This has been something of a UFO week for me. There was a story in the New Yorker about UFOs that included some quotes from me. That led to some entanglement with UFO enthusiasts on social media.  Given that the flying saucers have once again invaded my airspace, today I’m in hot take mode. Here are couple of the many reasons why I – as someone who studies the possibilities of alien life for a living - am skeptical there’s much “there” there with UFOs/UAPs and extraterrestrials.

Here is the most important point. Pretty much every large-scale study ever done using quality methods has found that something like 90% to 95% of all UFO reports have reasonable explanations. Sometimes it’s airplanes.  Sometimes it satellites. Sometimes it’s drones or balloons. Sometimes it’s the planet Venus. What this means is the sky is not full of things that we can’t explain. That’s the most important take away for today.

You start with 100 people lined up telling you they saw something impossible in the sky. After you ask them more detailed questions and doing a bit of research, you find that about 95 of them had actually seen something ordinary. There is no alien invasion underway.

So, what about the other 5% or 6%. 

Those fall into two categories. The first category is we don’t even have enough detail to begin trying to formulate an explanation. The person reporting it can’t tell you what time of day it was, what direction they were facing or anything else that would help in getting started. 

The second category is the interesting one.  Those are the freaky-deaky stories.  And let me be clear, there are absolutely some freaky- deaky UFO stories.  I discussed this in my The Little Book of Aliens in the chapter on James McDonald.

Those freaky-deaky stories (including the ones from the Navy pilots) are the reason why I completely support an open, transparent very public scientific investigation of the UFO/UAP phenomena.

But here is the thing.  Somebody telling you about something weird they saw is not a scientific verification of the most important discovery in human history.  Just because someone tells you they saw a ghost doesn’t mean that ghosts exist.  A zillion studies have shown that personal testimony - even from experts - is the worst, most unreliable form of evidence.

This emphasis on having rigorous “standards of evidence” is my main point in talking about UFOs.  People send me blurry images.  People send me testimony from some guy telling Congress he knows a guy who knows a guy who said he saw an alien spaceship in government garage. That ain’t gonna cut it here. If I tried to bring that kind of evidence to a scientific meeting as proof I’d found life on a distant alien world, I get laughed out of the room.

There is a reason Science works. There is a reason why it’s given us miracles like whatever device you’re reading this on.  UFOs don’t get a special dispensation.  If you don’t have evidence that hits those standards - the one’s science discovered via four centuries of blood, sweat and tears - then you’re just chasing after your own biases.

I don’t want to confirm my biases. I don’t want to believe. I want to know.

— Adam Frank 🚀