Carl Sagan Does Truth Matter Science, Pseudoscience, And ...
DOES TRUTH MATTER?
SCIENCE, PSEUDOSCIENCE,
AND CIVILIZATION.
CARL SAGAN
Science has beauty, power, and majesty that can provide
spiritual as well as practical fulfillment. But superstition and
pseudoscience keep getting in the way, providing easy answers,
casually pressing our awe buttons, and cheapening the
experience.
Do we care what's true? Does it matter?
. . . where ignorance is bliss, 'Tis folly to be wise
wrote the poet Thomas Gray. But is it? Edmund Way Teale in
his 1950 book Circle of the Seasons understood the dilemma
better:
It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long
as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money
as long as you have got it.
It's disheartening to discover government corruption and
incompetence, for example; but is it better not to know about it?
Whose interest does ignorance serve? If we humans bear, say,
hereditary propensities toward the hatred of strangers, isn't self-
knowledge the only antidote? If we long to believe that the
stars' rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a
Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our
conceits?
In The Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche, as so many
before and after, decries the "unbroken progress in the self-
belittling of man" brought about by the scientific revolution.
Nietzsche mourns the loss of "man's belief in his dignity, his
uniqueness, his irreplaceability in the scheme of existence." For me, it
is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in
delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. Which attitude is
better geared for our long-term survival? Which gives us more
leverage on our future? And if our naive self-confidence is a
little undermined in the process, is that altogether such a loss?
Is there not cause to welcome it as a maturing and character-
building experience?
To discover that the Universe is some 8 to 15 billion and not 6 to
12 thousand years old(1) improves our appreciation of its sweep
and grandeur; to entertain the notion that we are a particularly
complex arrangement of atoms, and not some breath of divinity,
at the very least enhances our respect for atoms; to discover, as
now seems probable, that our planet is one of billions of other
worlds in the Milky Way Galaxy and that our galaxy is one of
billions more, majestically expands the arena of what is
possible; to find that our ancestors were also the ancestors of
apes ties us to the rest of life and makes possible important - if
occasionally rueful - reflections on human nature.
Plainly there is no way back. Like it or not, we are stuck with
science. We had better make the best of it. When we finally
come to terms with it and fully recognize its beauty and its
power, we will find, in spiritual as well as in practical matters,
that we have made a bargain strongly in our favor.
But superstition and pseudoscience keep getting in the way,
distracting us, providing easy answers, dodging skeptical
scrutiny, casually pressing our awe buttons and cheapening the
experience, making us routine and comfortable practitioners as
well as victims of credulity. Yes, the world would be a more
interesting place if there were UFOs lurking in the deep waters
off Bermuda and eating ships and planes, or if dead people
could take control of our hands and write us messages. It would
be fascinating if adolescents were able to make telephone
handsets rocket off their cradles just by thinking at them, or if
our dreams could, more often than can be explained by chance
and our knowledge of the world, accurately foretell the future.
These are all instances of pseudoscience. They purport to use
the methods and findings of science, while in fact they are
faithless to its nature - often because they are based on
insufficient evidence or because they ignore clues that point the
other way. They ripple with gullibility. With the uninformed
cooperation (and often the cynical connivance) of newspapers,
magazines, book publishers, radio, television, movie producers,
and the like, such ideas are easily and widely available. Far
more difficult to come upon are the alternative, more
challenging, and even more dazzling findings of science.
Pseudoscience is easier to contrive than science because
distracting confrontations with reality - where we cannot
control the outcome of the comparison - are more readily
avoided. The standards of argument, what passes for evidence,
are much more relaxed. In part for these same reasons, it is
much easier to present pseudoscience to the general public than
science. But this isn't enough to explain its popularity.
Naturally people try various belief systems on for size, to see if
they help. And if we're desperate enough, we become all too
willing to abandon what may be perceived as the heavy burden
of skepticism. Pseudoscience speaks to powerful emotional
needs that science often leaves unfulfilled. It caters to fantasies
about personal powers we lack and long for (like those
attributed to comic book superheroes today, and earlier, to the
gods). In some of its manifestations, it offers satisfaction of
spiritual hungers, cures for disease, promises that death is not
the end. It reassures us of our cosmic centrality and importance.
