His Lame Game Was "Shame and Defame"

"The Conversation" web site bills itself as a site with "academic rigor, journalistic flair." But we saw no academic rigor in Chris Impey's recent article on UFO sightings.   It was just a crummy bit of  "stigmatize the witnesses" mudslinging.  

Impey insinuates that UFO sightings are mainly just an American phenomenon.  Very strangely, in the same sentence that he links to an online map indicating many UFO sightings in Canada, Impey says it is "even more surprising that the sightings stop at the Canadian and Mexican borders,"  insinuating that there are no UFO sightings in Canada. This is not at all correct. The link here discusses quite a few UFO sightings in Canada.  A Canadian news site has a story with this  headline: "Canadians report seeing UFOs in the sky at a rate of 3 times a day." Another Canadian news site lists 1267 UFO sightings in Canada in the year 2015. 

The first of Impey's clumsy attempts to besmirch UFO observers is this very crude insinuation: "Sightings concentrate in evening hours, particularly on Fridays, when many people are relaxing with one or more drinks."  This is obviously an attempt to suggest UFO observers tend to be more drunk than the average observer. There is no evidence that such a thing is true. We read here some specific numerical evidence: "After analyzing perhaps about 800 UFO sighting reports from 1966 to 1968, Keel made the determination that the 'greatest number of UFO sightings are reported on Wednesday, and then they slowly taper off through the rest of the week.' ” Getting drunk doesn't cause people to report UFO sightings, and I have never heard of a drunk person reporting a UFO. 

Impey speaks as if he suspects there are many extraterrestrials out there. He approvingly quotes someone saying, "The universe is apparently bulging at the seams with the ingredients of biology.”  This phantasmagoric claim is not at all correct. The ingredients of biology are things such as cells and functional protein molecules, and no such things have ever been discovered in outer space (except in spaceships or space stations built by humans). If Impey (an astronomy professor) suspects there are many extraterrestrials out there, why is he so hostile to UFO observers?  Perhaps it's the same old snobbish elitism we see among professors, who may rather seem to  think that only a tiny priesthood of professors are entitled to make observations of scientifically interesting novel phenomena, not the common masses.  

In the second part of his article, Impey tries some more tarnishing  attempts.  First, he tries to insinuate UFO observers are conspiracy theorists, saying, "UFOs are part of the landscape of conspiracy theories." No, a UFO report is not a conspiracy theory. A conspiracy theory is a claim that a certain number of human beings are secretly plotting to achieve some nefarious end.  Making a UFO report or believing that some UFOs are extraterrestrial visitors is not a case of believing in a conspiracy theory.  

Impey then proceeds to confuse UFO sightings with crop circle observations, so that he can deliver the line, "I remain skeptical that intelligent beings with vastly superior technology would travel trillion of miles just to press down our wheat." This is "straw man" arguing, because no one maintains that extraterrestrials have come here only to make crop circles. And crop circle reports are an entirely different thing from UFO reports. 

Impey then states, "To my mind, UFOs have become a kind of new American religion,"  and he mentions Diana Pasulka. In my post "Belief in UFOs Does Not Qualify as a Religion," I rebut Pasulka's claim that UFO belief is a religion.  Definitions of religion vary, but I think a good definition of religion (applying to every recognized religion) is the following: a religion is a set of beliefs about the fundamental nature of reality and life, or a recommended way of living, typically stemming from the teachings of an authority, along with norms, taboos, ethics, rituals, roles or social organizations that may arise from such beliefs.  A belief in UFOs does not qualify as such a thing. For one thing, such a belief does not stem from the teachings of an authority. Also, a vague belief that we are being visited from beings by another planet (or that UFO sightings are some mysterious unexplained reality) does not qualify as "a set of beliefs about the fundamental nature of reality and life, or a recommended way of living."  Moreover, the title of Impey's article refers to "UFO sightings." UFO sightings are a different thing from beliefs about UFOs.  You cannot discredit UFO sightings by referring to beliefs about UFOs. 

