Topics Rationality

Question Do you believe in all of the UFO stories like sightings, seeing little weird people, being abducted, etc.? I know that my mother-in-law and 2 daughters have sworn on a Bible that they witnessed the landing of a UFO in central Iowa. They didn't see any people but saw the space ship come out of the sky and land in the road ahead of the car. They just continued to watch it and after an hour or so they turned around in the road and headed back home.

Accepted:
November 19, 2007

Comments

I don't believe in them myself, though I'd be quite willing to be convinved that some of them are true. However, the story you tell illustrates a typical difficulty of these accounts: we might grant that your in-laws saw something, but what was it?

The acronym "UFO," of course, stands for "Unidentified Flying Object." And that's what we have if we take your in-laws' story at face value. We certainly don't know that whatever it was came from outer space, as they used to say.

Of course, some stories say more. As you point out, we get tales of abduction, strange beings and the like. Apparently many of the people who make these reports seem otherwise sane and normal. Do we know that what these people say isn't so? I wouldn't say that we do. After all, it's surely possible that there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, and that some of it has made it to where we are. But many of the cautions that the 18th-century philosopher David Hume applied to miracle stories seem to apply here. People are often attracted to the strange and exotic, and sometimes prefer extravangant explanations to more humble ones. People also get have vivid dreams, get confused, misinterpret what they see, and sometimes they even lie. There are many possible explanations for the reports of alien sightings (as for sightings of ghosts, the Loch Ness monster, susquatches, the Virgin Mary and Elvis.) It's not clear that the mundane explanations are insufficient, and so until there's better evidence to the contrary, I'll rest with open-minded skepticism.