I was watching an old repeat of "Star Trek: The Next Generation," and I saw a scene in which Captain Picard and Counselor Deanna Troi are instantly transported into the office of a scientist, surprising the scientist. The two announce that they are from the Federation of Planets. Deanna Troi says that Federation personnel such as her like to make such appearances to scientists, because "'scientists generally accept our arrival more easily than others." I don't know what might have caused the script writer to include such a line. On planet Earth, it seems that our scientists are mostly notoriously hostile to all reports of UFOs and countless other anomalous or paranormal phenomena.
Last year a web site did a story in which widely discussed UFO videos were shown to two professors. The videos were those widely seen videos released by the Department of Defense, in which pilots reported seeing mysterious objects moving inexplicably at incredible speeds. The videos were taken in-flight by the observation equipment on the jets of the pilots.
When asked to comment on these videos, our two professors didn't act like people having some prepared talking points to combat something they didn't want to believe in. Instead, they both acted in a "deer in the headlights" manner, as if they were utterly unprepared for such queries. The professors sounded like some high-school student lamely muttering something in response to some question he was totally unprepared to answer.
One professor stated, "The difficulty with this kind of problem is that you can't plan for it," seemingly suggesting his lack of any previous thought on how to react when encountering an observational anomaly. Then later in the article the same professor states, "You can't plan for it." As if these two statements were not sufficient to convince us that the professor was really, totally unprepared to be encountering an observational anomaly, the same professor states the same thought for the third time later in the article. He again states, "The difficulty with this kind of problem is that you can't plan for it." Earlier in the article, the other professor agreed with this silly thought.
Such a claim of "you can't plan for it" is very much untrue. Scientists can plan for how to respond to such videos of observational anomalies. They can have an intelligent strategy on how to respond to such videos and other evidence of observational anomalies.
Here is a general plan for how to respond to observational evidence of hard-to-explain anomalies:
(1) Quality-check.
(2) Promptly publicly document.
(3) Classify characteristics.
(4) Look for historical matches or similarities.
(5) Archive.
The first aspect of such a plan is to quality-check the report of an observational anomaly. This should involve an effort to detect signs of fraud or error. For example in the case of a UFO video, the following things can be done:
(1) An analysis can be made of the observational report connected to a a video, such as analyzing the claimed observational conditions, and analyzing the consistency of the report, and the reliability of the observer.
(2) A frame-by-frame analysis can be made of the video, using tools such as fpmpeg, which allow you to convert a video into a sequence of photos that can be analyzed individually. Such a frame-by-frame analysis can help weed out any fakery that might be in a video.
(3) An analysis can be made of other observational reports and videos published by the person connected with a video, to help judge whether that person is a reliable witness, and a credible source of information.
Other quality-check methods can be made of similar reports of the anomalous and seemingly inexplicable, such as reports of Bigfoot sightings or ghost sightings.
The second aspect of such a strategy would come into play only if the video or report of an anomalous observation has checked out successfully after being subjected to a quality-check. Then the report of the anomalous observational event should be promptly and publicly documented. You publicly document something when it is carefully written up in some kind of information source that the public can access.
The sooner that an observational report appears after the event occurred, the more reliable report is. For example, if you record an account of your near-death experience the day after it occurred, such a report has more weight than some report you may write years later. A publicly accessible documentation of an anomalous event has much more value than some private documentation such as something written only in your diary. The more people publicly document observational anomalies, the more likely that people will begin to recognize that certain types of anomalous phenomena are really happening.
The third part of the five-part strategy listed above is classification. For example, a UFO video would be analyzed for its main anomalous characteristics. Nowadays various types of software have features that can aid in classification. Such features may be called tags, keywords, topics or hashtags. Such classification activity is a key part of scientific activity. Scientists should not just observe and experiment, but spend great amounts of time classifying what they have observed. Proper classification efforts may require the introduction of new terminology or neologisms to describe novel phenomena for which no previous term existed.
The fourth part of the five-part strategy is to search for previous reports that had similar observational characteristics. If a match was found, the person documenting the incident would discuss how the other videos or observational reports had similar features. Doing such a search requires a scholarly literature carefully documenting various types of observational events or anomalies, or a database of such observational reports.
When AIDS first appeared in the US in the early 1980's, every report of an AIDS-like syndrome was a freakish anomaly observation. When COVID-19 first appeared in late 2019, every report of it was a freakish anomaly observation. Scientists started to realize that something very worthy of their attention was afoot in these cases when pattern-matching was done, with multiple instances of the anomaly report being compared to detect a recurring pattern.
Proper pattern matching requires scholarship of similar previous anomaly reports. Such pattern matching is very unlikely to successfully occur when researchers fail to research the related literature. A scholar who has studied the history of anomalous events in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries may be able to easily match some report of an anomalous occurrence with similar reports from those times. A person who has not studied such things will be unlikely to successfully find historical matches and similarities after receiving a report of the anomaly. Currently 95% of the authorities who declare that certain types of paranormal events are impossible have never bothered to make a substantial study of the relevant literature (something that requires reading hundreds of the right books). Such authorities are like people who never saw a movie or read about movies who declare that movies are impossible.
The fifth part of the strategy is to archive. Once observations have been made of anomalous phenomena, and such observations have been written up, it is of great importance that such written reports by archived, so that they are not lost to posterity. An anomalous phenomenon may occur at rare intervals over many decades or centuries. The reality of such a phenomenon may never be recognized unless reports of such a phenomenon from previous decades and centuries are preserved.
Observational reports appearing on Facebook feeds or Twitter feeds may not last very long. Such reports may last longer if they are written up in books. One of the best ways of archiving reports of anomalous phenomena is to write up such reports in a book, and upload such a book to www.archive.org, where the book can be available as a free download. Such observational reports will then presumably be publicly available for many decades. I routinely read reports of anomalous phenomena that were written in the nineteenth century, by reading online books that have been uploaded to www.archive.org.
So we see that we can indeed plan for what to do when some very unexpected anomalous observation occurs. "You can't plan for it" is not at all true. We live in a vastly mysterious universe in which incredibly puzzling things happen very frequently, often things totally defying the expectations and belief dogmas of scientists. There is no excuse for not having a plan or strategy for how to handle reports of such anomalies.
Minor nit: the plural of "deer" is "deer". For some reason this seems to be the case with other members of the Cervidae family such as elk or moose. I don't know why. This is something I learned in the 4th grade or so and it stuck.
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