Near the end of his article, Impey gives us one more crude piece of gaslighting. He says, "A study of young adults did find that UFO belief is associated with schizotypal personality, a tendency toward social anxiety, paranoid ideas and transient psychosis."  He refers us to a paper that questioned only 276 subjects, a sample group much smaller than other surveys on the same topic. The abstract of the paper says nothing about paranoid ideas or transient psychosis, but merely claims to find "UFO-related beliefs are associated with higher schizotypy scores." A good rule of thumb is that when the abstract of a paper claiming some association between two things does not report a specific numerical association, we can assume the association is probably a very weak one.  So we can assume that the claimed association is no greater than about 10% or 20%. 

What is this concept of "schizotypy"? It's the dubious speculative concept that certain beliefs or habits might be statistically associated with a somewhat higher chance of getting schizophrenia. It was originally claimed that 10% of people with "schizotypy" (the same as "schizotypal personality") might become schizophrenic (as opposed to 1% in the general population). But a 10-year followup study of 182 subjects found a much lower effect:  only about 2% of those who scored higher on "schizotypy questionaires" developed schizophrenia (versus 1% in the general population).  So this schizotypy or "schizotypal personality" means only a very slightly greater chance of developing hallucinations. 

So there is no substance in Impey's attempt to besmirch UFO believers as being "associated with schizotypal personality, a tendency toward social anxiety, paranoid ideas and transient psychosis." The dubious and arbitrary "schizotypy score" questionaires used by studies such as the one he cites have no value in determining any substantially greater likelihood of someone having hallucinations of things in the sky.  When there is only a 2% tendency for those with "schizotypy" to become schizophrenic, and a weak "association with greater schizotypy" were to be established for those with UFO beliefs (something like maybe a 10% or 20% greater chance or incidence of schizotypy), that would suggest at worst maybe something like a 1 in 200 greater chance (less than 1% greater chance) of hallucinations in UFO believers.  That's trivial in this context, a negligible reason for dismissing UFO sightings.  Schizophrenics virtually never  hallucinate about UFO's. 

I would estimate that at least 98% of professor skeptics of paranormal phenomena show no signs of being serious scholars of the evidence for such phenomena, and Impey shows no sign of being a serious scholar of UFO observations. He merely seems to have collected a few links he has used for cheap shots and tarnishing attempts, the type of "slur and shame the witnesses" thing done by the lawyers of rapists to besmirch witnesses of rape.  His shoddy attempt to insinuate that UFO observers may be rather prone to be psychotic reminds me of what was done in the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union if someone merely reported seeing regretful things in the "worker's paradise" of Communist society, or merely reported being dissatisfied with such a society, he might be put in a mental hospital, and diagnosed with "sluggish schizophrenia."

The tactics of lawyers of rapists and skeptics of the paranormal

Here is a bullet list concisely setting the record straight and correcting the many incorrect ideas some may get after reading Impey's article:

• There is no evidence that alcohol consumption plays any appreciable role in UFO sightings.
• It is false that UFO sightings stop at the border of the US; such sightings often occur in Canada.
• Reporting a UFO sighting or believing that UFOs are unexplained or of extraterrestrial origin does not make you a conspiracy theorist.
• Reporting a UFO sighting or believing that UFOs are unexplained or from other planets is not an example of joining a religion or believing in a religion. 
• Crop circles are anomalies found on the ground, and are not examples of UFO sightings, since UFO stands for unidentified flying object. 
• It is not true that so-called "schizotypal personality" is a tendency to have hallucinations, and at worse such a personality means no more than a very slightly greater chance of becoming schizophrenic.
• There is no evidence that people reporting UFO sightings have any appreciable tendency to have psychiatric hallucinations more than ordinary people.
• The more impressive cases of UFOs involve multiple witnesses or compelling photographic evidence, meaning they cannot be explained away as a hallucination of a single witness.