“an illustrative account”

Living in Colorado, I try to take interest in our local fringe personalities and organizations. Those like Richard Heene of Fort Collins, the father of balloon-boy fame, is a self-described ‘psyentist’ (homonym of ‘scientist’) who not only built a large metallic balloon and chased storms as widely reported, but also investigates psychic phenomena and what he believes to be intense magnetic anomalies within tornadoes.

Jeff Peckman of Denver is another. After failing in 2003 to get a ballot measure passed to promote public safety through “increasing peacefulness”, he has recently succeeded in gaining a sufficient number of signatures to get a new measure on the ballot for the coming city elections. This measure, if accepted by Denver voters, would assemble a commission to prepare the city for a possible visit by extraterrestrials. To back up his claim, he drew upon evidence provided by Stan Romanek of Greeley, famous within the UFO community for having the ‘best documented’ testimony of alleged contact with aliens.

To put it bluntly, I don’t think much of Heene or Peckman. I think even less of Romanek.

Romanek is the guy behind the ‘alien in the window‘ video that was pumped-up in the media in May of 2008 but never released. (Reinactments and hoaxes spawned on YouTube, a few of which went viral.) He then claimed to be sitting on strong evidence of alien contact but at the time had been reluctant to release that evidence outside of a DVD documentary that was then in the works.

The UFO community has likely asked itself the question whether Romanek actually has the goods to back his claims. If he could present reliable evidence, it would be of considerable interest to humanity and would secure his reputation and enrich him beyond measure. It wouldn’t make sense for him to embargo the evidence to make a cheap buck off of DVD sales. To an outsider as myself, it’s comical. Why doesn’t the UFO community raise its voice in anger over the mockery Romanek brings to their movement? Has the UFO community grown so cynical of late that no claim, however extraordinary, deserves public challenge by its major players?

In spite of his fringe status in the UFO community, Romanek still makes rounds on the conference circuit. He at least retains the sort of credibility that can draw an audience. However in spite of this credibility (and to my surprise) I recently discovered that someone prominent within the community has stepped-up to take Stan to task on the topic. It’s another Coloradoan by the name of James Carrion of Fort Collins who hadn’t yet hit my radar. He heads MUFON, one of the principle UFO organizations with some 3,000 members.

Carrion wrote in his blog last October:

Now I have said it before and I will say it again, if the Romaneks want to prove their claims, then they should release ALL of their alleged video and photo evidence for the world and independent researchers to examine and analyze. Instead they have tried to paint that I am on some sort of personal vendetta to discredit their claims.

Romanek has even threatened legal action against Carrion over the matter.

This was unexpected. I wondered if this was merely another personality spat within the UFO movement, or perhaps a signal of a serious attempt to reform the UFO movement by purging itself of those who persistently make unfounded claims?

I’d known that MUFON emphasizes investigation — scientific investigation of UFO phenomena — but I never had any reason to take them seriously, in part because I’d never hear them speak an ill word about Romanek or Peckman.

So it was time to give them a fresh look. I found an extended 90 minute interview (mp3 link) with Carrion from last June, predating his blog confrontation of Romanek by several months. He says:

“I’ve always been interested in [mysteries]” (00:04:30)

As do most of us skeptics. He even prefers that they be solved, which is promising.

Until he had joined MUFON as a member a decade back, he had investigated and rejected other groups, presumably for their lack of rigor:

“[I was] exposed to a couple of different groups [...] too esoteric or new age for my liking” (00:05:03)

This I can sympathize with as there exist weird groups — some of which are engaged in the worship of UFOs and extraterrestrial beings. Carrion separates himself from these groups by asserting a skeptical stance:

“I’m truly a skeptic at heart [and focused on taking] a look at the subject from a scientific viewpoint.” (00:05:07)

That’s promising, but what exactly do he and MUFON mean by science?

Of course, merely claiming to do ‘science,’ or to claim to be a scientist, does not make it so. Science is not merely about gathering and cataloging data. It is about drafting hypotheses that make testable predictions. It’s about developing theories that provide explanatory power. It’s about eliminating sources of bias and presenting one’s findings to one’s harshest critics to see if they can pass muster.

