I watch and chuckle at UFO updates, a private email forum which has some heavy hitters in the UFO ‘biz.” . Recently there was an amusing exchange between Christopher Allan, a British critic who’s written a few things about Roswell and other celebrated UFO events and me buddy, Alfred Lehmberg, highly decorated combat veteran, warrior poet and all around strange guy.
The two of them exchanged verbiage about the ETH for a time, Lehmberg wound up his argument (such as it was) with this.
“Mr. Allan, it’s obvious that you would never find what you would
accept as ‘acceptable evidence’ — you’ll keep raising the bar
or chasing your retreating evidentiary horizon in sputteringly
obtuse denial.. always demanding higher acceptance levels like
other moopy klasskurtxians in your avian camp. If instead you
would pause to examine, seriously, www.ufoevidence.org for a
huge catalog of multiple physical trace databases, CUFOS, NICAP,
STURROCK and others, all available forensics… e.g.photos of
plaster casts of landing gears, soil changes… a virtual
_museum_ of data that the SETI “they can’t get here” partisans
should rub their anti-empirical beaks in. Ted Phillip’s work
alone, around _5000_ cases, is abundant to stun the “no
evidence” partisans… _if_ they got off their lazily assumptive
buns and started chasing the data, instead of “engaging in a
sociopolitical inebriate frenzy,” and driving that data, as they
must.
Think of that!”
I’m often amused at this mindset. Mr. Lehmberg in his ever charming and insulting way is trying to tell Allen that eventually, nothing plus nothing equals something. And so nothing plus a million nothings equals something important.
It goes like this.“Since many people see UFOs and a few encounters have traces we can conclude that Klatu and the Robot Gort or (insert your favorite aliens here) have indeed visited planet Earth. We should all stop looking for evidence (because we have a whole lot of it.) and begin writing learned articles on alien sociology and reverse engineer their spacecraft so we can all have free energy and take trips to the Pleiades.
According to Mr. Lehmberg and so many people in the UFO ‘biz’, we should allow the data to drive our conclusions. He’s very mistaken. Data alone is irrelevant. Look at any UFO cult, ask the followers of Rael, of Hubbard, of Do. All of them allowed data alone to drive their conclusions. It resulted in the untimely deaths of several dozen Haven’s Gate followers. Data alone is a very poor substitute for evidence which is (I hope) what Mr. Lehmberg meant.
Conclusions should never be data driven, they should always be *evidence* driven or fact driven.
Some helpful terms.
Data;
Factual information, especially information organized for analysis or used to reason or make decisions.
Evidence;
A thing or things helpful in forming a conclusion or judgment: The broken window was evidence that a burglary had taken place. Scientists weigh the evidence for and against a hypothesis.
Note that data is factual *information,* not fact itself. I.E. someone so states that this information is a fact but does not necessarily provide *evidence* as to the nature of the data. Factual information could be fact or fiction considering its source. Data therefore could be a (and often is) a systematized lie., a distortion or a falsehood. Allowing data to drive a conclusion is allowing the *originator* of the data to drive the conclusion. This is in effect, allowing others to drive you.
In the realm of rampant belief it’s easy to believe and i’ts easy to find data to back up a belief. Really anything will do. Some words in an old book, thoughts written down by a drug crazed guru or the mindless blathering of TV advertising All of this is data which could be true or false depending on the credentials of the person issuing the data.
Mr Allen tossed the towel at this point quite understandably!
“Looks like it is heads you win, tails I lose.
I am bowing out of this debate. Your thinking is on a level far
too high for me to contemplate. My mind is truly numbed,
confused and flummoxed by it all.
A former editor of FSR once advised me to quit ufology and get
some mental relaxation by taking up carpentry or gardening.
Whilst risking possible backache from the latter, I now propose
to do just that.
CDA”
Mr Lehmberg responded;
“I think that’s, largely, a self-inflicted flummox, Sir. It’s not
one I’ve, in any way, provoked. Might I suggest worm farming? we’ll see you when you come back from the moors.”
Such is the state of intelligent research in the UFO biz. As I said; it always brings a chuckle.