Michael Shermer
on Larry King Live on UFOs
I thought eSkeptic readers might appreciate some of the more amusing (and nasty) letters I have received (appended below), plus one very revealing letter about Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin’s UFO sighting on the way to the moon, recounted by him on the show (revealing UFOlogist Stanton Friedman to be an incompetent researcher). Unfortunately it took Buzz a long time to get to the point of the stor which was that the UFO turned out to be one of the panels from the Apollo rocket booster so I fear that it might have been missed by viewers that he was, in fact, a UFO skeptic.
Please note as well that former Arizona governor Fife Symington described what he saw during the Phoenix Lights event as otherworldly.I spoke at length with Fife before and after the show and found him to be a most thoughtful, intelligent, and warm individual with no special propensity toward gullibility (any more than the rest of us normally express), so after the show I asked him,How do you know what you saw was otherworldly, when none of us has any experience whatsoever with other worlds? Yet we have vast experience with strange and unusual secret military aircraft from this world that we find out about years later.†His response to me in private was similar to what he said on the show: it is possible that it was some secret military experimental aircraft, but he was so awed by what he saw that the military aircraft explanation just seemed too unlikely. I noted both on the show and in private that in science it’s okay to just say I don’ know and leave it at that.
Overall I find such shows to be a frustrating experience, which is why I brought along the little toy aliens to break up the gravitas of the conversation, plus to make the point that whatever actual aliens from another planet will look like, it most definitely will not be that they are bilaterally symmetrical bipedal primates, which only happened once on this planet in two billion years of biological evolution and hundreds of billions of different species.