Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Dr Fil (talk | contribs) at 20:19, 9 August 2005 (→Serious NPOV problem). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

There are additonal terms, names, and links which should be part of the article. NICAP, the National Investigations (Investigating) Commitee for Aerial Phenomena, has a website: http://www.nicap.dabsol.co.uk/. I knew Ray fowler, an investigator for NICAP, many years ago, and read his (first?) book on his experiences. He has a website, http://members.evansville.net/slk/rfowler.htm, with other books. Also interesting is an interview with Ray: http://boudillion.com/interviews/fowler.htm. Ray pointed out to me that perhaps the book of Ezekial--the "wheels"--recounted UFO sightings. --User:John Barrington

Serious NPOV problem

This article has serious NPOV problems. It is important to note that the VAST majority of the scientific community, as well as governmental agencies, do not believe in the extraterrestrial hypothesis. As such, in keeping with wikipedia's NPOV policy, the majority of this article should be explaining the position that the vast majority of the scientific community holds. This article frequently mentions fringe conspiracy theories and theories which are not accepted at all within scientific/government circles at least on the same level as the scientific view. And, when the non extraterrestrial evidence is presented, it is always intentionally undermined by immediate presentation of said fringe beliefs. I am going to do a MAJOR edit of this article soon.

I acknowledge that the belief that UFOs are alien spacecraft is important and certainly worthy of being presented fairly here. However, this article leans WAY too far to that side of the debate. I am going to greatly strengthen the anti-alien side of things, while still keeping the major pro-alien arguments (trimming some as this page is getting long). --Krazikarl

Could you please cite the study or poll showing that literally the "VAST majority of the scientific community" does not believe in the extraterrestrial hypothesis? References and numbers please.

Actually your assertion flies in the face of actual internal polls sometimes taken within the scientific community. E.g., Dr. Peter Sturrock did an internal poll of 2600 members of the American Astronomical Society (half of whom responded). Sturrock's summary of the results:

"Each respondent was asked to state his opinion on whether the UFO problem deserves scientific study: 23% replied "certainly", 30% "probably", 27% "possibly", 17% "probably not", and 3% "certainly not", which represents a positive attitude among 53% of the respondents, as against a negative attitude among 20%. Analysis of the returns shows that older scientists are markedly more negative to the problem than are younger scientists. One also finds that opinions correlate strongly with time spent reading about the subject. The fraction of respondents who think that the subject certainly or probably deserves scientific study rises from 29%, among those who have spent less than one hour, to 68% among those who have spent more than 365 hours in such reading."

In other words, the poll showed that ignorance of the subject matter resulted in skeptical attitudes. The majority of the scientists, however, felt the subject at least merited further study.

Even if your statement about the "VAST majority" were correct, so what? The history of science is replete with examples where the strongly held majority view turned out to be short-sighted and wrong, restricted by their own personal beliefs and scientific paradigms (not to mention ignorance of the evidence, as Sturrock's survey demonstrated).

E.g., it is fair to say that the theory of continental drift was not "believed" by the vast majority of the scientific community for over four decades after Wegner first laid out various lines of strong evidence pointing to it. Why didn't they "believe" Wegner's evidence? Was it because it was poor or they thought Wegner incompetent or dillusional? No, it had nothing to do with that. It was simply because they couldn't understand how entire continents could move, hence his evidence had to be wrong.

Another example is meteor sounds, heard instantaneously by people on the ground. Consistently reported for hundreds of years by many thousands of eyewitnesses, the "vast majority" of the scientific community scoffed at the reports. Why? Because again they couldn't conceive of a physical mechanism that could account for such instantaneous sounds. So they simply ignored the overwhelming evidence that people were in fact hearing them.

If you read "UFO's: A Scientific Debate" (1972), Frank Drake in his UFO debunking chapter brings up the subject of meteor sounds, acknowledges they have been consistently reported for hundreds of years, but then dismisses them because he personally can't understand how they could be generated. Instead he postulates a "psychological" theory that would make a Psych 101 student wince with its obvious stupidity. But the whole point of Drake's exercise was to debunk UFO's with the argument that eyewitnesses are all inherently unreliable. He was also arguing, falsely, that since the phenomenon was purely psychological and not physical, there was nothing for physical scientists to study. Sound familiar?

