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Merged Is ufology a pseudoscience?

Yes, UFOs are psuedoscience, but that only makes them even more relevant than traditonal science, which focuses on the past.
 
kblood said:
Yes, UFOs are psuedoscience, but that only makes them even more relevant than traditonal science, which focuses on the past.
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Not exactly. It's the study of UFOs as Alien Space Ships that is pseudoscience. You may have missed an earlier post that noted some of the different things that UFOs which have been identified have turned out to be. It isn't one phenomenon. Note that none of them have ever turned out to be an Alien Space Ship.
 
Are we there, yet?

  • a car pulls up, outside my flat - mundane
  • a car pulls up, outside my flat and a person gets out - mundane
  • a car pulls up, outside my flat and a person gets out and rings my doorbell - mundane but unusual, given my grumpy lack of friends
  • a car pulls up, outside my flat and a person gets out and rings my doorbell and it's F1 driver Jackie Stewart - strange, but not impossible, and I did meet him and have a chat on the QE11 in 1981
  • a car pulls up, outside my flat and a person gets out and rings my doorbell and it's Zaphod Beeblebrox, with two heads - out of of this world
 
The Common Potato said:
Are we there, yet?
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Yes. We've been there since 2005.

Philip J. Klass (November 8, 1919 – August 9, 2005)
The UFO curse

Klass left this statement, originally published in Moseley's newsletter Saucer Smear on October 10, 1983.

THE LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF PHILIP J. KLASS

To ufologists who publicly criticize me, ... or who even think unkind thoughts about me in private, I do hereby leave and bequeath: THE UFO CURSE:
No matter how long you live, you will never know any more about UFOs than you know today. You will never know any more about what UFOs really are, or where they come from. You will never know any more about what the U.S. Government really knows about UFOs than you know today. As you lie on your own death-bed you will be as mystified about UFOs as you are today. And you will remember this curse.
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I think I've worked it out. It's not aliens, it's Alan. A simple, mundane, inter-galactic typo. My maths' teacher was an Alan. "Sir" to the minions. He had an e-type jag and smoked a curly pipe. Seemed extraordinary to me.

"Hodson Potato, I have wing mirrors on my jag and I know how to use them." Top paranormal spookiness, in my then 14-year-old view. I then took up secretive cigarette smoking.

https://youtu.be/O4-Fi6Gcdao?t=19 The 'ref' cloister. I once dropped a 10p coin and it rolled all the way along! Tee hee. Girls? Wot?!

What's a Magnum Pie, anyway?
 
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Garrett M. Graff attempts to answer the question posed in the thread title in a Skeptic Magazine podcast with Michael Shermer. UFO: The Inside Story of the U.S. Government’s Search for Alien Life



Garrett M. Graff has spent nearly two decades covering politics, technology, and national security. The former editor of Politico and contributor to Wired and CNN, he’s written for publications from Esquire to Rolling Stone to the New York Times, and today serves as the director of the cyber initiative at the Aspen Institute. Graff is the author of multiple books, including the FBI history The Threat Matrix, Raven Rock, about the government’s Cold War Doomsday plans, and the New York Times bestsellers The Only Plane in the Sky and Watergate: A New History, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History.
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For as long as we have looked to the skies, the question of whether life on Earth is the only life to exist has been at the core of the human experience, driving scientific debate and discovery, shaping spiritual belief, and prompting existential thought across borders and generations. And yet, the idea of extraterrestrial intelligence has been largely seen as a joke, banished to the realm of fantasy and conspiracy. Now, for the first time, the full story of our national obsession with UFOs — and the covert, decades-long search by scientists, the United States military, and the CIA for proof of alien life — is told by bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize finalist Garrett M. Graff in a deeply reported and researched history.
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He gets it mostly right but is puzzled by Lonnie Zamora incidentWP (as is Wikipedia) that can be explained (in particular the flames and the noise) as an early hot air balloon.
 
