Tuesday, July 26 2011: Beyond UFOs
My personal UFO remains unidentified, leaving me free to believe what I want of it. If I want to, I can decide to follow my heart and imagine that I caught a glimpse of some of the intelligent beings who I really do believe share our universe with us. Or, I can keep my usual skepticism, and hold fast to my argument that it was more likely just a meteor.
And now I think you can understand the title of this book [Beyond UFOs]. No matter what I may believe about my UFO, there is nothing I can do to convince you that my belief is correct, especially if you are as skeptical as me. Some people think that makes skepticism bad, but I don't. It just means that instead of trying to convince you that aliens exist by telling you what I saw with my eyes, I need to go about it by concentrating on evidence that we can examine together. And that means we need to go beyond UFOs, and beyond arguments based solely on personal beliefs and opinions, and turn to science. Only through science will we actually learn something about other life in the universe, if indeed it exists.
-- Jeffrey Bennett, "Beyond UFOs", p 40
And now I think you can understand the title of this book [Beyond UFOs]. No matter what I may believe about my UFO, there is nothing I can do to convince you that my belief is correct, especially if you are as skeptical as me. Some people think that makes skepticism bad, but I don't. It just means that instead of trying to convince you that aliens exist by telling you what I saw with my eyes, I need to go about it by concentrating on evidence that we can examine together. And that means we need to go beyond UFOs, and beyond arguments based solely on personal beliefs and opinions, and turn to science. Only through science will we actually learn something about other life in the universe, if indeed it exists.
-- Jeffrey Bennett, "Beyond UFOs", p 40
