Faith vs. Fact

Its quite common to run into this problem. You try to have an open minded conversation about UFOs when suddenly you realize that the person you’re talking to is not open minded at all. they are one of the faithful, a believer in one or more strange ideas and nothing you can say will have the slightest impact.

If you persist you find that these people will lie to you, systematically distort information, mix fact with faith and ruthlessly cherry-pick data to reach whatever conclusion happens to be on their agenda. that’s if they don’t just go on the attack. Like believers in one religion or another they will defend their faith with a fervor that’s spectacular to behold.

Funny that two things fact and faith, so basic, so powerful are so completely misunderstood . In the UFO community, faith and fact are close to becoming synonyms. Even though one describes human thought and the other literally describes the Cosmos.

Here’s what I mean. What exactly is fact? What exactly is faith?

The dictionary defines fact as “Knowledge or information based on real occurrences:

How do we define faith?

Confident belief in the truth–loyalty to a person or thing; allegiance.

They are indeed two diametrically different terms. They might seem similar but, the enabling word in faith is belief. The two enabling words in fact are Knowledge and real. This is a profound difference because fact does not require belief.

In the UFO field the distinction of what is factual or not falls on the so called Ufologist. Luminaries who because of a lack proper peer review (cloistering according to some) can proclaim whatever they want without impeachment. And they do exacly that, to the amusement of people on the outside of the UFO biz. Hence the sharp screeds by engineering types like Aaron Sakulich of Drexel University. He’s been roundly panned by the UFO community even though many of his columns are taken right out of the same cannon believers use.

In most other fields, distinguishing between what is factual and an article of faith is easy. Think of an aerospace engineer, an airframe designer for example. He or she cannot design something based on faith or belief, engineering must be based on verifiable–factual information. An airframe based on faith alone is not going to fly very well. The same goes for a civil engineer, a medical doctor, electricians, or even an artist! You must have a recipe of facts or your project will not succeed. Experience helps but experience can be defined as based on fact. Even if the experience is so ingrained that its intuitive, the intuition itself is coming from experience which (hopefully) is based on facts pertaining to one’s success or failures.

But this is different in other fields. Take religion! Religion substitutes fact with faith. Faith becomes fact, its kind of the engineering of religion. In so the faith/facts becomes belief in the intangible, what life after death is like, what are the personalities the likes and dislikes of the gods. That sort of thing. And so a web of legend and mythology is created to substitute for factual information. Thus belief and faith becomes the “fact” of religion.

The same concept is very much a tradition for some so-called UFOlogests. When one looks at the field of UFOlogy one can see why. Let’s face it, there are, very few facts here, most of the cannon in UFOlogy must be taken as articles of faith. Take for example (more or less selected at random,) the famous Mexican UFO wave of the 1990s There are hundreds of eye witness reports, repeat encounters involving hundreds of people. There were alien encounters of various sorts, even a Roswell type crash and retrieval tale. But facts? There are almost no facts from this ten year period in Mexico. A number of very good but virtually unverifiable photos, lots of testimony and a certain amount of video footage. Footage that has little or no pedagree and is not reproducable. (There is one major exception to this, the so-called Gulf FLIR footage but that’s a whole column in itself.)

Some people argue that the abundance of data adds up to factual information. If one person sees a flying object, believes it’s an aircraft built by an alien race, that’s a data point. It has some significance–to that person certainly.

If a hundred people see the same thing and most believe it’s an alien aircraft? That’s a more reliable data point to many in the UFO field.

If a thousand or ten thousand people see and believe the same thing? That must lend weight to the belief that this in fact was an alien aircraft. Many UFOlogest will ague that there is a preponderance of evidence proving that Earth is being visited by extra terrestrials. The sheer weight of testimony and anecdotal data somehow adds up to factual information .

In the gritty real world of facts, it doesn’t matter how many people believe something. Remember all the people in my example are seeing exactly the same object. Their belief does not change the physical aspects of the thing, their beliefs do not make it an alien aircraft. We don’¢t really know what they saw. Any other conclusion is sheer speculation.

In many parts of UFOolgy where facts are based on such data, this (so the belivers say) proves the existence of aliens, beyond a shadow of a doubt. To many (even to a few prominent Ufologists) a mountain of poor data is significantly better than a single poor data point.

When one compares UFOlogy with almost any other field, one is struck by how backward this method seems. Most of the time, proof is the proof of reproducible evidence. There is no such thing in UFOology. In other feilds, fact comes from a direct result of experimentation or experience. For example; each point on a scuba dive table is a result of a diver’s experience. Think about how useless that tool would be, how deadly if someone’s opinion replaced the gritty facts. But replacement of fact by opinion and belief is done in almost every aspect of UFOlogy.

This is why the field is a circus, fodder for tabloid journalism and a haven for nutcases. What do they expect?

Look at how little progress has been made in not just the last few dozen years but the last several hundred. We do not know ay more about those lights in the sky than our ancestors did. Sure we have lots of information! I can show you people who know intimate details about aliens, their likes and dislikes. What planet they come from, how their spacecraft work or what they eat for breakfast.

But, all of this information must be taken as an article of faith. None of it is factual. And this is not the fault of some giant conspiracy of the US government. The US does not have influence everywhere and I’m not aware of significantly better research going in Europe or the Eastern Europian countries.

It’s a conspiracy all right but it begins by with the face UFOlogy shows the world.

Until and unless UFOlogests stop thinking about what they want to see in UFOs and take a good hard look at what they are actually seeing, the study of UFOs will remain as it is today. A carnival of ideas and conflicting information. A clash of competing faiths and beliefs with very few facts. Useless from a knowledge standpoint. Useful for entertainment but not very good in the quest for knowledge.

In short the study of UFOs will be exactly the same today as it was yesterday and it will be tomorrow unless the UFOlogests stop trying to defend their petty beliefs. Unless they start gathering and cherishing facts.

Since facts seem to be in such short supply, this shouldn’t take them very long. The hard part is going to be, dumping the carnival of beliefs and faith-based material.

That”s going to be difficult indeed, maybe impossible.