It vouchsafes that we are hooked up with, tied to, the
Universe.(2) Sometimes it's a kind of halfway house between
old religion and new science, mistrusted by both.
At the heart of some pseudoscience (and some religion also,
New Age and Old) is the idea that wishing makes it so. How
satisfying it would be, as in folklore and children's stories, to
fulfill our heart's desire just by wishing. How seductive this
notion is, especially when compared with the hard work and
good luck usually required to achieve our hopes. The enchanted
fish or the genie from the lamp will grant us three wishes -
anything we want except more wishes. Who has not pondered -
just to be on the safe side, just in case we ever come upon and
accidentally rub an old, squat brass oil lamp - what to ask for?
I remember, from childhood comic strips and books, a top-
hatted, mustachioed magician who brandished an ebony
walking stick. His name was Zatara. He could make anything
happen, anything at all. How did he do it? Easy. He uttered his
commands backwards. So if he wanted a million dollars, he
would say "srallod noillim a em evig." That's all there was to it. It
was something like prayer, but much surer of results.
I spent a lot of time at age eight experimenting in this vein,
commanding stones to levitate: "esir, enots." It never worked. I
blamed my pronunciation.
Pseudoscience is embraced, it might be argued, in exact
proportion as real science is misunderstood - except that the
language breaks down here. If you've never heard of science (to
say nothing of how it works), you can hardly be aware you're
embracing pseudoscience. You're simply thinking in one of the
ways that humans always have. Religions are often the state-
protected nurseries of pseudoscience, although there's no
reason why religions have to play that role. In a way, it's an
artifact from times long gone. In some countries nearly
everyone believes in astrology and precognition, including
government leaders. But this is not simply drummed into them
by religion; it is drawn out of the enveloping culture in which
everyone is comfortable with these practices, and affirming
testimonials are everywhere.
Most of the case histories I will relate are American - because
these are the cases I know best, not because pseudoscience and
mysticism are more prominent in the United States than
elsewhere. But the psychic spoonbender and extraterrestrial
channeler Uri Geller hails from Israel. As tensions rise between
Algerian secularists and Moslem fundamentalists, more and
more people are discreetly consulting the country's 10,000
soothsayers and clairvoyants (about half of whom operate with
a license from the government). High French officials, including
a former president of France, arranged for millions of dollars to
be invested in a scam (the Elf-Aquitaine scandal) to find new
petroleum reserves from the air. In Germany, there is concern
about carcinogenic "Earth rays" undetectable by science; they
can be sensed only by experienced dowsers brandishing forked
sticks. "Psychic surgery" flourishes in the Philippines. Ghosts
are something of a national obsession in Britain. Since World
War II, Japan has spawned enormous numbers of new religions
featuring the supernatural. An estimated 100,000 fortune-tellers
flourish in Japan; the clientele are mainly young women. Aum
Shinrikyo, a sect thought to be involved in the release of the
nerve gas sarin in the Tokyo subway system in March 1995,
features levitation, faith healing, and ESP among its main
tenets. Followers, at a high price, drank the "miracle pond"
water - from the bath of Asaraha, their leader. In Thailand,
diseases are treated with pills manufactured from pulverized
sacred Scripture. "Witches" are today being burned in South
Africa. Australian peace-keeping forces in Haiti rescue a
woman tied to a tree; she is accused of flying from rooftop to
rooftop, and sucking the blood of children. Astrology is rife in
India, geomancy widespread in China.