Since then a theory of how meteor sounds are generated has come out and they have actually been recorded in the field during meteor showers. Apparently the tape recorders are also suffering from psychological aberrations. Possibly the "vast majority" of scientists that didn't believe in meteor sounds simply because they didn't understand how they could be generated has disappeared.

Want yet another example from the history of science? Lord Kelvin tried to debunk Darwinian evolution theory with a theoretical argument that the Earth and Sun couldn't be more than 100 million years old, not billions as the evolutionists were saying, based on then understanding of physics and chemistry. Kelvin was arguing that theory trumped evidence. Of course, Kelvin nor any other scientist back then knew anything beyond chemical energy sources. Atomic and nuclear physics still lay a few decades in the future. (And that is a good example why evidence should normally take precedence over theories, which are almost always incomplete.)

Or how how about most scientists at the turn of the 19th century snickering at the notion of rocks falling from the sky, i.e., meteorites. Those were the superstitions of the unwashed peasants who reported such things.

The point is that scientists are human beings and are encumbered by their own belief systems just like other human beings. This often takes the form of putting their own internal models or understanding of reality above contradictory evidence, however strong.

If you want to put most scientific DISBELIEF in UFOs and the extraterrestrial hypothesis in a nutshell it is this: most scientists personally don't understand how interstellar travel might be possible or practical within our current knowledge of physics (energy and distance arguments). From this many of them jump to the unscientific conclusion that aliens couldn't get here because they personally don't understand how they could get here. And if aliens can't get here, then UFOs must be bunk, and to hell with any evidence to the contrary. With such illogical circular reasoning, most don't even bother to look at the available evidence (as is often the case with controversial theories in the history of science).

Instead we get nonfactual and unscientific arguments that there is no physical evidence worthy of study and literally all UFO cases represent psychological delusions, hoaxes, or misidentifications of common things. All could be explained if only more data were available, etc., etc. Based on actual evidence and studies by our own government agencies, these contentions are false. E.g., the massive Battelle Institute statistical study for the USAF in the 1950s thoroughly disproved the idea that unknown cases merely represented poor quality sightings and could all be explained if only more data were available as conventional phenomena. It was also clear from the statistics that the unknowns had distinctly different characteristics than the knowns (thus, they represented something distinctly different from conventional phenomena used to explain the known cases).

The dividing line between scientists who don't _believe_ in UFOs as ET generated and those scientists who accept at least the possibility that they might be real ET craft is really nothing more than the "disbelievers" rejecting interstellar travel as possible while the "believers" accepting that interstellar travel might be possible even if we humans currently don't understand exactly how it might be done. Note that a number of prominent scientists (e.g. astronomer who had numerous UFO sightings) have taken other scientists to task for being so narrow-minded in their thinking.

Please keep these points in mind before you take a meat axe to the current version. I have already seen skeptics previously edit out material they obviously find uncomfortable to their own belief systems, such as the statistical results of the Battelle Institute study or early USAF studies concluding UFOs were real craft. The rationalization, no doubt, was that the article as written had serious POV problems to their way of thinking. Editing out certain material would slant the POV more in a direction to their own liking. But is that really being more "scientific" or NPOV or just personally self-serving?

---Dr Fil

Name of article

It seems to me that this entry violates the Misplaced Pages convention to spell out acronyms, and that Unidentified flying objects would be the correct site. What makes it particularly important for this topic is the tendency when discussing the matter to forget the meaning of the word "unidentified". Eclecticology

What is more important than having an article reside on its spelled-out page, is the way the acronym is used in the English. The acronym UFO really no longer has the meaning of "unidentified flying object" in any modern context.

This claim is false, and is the same type of thinking that leads to preposterous assertions such as "We don't know what it is but it is not a UFO" (when they have excluded the possibility of its being a flying saucer but still don't know what else it is). Isn't this facially absurd? --Daniel C. Boyer

The issue here is with how the term is currently used in the English language – not on how it should be used. There is a presupposition in the average person’s mind nowadays that UFO is a term in and of itself that has a meaning beyond simply “unidentified flying object” – as I state right after you interjection. --maveric149

I'll throw my weight in here as well - Misplaced Pages should be primarily descriptive, not prescriptive. Certain acronyms have gained ascendancy over their "spelt-out version", SCUBA, RADAR, UFO, LASER.

