can put to rest this tired notion that UFOs are bunk, and people who study them rationally suspect (or delusional), or whatever cheap shots continue to make the rounds in “rationalist” circles these days. And before we go further we can just get on with the business of building the infrastructure for the real science that needs to get done.

Then we can revisit the stories and allegations to see what’s more myth than reality, and where the mysteries persist for our sciences to go and work on.

Otherwise, we circle about in an endless, ideological overdetermined space of science dogma, rather than getting on with the business of scientific exploration and discovery.