Perhaps the most successful recent global pseudoscience - by
many criteria, already a religion - is the Hindu doctrine of
transcendental meditation (TM). The soporific homilies of its
founder and spiritual leader, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, can
be seen on television. Seated in the yogi position, his white hair
here and there flecked with black, surrounded by garlands and
floral offerings, he has a look. One day while channel surfing
we came upon this visage. "You know who that is?" asked our
four-year-old son. "God." The worldwide TM organization has
an estimated valuation of $3 billion. For a fee they promise
through meditation to be able to walk you through walls, to
make you invisible, to enable you to fly. By thinking in unison
they have, they say, diminished the crime rate in Washington,
D.C., and caused the collapse of the Soviet Union, among other
secular miracles. Not one smattering of real evidence has been
offered for any such claims. TM sells folk medicine, runs
trading companies, medical clinics and "research" universities,
and has unsuccessfully entered politics. In its oddly charismatic
leader, its promise of community, and the offer of magical
powers in exchange for money and fervent belief, it is typical of
many pseudosciences marketed for sacerdotal export.
At each relinquishing of civil controls and scientific education
another little spurt in pseudoscience occurs. Leon Trotsky
described it for Germany on the eve of the Hitler takeover (but
in a description that might equally have applied to the Soviet
Union of 1933):
Not only in peasant homes, but also in city skyscrapers, there
lives along side the twentieth century the thirteenth. A hundred
million people use electricity and still believe in the magic
powers of signs and exorcisms. . . . Movie stars go to mediums.
Aviators who pilot miraculous mechanisms created by man's
genius wear amulets on their sweaters. What inexhaustible
reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance and savagery!
Russia is an instructive case. Under the tsars, religious
superstition was encouraged, but scientific and skeptical
thinking - except by a few tame scientists - was ruthlessly
expunged. Under Communism, both religion and
pseudoscience were systematically suppressed - except for the
superstition of the state ideological religion. It was advertised as
scientific, but fell as far short of this ideal as the most unself-
critical mystery cult. Critical thinking - except by scientists in
hermetically sealed compartments of knowledge - was
recognized as dangerous, was not taught in the schools, and
was punished where expressed. As a result, post-Communism,
many Russians view science with suspicion. When the lid was
lifted, as was also true of virulent ethnic hatreds, what had all
along been bubbling subsurface was exposed to view. The
region is now awash in UFOs, poltergeists, faith healers, quack
medicines, magic waters, and old-time superstition. A stunning
decline in life expectancy, increasing infant mortality, rampant
epidemic disease, subminimal medical standards, and
ignorance of preventative medicine all work to raise the
threshold at which skepticism is triggered in an increasingly
desperate population. As I write, the electorally most popular
member of the Duma, a leading supporter of the ultranationalist
Vladimir Zhirinovksy, is one Anatoly Kashpirovsky - a faith
healer who remotely cures diseases ranging from hernias to
AIDS by glaring at you out of your television set. His face starts
stopped clocks.
A somewhat analogous situation exists in China. After the
death of Mao Zedong and the gradual emergence of a market
economy, UFOs, channeling, and other examples of Western
pseudoscience emerged, along with such ancient Chinese
practices as ancestor worship, astrology, and fortune telling -
especially that version that involves throwing yarrow sticks and
working through the hoary tetragrams of the I Ching. The
government newspaper lamented that "the superstition of
feudal ideology is reviving in our countryside." It was (and
remains) a rural, not primarily an urban, affliction.
Individuals with "special powers" gained enormous followings.
They could, they said, project Qi, the "energy field of the
Universe," out of their bodies to change the molecular structure
of a chemical 2000 kilometers away, to communicate with
aliens, to cure diseases. Some patients died under the
ministrations of one of these "masters of Qi Gong" who was
arrested and convicted in 1993. Wang Hongcheng, an amateur
chemist, claimed to have synthesized a liquid, small amounts of
which, when added to water, would convert it to gasoline or the
equivalent. For a time he was funded by the army and the secret
police, but when his invention was found to be a scam he was
arrested and imprisoned. Naturally the story spread that his
misfortune resulted not from fraud, but from his unwillingness
to reveal his "secret formula" to the government. (Similar stories
have circulated in America for decades, usually with the
government role replaced by a major oil or auto company.)
Asian rhinos are being driven to extinction because their horns,
when pulverized, are said to prevent impotence; the market
encompasses all of East Asia.
