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IsaacKoi
New Member
United Kingdom
14 Posts |
 Posted - 04/23/2006 : 08:34:50
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Greetings,
I've failed to achieve any real success when posting the request below on a couple of UFO discussion Lists. Since those Lists appeared to have rather limited participation by skeptics, I thought I'd try my luck here.
Kind Regards,
Isaac Koi
Only idiots believe in UFOs
The view that "only idiots believe in UFOs" (or variations thereon, such as "only nutters report UFOs" or "only idiots bother investigating UFO reports) is one that I've heard friends and colleagues express.
It is also one that has been implicit in quite a few recent press articles in the UK, including the articles at the following links:
http://tinyurl.com/8dtwe
http://tinyurl.com/8z2v5
http://tinyurl.com/dtwd9
I don't believe that I can be alone in hearing such dismissive views being expressed.
However, despite a fair bit of effort, I have not found any explicit statements of such views by any sceptics of any note.
Indeed, quite the contrary.
For example, despite a suggestion that Philip J Klass has made such comments , in fact Klass makes the following comment in his "UFOs Explained" (in the Introduction):
"Some skeptics dismiss the UFO question without investigation in the belief that reports come only from 'kooks'. This is not so, as numerous UFO cases analyzed in this book will demonstrate. Many come from seemingly honest, intelligent and often well-educated citizens, including scientists, law-enforcement officers and aircraft flight crews."
Similarly, the Condon Report (which, to put it mildly, is not generally considered to be biased in favour of ETH proponents) includes a section by Aldora Lee on opinion polls relating to UFOs. That section suggests that in fact there is some evidence that the _greater_ their education, the _more_ likely people are to think that flying saucers are "real". Page 320 of the version of the Condon Report available online at the link below includes the following: "Although the relationships are not strong, the results of the 1966 Gallup poll suggest that education is related to opinions. The greater the education, the higher the proportion who indicated they have heard of flying saucers, who think they are real rather than the product of imagination and who believe that there are people somewhat like ourselves living on other planets." See:
http://ncas.sawco.com/condon/text/s3chap07.htm
So, whilst it seems that everyone agrees that some skeptics and/or members of the public think UFO reports only come from idiots/kooks, I'm still looking for an explicit quotation to this effect by any prominent individual. About the closest I've found in the last few days is in an article by Bruce Maccabee (at the link below) which quotes the editor of a magazine called "Applied Optics" referring to "UFO believers" as "99 and 44/100ths percent kooks." See:
http://www.stardrive.org/maccabee.shtml
I'm currently planning on writing more on this topic and am attempting to find a few pithy quotations which explicitly express such dismissive views of UFO witnesses/believers generally.
I've read a couple of dozen books by UFO skeptics (e.g. Klass, Oberg, Condon, Sheaffer, Menzel and others) plus more general books on skepticism generally (e.g. by Gardner, Sagan and others) but not had any joy.
I'd welcome any references, suggestions or recommendations anyone has.
Any thoughts?
All the best,
Isaac Koi
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marfknox
SFN Die Hard
USA
3739 Posts |
Posted - 04/23/2006 : 08:50:25 [Permalink]
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I've met college students who seemed perfectly normal who believe in alien abduction. But I also know a guy who has a college degree, has traveled the world, and is in his 60's, and claims that he reguarly channels the "5th dimention", which as he describes it is some kind of parallel universe. I think both that claim and the claims of alien abductions are false. I do not hold this opinion because I think believers are "kooks". I hold this opinion because there is no scientific evidence of alien abductions. When there is a lack of hard evidence, it is the skeptical position to tend toward the simplest explanation. Given what we know about the unreliability of human eye-witnesses (which are the only evidence for alien abductions), how easily humans can hallucinate, and the power of suggestion, that this whole phenomenon is just in peoples' heads is the most simple explanation. As alien abduction imagery has increased in pop and underground cultures, the number of people claiming to have been abducted increases. And yet, as the number of security and other cameras has incredibly increased, photographic images that claim to be of spaceships have not improved in quality.
Hell, consider religion. Obviously all religions can't be right. And yet, millions of people from every major religion have had powerful spiritual experiences that would seem to prove their faith. Obviously most or all of those millions of spiritual experiences are being interpreted incorrectly by the people having them. It doesn't mean they are kooks, just that they are not skeptics. |
"Too much certainty and clarity could lead to cruel intolerance" -Karen Armstrong
Check out my art store: http://www.marfknox.etsy.com
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BigPapaSmurf
SFN Die Hard
3192 Posts |
Posted - 04/23/2006 : 09:29:28 [Permalink]
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Yeah you just need to get over it, if you take any religion or lack thereof as true you can assume the other 90% of the world is loony.
