IN YET another long comment about, yes, UFOs, Alan provides a link to a thoughtful 1975 essay by the Caltech scientist Bruce Murray. Murray writes:

The existence of UFO’s gets to be a debate of almost theological proportions, involving heresy and faith, and that is not very scientific. The reason is that when one is presented with reports of phenomena that do not make sense, some people cannot stand the uncertainty. It is just like the situation in ordinary social affairs, where there is a tendency to want to have an answer right now, right or wrong, and if the only choices are between, “It’s nothing,” or, “It’s the most bizarre thing in the world,” you choose one of those two answers. Well, the answer really is that you probably do not have the right answer yet, and so you should not make a choice.

One point I want to emphasize about UFO’s and other problematic phenomena is that if there are a lot of emotions involved, on both sides-the debunkers and the advocates-then the situation has gone far beyond the domain of scientificinquiry. The very fact that there is an emotional component indicates the matter involves more than objective evaluation. One can wonder why a scientist feels so compelled to disprove the possibility that some- thing unexplained could be involved. Is he so concerned

about his holy church that he cannot stand a little bit of heresy? Similarly, one can question the objectivity of a person who has a conspiratorial theory about how the government is covering up evidence of UFO’s. What’s the angle? Why is he so emotionally absorbed in this thing that he has to develop such an idea?

However, the real issue with UFO’s, or with some of the other purported phenomena, can be stated in this way: Is seeing believing? Can you really trust what you see?

Earlier in the piece, Murray describes his own position on UFOs:

For myself, I am in the middle of the road-mildly negative on UFO’s. I do not think there are little green men, but I also do not think you can prove a negative very .well. And I do believe there are a lot of honest, sober witnesses who have had the daylights scared out of them by flashing lights or something else happening at night that was real. It was not their imaginations;something was there. But to associate that with spaceships from an alien civilization is a big jump that I think is unsupported.

—- Comments —–

Mark writes:

“The very fact that there is an emotional component indicates the matter involves more than objective evaluation.” — from the article

There is a very emotional argument because there is a religious argument, here. There are many of the secular humanist persuasion who have rightly concluded that materialist neo-darwinism (that is, that life came from non-life in a series of fortuitous random events) is untenable, and yet cannot bring themselves to the belief in the Lord God. These unfortunate souls, then, fancy a “cosmic-seed” theory; that the earth was “seeded” with these seeds of life which eventually sprung forth all the varieties of life as we know it today. These people thus scan the skies for the return of the seeders, who are all-wise and will give us the answers to existence.

Knowing as we do that life begins with God (in contrast to the agnostic position, which posits that if all of the manifest conditions were just so, life could arise, as in the Drake Equasion) we may accept the possibility that He, in his Wisdon, may have put life in other parts of the heavens.

What ought we to think of UFOs as believers? I can think of three possibilities…

1. Swamp gas, hallucinations, misidentified aircraft, etc.

2. Super-technological craft being tested by the U.S. Military

3. Demonic manifestations

On the third possibility, it seems likely that the hosts of Hell would be only too happy to give counsel and guidance to the “cosmic-seeders”, posing as all-intelligent and benevolent visitors from the utter reaches of the cosmos. It has also been pointed out to me — by a friend who studies these things — that never has a follower of the Lord Jesus been abducted by aliens, been subject to experimentation in a flying saucer, or such.

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