Category: Deep Thoughts

Materials from the Mysteries of Space and Sky 2023 Conference

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API’s Paul Carr spoke at the Mysteries of Space and Sky 2023 conference in Gambrills, Maryland on the 21st of October. The purpose of the talk was four fold:

  • To discuss the current paradigm for citizen involvement in studying the phenomena and why and how it needs to evolve.
  • To propose some research questions that we can address with data we have or could collect.
  • To introduce the idea of Citizen Science into the UAP space.
  • To encourage everyone to get involved in some way.

As usual, the materials for this talk are published under Creative Commons 1.0. You can copy and remix them as you see fit. Attribution would be nice, but we won’t insist.

Mysteries of Space and Sky 2023 – Presentation materials by Paul Carr is marked with CC0 1.0  

Mysteries of Space and Sky 2023 – talk text by Paul Carr is marked with CC0 1.0

 

The visual aids for the talk can be seen here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HLgHmUsY-46fQnyY746HBoY4SfojICPf/view?usp=share_link

The text of the talk, which was not followed exactly, can be read here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vS6PcRQdKQODc6pbldYNpistTsatuV_ASxIxp6KtgVykZyhc8J4OmsYIvCy3qHsJRP2-djfMJE98V2a/pub

 

 Unidentified Science 10 – Images as Evidence

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There are two things we hear a lot about photographs and videos of UFOs:

  1. It is so easy to fake a photo or video now that they can’t serve as proof of anything.
  2. If UFOs are real, why aren’t there more compelling, bulletproof photos and videos?

It would seem that these two questions are at odds, and to some extent I think they are. However, let me just deal with the first one now – are photos and videos useless?

Proof, Evidence and Truth

Let’s start with a distinction I think I have made before, but needs to be reasserted from time to time – that is there is an important difference between proof and evidence. I’m not splitting hairs here.

Proof is something we basically never get in the real world. In the abstract realms of mathematics and logic, we can prove a proposition, and if you have ever taken an abstract mathematics course, you know that proofs can be very hard to come by. Outside of mathematics, proof is basically not available, nor is it necessary, or even desirable. Some doubt, some willingness to question, is healthy. So, we should never look to a photo or video as “proof” of anything.

What we do ask for is evidence, and the more the merrier. As Christopher Hitchens once said, what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

If you have more than one line of evidence, that is far more convincing than just one, and if you have multiple lines of  evidence that all converge on the same consistent set of ideas without serious contradiction, then we can, in time, reach a level that we call “truth.” Let me take the liberty of defining truth operationally  as some assertion (or better yet, a system of consistent assertions) about the world that you can act upon and think in terms of with confidence.  We tend to take our truths for granted, but they require generations of careful, hard work and emerge from many years of bitter controversy. It is also the case that some truths may one day have to make way for stronger, more powerful truths.

But let’s not throw the word “Evidence” around too carelessly. A video or photo isn’t evidence, unless we specify meaningfully what we think it is evidence of.  Actually, without a hypothesis in play, images are just a collection of numbers.

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At the Grave of Paul Bennewitz

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After smooth jazz, lite beer, and stock photography, one of the greatest evils in the human universe is disinformation – a way of manipulating people (or even entire fields of inquiry) using information crated in fact and mixed with subtle untruths that comport with the target’s expectations. The payload for disinformation can poison the well for an entire area of inquiry, as well as discrediting individuals. It is also a kind of unethical social experiment, to see how the public and media react. As we have also seen recently, it can be used to influence the low information demographic for political gain or to stir up unrest. A skilled disinformer can play his marks like a banjo, and inject well engineered falsehoods into the mythosphere that may take decades to expunge.

No one wants to be played, and in the current environment in which bogus information is pushed our way from many directions, we need to have our defenses up and be vigilant. We need to be especially alert when the news is what we want to hear.

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Unidentified Science 7 – High Strangeness Cases

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This is a work in progress –  notes on high strangeness cases and the hope, if any of a scientific approach to them. What do we mean by high strangeness cases? I mean cases that may or may not involve anomalous aerial phenomena, but go beyond even close encounters of the third kind, and also involve unexpected elements like interactions with the witness, distortions of time, and other strange events that generally fall under the broad category of “paranormal.”

I have resisted lumping paranormal experiences with UAPs, and continue to resist this, because at face value, different categories of human experience could well admit of different explanations. However, what is common in all this is the human experiencer, and in nearly all cases all we have to study are the memories of the experiencers. In Unidentified Science 3, I talked about some of the problem with eyewitness testimony, rooted in the flaws of human perception and memory, and almost as much of a problem are our oversimplified mental models of how these work.

But this is not a reiteration of those concerns, real as they are. I want to make a point about high strangeness cases, and that is that we have no basis for dismissing them out of hand, or for ignoring the stranger elements, or for regarding the experiencers as mentally deranged. We have the experiencers, their memories, and what they are willing to tell us about themselves, and we are not justified in jumping to conclusions about the reality of the experiences. Note that I am not approaching these cases as a psychologist who wants to know how people could possibly remember such absurd things. That is one possible approach, although I don’t think it’s completely satisfying by itself. As a field investigator, I want to find the facts of the case, and we struggle with the facts, if any, masked by all the oddities.