The government of China and the Chinese Communist Party
were alarmed by certain of these developments. On December
5, 1994, they issued a joint proclamation that read in part:
[P]ublic education in science has been withering in recent years. At
the same time, activities of superstition and ignorance have been
growing, and antiscience and pseudoscience cases have become
frequent. Therefore, effective measures must be applied as soon as
possible to strengthen public education in science. The level of public
education in science and technology is an important sign of the
national scientific accomplishment. It is a matter of overall importance
in economic development, scientific advance, and the progress of
society. We must be attentive and implement such public education as
part of the strategy to modernize our socialist country and to make our
nation powerful and prosperous. Ignorance is never socialist, nor is
poverty.
So pseudoscience in America is part of a global trend. Its causes,
dangers, diagnosis, and treatment are likely to be similar
everywhere. Here, psychics ply their wares on extended
television commercials, personally endorsed by entertainers.
They have their own channel, the "Psychic Friends Network"; a
million people a year sign on and use such guidance in their
everyday lives. For the CEOs of major corporations, for
financial analysts, for lawyers and bankers there is a species of
astrologer/soothsayer/psychic ready to advise on any matter.
"If people knew how many people, especially the very rich and
powerful ones, went to psychics, their jaws would drop through
the floor," says a psychic from Cleveland, Ohio. Royalty has
traditionally been vulnerable to psychic frauds. In ancient China
and Rome astrology was the exclusive property of the emperor;
any private use of this potent art was considered a capital
offense. Emerging from a particularly credulous Southern
California culture, Nancy and Ronald Reagan relied on an
astrologer in private and public matters - unknown to the
voting public. Some portion of the decision-making that
influences the future of our civilization is plainly in the hands of
charlatans. If anything, the practice is comparatively muted in
America; its venue is worldwide.
As amusing as some of pseudoscience may seem, as confident
as we may be that we would never be so gullible as to be swept
up by such a doctrine, we know it's happening all around us.
Transcendental Meditation and Aum Shinrikyo seem to have
attracted a large number of accomplished people, some with
advanced degrees in physics or engineering. These are not
doctrines for nitwits. Something else is going on.
What's more, no one interested in what religions are and how
they begin can ignore them. While vast barriers may seem to
stretch between a local, single-focus contention of
pseudoscience and something like a world religion, the
partitions are very thin. The world presents us with nearly
insurmountable problems. A wide variety of solutions are
offered, some of very limited worldview, some of portentous
sweep. In the usual Darwinian natural selection of doctrines,
some thrive for a time, while most quickly vanish. But a few -
sometimes, as history has shown, the most scruffy and least
prepossessing among them - may have the power to profoundly
change the history of the world.
The continuum stretching from ill-practiced science,
pseudoscience, and superstition (New Age or Old), all the way
to respectable mystery religion, based on revelation, is
indistinct. I try not to use the word "cult" in its usual meaning of
a religion the speaker dislikes, but try to reach for the headstone
of knowledge - do they really know what they claim to know?
Everyone, it turns out, has relevant expertise.
I am critical of the excesses of theology, because at the extremes
it is difficult to distinguish pseudoscience from rigid,
doctrinaire religion. Nevertheless, I want to acknowledge at the
outset the prodigious diversity and complexity of religious
thought and practice over the millennia; the growth of liberal
religion and ecumenical fellowship during the last century; and
the fact that - as in the Protestant Reformation, the rise of
Reform Judaism, Vatican II, and the so-called higher criticism of
the Bible - religion has fought (with varying degrees of success)
its own excesses. But in parallel to the many scientists who seem
reluctant to debate or even publicly discuss pseudoscience,
many proponents of mainstream religions are reluctant to take
on extreme conservatives and fundamentalists. If the trend
continues, eventually the field is theirs; they can win the debate
by default.
One religious leader writes to me of his longing for "disciplined
integrity" in religion:
We have grown far too sentimental. . . . Devotionalism and cheap
psychology on one side, and arrogance and dogmatic intolerance on
the other distort authentic religious life almost beyond recognition.
