If you'll permit me to elaborate a little, I'll begin with a loose analogy. Ufology is sort of like birdwatching, it is an activity that can involve elements of science, but isn't really hard core ornithology, but we don't call birdwatching pseudoscience.
However if a birdwatcher has a sighting of some rare ( perhaps previously unknown or extinct ) bird, he or she may record the details and try to get a picture and maybe some trace evidence and take that to an ornithologist. When that happens, and the scientist is looking at the evidence, I think it is fair to say that science is taking place.
Sorry for butting in, but I was just sent a PM by ufology about whether or not birdwatching is a pseudoscience, and I would like to repost my reply here, with some elaboration, in an attempt to kill this analogy.
Birdwatching most certainly is scientific, in every aspect of the word. Not only does it rely entirely on scientifically collected data on distribution, habitat choice, food choice, migration patterns, sounds, behaviour, nest structure, moulting, size, colouration, community structure, population structure, and phylogeny of the birds, but birdwatching itself is nothing if not hypothesis testing writ large.
A bird guide is essentially a collection of hypotheses. Apart from what birds look and sound like, they will typically detail where you will find then, i what habitat, and when. Many will have notes on behaviour and so on. These are all well-founded hypotheses, which have been tested over and over again by professional ornithologists and amateur birdwatchers alike, and continue to be tested by both groups to this day. This is one reason why bird guides rarely are definite, unless they cover only a very small area such as a tropical island.
For instance, a hypothesis could be that a certain species of warbler breed in a certain mountain range, and that this warbler has a certain sound. An amateur birdwatcher could then go there and test this hypothesis by going to all parts of the range and listen. If the sounds are the same, they will have confirmed this hypothesis. If they differ, they will have challenged it, which in extreme cases could result in the two populations being split into different species. The thing is that this does not have to be a conscious test, but it is nonetheless a test.
Often, observational data on birds by amateur birdwatchers are formally reported in scientific journals such as Journal of Field Ornithology, Bird Banding, and the many national or regional journals (Forktail, Aquila, Anser, Ibis, The Auk, and so on). These journals are sometimes, but not always, subject to peer review (of the ones above, I think only Anser isn't). The data collected in these reports are then used in monographs and field guides. For instance, the first page of references in the Pica Press monograph on Nightjars cite 17 sources (out of 42) that are of this nature, and which describe very minor details and observations that are likely made by amateur birdwatchers or bird-banders.
This, you may claim, is just what you refer to as "take that to an ornithologist", but similar observational data is regularly posted on forums and very local journals -- or just discussed in the field -- with people who are not professional ornithologists, and if there is a large amount of observational data for something, it may be entered into field guides and monographs without ever having been "take[n] to an ornithologist". This is because apart from hypothesis testing, birdwatching is also data gathering. The methods may not be as strict as during a formal scientific study (
i.e., you may estimate the number of stints on a mudflat rather than count then and break them down by age-structure), but it does constitute data gathering.
The same goes for cases which are aberrant. In Northern Europe, we could assume that vagrant birds that breed in the Mediterranean will occur here accidentally only in the spring and the autumn, when they migrate, and that the spring will be dominated by last year's birds that migrate to far on coming back from Africa, whereas the autumn will be dominated by the same year's birds that have a so called "reverse migration drive", and migrate in the wrong direction. We can test this by observational data, but this needs to be carried out by amateurs, as no professional would have the same amount of time as a horde of amateurs. In any case, even finding rare birds is hypothesis testing, and the hypotheses on which birds are vagrant in which areas when can be tested and challenged.
The kinds of birdwatching I usually do is scientific in another respect as well. I do population censuses and count everything I see and hear, and report this to a national database. We can then use this data to see population trends, and try to correlate this to the known ecology of the bird, and known (or unknown) changes in their environment. This is also what most bird banding is used for. We catch or observe birds and attempt to make an estimate (and good techniques for making this estimate have been developed) of the actual population number of a given species, then compare that with
e.g. known weather patterns and temperatures in their breeding sites, and see if these can be correlated. The difference, in these cases, between birdwatching and "ornithology proper" is merely a matter of energy you put into it, and whether or not you can get paid to set up formal experiments, or if you have to be satisfied with observational data. From a scientific point of view, there is no difference, and there are certainly a lot of "proper" scientists who publish the same kind of studies as amateurs.
It could, perhaps, be argued that "twitching", that is traveling around looking at rare birds and trying to see as many bird species as possible in a year, could be unscientific, and this would be the closest thing you'd get to unscientific, I think (apart from people who just make things up). I don't think twitchers consider themselves as doing science, though, but rather just enjoying themselves and having a bit of a competition in a field that requires knowledge instead of physical strength, and that you can do at any time in any place. However, strictly speaking, they are still gathering data, if only for themselves, which will make pattern-spotting easier in the future, and more data on migration and distribution of rare birds can be obtained from their behaviour as well.
So to me, the bottom line is that birdwatching is hypothesis testing and data gathering about natural entities that are indisputably known to exist. This is not the case with ufology, which is more a form of wishful thinking.