My central point of curiosity was whether Carrion and MUFON had any interest in such a standard. It’s a demanding standard that risks soberly abandoning a conclusion where the backing evidence never materializes.

The UFO community has several working hypotheses to help explain UFO phenomena, but one that persists is the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (ETH):

[In 1969, physicist Edward Condon defined ETH as the "idea that some UFOs may be spacecraft sent to Earth from another civilization or space other than earth, or on a planet associated with a more distant star," wikipedia]

This is an interesting hypothesis. Any given sighting could potentially be an alien spacecraft containing not only technology far more advanced than our own, but also offers the tantalizing prospect of life having originated beyond our planet. For us to understand the technology could open the galaxy to humanity.

Is the ETH testable? According to Carrion, I was surprised to hear that he judged it as beyond the reach of science:

“This is a tough subject because for a hypothesis to be viable, it has to be falsifiable. And that is one of the problems with the ETH. There’s no way you can prove that they’re here if there’s no way you can disprove they’re here.” (00:06:40)

Really?

First off, UFOs are routinely found to have natural explanations (the planet Venus, aircraft lights, etc.) which shows that individual sightings can be investigated and falsified against a claim of extraterrestrial origin. MUFON does this all the time, as Carrion knows well.

Second, the main requirement of a hypothesis is that you can test it. If Carrion were to recover physical evidence of extraterrestrial technology such as a chunk of metal alloy, an integrated circuit or biological device, he could bring it into a laboratory to have it analyzed. If he recovered blood or flesh from an alien creature, it could be shown to have no relation to the biology we have on earth.

Clearly Carrion must be familiar with the possibility of testing recovered technology or biological matter. It’s unclear why he would think that science would be so impotent as to be irrelevant to testing the ETH.

Carrion laments the lack of respect of UFOlogy among science professionals:

“[...] It’s probably why mainstream science shies away from this field in general, because most people associate UFOs with ETH.”

Isn’t it more likely that mainstream science shies away from the UFO field because there is no reliable evidence in its favor? Doesn’t he think any scientist would leap at the chance of examining alien technology or biology or culture?  For crying out loud, these aren’t ghosts and goblins. These are supposedly physical craft and creatures as so often claimed.

However, there’s a far more disturbing reason why Carrion and others will never gain the scientific legitimacy they so desperately seek. I’ll let Carrion speak:

“I can tell you one thing that I’ve observed in the time that I’ve been in MUFON, especially as the International Director. I absolutely believe that there is an active interest on the part of certain elements within the government in the subject. I’m not really sure exactly why — there could be national security implications for why they’re interested, but I’ve come to a fundamental conclusion on how we’re going to make progress in understanding the phenomena, we’ve to eliminate the government wild card in this. It’s obvious to me based on research I’ve done [...] there are folks who have meddled in the field for their own purposes for way too long and have muddied the waters and they’ve tried to obscure the truth. We’re going to have a miserable time coming to the understanding of this so long as that meddling continues.  Some call it conspiracy; I say it’s reality.” (00:14:42)

Much of the remainder of the interview continues along these lines where Carrion states repeatedly that governmental entities are engaged in a sustained disinformation campaign against the media and members of the UFO community, including himself.

He acknowledges that this sort of language is common within UFO circles. But I wonder if he realizes how he appears to outsiders, where such language comes across as positively nutty. Is Carrion blind to his own words and how he comes across? Is he unaware that this language strikes others as lame excuses for his not being able to deliver the goods in providing cogent explanations of UFO phenomena?

The science-oriented skeptical movement (of which I’m part) doesn’t seem to have this baggage. For me to assert conspiracy in the absence of evidence would be treated by my fellow skeptics as a logical fallacy — specifically an argument from ignorance. It is a symptom of bias, faulty thinking, and in certain cases undiagnosed mental illness.

So Carrion and MUFON seem to be between a rock and a hard place. They aspire to the legitimacy of science yet cannot let go of the malignancy of conspiratorial thinking that will forever keep their aspirations beyond arm’s reach.

But I’m glad that Carrion is calling bullshit on Romanek. It’s a bit late, but still a baby-step towards reality.