UFOs are a baffling phenoenon. You might ask many questions about UFOs that I could not answer. But I think I have a partial answer to one question about UFOs recently posed at the NBC News web site.site. The question (posed by Rizwan Virk) was "The U.S. military takes UFOs seriously. Why doesn't Silicon Valley or academia?"
I can't answer the part about Silicon Valley. Although I very long worked as a software developer in high-tech teams, I don't claim to know much about what people in Silicon Valley firms are thinking these days, and I am not sure why anyone would even expect such firms to pay attention to UFOs. But I do know a bit about the behavior of the science professors of academia. So I can give a partial answer to Virk's question by saying this: those in scientific academia pay no attention to UFOs because their behavior conforms to a strange set of customs and habits that include pretending to know very big things they don't really know, and deliberately ignoring evidence that conflicts with their pretensions of knowledge.
The great majority of tenured science professors are white males (the source here tells us in the sciences 81% of full professors are male). Male science professors are above all Men of Custom, just as Catholic priests are Men of Custom. The habits of science professors include the following not-very-logical customs when writing science papers:
- The custom of almost always describing observations in the passive voice, saying something like, "The mice were weighed and had their length measured," rather than using the active voice and saying something like "John Davis weighed the mice and measured their length."
- The custom of almost never mentioning the specific person who made a measurement (which is very convenient for concealing the use of possibly incompetent trainee scientists and students to make measurements).
- The custom of failing to mention the day when a particular measurement was made (making it harder for people to sort out the chronology involved in an experiment, such as whether it was preceded or followed by failing experiments that did not find the reported effect).
- The custom of almost always failing to mention the exact location and piece of equipment that was used to make a particular measurement (useful for avoiding challenges to a measurement based on the use of inferior or faulty or outdated equipment).
- The custom of failing to publish in advance of experiments a research plan discussing which hypothesis will be tested, exactly how measurements will be done, and exactly how measurements will be analyzed (making it easy for experimenters to play around with data and observations in a hundred different ways until something is reported as a discovered effect, often something that was not originally being tested for).
- The custom of writing scientific papers as if you were paid five dollars for each piece of jargon you use, and rather as if your likelihood of getting published was proportional to how opague and obscure your writing was.
- The custom of often cluttering up scientific papers with mathematical equations that no one would ever write when trying to clearly communicate mathematical reasoning, but which someone might write if he were trying to be deliberately obscure, like some priest speaking in Latin.
- The custom of failing to have (in a paper having a report of some positive result) a discussion of all similar experiments done by the same researchers that failed to produce such a result. So under the conventions of modern science, a scientist who does 14 weeks of experiments failing to show evidence for Effect X (and 1 week showing marginal evidence of such an effect) can publish a paper mentioning only the one successful week, without mentioning all the unsuccessful weeks.
- The strange pre-pandemic custom of jetting great distances to attend scientific conferences that have not been really needed since the invention of a high-speed Internet, while at the same time frequently scolding those who have too high a carbon footprint because of things such as jetting around unnecessarily.
- The strange pre-pandemic custom of teaching classes in pretty much the same way that classes were taught two thousand years ago, by having groups of people listen to lectures by a teacher standing in front of them, despite innumerable more modern possibilities by which students might learn more effectively.
- The custom of almost always using the phrase "Materials and Methods" as a section title in their experimental scientific papers, even when no materials were used and even when the experimenters seem to have no method other than gather data and slice and dice it until something "statistically significant" could be reported.
- The custom of describing scientist activity in some romanticized idealized way, as if it were some pristine and impartial Quest for Truth, without discussing all of the sociological and careerist and monetary reasons why it is very often something much less grand and noble (such as a Quest for Paper Citations or a Quest for Tenure or a Quest for Consulting Fees or a Quest for Grant Money or a Quest for Greater Paper Counts or a Quest for Speaker Fees or a Quest for Lucrative Book Contracts).
- Many decades of compelling laboratory experimental evidence that humans have extrasensory perception (ESP) that cannot be explained by any neural hypothesis.
- Abundant anecdotal testimonies that humans have such ESP.
- Two hundred years of very carefully written published testimony that some humans have had the power of clairvoyance, much of it written by doctors and scientists who carefully observed such powers.
- Well over a hundred years of published testimony (often written by scientists) that inexplicable paranormal events occur in the presence of mediums.
- Abundant testimony of inexplicable apparitions, deathbed visions and near-death experiences.
- Abundant low-level neuroscience evidence that brains are too slow, too noisy and too unstable to be the source of regular human abilities such as instant recall, very fast thinking, and the retention of memories for 50 years or more.
- Abundant evidence that humans can think well and remember well even after losing most or half of their brains due to surgery or disease.
- Very many fantastically organized biological systems that are too complex and functionally fine-tuned to be credibly explained by any Darwinian explanation of accumulation of random mutations.
- Dreams that seemed to foretell a death.
- Out-of-body experiences, many in which people seemed to perceive details they should not have been able to perceive given the physical position of their bodies.
- Many examples of very precise fine-tuning in the laws and fundamental constants of the universe, things that conflict with commonly stated scientist claims that beings such as humans arose merely because of lucky accidents.
- Abundant testimony of inexplicable phenomena in the sky.
Before starting my phd in particle physics, I attended a summer school in particle physics whith lectures by CERN researchers and other high status professors. At the last lecture about the future of physics where they recited the poetry about dark matter, dark energy, string theory, I raised my hand and asked about consciousness. They told me that science should be reductionist and that I should sit down. Only one fellow student came to me after the lecture to tell me that he appreciated my question.
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