Better to think of the world of humans as highly susceptible to wishful thinking, after all most of them are rational they just dont have functioning bullshit receptors. |
"...things I have neither seen nor experienced nor heard tell of from anybody else; things, what is more, that do not in fact exist and could not ever exist at all. So my readers must not believe a word I say." -Lucian on his book True History
"...They accept such things on faith alone, without any evidence. So if a fraudulent and cunning person who knows how to take advantage of a situation comes among them, he can make himself rich in a short time." -Lucian critical of early Christians c.166 AD From his book, De Morte Peregrini |
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Kil
Evil Skeptic
USA
13477 Posts |
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Gorgo
SFN Die Hard
USA
5310 Posts |
Posted - 04/23/2006 : 12:01:05 [Permalink]
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I think you need to define the term idiot. If you're saying that people who believe in irrational things do so because they have less intelligence than others, I'm not sure that can be demonstrated. It may be true, but what kind of intelligence, and how can it be measured?
If you're looking for pithy quotes, I don't have any for UFO's, but I have a couple for other irrational ideas. See below from http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/1990----.htm More comments on the subject at that web address.
-=---------------------
From an interview with David Barsamian in Keeping the Rabble in Line (Common Courage, 1994):
QUESTION: Historian Paul Boyer, in his book When Time Shall Be No More, writes, "Surveys show that," and I find this absolutely stunning, "from one third to one half of the population," he's talking about Americans, "believes that the future can be interpreted in biblical prophecies." Have you heard of these things?
CHOMSKY: I haven't seen that particular number, but I've seen plenty of things like it. I saw a cross-cultural study a couple of years ago, I think it was published in England, which compared a whole range of societies in terms of beliefs of that kind. The U.S. stood out. It was unique in the industrial world. In fact, the measures for the U.S. were similar to pre-industrial societies.
QUESTION: Why is that?
CHOMSKY: That's an interesting question, but it's certainly true. It's a very fundamentalist society. It's like Iran in the degree of fanatic religious commitment. You get extremely strange results. For example, I think about seventy-five percent of the population has a literal belief in the devil. There was a poll several years ago on evolution. People were asked their opinion on various theories of evolution, of how the world came to be what it is. The number of people who believed in Darwinian evolution was less than ten percent. About half the population believed in a church doctrine of divine-guided evolution. Most of the rest presumably believed that the world was created a couple of thousand years ago. This runs across the board. These are very unusual results. Why the U.S. should be off the spectrum on these issues has been discussed and debated for some time.
I remember reading something by a political scientist who writes about these things, Walter Dean Burnham, maybe ten or fifteen years ago. He had also done similar studies. He suggested that this may be a reflection of depoliticization, that is, inability to participate in a meaningful fashion in the political arena, which may have a rather important psychic effect, heightened by the striking disparity between the facts and the ideological depiction of them. What's sometimes called the ideal culture is so radically different from the real culture in terms of the theory of popular participation versus the reality of remoteness and impotence. That's not impossible. People will find some ways of identifying themselves, becoming associated with others, taking part in something. They're going to do it some way or other. If they don't have the options of participation in labor unions, political organizations that actually function, they'll find other ways. Religious fundamentalism is a classic example.
We see that happening in other parts of the world right now. The rise of what's called Islamic fundamentalism is to a significant extent a result of the collapse of secular nationalist alternatives which were either discredited internally or destroyed, leaving few other options. Something like that may be true of American society. This goes back to the nineteenth century. In fact, in the nineteenth century you even had some conscious efforts on the part of business leaders to promote and encourage fire and brimstone-type preachers who would lead people into looking in another way. The same thing happened in the early part of the Industrial Revolution in England. E.P. Thompson writes about this in his classic The Making of the English Working Class.
QUESTION: What is one to make of Clinton's comment in his recent State of the Union speech. He said, "We can't renew our country unless more of us, I mean all of us, are willing to join churches."
CHOMSKY: I don't know exactly what's in his mind, but the ideology is very straightforward. If you devote yourself to activities out of the public arena, we folks [in power] will be able to run it straight....