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Gord_in_Toronto said:
Garrett M. Graff attempts to answer the question posed in the thread title in a Skeptic Magazine podcast with Michael Shermer. UFO: The Inside Story of the U.S. Government’s Search for Alien Life







He gets it mostly right but is puzzled by Lonnie Zamora incidentWP (as is Wikipedia) that can be explained (in particular the flames and the noise) as an early hot air balloon.
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The reason I was asked to leave the local UFO Discussion Group was my tendency to question things, and ask for evidence instead of just "going with it". Today when I look back at the USAF's Project Grudge and Blue Book I feel sorry for the officers and scientists who worked on those research projects for many reasons. Investigating the average UFO sighting from the 1950s and 1960s was an absurd enterprise to begin with. The act of driving out to meet with someone who saw something in the air days, weeks, months, or even years ago is right out of a Kafka novel being made into a Fellini movie.

Today things haven't changed that much on the investigational side of things. Sure, we have a few video images from F-18s, but they've been explained, and none of them show anything that fantastic. At no point do any of the objects interact with the trailing aircraft or the environment. The only thing different is 40 years of conspiracy theories perpetuated by true-believers, and these believers have real jobs in key sectors of the military, DoD, and the press. There is no longer a filter of logic. Facts are not checked by the media, nor the people advancing these claims of captured UFOs hidden by the government.

There is no scientific method used by UFOlogists. What do we have to show from the UAP flap? Chinese spy balloons ignored by the USAF, and shunted off to the UAP program and ignored for what they were because the guy running the UAP program is a true-believer who saw aliens instead of Chinese spy balloons. And the other thing we've "discovered" is someone is testing our Navy and USAF with drones, and it seems that in spite of 9-11, we've been asleep at the wheel on this issue.

If anything, this UAP crap has been a handicap to our national security.
 
IDK, to some extent, the airforce would be remiss if they didn't investigate unidentified flying objects, after all, sometimes they aren't Venus but rather spy balloons. In the 50s, there was every chance it was the Commies spying on us. Now its probalby the Chinese commies and or a few other antagonists.

That being said, its amazing how many people really seem to believe the last run of "news" about UAPs is in anyway new or better evidence.
 
Axxman300 said:
The reason I was asked to leave the local UFO Discussion Group was my tendency to question things, and ask for evidence instead of just "going with it". Today when I look back at the USAF's Project Grudge and Blue Book I feel sorry for the officers and scientists who worked on those research projects for many reasons. Investigating the average UFO sighting from the 1950s and 1960s was an absurd enterprise to begin with. The act of driving out to meet with someone who saw something in the air days, weeks, months, or even years ago is right out of a Kafka novel being made into a Fellini movie.

Today things haven't changed that much on the investigational side of things. Sure, we have a few video images from F-18s, but they've been explained, and none of them show anything that fantastic. At no point do any of the objects interact with the trailing aircraft or the environment. The only thing different is 40 years of conspiracy theories perpetuated by true-believers, and these believers have real jobs in key sectors of the military, DoD, and the press. There is no longer a filter of logic. Facts are not checked by the media, nor the people advancing these claims of captured UFOs hidden by the government.

There is no scientific method used by UFOlogists. What do we have to show from the UAP flap? Chinese spy balloons ignored by the USAF, and shunted off to the UAP program and ignored for what they were because the guy running the UAP program is a true-believer who saw aliens instead of Chinese spy balloons. And the other thing we've "discovered" is someone is testing our Navy and USAF with drones, and it seems that in spite of 9-11, we've been asleep at the wheel on this issue.

If anything, this UAP crap has been a handicap to our national security.
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Indeed. The recent case of "the tall aliens in the back yard who left this huge circle in the ground" was widely reported by everyone including the MSN. No one had the freaking intelligence to Google the location on Google Earth and see that the "huge circle" had been there for months. Not so :mad: as :sad:
 
In the sense that UFOlogy essentially just means "interest in UFOs", and that interest can and does take on many forms of expression very few of which even pretend to be "scientific" in nature, I would say that UFOlogy is not intrinsically pseudoscience, but that individual UFOlogists can incorporate pseudoscientific behaviors and thinking into their expression.
 
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