Donald R. Prothero - Ufos, Chemtrails, and Aliens: What Science Says

UFOs ,
CHEMTRAILS, AND ALIENS

Donald R. Prothero and Timothy D. Callahan Foreword by Michael Shermer

What Science Says

This book is a publication of

Indiana University Press

Office of Scholarly Publishing

Herman B Wells Library 350

1320 East 10th Street

Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA

iupress.indiana.edu

2017 by Donald R. Prothero and Tim Callahan

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.481992.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Prothero, Donald R., author.

Title: UFOs, chemtrails, and aliens : what science says / Donald R. Prothero and Timothy D. Callahan ; foreword by Michael Shermer.

Description: 1st [edition]. | Bloomington, Indiana : Indiana University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017019981 (print) | LCCN 2017006388 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253027061 (e-book) | ISBN 9780253026927 (cloth : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Human-alien encounters. | Extraterrestrial beings. | Unidentified flying objects. | Curiosities and wonders. | Pseudoscience. | Parapsychology. | Occultism.

Classification: LCC BF2050 (print) | LCC BF2050 .P76 2017 (ebook) | DDC 001.94dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017019981

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We dedicate this book to our wonderful wives,
Teresa LeVelle and Bonnie Callahan,
for all their love and support while writing it.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

CARL SAGAN

By Michael Shermer

UFOs, UAPs, and CRAPs: Unidentified Aerial
Phenomena Offer a Lesson on the Residue
Problem in Science

BY MICHAEL SHERMER

One early morning several years ago, a black, triangular object flew over my home in the San Gabriel Mountains of Southern California. It was almost completely silent, made rapid turns and accelerations, and was so nonreflective that it looked like a hole in the sky. It seemed almost otherworldly. It was, in fact, the B-2 Spirit, or stealth bomber, looping around to make another run over the Pasadena Rose Bowl Parade on January 1an annual tradition. But had I not known what it was, and had I been seeing it for the first timesay, out in the desert at duskI might easily have thought it a UFO. Such is the nature of human perception and belief when it comes to UFOs and aliens, which Donald Prothero and Tim Callahan have so effectively demonstrated in this bookone of the most thorough and effective skeptical analyses of the topic I have read. As they show in case after case, the likelihood that UFOs and aliens are real is exceptionally small, whereas the probability that people make mistakes in their perceptions, have preconceived notions that influence their belief, and cannot seem to say I dont know when it comes to an unidentified flying object is extremely high.

In this sense, it is good to remember what the U in UFO stands for: unidentified. Unidentified does not mean extraterrestrial, or government conspiracy, or anything else asserted by any other pet theory. The U just means unidentifiednothing more. And in science it is always acceptable to say I dont know. In fact, doing so is a virtue. A case in point is a best-selling book published a few years ago by investigative journalist Leslie Kean, UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record (Crown, 2010). It is a compilation of anecdotes and stories by military, aviation, and political observers about what she calls Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). Kean asks her readers to consider with an open and truly skeptical mind that such sightings represent a solid, physical phenomenon that appears to be under intelligent control and is capable of speeds, maneuverability, and luminosity beyond current known technology, that the U.S. government routinely ignores UFOs and, when pressed, issues false explanations, and that the hypothesis that UFOs are of extraterrestrial or interdimensional origin is a rational one and must be taken into account, given the data we have.

How much data do we have? And can it help us distinguish between UAPs and what I call Completely Ridiculous Alien Piffle (CRAP) such as crop circles and cattle mutilations, alien abductions and anal probes, and genetic experiments and humanalien hybrids? According to Kean, roughly 90 to 95 percent of UFO sightings can be explained as weather balloons, flares, sky lanterns, planes flying in formation, secret military aircraft, birds reflecting the sun, planes reflecting the sun, blimps, helicopters, planes in formation, the planets Venus or Mars, meteors or meteorites, space junk, satellites, swamp gas, spinning eddies, sundogs, ball lightning, ice crystals, reflected light off clouds, lights on the ground or lights reflected on a cockpit window and more. So the entire extraterrestrial hypothesis is based on the residue of data left over after the foregoing list has been exhausted. Whats left? Not much, Im afraid.

For example, Kean opens her exploration on very solid ground, with a Major Generals firsthand chronicle of one of the most vivid and well-documented UFO cases everthe UFO wave over Belgium in 198990. Here is Belgian Major General Wilfried De Brouwers recounting of the first night of sightings: Hundreds of people saw a majestic triangular craft with a span of approximately a hundred and twenty feet and powerful beaming spotlights, moving very slowly without making any significant noise but, in several cases, accelerating to very high speeds. But even seemingly unexplainable sightings such as De Brouwers can have simple explanations. It could simply have been an early experimental model of a stealth bomber (U.S., Soviet, or otherwise) that secret-keeping military agencies were understandably loath to reveal.

In any case, compare De Brouwers narrative to Keans summary of the same incident: Common sense tells us that if a government had developed huge craft that can hover motionless only a few hundred feet up, and then speed off in the blink of an eyeall without making a soundsuch technology would have revolutionized both air travel and modern warfare, and probably physics as well. Note how a 120-foot craft becomes huge, how moving very slowly changes to can hover motionless, how without making any significant noise shifts to without making a sound, and how accelerating to very high speeds transforms into speed off in the blink of an eye. This language transmutationprobably unintentionalis common in UFO narratives, making it harder for scientists to provide natural explanations.

In all fields of science, we find a residue of anomalies unexplained by the dominant theory. That does not mean that the prevailing theory is wrong or that alternative theories are right. It just means that we need to do more work to bring those anomalies into the accepted paradigm. In the meantime, it is okay to live with the uncertainty of knowing that not everything has an explanation.