_____________________________
From another interview with David Barsamian in Keeping the Rabble in Line (Common Courage, 1994):
QUESTION: You talk about the standard techniques and devices that are used to control the population: construction of enemies, both internal and external, the creation of hatreds, religious enthusiasm, and then you say, "the techniques are constant for the same structural reasons." What are those structural reasons?
CHOMSKY: The structural reason is that power is concentrated. The general policy is exactly the way that Adam Smith described it: it's designed for the benefit of its principal architects, the powerful. It serves "the vile maxim of the masters: all for ourselves and nothing for anyone else". Those are the basic rules of the world. The way it works out depends on what the structures are. In our case [the United States] it happens to be basically corporate structure. Much of the population is going to be harmed by that. Those policies are designed to turn state power into an instrument that works for the wealthy. Maybe there are some crumbs for the rest of the population, maybe not. But that's given.
Somehow you have to get the general public to accept this. Hume's paradox does hold: power is in the hands of the governed. If they refuse to accept it, you're in trouble, no matter how many guns you have. How do you do that? There are not a lot of ways. One way is to frighten people and make them cower in terror that only the great leader can save them. Saddam Hussein is coming. You'd better hide in the sand, and by a miracle I'll save you. Then you save them by a miracle. So the combination of fear and awe is a standard technique, used all the time. Diverting people to other things. Elvis stamps. That's a technique. Professional sports are another. Get people to go insane about somebody or other. It also has the effect of creating attitudes of subservience. Somebody else is doing it, and you're supposed to applaud them. They're doing something you could never dream of doing in your life. So there are many devices, but not a lot. You generally find one or another of them being employed.
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I know the rent is in arrears
The dog has not been fed in years
It's even worse than it appears
But it's alright-
Jerry Garcia
Robert Hunter
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| Edited by - Gorgo on 04/23/2006 12:27:14 |
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IsaacKoi
New Member
United Kingdom
14 Posts |
Posted - 04/24/2006 : 03:45:13 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by Kil
Welcome to SFN, IsaacKoi. I don't know how helpful this will be but we have a nice article on UFO terminology.
See:
The War of the Words: Revamping Operational Terminology for UFOs
Thanks for the welcome and the link.
It's an interesting article, but you don't want to get me started on the terminology used within Ufology. I'm a barrister and have a limited tolerance for the often sloppy language used in that field.
Take, for example, the label "skeptic" used in the title of this forum. The term "skeptic" is often used by those that support the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis ("ETH", i.e. that UFOs are probably piloted by extraterrestrials) as a term of abuse. The willingness of the pro-ETHers to label their opposition as "skeptics" implies to bystanders that:
(a) they do not regard themselves as "skeptics" and
(b) that they consider skepticism a bad thing.
However, many of the pro-ETHers would be insulted by any implication that their beliefs and methodology do not conform to a reasonably accurate definition of skepticism.
All the best,
Isaac Koi |
| Edited by - IsaacKoi on 04/24/2006 03:45:40 |
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IsaacKoi
New Member
United Kingdom
14 Posts |
Posted - 04/24/2006 : 03:51:42 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by Gorgo
I think you need to define the term idiot. If you're saying that people who believe in irrational things do so because they have less intelligence than others, I'm not sure that can be demonstrated. It may be true, but what kind of intelligence, and how can it be measured?
Hi Gorgo,
I'm not saying that people who believe in irrational things do so because they have less intelligence than others.
I'm merely looking for pithy quotes expressing such a view.
As my original post above makes clear (I hope), I've heard such views expressed informally but cannot recall such a view being expressed by any well-recognised skeptic or other commentator (such as Carl Sagan, Frank Drake, Philip Klass, Oberg, Sheaffer, Seth Shostak or others).
Are expressions of the view that "only idiots believe in UFOs" only made informally? Perhaps such a view is not expressed in books or in televised debates etc due to concern about potential libel actions?
As for how such a view can be tested, I've been working on an article about this topic for a year or so. There is quite a bit of evidence relevant to this issue in the form of the beliefs of members of MENSA (the high IQ society), Gallup polls, and studies of the education levels of members of ufo groups.
Kind Regards,
Isaac Koi |
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Valiant Dancer
Forum Goalie
USA
4826 Posts |
Posted - 04/24/2006 : 05:08:37 [Permalink]
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Welcome, IsaacKoi to the SFN.
I do not believe that people who report UFO's are idiots. We here in the states even have one US President who has reported one. I definately would not call him an idiot.