Sometimes I come close to despair, but then I live tenaciously and
always with hope. . . . Honest religion, more familiar than its critics
with the distortions and absurdities perpetrated in its name, has an
active interest in encouraging a healthy skepticism for its own
purposes. . . . There is the possibility for religion and science to forge a
potent partnership against pseudo-science. Strangely, I think it would
soon be engaged also in opposing pseudo-religion.
Pseudoscience differs from erroneous science. Science thrives
on errors, cutting them away one by one. False conclusions are
drawn all the time, but they are drawn tentatively. Hypotheses
are framed so they are capable of being disproved. A succession
of alternative hypotheses is confronted by experiment and
observation. Science gropes and staggers toward improved
understanding. Proprietary feelings are of course offended
when a scientific hypothesis is disproved, but such disproofs
are recognized as central to the scientific enterprise.
Pseudoscience is just the opposite. Hypotheses are often framed
precisely so they are invulnerable to any experiment that offers
a prospect of disproof, so even in principle they cannot be
invalidated. Practitioners are defensive and wary. Skeptical
scrutiny is opposed. When the pseudoscientific hypothesis fails
to catch fire with scientists, conspiracies to suppress it are
deduced.
Motor ability in healthy people is almost perfect. We rarely
stumble and fall, except in young and old age. We can learn
tasks such as riding a bicycle or skating or skipping, jumping
rope or driving a car, and retain that mastery for the rest of our
lives. Even if we've gone a decade without doing it, it comes
back to us effortlessly. The precision and retention of our motor
skills may, however, give us a false sense of confidence in our
other talents. Our perceptions are fallible. We sometimes see
what isn't there. We are prey to optical illusions. Occasionally
we hallucinate. We are error-prone. A most illuminating book
called How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human
Reason in Everyday Life, by Thomas Gilovich, shows how
people systematically err in understanding numbers, in
rejecting unpleasant evidence, in being influenced by the
opinions of others. We're good in some things, but not in
everything. Wisdom lies in understanding our limitations. "For
Man is a giddy thing," teaches William Shakespeare. That's
where the stuffy skeptical rigor of science comes in.
Perhaps the sharpest distinction between science and
pseudoscience is that science has a far keener appreciation of
human imperfections and fallibility than does pseudoscience (or
"inerrant" revelation). If we resolutely refuse to acknowledge
where we are liable to fall into error, then we can confidently
expect that error - even serious error, profound mistakes - will
be our companion forever. But if we are capable of a little
courageous self-assessment, whatever rueful reflections they
may engender, our chances improve enormously.
If we teach only the findings and products of science - no matter
how useful and even inspiring they may be - without
communicating its critical method, how can the average person
possibly distinguish science from pseudoscience? Both then are
presented as unsupported assertion. In Russia and China, it
used to be easy. Authoritative science was what the authorities
taught. The distinction between science and pseudoscience was
made for you. No perplexities needed to be muddled through.
But when profound political changes occurred and strictures on
free thought were loosened, a host of confident or charismatic
claims - specially those that told us what we wanted to hear -
gained a vast following. Every notion, however improbable,
became authoritative.
It is a supreme challenge for the popularizer of science to make
clear the actual, tortuous history of its great discoveries and the
misapprehensions and occasional stubborn refusal by its
practitioners to change course. Many, perhaps most, science
textbooks for budding scientists tread lightly here. It is
enormously easier to present in an appealing way the wisdom
distilled from centuries of patient and collective interrogation of
Nature than to detail the messy distillation apparatus. The
method of science, as stodgy and grumpy as it may seem, is far
more important than the findings of science.
Notes
1. "No thinking religious person believes this. Old hat," writes one of
the referees of this book. But many "scientific creationists" not only
believe it, but are making increasingly aggressive and successful
efforts to have it taught in the schools, museums, zoos, and textbooks.
Why? Because adding up the "begats," the ages of patriarchs and
others in the Bible, gives such a figure, and the Bible is "inerrant."
2. Although it's hard for me to see a more profound cosmic connection,
than the astonishing findings of modern nuclear astrophysics: Except
for hydrogen, all the atoms that make each of us up - the iron in our
blood, the calcium in our bones, the carbon in our brains - were
manufactured in red giant stars thousands of light-years away in
space and billions of years ago in time. We are, as I like to say,
starstuff.