But this is completely off-point! These are typically used rather than the spelt-out versions but what maveric149 is talking about is using the acronym with a meaning other than its spelt-out meaning. --Daniel C. Boyer

Unfortunetely, that is the case. We report the way things are here, we don't try to change to common meanings of things. --maveric149

We should simply recognise that, not debate the philosphical legitimacy thereof (or else I'd have to start arguing against the appalling "spelled" - instead of the proper "spelt" - that you ghastly ermerikens insist on using :) Conversely the acronym "WHO" is far better under its full name "World Health Organisation". I can't think of any "grey area" examples where much debate would be necessary. Manning Bartlett, Monday, June 17, 2002

What this term now means is "spaceships with little green men who make crop circles, mutilate cattle, have sex with trailer-park humans" etc. In addition, most people that believe this <stuff> don't know what the acronym means (well they don't know alot of things - but that is another story). This is the same reason why the NASA article resides at NASA and not National Aeronautics and Space Administration. What is important, is what the average visiter will most easily recognize as the right name of something - not whether an article title is an acronym or not. Redirects will do just fine in these cases. The article/redirect order should be reversed. --maveric149, Saturday, April 6, 2002

I think this discussion is a little pointless. The many diferent interpretations of the word Ufo might be inside the article, not in it's name. I vote to simply rename it to Unidentified flying objects, simply because i can't see any against.

The real question would be if the UFO page should eb a redirect or a disambig.

--Zero00 15:08, 16 May 2004 (UTC)

Unidentified flying objects

Pro

• end the discussion
• agree to wikipedia rules
• being more specific and avoiding ambiguity
• teach those who does not know what Ufo means

against

UFO

Pro

• many don't know what UFO means

against

• Althought 90% of the times we mean flying objects, there are many more acronims that might give Ufo. Like United Future Organization (the band) for example.

"UFOs are most frequently seen in Scotland."

Source? I've never heard this before.

This link no longer works:

• http://web.archive.org/web/20001201174900/http://www.primenet.com/~bdzeiler/index.htm A page belonging to proponents of the extraterrestrial life hypothesis

Neither the original page nor the supposedly archived page exists. Parking here in case the situation is temporary. Ortolan88

Very odd, since I was briefly at that site when I made my NPOV edit eariler today - that's why I changed the description to mention that it belonged to propoments of the extraterrestrial life hypothesis. I wonder if the archive got alerted to the link from the referrer when I followed it, and they took it down. Bryan 04:08 Sep 23, 2002 (UTC)

There is some additional info from this version that might deserve reinclusion into the article. The author took out much of the current article w/o any explanation and CamelCased some things which was odd. --mav

This might use some NPOV for the alternative view. As vital as skepticism is, this version kind of discounts by omission. I had a good 15-second sighting of three during the daytime; there was no mistaking the flight patterns, it does make one a believer. There are good methodical books out there like Timothy Good's Above Top Secret, which even as a resource reference might lend this balance. Might do sometime if someone else doesn't. --CR 03:34 Sep 5, 2003 (UTC)

Does Misplaced Pages have an article on UFO hoaxes?

Hoaxes are fair game for discussion; elimination of alternative views, particularly without discussion, are not, and pretty revealing. NPOV requires acknowledging even the existence of alternative views. Removing edits that did not undercut one view, they simply presented the alternative, is bad enough, but deleting even two links discussing the evidence is highly POV. I've been studying this field for years (even subscribed to Skeptical Inquirer) and observed these non-delusional craft in flight. Selective bias has no place in wiki. Kindly practice civility and discuss first, but I do intend to revert it. Chris Rodgers 08:51, 23 Mar 2004 (UTC)

An article on known hoaxes (of all kinds) would be fun! Mark Richards 22:59, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

--Zero00 13:43, 15 May 2004 (UTC) Great idea. Why don't you write one then chris?

