The SETI Institute’s podcast interview with journalist Leslie Kean on Monday should be Exhibit A in the case to disqualify it from any future American media discussions on UFOs. That won’t happen, of course, but if you’re on the fence about SETI’s mind set, you need to give this a serious listen(Link). When it comes to sophistry, SETI’s “Skeptic Check: The Saucer’s Apprentice” is stone-cold gold.
Hosted by astronomer Seth Shostak, the SETI thing — also known as “Our Monthly Look at Critical Thinking” — was 50 minutes of mostly rehash bemoaning the lack of UFO evidence to study. It featured the predictable reassurances of experts like Phil “Bad Astronomy” Plait and Skeptical Inquirer managing editor Benjamin Radford, alongside Harvard alien abduction skeptic Susan Clancy. There was also an attempt to nudge Indiana University folklorist/abduction researcher Thomas Bullard into the skeptic’s corner, but alien abduction is another discussion altogether.
What made the session noteworthy was its invitation to Kean, whose skillfully presented UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record(Link) confronts debunkers with their most formidable challenge in recent memory. But it became immediately clear that Shostak (“I have an open mind”) not only wasn’t interested in evidence, he probably hadn’t bothered to read the book.
In his subsequent discussion with Radford, Shostak stated: “The other argument that’s frequently made is that scientists simply dismiss this phenomenon out of hand, that they won’t look, and this is one of the arguments in the new book by Leslie Kean … that there may be something real here and nobody will look at it …”
“Well, there’s a couple of errors right there,” Radford replied. “First of all, UFO sightings have been investigated. The claim that the U.S. government has never looked into these things is patently false. They have looked into these things …”
Whoa, time out. Kean mentioned Project Blue Book, the USAF study, in On the Record. Who claimed Uncle Sam “has never looked into these things”? Nobody. Except maybe Radford. Shostak, who didn’t bother to correct him, is a clever guy who really knows how to bait the hook. Here’s how he opened the Q&A with Radford:
“Ben, in your long career as someone who has investigated UFOs and sorted through the evidence, has there ever been a case that convinced you that aliens have visited the planet?”
Who said anything about aliens? Kean’s book dealt with an extraterrestrial hypothesis — the hypothesis that keeps SETI in business — but as she told Shostak earlier on the show, “I’m not even willing to assume that these are aliens.” On the Record deals with radar data, military reports, analysis of plant and soil damage, photo analysis, etc. Reviewing the data doesn’t amount to endorsing aliens. Shostak knows that. And yet, his tortured contortions to avoid said evidence are becoming cartoonish.
“You say a lot of them are disc-shaped,” he countered to Kean, “but isn’t the fact that we call them flying saucers, that we expect them to be disc-shaped, simply due to a reporter’s error back in 1947, when Kenneth Arnold … said he saw objects that moved across the sky like saucers skipping in water, he wasn’t describing the shape of course, he was describing the motion, and ever since, people have seen saucers — that strikes me as a little odd.”
Kean corrected him by mentioning the multiple shapes on record, and added that the USAF coined the UFO term for accuracy’s sake. Shostak was all over the board, even invoking Carl Jung’s collective unconscious as a possible explanation for abductions without mentioning how the Swiss psychoanalyst ultimately concluded UFOs had a physical component that could not be confined to symbolic projections(Link) .
Kean was interviewed for half an hour, knowing in advance their discussion would be trimmed for length. Two UFO cases came up: the 2006 Chicago O’Hare incident, and the 1989-90 Belgian triangle wave. The latter involved an F-16 scramble, radar data, detailed photo analysis, and a military press conference assembled by the colonel in charge of the Air Force investigation, who would later become a Major General . You don’t need a crystal ball to figure out which incident got sliced out of Kean’s nine-minute segment.
The Belgian investigation, “which included a group of university scientists working on it outside of the government,” Kean wrote in an e-mail to De Void, “would have made a strong case for the listeners as to the genuine mystery here. The O’Hare case does not have the same level of gravitas because it was not repeated, and because it didn’t involve an official investigation and a report by a Major General, who had worked closely with scientists over an extended period.”
Shostak, naturally, had an explanation for everything. “Our choice of which parts of each interview to run were based on using the most compelling and clear stories,” he e-mailed De Void. “I think that O’Hare won out over the Belgian wave because of its immediacy, fame, and relevancy to our broadcast audiences. It certainly wasn’t an attempt to ‘load the dice’ in any way I can assure you.”
Maybe the weirdest part of “Our Monthly Look at Critical Thinking” was the kicker, reserved for a discussion of the best Hollywood ET spacecraft. For eight fetish-like minutes, Shostak and sidekick Molly Bentley detailed the special properties and features of the make-believe hardware in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “District 9,” “Independence Day,” and 1953’s “War of the Worlds.”
De Void asked flat out if Shostak had actually read Kean’s book. Or the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena’s analysis of the O’Hare incident(Link) (a former NASA guy led the study). Or, for that matter, MUFON’s radar-saturated report(Link) on the 2008 Stephenville incident.
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