Um, okay, initial thoughts.
Firstly there are (at least) two levels of Ufology – those that do it professionally or “constantly” and those that get interested or involved from time to time.
I’ll treat this from the viewpoint of the second-level (i.e. amateur) Ufologist & debunker, since few of us have access to primary sources.
A. A failure to look at the literature that is available about all of these.
Agreed, and it applies
both ways – the pro party constantly brings up successfully(?) debunked material and the con party hasn’t done quite as much background research, dealing (mainly) with things on a case-by-case basis.
B. An unwillingness to recognize that the “specific details of how something is to be done” are very much more important than broad general notions about the laws of physics.
This I have to disagree with vehemently, as an engineer. If someone comes to me and says “Hey I’ve got a great idea, if we turn the widgets round it’ll pull instead of push” (or some other inanity) then they're likely to be wrong regardless of "specific details": if something is not possible under the laws of physics then it doesn’t matter about the details of a design – painting your motorbike red does not make it go faster. And “specific details” of a UFO are, to say the least, few and far between.
C. An enormous arrogance in thinking that if certain things were true or certain technologies were real, these all-wise pseudo-scientists would know about them. They don’t, so the notions must not be true. None of this is to say that there hasn’t been a lot of pro-UFO garbage published as well. But Ufologists tend to be critical of their own kind. The pseudo-scientific anti-Ufologists never seem to want to critique another debunker no matter how false the claims. They repeat the claims rather than pointing out the fallacies.
Agreed again, note that he does say that the pro-UFO crowd do it also. But then goes on to accept that there’s a lot of garbage published – in other words he’s a debunker of the stuff HE doesn’t believe. The third point (about debunkers not debunking other debunkers) is more valid, but not entirely true: the general attitude is “if it’s been shown to be wrong then it’s wrong, why go further” but I have seen cases (even on SciForums) where one or more anti-posters have pointed out errors in another anti’s explanation.
And I'm very much in two minds (or 1-1/2) about the "if certain things were true or certain technologies were real, these all-wise pseudo-scientists would know about them" - it's
incredibly hard to keep everything secret, there are people who's jobs are finding out about new stuff (particularly aircraft) and ANY hint at all would send them off on a hunt.
In the interval I had examined two of his books and was able to quote from him as to why debunkers believe what they believe
1.”Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons”p.297 “Why People Believe Weird Things” Owl Books, 2002, p.297
2. The Confirmation Bias: “The tendency to seek or interpret evidence favorable to already existing beliefs, and to ignore or reinterpret evidence unfavorable to already existing beliefs”. Why People Believe Weird Things” p. 299.
Obviously these are right on about the pseudo-scientists.
But no acknowledgement that both of those work both ways?
There are all kinds of comments to the effect that all there is on the UFO scene is anecdotal data. This is more pseudo-science. “Anecdote” is defined as “a short account of an interesting incident or event, often biographical” (Webster’s Encyclopedic Dictionary); also “a short story narrating a detached incident or fact of an interesting nature; a biographical incident; a single passage of private life” (New Webster’s Dictionary).
The famous RB 47 case involves detailed testimony from a well trained military crew of 7 flying a very sophisticated USAF RB-47 aircraft whose encounter with a UFO lasted almost an hour and was visually observed and by radar on the ground as well. This is absolutely not a detached incident and certainly not an anecdote.
Now he’s nit-picking: how is the above (RB-47) case NOT “a short account of an interesting incident or event, often biographical”?
An hour-long event which was interesting (to say the least), recounted by those who were there (biographical).
So maybe their accounts took a while to tell, but they remain anecdotal.
Try this definition: “refers to evidence based on reports of specific individual cases rather than controlled clinical trials”.
Long list of individuals (usually not in their own field) being wrong…
We’ve been through most of those.
. In another excellent example of pseudoscience, we have the statement by Hayden Planetarium director Dr. Neil de Grasse Tyson that our fastest spacecraft, the Voyager would take 70,000 years to go the distance to the nearest star, 4.3 light years. He said this on the Peter Jennings ABC TV Mockumentary of February 24, 2005. This is as pseudo-scientific and misleading as Dr. Campbell’s work. Voyager has no propulsion system on it.
No, this is deliberately dishonest of Friedman, he’s imputing (and knocking down) a meaning that was not in the original statement.
Voyager, by definition, IS our fastest (yet) spacecraft. Simply because it has no propulsion system does not alter that.
Strawman.
More nit-picking.
Okay, we all do that
4. People are notoriously poor observers . . . except, of course, when we depend on their testimony to make identification.
And when we do depend on them for identification it’s with corroborating evidence. Nearly a strawman.
And now the bit supporting the “government secrecy” theory.
The Brits developed radar around 1938. They fooled the Germans into thinking they had no radar for the entire war . . . very important for winning the battle of Britain.
Yup, we Brits did develop radar around 1938 – 27 years after the Germans had it service on a Rhine river boat.
And no we most emphatically DID NOT fool the Germans into thinking we had no radar for the entire war (or for any significant period of it for that matter). There were bombing missions led against our radar stations, jamming tactics, even devices that let night-fighters find our bombers in the dark by homing in on the bombers’ own target-finding radar. Professor R. V. Jones documents much of the measure/ counter-measure/ counter-counter-measure war in his book
Most Secret War. There are many other books on the radar war, but that’s one I re-read fairly often.
So please Friedman, tell me again what defines a pseudo-scientist:
…the failure of the pseudo-scientists to do their homework before putting their mouths or computers in gear.
It is pseudo-scientific for a so-called scientist to make false claims and ignore the very data he claims doesn’t exist, even when published by noted colleagues.
Hmm, okay.
One thing I will say (from a personal perspective) with regard to reading the “backlog” of evidence for a secondary-level !researcher": it’s notoriously flaky.
We have to rely on pre-digested reports for the main part - websites and books that have
already filtered the evidence to suit their own perspective.
For example Timothy Good, supposedly the ex-MoD (UK Ministry of Defence) UFO man (slight exaggeration on his part, he overstates his actual duties on that score in all of his publicity), is, according to a lot of UFOlogists, a good source.
I started (but didn’t finish) one his later books wherein he describes being in a café when he decided to test if the waitress was an alien.
The words are mine – the anecdote is his -
“I sent the question telepathically: are you an alien?”
As she walked past me she nodded and smiled gently.
Confirmation! I left immediately.
Er, excuse me: first of all you have to confirm the existence of telepathy, then you have to confirm that these particular aliens use it and then… has no-one EVER been seated on their own in a café before and have the waitress nod and smile at them out of politeness as she walks past?
Or does that only happen in the cafés I frequent?
Having seen what Good accepts as “evidence”*, why bother reading any more?
* Good is actually on my list for a thread on “Dishonesty or Gullibility in UFO Literature” – I’ve read a few of his books and he doesn’t seem to give any critical thought whatsoever to his accounts. He accepts them at face value and builds hypothesis after hypothesis on the strength of fabrications.