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Unidentified Science 6 – The Probability/Strangeness Matrix

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This time I am going to talk about a specific and easy to understand tool for revealing patterns in our data. It is called the Probability/Strangeness matrix, and it has been around for decades, although I’ve yet to see it used to its full potential.

The matrix is very simple. After we have investigated a case, we rate the case on a scale of 0 to 5 for both probability and strangeness. These two ratings are required to be independent – a case can be strange but improbable, it can be probable but not very strange, or any combination. What we are of course most interested in the small fraction of cases in the upper right hand corner of the matrix that are both probable and strange, and how they move on the matrix as the investigation proceeds. It’s very clear from the plot – usually done with probability on the horizontal axis and strangeness on the vertical – what is going on.

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Unidentified Science 5 – The Virtue of Skepticism

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I spent a fair bit of time trying to think of a clever metaphor for skepticism, and failed, so for now, let me just remind you that I have been saying for some time that skepticism is a virtue and a practice that we must not only accept, but embrace. Before, we do that, though, let me remind you briefly about what skepticism isn’t.

Skepticism isn’t about arguing that one static view of the world is superior to its rivals. It isn’t cynicism, an attitude of superiority, or membership in the elite Tribe of Reason and Science. Nor is it a commitment to discredit any particular controversial claim. Skepticism doesn’t make you better than other people, but properly practiced, it can help you be better than you were, or might have been without it.

Some of you, most I expect, will have painful memories of fundamentalist debunkers calling themselves skeptics, who will take refuge in any half-baked, hand-waving explanation in a storm, so long as it does no violence to their worldview. I promise that we’re not talking about this skepticism in name only, which is actually just motivated reasoning in defense of dogma. It’s easy to claim the critical thinking high ground when no one else challenges you for it, but that is what we are going to do. I’m on the side of discarding the dishonest and the mistaken, and I make so bold as to think that’s what you want as well.

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Unidentified Science 4 – Smarter than we are?

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As I promised at the end of Unidentified Science 3, this time I’m going to take a little break this time from talking about virtuous scientific work. Such work is hard, slow and often reaches a Great Divide where no progress seems possible, but we have gone too far to quit.

So, it’s good to have a little fun once and awhile and indulge in speculation. As long as you clearly label speculation as just that, there is no harm in it, and these little imaginative expeditions can often stimulate really useful new ideas.  After all, that’s one thing science fiction is good for. Like good science fiction, we want our speculations to be informed by the best science we have, admitting that there are leaps across the gap of our ignorance that are simply made up for the amusement of thinking about it.

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Unidentified Science 3 – Perception and Memory

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I started off this series by talking about four virtues I think we are going to have to live by if the study of UFOs is ever going to be accepted as a science: humility, patience, integrity and skepticism. This one is a little bit about skepticism, but mostly about patience.

There is a big problem in Unidentified Aerial Phenomena research that needs to be addressed before we can make any claim of being a scientific enterprise. We are going to need a lot of patience to solve it. The problem is that much, in fact nearly all of our database is eyewitness testimony.

While our research has keep pretty much the same approach as always, science has marched on, and this includes the studies of human perception and memory.

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Unidentified Science 2 – There Is no ET Hypothesis

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This first appeared on API Case Files in audio form in 2014. It has been edited a bit to make it more suitable for a text post.

In the first installment of Unidentified Science, I said I was going to emphasize four important virtues: humility, patience, integrity, and skepticism. Of these, I think the first – humility  – has been the most neglected in the UFO field. The kind of humility I am talking about here is “epistemic” humility: being honest with ourselves and each other about how little we reliably know, and how much what we know is overwhelmed by what we don’t know, understand, or have even imagined.

An example of one type of failure of humility – epistemic arrogance, let us call it – is the wide range of conjectures about non-human intelligence, and our eagerness to assign anomalous experiences to their activity.

I want to state plainly that it is not a stupid question to ask whether there are other intelligences than humans in the universe -beings like us in some ways – and whether we have ever been in direct contact with them. The arrogance comes in with connecting this naive but reasonable question with any claimed evidence or absence of evidence of alien visitation. It is overreaching to think we should somehow know what an alien visitation would look like, how they and their technology would behave, what the purposes of their visits would be, and what sort of phenomena we would detect should they be present.

Not only are we safe in saying that we simply don’t know these things, but just as likely in my view, ET intelligence – if it exists – is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine  – to paraphrase the famous pronouncement know as “Haldane’s Law”. We just have no idea what to look for, except that it’s unlikely to be what we expect.

I will call the notion that an ET intelligence is responsible for some UFO events the “Extraterrestrial Conjecture” , and I’d like to explain why I don’t call it the “Extraterrestrial Hypothesis.”

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