The difference lies in how the reporting person phrases the UFO report. Literally thousands of UFOs are seen each year in the US alone. If the person reports it as "I have no frickin clue what that is" or "unidentified radar contact", then the person is merely stating that they are unable to identify what the flying object actually is. If the person reports it as alien craft from another planet and that they have swooped down to perform medical disections of cattle, then it is likely that you are dealing with a whack job.
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Cthulhu/Asmodeus when you're tired of voting for the lesser of two evils
Brother Cutlass of Reasoned Discussion |
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Gorgo
SFN Die Hard
USA
5310 Posts |
Posted - 04/24/2006 : 05:22:50 [Permalink]
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| You want quotes from someone here calling people idiots, they're all over the place. |
I know the rent is in arrears
The dog has not been fed in years
It's even worse than it appears
But it's alright-
Jerry Garcia
Robert Hunter
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Valiant Dancer
Forum Goalie
USA
4826 Posts |
Posted - 04/24/2006 : 07:33:10 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by Gorgo
You want quotes from someone here calling people idiots, they're all over the place.
And this has to do with the topic..... how? |
Cthulhu/Asmodeus when you're tired of voting for the lesser of two evils
Brother Cutlass of Reasoned Discussion |
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Gorgo
SFN Die Hard
USA
5310 Posts |
Posted - 04/24/2006 : 07:35:46 [Permalink]
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quote:
Hi Gorgo,
I'm not saying that people who believe in irrational things do so because they have less intelligence than others.
I'm merely looking for pithy quotes expressing such a view.
Does that explain it to you, Valiant Dancer?
I agree that no prominent person is likely to have used the word 'idiot' in relation to people who believe irrational things. I don't even think Madalyn Murray O'Hair did that.
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I know the rent is in arrears
The dog has not been fed in years
It's even worse than it appears
But it's alright-
Jerry Garcia
Robert Hunter
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| Edited by - Gorgo on 04/24/2006 09:24:11 |
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Gorgo
SFN Die Hard
USA
5310 Posts |
Posted - 04/24/2006 : 08:43:37 [Permalink]
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quote:
of cattle, then it is likely that you are dealing with a whack job.
Is that a medical term? |
I know the rent is in arrears
The dog has not been fed in years
It's even worse than it appears
But it's alright-
Jerry Garcia
Robert Hunter
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Valiant Dancer
Forum Goalie
USA
4826 Posts |
Posted - 04/24/2006 : 09:26:52 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by Gorgo
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">Hi Gorgo,
I'm not saying that people who believe in irrational things do so because they have less intelligence than others.
I'm merely looking for pithy quotes expressing such a view.
Does that explain it to you, Valiant Dancer?
I agree that no prominent person is likely to have used the word 'idiot' in relation to people who believe irrational things. I don't even think Madalyn Murray O'Hair did that.
[/quote]
No, Gorgo, it does not. |
Cthulhu/Asmodeus when you're tired of voting for the lesser of two evils
Brother Cutlass of Reasoned Discussion |
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Valiant Dancer
Forum Goalie
USA
4826 Posts |
Posted - 04/24/2006 : 09:28:43 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by Gorgo
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">of cattle, then it is likely that you are dealing with a whack job.
Is that a medical term?
[/quote]
It is a term meant to convey someone who believes in an irrational cause for a semi-common occurence.
Is that clearer to you? |
Cthulhu/Asmodeus when you're tired of voting for the lesser of two evils
Brother Cutlass of Reasoned Discussion |
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Gorgo
SFN Die Hard
USA
5310 Posts |
Posted - 04/24/2006 : 09:38:53 [Permalink]
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quote:
It is a term meant to convey someone who believes in an irrational cause for a semi-common occurence.
Is that clearer to you?
Someone unlike yourself, I'm sure. |
I know the rent is in arrears
The dog has not been fed in years
It's even worse than it appears
But it's alright-
Jerry Garcia
Robert Hunter
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Valiant Dancer
Forum Goalie
USA
4826 Posts |
Posted - 04/24/2006 : 09:41:56 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by Gorgo
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">
It is a term meant to convey someone who believes in an irrational cause for a semi-common occurence.
Is that clearer to you?
Someone unlike yourself, I'm sure.
[/quote]
Which terms are you finding difficult? Perhaps I could phrase them differently. |
Cthulhu/Asmodeus when you're tired of voting for the lesser of two evils
Brother Cutlass of Reasoned Discussion |
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