Eventually Bower and Chorley tired of the increasingly elaborate prank. While in excellent physical condition, they were both in their sixties now and a little old for nocturnal commando operations in the fields of unknown and often unsympathetic farmers. They may have been annoyed at the fame and fortune accrued by those who merely photographed their art and announced aliens to be the artists. And they became worried that if they delayed much longer, no statement of theirs would be believed.
So they confessed. They demonstrated to reporters how they made even the most elaborate insectoid patterns. You might think that never again would it be argued that a sustained hoax over many years is impossible, and never again would we hear that no one could possibly be motivated to deceive the gullible into thinking that aliens exist. But the media paid brief attention. Cerealogists urged them to go easy; after all, they were depriving many of the pleasure of imagining wondrous happenings.
Since then, other crop circle hoaxers have kept at it, but mostly in a more desultory and less inspired manner. As always, the confession of the hoax is greatly overshadowed by the sustained initial excitement. Many have heard of the pictograms in cereal grains and their alleged UFO connection, but draw a blank when the names of Bower and Chorley or the very idea that the whole business may be a hoax are raised. An informative expose by the journalist Jim Schnabel (Round in Circles, 1994), from which much of my account is taken, is in print. Schnabel joined the cerealogists early and in the end made a few successful pictograms himself. (He prefers a garden roller to a wooden plank, and found that simply stomping grain with one’s feet does an acceptable job.) But Schnabel’s work, which one reviewer called ‘the funniest book I’ve read in ages’, had only modest success. Demons sell; hoaxers are boring and in bad taste.
The tenets of scepticism do not require an advanced degree to master, as most successful used car buyers demonstrate. The whole idea of a democratic application of scepticism is that everyone should have the essential tools to effectively and constructively evaluate claims to knowledge. All science asks is to employ the same levels of scepticism we use in buying a used car or in judging the quality of analgesics or beer from their television commercials.
But the tools of scepticism are generally unavailable to the citizens of our society. They’re hardly ever mentioned in the schools, even in the presentation of science, its most ardent practitioner, although scepticism repeatedly sprouts spontaneously out of the disappointments of everyday life. Our politics, economics, advertising and religions (New Age and Old) are awash in credulity. Those who have something to sell, those who wish to influence public opinion, those in power, a sceptic might suggest, have a vested interest in discouraging scepticism.
5
Spoofing and Secrecy
Trust a witness in all matters in which neither his self-interest, his passions, his prejudices, nor the love of the marvellous is strongly concerned. When they are involved, require corroborative evidence in exact proportion to the contravention of probability by the thing testified.
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895)
When the mother of celebrity abductee Travis Walton was informed that a UFO had zapped her son with a bolt of lightning and then carried him off into space, she replied incuriously, ‘Well, that’s the way these things happen.’ Is it?
To agree that UFOs are in our skies is not committing to very much: ‘UFO’ is an abbreviation for ‘Unidentified Flying Object’. It is a more inclusive term than ‘flying saucer’. That there are things seen which the ordinary observer, or even an occasional expert, does not understand is inevitable. But why, if we see something we don’t recognize, should we conclude it’s a ship from the stars? A wide variety of more prosaic possibilities present themselves.
After misapprehended natural events and hoaxes and psychological aberrations are removed from the data set, is there any residue of very credible but extremely bizarre cases, especially ones supported by physical evidence? Is there a ‘signal’ hiding in all that noise? In my view, no signal has been detected. There are reliably reported cases that are unexotic, and exotic cases that are unreliable. There are no cases – despite well over a million UFO reports since 1947 – in which something so strange that it could only be an extraterrestrial spacecraft is reported so reliably that misapprehension, hoax or hallucination can be reliably excluded. There’s still a part of me that says, ‘Too bad.’
We’re regularly bombarded with extravagant UFO claims vended in bite-sized packages, but only rarely do we get to hear about their comeuppance. This isn’t hard to understand: which sells more newspapers and books, which garners higher ratings, which is more fun to believe, which is more resonant with the torments of our time – real crashed alien ships, or experienced con men preying on the gullible; extraterrestrials of immense powers toying with the human species, or such claims deriving from human weakness and imperfection?
Over the years I’ve continued to spend time on the UFO problem. I receive many letters about it, frequently with detailed first-hand accounts. Sometimes momentous revelations are promised if only I will call the letter writer. After I give lectures – on almost any subject -1 often am asked, ‘Do you believe in UFOs?’ I’m always struck by how the question is phrased, the suggestion that this is a matter of belief and not of evidence. I’m almost never asked, ‘How good is the evidence that UFOs are alien spaceships?’
I’ve found that the going-in attitude of many people is highly predetermined. Some are convinced that eyewitness testimony is reliable, that people do not make things up, that hallucinations or hoaxes on such a scale are impossible, and that there must be a long-standing, high-level government conspiracy to keep the truth from the rest of us. Gullibility about UFOs thrives on widespread mistrust of government, arising naturally enough from all those circumstances where, in the tension between public well-being and ‘national security’, the government lies. As government deceit and conspiracies of silence have been exposed on so many other matters, it’s hard to argue that a cover-up on this odd subject is impossible, that the government would never hide important information from its citizens. A common explanation on why there would be a cover-up is to prevent worldwide panic or erosion of confidence in the government.
I was a member of the US Air Force Scientific Advisory Board committee that investigated the Air Force’s UFO study – called ‘Project Bluebook’, but earlier and revealingly called ‘Project Grudge’. We found the on-going effort to be lackadaisical and dismissive. In the middle 1960s, ‘Project Bluebook’ was headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, where ‘Foreign Technical Intelligence’ (chiefly, understanding what new weapons the Soviets had) was also based. They had state-of-the-art technology in file retrieval. You asked about a given UFO incident and, somewhat like sweaters and suits at the dry cleaner’s today, reams of files made their way past you, until the engine stopped when the file you wanted arrived before you.
But what was in those files wasn’t worth much. For example, senior citizens reported lights hovering over their small New Hampshire town for more than an hour, and the case is explained as a wing of strategic bombers from a nearby Air Force base on a training exercise. Could the bombers take an hour to pass over the town? No. Did the bombers fly over at the time the UFOs were reported? No. Can you explain to us, Colonel, how strategic bombers can be described as ‘hovering’? No. The slipshod Blue-book investigations played little scientific role, but they did serve the important bureaucratic purpose of convincing much of the public that the Air Force was on the job; and that maybe there was nothing to UFO reports.
Of course, this doesn’t preclude the possibility that another, more serious, more scientific study of UFOs was going on somewhere else, headed, say, by a brigadier general rather than a lieutenant colonel. I think something like this is even likely, not because I believe we’re being visited by aliens, but because hiding in the UFO phenomena must be data once considered-of significant military interest. Certainly if UFOs are as reported – very fast, very manoeuvrable craft – there is a military duty to find out how they work. If UFOs were built by the Soviet Union it was the Air Force’s responsibility to protect us. Considering the remarkable performance characteristics reported, the strategic implications of Soviet UFOs flagrantly overflying American military and nuclear facilities were worrisome. If on the other hand the UFOs were built by extraterrestrials, we might copy the technology (if we could get our hands on just one saucer) and secure a huge advantage in the Cold War. And even if the military believed that UFOs were manufactured neither by Soviets nor by extraterrestrials, there was a good reason to follow the reports closely.