Date: November 10, 2009

Title: Wake Up and Smell the Baloney!

Podcaster: Larry Sessions

Organization: None

Description: Some people, upon seeing something unusual in the sky, jump to the conclusion that it must be the result of an extraterrestrial visitation, inter-dimensional travel, or perhaps some secret and sinister government experiment. Carl Sagan used to say, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” and yet in most of these cases, there is no real evidence at all. So should all such claims be dismissed out of hand. Sagan had an answer for that, too. It’s called the “Baloney Detection Kit.”

Bio: Larry Sessions is a former director and staff astronomer at Denver’s Gates and Fort Worth’s Noble planetariums, and now is an instructor for Metropolitan State College and the Community College of Aurora, Colorado. He also is the webmaster and editor for the Southwestern Association of Planetariums, as well as his own website, North American Skies, and a contributor to both Space.com and EarthSky.org. A NASA/JPL “Solar System Amabassador,” he has every copy of the Royal Astronomical Society’s annual handbook since 1971.

Today’s sponsor: This episode of “365 Days of Astronomy” is sponsored by Ed Bode. This podcast is dedicated to two Marines who started me on a lifelong journey seeking knowledge. They took me to Mt. Wilson and Mt. Palomar. Semper Fi, Mom and Dad! “…Ever look on Heaven’s scenes; They will find the streets are guarded by United States Marines.”

Transcript:

Wake up and smell the baloney!

Hi and welcome to this edition of 365 Days of Astronomy. I am Larry Sessions, a former planetarium director, and currently an astronomy instructor in Denver, Colorado. I also occasionally lecture at Gates Planetarium and contribute to astronomical websites. I tweet a lot, too.

Recently I made a comment, via the Internet, to a local TV show about a proposed ballot measure in Denver. The proposal was to establish an “Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission” to help the city and its citizens deal with the potential arrival of aliens from another world. To be honest, I thought the idea was absurd. I said that it was a waste of time and money, and an affront to the intelligence of the people of Denver. Considering the total lack of any scientifically verifiable data or observations on alien visitations, we might just as well have a commission on leprechauns or ghosts. Anyway, I forgot about it, only to receive an email some weeks later that a proponent of this ridiculous idea had written a blog about me, accusing me of being paid by NASA and JPL to squash his proposal. In a sense it was complimentary because it gave the impression – an utterly false impression – that I was some high official in NASA or otherwise a person of great stature in the agency. Still, it was filled with lies and innuendo and was quickly mirrored on other sites and further distorted. It made me hopping mad, but it also struck home about just how unreasonable people can be about their pet ideas.

I would honestly like for real aliens to visit Earth and make their presence known. It would be a fantastic revelation. But the fact remains that there is not one shred of solid, verifiable, scientific evidence of any such visitations today or in the past. Nor is there any good scientific reason to expect it.

This brings me to the point. Science demands evidence. Not just any evidence, but evidence that can be tested or examined in some reasonable way. Personal stories, hypnotic regressions, and potentially faked photos and videos are not good evidence. Effectively, science has adopted the Missourians cry to “Show me the evidence.”

Decades ago, as planetarium director at the Noble Planetarium in Fort Worth, I read of another absurd idea, that at a certain time the planets would line up in a way that would spell disaster for Earth. To my surprise, I learned that this unsubstantiated bit of hogwash was proposed by none other than an astrophysicist recently graduated from the University of Cambridge. Despite the author’s credentials, I knew that there was no evidence or any demonstrated mechanism to validate the idea. Yet as a lowly planetarium director, I needed an ally I could cite when I debunked the planetary alignment folly. So I wrote to Carl Sagan, a PhD astronomer from Cornell, who was just then becoming widely known as a popularizer of science. Expecting a form reply or a short letter from his secretary, I was pleased several weeks later to receive a personal note from Dr. Sagan. He confirmed my opinion of the aforementioned idea. Unfortunately, I never met Carl Sagan, and never corresponded with him again. He died in December, 1996. On November 9, 2009, he would have been 75 years old.

Sagan was a particularly strong and effective debunker of pseudoscience. He demanded “extraordinary evidence” for extraordinary claims. Given the number of stars in the Universe, and the existence of common elements throughout, Sagan felt, as do most astronomers, that the probability of life elsewhere is high. There is certainly a logic to the idea. Yet even today we have no actual evidence of it at all. At best we have faint hints of possible microbial life in Mars rocks. It really seems likely that the Universe is filled with life.

But alien visitations to Earth are a different story. Given the enormous distances between stars, and the great difficulties of physically traveling across those distances, any alien visitation to Earth would indeed be “extraordinary.” (Note that I did not say “impossible.”) But despite all the claims, after more than a half century of intense interest in UFO sightings, there is not even any reasonably good evidence, much less any that is “extraordinary.”

Along about the same time I wrote to Dr. Sagan (and subsequently panned the planetary alignment silliness in a magazine review,) I developed my own ideas of “positive skepticism.” I have written about them in my blog on EarthSky.org. Years later, Dr. Sagan wrote about his “Baloney Detection Kit” in The Demon-Haunted World. Basically he gives guidelines for skeptical thinking. His list was much more substantive and complete than mine, and includes:

• Wherever possible, there must be independent confirmation of the “facts.”
• If there’s a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work (including the premise) – not just most of them.
• Occam’s Razor. This convenient rule-of-thumb urges us when faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well to choose the simpler.
• …and much more.

Sagan emphasized the need for controlled experimentation or good evidence. Sagan’s list includes the signs of weak arguments, such as the “ad hominem” or personal attack, the “argument from authority,” and the “appeal to ignorance.”

The Baloney Detection Kit is one of the greatest gifts that Carl Sagan left us. To me, the most important criteria is evidence over argument. You may give me a good and seemingly reasonable argument, but without evidence, the argument is mute. Maybe you’ve heard that “Faith without works is dead,” supposedly uttered by the apostle James. Well, let me paraphrase that to say that “Belief without evidence is baseless.”

Anyone can argue all they want that Jupiter’s influence on Sagittarius will cause the Moon to fall from the sky in 2012 – or whatever the idea is. But without evidence, the argument is utterly irrelevant – not to mention silly in this example.

I know that some listeners will disagree with me, especially about UFO visitations. To them I can only say that it is at least possible that we may some day be visited. Or even that we may already have been visited. But the evidence is lacking. Without evidence, there is no proof. I know that not everyone needs good evidence to believe. After all, most of us believed in Santa Claus at one time. But belief in something does not make it real. Science requires evidence to separate the baloney from the filet mignon, so to speak.

By the way, the planetary alignment mentioned above came and went in March 1982. Well, it wasn’t actually the way it was depicted on the cover of the book. On the book cover, all the planets were lined up in a straight row. In reality, the planets simply were all on the same side of the Sun, but otherwise not “lined up.” And was there a great earthquake that destroyed Los Angeles and much of the rest of the world? Hmmmm. I don’t think so. I think I would have remembered that.

Thanks for listening.

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You can read about Carl Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit in The Demon-Haunted World, or you can find it on line, such as here: http://users.tpg.com.au/users/tps-seti/baloney.html
You can read my Positive Skepticism here: http://www.mscd.edu/~physics/astro/info/thinking.htm
In addition, you can check out my North American Skies Twitter page: http://twitter.com/NASkies

End of podcast:

365 Days of Astronomy
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