There it is ! hoax Mark Richards 23:17, 4 Jun 2004 (UTC)

"UFO-ism"

This section is presently rambling editorial speculation. I can vaguely see the idea you're getting at, but so far it's rubbish. Is there any good reason this section should stay at all in its present form? - David Gerard 16:12, May 15, 2004 (UTC)

The article might be not perfect, and might not be based in facts. But A important aspect of the UFO's mith is the religious aspect some see in it, this should not be omitted. Maybe a little less speculation a more names of sects with believes as described might improve the article. I'll do some research, but i don't agree to eliminate everything --Zero00 14:52, 16 May 2004 (UTC)

Ok I improved the article, we both happy? I do prefer him like this. --Zero00 15:30, 16 May 2004 (UTC)

That's a lot better :-) The section header needs a new name. "UFOs and religion", or something. Listing the UFO sects is very good! - David Gerard 16:49, May 16, 2004 (UTC)

I've tried to clean it up a bit. I've listed the religions before the list of characteristics - some of those listed don't share those characteristics. Is there a written work or two we can reference on the subject? - David Gerard 17:06, May 16, 2004 (UTC)

In fact yes there are many books. I added the Erich Danikem reference. I am trying to write in a tone more apropriate to ufo article than extraterrestrials article or something. --Zero00 18:25, 17 May 2004 (UTC)

Merge flying saucer

I just merged flying saucer, which was basically about the same stuff this article is about. The text will need a bit of digestion. Also, that article had a different inter-wiki link to ja: - someone who can read Japanese will need to check which is the right one. Assuming the ja: articles don't need a merge too! - David Gerard 11:52, 17 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Positions of UFO groups

I was appalled to read in the article that CSICOP was a group that "encourages critical investigation of the alien spacecraft hypothesis from a scientific point of view." That is a pure BS. CSICOP is a hardline debunking group, nothing else. They have postulated "explanations" for every conceivable UFO sighting in history without even conducting ANY investigation of their own. They slander researchers who they think might even hint at the idea that there could be something even remotely unexplainable about any UFO reports. Misplaced Pages articles are supposed to be written from a neutral point of view and such a gross deception as this is not becoming of such a perspective. I am not just talking nonsense here. If anyone needs evidence that CSICOP is exactly that, there is more than enough available.

I deleted that brief section from the article for this reason. It might be a good idea to have more critical investigation be conducted of ufo groups' true positions than simply looking at what's on their home page.

If people think there should be a section on different organizations and groups and what positions they hold, I think that would be a worthwhile addition. truthseeker7 08:47, 7 July 2004 (UTC)

Someone has reinserted this garbage without any explanation. Sorry but that is unacceptable. This is the most ridiculous description of CSICOP's position I have ever heard. Despite their name they do not and have NEVER conducted ANY investigation, scientific or not. They make armchair conclusions without any supporting evidence. They are a travesty of science and most definitely not an objective investigative body. A false portrayal of this magnitude on such an important topic is very alarming and will continue to be deleted. Please respond here if you want to put it back or differ so we can work out something. truthseeker7 17:54, 7 July 2004 (UTC)

Your characterization of CSICOP certainly doesn't sound neutral. Perhaps in the interest of NPOV we should invite someone in CSICOP to explain their position. Or link directly to their website; after all, other groups whose conclusions people may disagree with are linked to as well.

Case in point: current mention in the article of a radar/visual case in Santiago links only to a pro-extraterrestrial intelligence explanation for UFO site, and doesn't offer the opinion that just because something is seen in the sky and tracked by radar does not mean it is piloted by extraterrestrial intelligence. It would be a disservice, perhaps even an insult, to readers to imply that radar cannot also track inanimate objects.

17 Nov 2004

I realise that the verdict of this article has already been decided but I feel that many of the things said in the article were rediculous. It basically said that all of those who believe in UFOs are amature scientist though in a recent survey of 250 scientists from NASA, about 90% believe that either life once existed on Mars or bacterial life currently does. As Earth is believed to have been oxiginated through the emissions of bacteria, the next step on a more habital planet (one of the reasons that Mars isn't as easily habitable is because of the large amount of methane)would logicaly be the evolution of macroorganisms and eventually extremely intelligent beings. LunarMoon, Saturday February 26, 2005

Inconsistencies regarding the alleged hoaxes.

The article includes three entries under UFO hoaxes. Two of those entries have Misplaced Pages pages, but if you check those pages, there's no proof offered that they are indeed hoaxes. (For Adamski's page, there is at least the fact that his claims about Venus, etc., are inconsistent with later observations.)

I think the UFO page should either mark these as alleged hoaxes or the Adamski and Meier pages should more clearly state why the preponderance of evidence points to hoax.

Sorry, but I don't know the cases well enough to contribute the changes myself.