Subject:      Confessions of a UFO cynic
From:         jamth@mindspring.com (Jim Muth)
Date:         1997/02/07
Message-Id:   <5dfqi8$t29@camel1.mindspring.com>
Newsgroups:   sci.skeptic


I confess that I am a cynic.  I am cynical when I hear claims of an
ET presence on Earth.  I can't be any other way.  I've been
disappointed too many times, and I'm bitter.  For many years, I
faithfully followed the UFO news, eagerly awaiting the day when the
conclusive evidence would be uncovered, the day when the skeptics
would be forced to eat their words.

That day never came.  And now I realize that such a day most likely
never will come.  I myself have become one of those cold-hearted, fun-
killing, rational-thinking, down-to-earth skeptics that I once so
disliked, and all I can do is ask myself how it happened.

Even as I write these words, the meager remaining evidence of an
actual alien spacecraft crash near Roswell in 1947 is looking more and
more questionable.  The whole event now appears more like a much-
embellished legend than a fact.  Yet despite the questionable
evidence, many still faithfully believe that a space vehicle actually
crashed in the New Mexico desert 50 years ago.  They defend their
belief with vigor, but the very vigor with which they defend their
belief betrays that these people are being driven by their emotions
rather than by their intellects.  I know how it feels -- at one time
I also reasoned about UFO's and ET's with my heart rather than with
my head.

Emotions are powerful things, so powerful that they sometimes prevent
people from seeing facts that stare them in the face.  In the UFO
situation, the fact being denied is that, although there is much
evidence suggestive of an ET presence on Earth, there is absolutely
no conclusive evidence.  It would be exciting if those mysterious
aliens actually were here to tell of life on other worlds and bestow
their technology upon us, but as far as we know they are not here.

Despite the pretensions of the ET believers, the evidence is not
consistent with a covert ET presence on Earth.  Rather, the evidence
is exactly what would be expected if the ET presence were no more than
a collective fantasy.  Real evidence of a real phenomenon is not so
ephemeral.  It does not so consistently fall apart when checked for
accuracy.  I was blind to this fact because I so sincerely wanted the
extraterrestrial visitors to be real.

I wasted too many years trying to imagine loopholes in the laws of
physics, trying to invent ways of overcoming the vast distances of
space and the absolute speed limit of light, the time distortions of
near-light velocities and the impossibly great energies needed to
accelerate a vehicle to that velocity.

I read every unlikely idea I could find that described ways to
overcome these obstacles, including space warps, time warps, parallel
universes and unknown energy sources.  And I read about the cover-ups
and the conspiracies, and about the worldwide panic that would result
if the truth were made public.  Gradually, I came to realize that all
of it is speculation, contrived to support a questionable premise.

In the end I was forced to admit that the presence of alien inter-
stellar vehicles in Earth's atmosphere is a fantasy.  The Grays and
the Blues and all the others are fantasy beings.  Some other solar
systems might be filled with ET traffic, but our solar system is not. 
Regardless of a race's technological development, space is just too
large, light is just too slow, and the laws of physics are just too
rigid for interstellar travel or communication to be practical.  And
without interstellar communication, galactic civilizations cannot
exist.

It makes me sad when I see people on these newsgroups still expecting
the aliens to reveal themselves in the near future and bring about a
golden age of prosperity on Earth.  What can I tell these people?  I
don't enjoy spreading the skeptic message of disappointment, but I can
do nothing else.  The aliens do not reveal themselves because no
aliens are here.  If mankind is to attain a golden age, it will be
through his own efforts.  And to this point, those efforts have been
woefully insufficient.

Yes, I am a skeptic, and I am cynical, and as such I can be honestly
criticized.  But I am skeptical by necessity, not by choice.  I have
been burned too many times.  I have no hope that the things supposedly
happening around the world -- in Belgium, or Mexico City, or anywhere
else -- are of extraterrestrial origin.

Yet there is an actual mystery that needs to be solved.  Both skeptics
and believers can agree on this.  People continue to report things in
the sky that cannot be explained in terms of known phenomena.  Even
if we call these things mass hallucinations, we are left with the task
of explaining mass hallucinations.

Perhaps more progress toward solving this mystery could me made if,
instead of arguing, skeptics and believers could ignore their
differences and join forces to work together on the points where they
agree.  Then again, perhaps if we stopped arguing, we would find that
the debate itself had been the source of most of the fun and mystery.


Jim Muth
jamth@mindspring.com