RELATED ARTICLE: SCIENCE A SOURCE OF SPIRITUALITY
In its encounter with Nature, science invariably elicits a sense of
reverence and awe. The very act of understanding is a
celebration of joining, merging, even if on a very modest scale,
with the magnificence of the Cosmos. And the cumulative
worldwide buildup of knowledge over time converts science
into something only a little short of a transnational,
transgenerational metamind.
"Spirit" comes from the Latin word "to breathe." What we
breathe is air, which is certainly matter, however thin. Despite
usage to the contrary, there is no necessary implication in the
word "spiritual" that we are talking of anything other than
matter (including the matter of which the brain is made), or
anything outside the realm of science. On occasion, I will feel
free to use the word. Science is not only compatible with
spirituality; it is a profound source of spiritually. When we
recognize our place in an immensity of light-years and in the
passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and
subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation
and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions
in the presence of great art or music or literature, or of acts of
exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi
or Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion that science and
spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice
to both.
RELATED ARTICLE: THE METAPHYSICIST HAS NO LABORATORY
The truth may be puzzling or counterintuitive. It may contradict
deeply held beliefs. Experiment is how we get a handle on it.
At a dinner many decades ago, the physicist Robert W. Wood
was asked to respond to the toast, "To physics and
metaphysics." By "metaphysics," people then meant something
like philosophy, or truths you could recognize just by thinking
about them. They could also have included pseudoscience.
Wood answered along these lines:
The physicist has an idea. The more he thinks it through, the
more sense it seems to make. He consults the scientific
literature. The more he reads, the more promising the idea
becomes. Thus prepared, he goes to the laboratory and devises
an experiment to test it. The experiment is painstaking. Many
possibilities are checked. The accuracy of measurement is
refined, the error bars reduced. He lets the chips fall where they
may. He is devoted only to what the experiment teaches. At the
end of all this work, through careful experimentation, the idea
is found to be worthless. So the physicist discards it, frees his
mind from the clutter of error, and moves on to something
else.(1)
The difference between physics and metaphysics, Wood
concluded as he raised his glass high, is not that the
practitioners of one are smarter than the practitioners of the
other. The difference is that the metaphysicist has no laboratory.
Note
As the pioneering physicist Benjamin Franklin put it, "In going
on with these experiments, how many pretty systems do we build,
which we soon find ourselves obliged to destroy?" At the very
least, he thought, the experience sufficed to "help to make a vain
Man humble."
RELATED ARTICLE: THE SIREN SONG OF UNREASON
A Candle in the Dark is the title of a courageous, largely
Biblically-based, book by Thomas Ady, published in London in
1656, attacking the witchhunts then in progress as a scam "to
delude the people." Any illness or storm, anything out of the
ordinary, was popularly attributed to witchcraft. Witches must
exist, Ady quoted the "witchmongers" as arguing - "else how
should these things be, or come to pass?" For much of our
history, we were so fearful of the outside world, with its
unpredictable dangers, that we gladly embraced anything that
promised to soften or explain away the terror. Science is an
attempt, largely successful, to understand the world, to get a
grip on things, to get hold of ourselves, to steer a safe course.
Microbiology and meteorology now explain what only a few
centuries ago was considered sufficient cause to burn women to
death.
Ady also warned of the danger that "the Nations [will] perish
for lack of knowledge." Avoidable human misery is more often
caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly
our ignorance about ourselves. I worry that, especially as the
Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will
seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason
more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before?
Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in
times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or
nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and
purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then,
habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.
The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles.
Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.
RELATED ARTICLE: AN ABSENCE OF ALIEN ARTIFACTS
Some [alleged UFO] abductees say that tiny implants, perhaps
metallic, were inserted into their bodies - high up their nostrils,
for example. These implants, alien abduction therapists tell us,
sometimes accidentally fall out, but "in all but a few of the cases
the artifact has been lost or discarded." These abductees seem
stupefyingly incurious. A strange object - possibly a transmitter
sending telemetered data about the state of your body to an
alien spaceship somewhere above the Earth - drops out of your
nose; you idly examine it and then throw it in the garbage.
