Experts weigh UFO facts and fiction

Trash from the past
"I would have to say that we're stuck in neutral," said Kevin Randle, a leading expert and writer on UFOs who is known as a dogged researcher of the phenomena. There's no real new research, he said, and that's "because we have to revisit the trash of the past."

Randle points to yesteryear stories, including one that stretches back in time to a supposed 1897 airship crash in Aurora, Texas. The tale was proven long ago to have been a hoax by two con men — yet it continues to surface in UFO circles. 

Then there's the celebrated saga of Thomas Mantell, a pilot who lost his life chasing a UFO in 1948. There are those that contend he was killed by a blue beam from a UFO, Randle said, "even though we have known for years that the UFO was a balloon, and he violated regulations by climbing above 14,000 feet without oxygen equipment. I mean, we know this, and yet there are those who believe that Mantell was killed by aliens."

Randle's advice is to the point: "We need to begin to apply rigorous standards of research … stop accepting what we wish to believe even when the evidence is poor, and begin thinking ahead."

Paucity of physical evidence
"I've no doubt that UFOs are here to stay," said Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. "I'm just not convinced that alien craft are here to stay … or for that matter, even here for brief visits.

"First, despite a torrent of sightings for more than a half-century, I can't think of a single, major science museum that has alien artifacts on display," Shostak said. "Contrast this paucity of physical evidence with what the American Indians could have shown you 50 years after Christopher Columbus first violated their sea-space. They could have shown you all sorts of stuff — including lots of smallpox-infested brethren — as proof that they were being 'visited,'" he said.

When it comes to extraterrestrial visitors in the 21st century, the evidence is anecdotal, ambiguous, or, in some cases, artifice, Shostak suggested.

Calling it "argument from ignorance," Shostak pointed to the claim that aliens must have careened out of control above the New Mexico desert simply because some classified government documents sport a bunch of blacked-out text. "How does the latter prove the former?"

Sure, the missing verbiage is consistent with a government cover-up of an alien crash landing, Shostak said. "But it's also consistent with an infinitude of other scenarios … not all of them involving sloppy alien pilots," he added.

Shostak said that it is not impossible that we could be visited. It doesn't violate physics to travel between the stars, although that's not easy to do.

"But really, if you're going to claim — or for that matter, believe — that extraterrestrials are strafing the cities, or occasionally assaulting the neighbors with an aggression inappropriate for a first date, then I urge you to find evidence that leaves little doubt among the professionally skeptical community known as the world of science."

Residue of sightings
Why is there precious little to show that world of science that UFOs merit attention?

"Obviously there is not a simple answer, but part of it is reluctance of the scientific community to support such research," explained Bruce Maccabee, regarded as a meticulous researcher and an optical physicist who uses those talents to study photographs and video of unexplained phenomena.

Why this reluctance? 

"In my humble opinion it is largely a result of 'tradition' … tradition set by the U.S. Air Force in the early years when they publicly stated that everything was under control, they were investigating … and finding nothing that couldn't be explained," Maccabee said.  

Nevertheless, Maccabee observed, work on the phenomenon will carry on.

"UFO studies will continue until all the old cases have either been explained or admitted to being unexplainable — meaning a residue of sightings that could be ET-related — and/or until people stop seeing unexplainable UFO-like events throughout the world," Maccabee concluded.

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