Something like this is true, we are told, of the majority of
abduction cases.
A few such "implants" have been produced and examined by
experts. None has been confirmed as of unearthly manufacture.
No components are made of unusual isotopes, despite the fact
that other stars and other worlds are known to be constituted of
different isotopic proportions than the Earth. There are no
metals from the transuranic "island of stability," where
physicists think there should be a new family of nonradioactive
chemical elements unknown on Earth.
What abduction enthusiasts considered the best case was that of
Richard Price, who claims that aliens abducted him when he
was eight years old and implanted a small artifact in his penis.
A quarter century later a physician confirmed a "foreign body"
embedded there. After eight more years, it fell out. Roughly a
millimeter in diameter and 4 millimeters long, it was carefully
examined by scientists from MIT and Massachusetts General
Hospital. Their conclusion? Collagen formed by the body at
sites of inflammation plus cotton fibers from Price's underpants.
On August 28, 1995, television stations owned by Rupert
Murdoch ran what was purported to be an autopsy of a dead
alien, shot on 16-millimeter film. Masked pathologists in
vintage radiation-protection suits (with rectangular glass
windows to see out of) cut up a large-eyed 12-fingered figure
and examined the internal organs. While the film was
sometimes out of focus, and the view of the cadaver often
blocked by the humans crowding around it, some viewers
found the effect chilling. The Times of London, also owned by
Murdoch, didn't know what to make of it, although it did quote
one pathologist who thought the autopsy performed with
unseemly and unrealistic haste (ideal, though, for television
viewing). It was said to have been shot in New Mexico in 1947
by a participant, now in his eighties, who wished to remain
anonymous. What appeared to be the clincher was the
announcement that the leader of the film (its first few feet)
contained coded information that Kodak, the manufacturer,
dated to 1947. However, it turns out that the full film magazine
was not presented to Kodak, but at most the cut leader. For all
we know, the leader could have been cut from a 1947 newsreel,
abundantly archived in America, and the "autopsy" staged and
filmed separately and recently. There's a dragon footprint all
right - but a fakable one. If this is a hoax, it requires not much
more cleverness than crop circles and the MJ-12 document.
In none of these stories is there anything strongly suggestive of
extraterrestrial origin. There is certainly no retrieval of cunning
machinery far beyond current technology. No abductee has
filched a page from the captain's logbook, or an examining
instrument, or taken an authentic photograph of the interior of
the ship, or come back with detailed and verifiable scientific
information not hitherto available on Earth. Why not? These
failures must tell us something.
Since the middle of the twentieth century, we've been assured
by proponents of the extraterrestrial hypothesis that physical
evidence - not star maps remembered from years ago, not scars,
not disturbed soil, but real alien technology - was in hand. The
analysis would be released momentarily. These claims go back
to the earliest crashed saucer scam of Newton and GeBauer.
Now it's decades later and we're still waiting. Where are the
articles published in the refereed scientific literature, in the
metallurgical and ceramics journals, in publications of the
Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, in Science or
Nature?
Such a discovery would be momentous. If there were real
artifacts, physicists and chemists would be fighting for the
privilege of discovering that there are aliens among us - who
use, say, unknown alloys, or materials of extraordinary tensile
strength or ductility or conductivity. The practical implications
of such a finding - never mind the confirmation of an alien
invasion - would be immense. Discoveries like this are what
scientists live for. Their absence must tell us something.
Carl Sagan is the David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences
and the Director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell University.
The American Astronomical Society recently cited him for his "extraordinary
contributions to planetary science" and, in 1994, the National Academy of
Sciences awarded him its highest honor, the Public Welfare Medal, for
distinguished contributions in the application of science to the public welfare. He
is a CSICOP Fellow and recipient of CSICOP's In Praise of Reason Award
(1987) and its first Isaac Asimov Award (1994).
GL
