Harvard astronomy professor Avi Loeb recently announced a project he calls the Galileo Project. His announcement of the project in Scientific American is characterized by a sometimes errant haughty pomposity.
Things go wrong in the very title and subtitle of this announcment. The title is "Announcing a New Plan for Solving the Mystery of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena." Since humans have been greatly puzzled by unidentified aerial phenomena for many decades, and have made no real progress in solving the problem, we should all be very humble before this great mystery. It seems grandly presumptuous to announce "a plan for solving the mystery of unidentified aerial phenomena," just as it would sound grandly presumptuous to announce "a plan for solving the mystery of the universe's origin." A better title would have been something like "Announcing a New Plan for Further Study of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena."
The subtitle is: "The newly organized Galileo Project will use a three-pronged approach to replace unreliable eyewitness reports with reproducible scientific observations." The project announced is mainly some high-tech automated monitoring system. But why would anyone think that such a system would be a replacement for eyewitness reports, as if such reports would stop once such a system is set up?
When we read the paragraphs of Loeb's announcement, we get some insight into his attitude towards eyewitness reports. It rather seems to be an attitude of snobbish contempt towards those who report seeing strange things with their eyes or who take simple photos or videos (what Loeb calls "low-quality instrumental data") rather than using fancy expensive high-tech equipment like astronomers use.
It is easy to explain why this attitude makes no sense. Observations do not become more reliable when we use fancy equipment to make them. In fact, in some cases it seems the more complicated the equipment used, the higher the risk that something will go wrong. A very simple point-and-click camera is almost foolproof, but there are 101 ways to go wrong if you are using some fancy camera with 200 features and 75 filters, or some fancy machine that has fifty little dials and buttons. So it simply isn't true that the fancier the equipment, the more reliable the observation.
Loeb makes the statements below:
"In the courtroom, eyewitness testimony can lead to a life sentence in jail. But in science, such testimony is of limited value. Science mandates quantitative measurements by instruments, removing the subjective impressions of humans from the balance scale of reliability."
No, science does not mandate "quantitative measurements by instruments." Some scientific studies use instruments to make quantitative measurements, but very many do not. Many scientific papers are based on the simple eyewitness testimony of the scientist or some other witness, or simple photographs that are not quantitative. A paper or statement does not become more scientific when it uses instruments to make quantitative measurements. High-tech observations are very often subject to a thousand-and-one different interpretations, and you do not remove "the subjective impressions of humans" by using high-tech equipment.
Any astronomer knows very well that we do not remove the subjective interpretations of humans when you do things such as using spectroscopy. The analysis of spectra is often highly subjective, since there are many different ways to interpret spectroscopy results, because of issues such as "spectral overlap" (in which signals from different metals or molecules appear in the same spot, making it hard to sort things out). Similarly, the analysis of faintly observed things in telescopes is not at all something free from the subjective. The perfect example is Loeb's very subjective interpretation of the faint photographic specks showing the distant object ‘Oumuamua. Most astronomers disagree with his subjective interpretation of that object, that it was an extraterrestrial spaceship (for reasons such as those discussed here).
In the previously quoted statement, Loeb rather seems to be insinuating that scientists follow evidence standards higher than those of courts. But that isn't true. Courts have formal, elaborate standards of evidence such as the Federal Rules of Evidence used by US federal courts. Scientists have no formal written standards of evidence, and they often seem to be accepting or excluding evidence based on capricious vacillating whims.
Next Loeb states this:
"Similarly, one-time events—miracles, for example—do not have scientific credibility. Science rests on reproducible results that can be replicated by creating similar circumstances over and over again."
No, it is not true that one-time events do not have scientific credibility. Many things observed only one time do have scientific credibility when their occurrence is backed up by sufficient evidence. For example, each time a supernova explosion occurs, the explosion of that particular star occurs only once. To give another example, the eruption of Mt. St. Helens occurred only once, but such an eruption has perfectly good scientific credibility. Loeb is a professor of astronomy, which is not an experimental science, not a laboratory science, and is mostly not based on "reproducible results that can be replicated by creating similar circumstances over and over again." His claim that "a complete quantitative knowledge of the conditions in an experimental setup is a fundamental prerequisite for scientific data to be credible" is incorrect, because a large fraction of scientific data is not gathered in experiments but through non-experimental observation.
What is really going on when scientists make statements like the ones just quoted, and similar statements Loeb makes trying to pretty much belittle all previous observations of UFOs (also called UAPs)? What seems to be happening is that scientists are making excuses for scholarly indolence. They're making lame excuses for not studying some large body of evidence that they haven't studied. We should ignore such excuses, recognizing them as just reasons some people give for failing to seriously study some topic.
So, for example, when Loeb tells us "the data on ‘Oumuamua was obtained through scientific observations on fully equipped state-of-the-art telescopes, whereas even the best UFO reports stem from a jittery camera on a fighter jet maneuvering along an unknown path," we should chuckle at this "holier-than-thou" comparison, because (1) the observations of ‘Oumuamua were just observations of a blurry little speck by a telescope seeing something at its observational limits, and (2) since Loeb is not an actual scholar of UFO reports, no one should think he is qualified to be telling us what are the "best UFO reports." And when Loeb belittles military observations on the grounds that "military personnel have insufficient training in science and no authority over unexpected phenomena in the sky," it seems like just a lame excuse for ignoring observations by reliable witnesses, often involving good photographic evidence.
The Galileo Project announced by Loeb consists of three things:
(1) Setting up some "high resolution multi-detector" machines that will scan the sky for unidentified phenomena, machines that may combine cameras and other scientific equipment such as telescopes, infrared sensors, radar or spectrographic equipment.
(2) Some effort looking for more objects coming into the solar system from outside of the solar system, like the very rare 'Oumuamua object. We can expect that little will come from this, because 'Oumuamua is now out of range of our telescopes, and because objects like it are not expected to be seen more than very rarely (perhaps never again in the next ten years).
(3) Some effort looking for mysterious satellites orbiting the earth, satellites created by extraterrestrials. There is no reason to believe any such satellites exist. Looking (among the many orbiting satellites) for orbiting satellites from extraterrestrials makes about as much sense as looking in New York City for extraterrestrial impostors pretending to be humans.
None of this is anything that should get anyone particularly excited. Currently there are more than a billion people who take cameras with them when they walk around outside carrying their camera-equipped smartphones, and there are also very many millions of security cameras that monitor outdoors for 24 hours. It would seem that there is not much chance that some dramatic UFO would be detected by a small number of machines set up by this Galileo Project, and not by any other 24-hour camera or any other people photographing something they saw in the sky.
There is no reason to think that some data from some Internet-connected observation machine will necessarily be better evidence than a good eyewitness report from reliable witnesses. Internet-connected machines can be hacked, and the databases where they store data can be hacked; but the human mind cannot be hacked. The same hackers that are causing so much trouble for corporations these days might upload some fake UFO data to an Internet-connected observation machine or its database, for any number of reasons.
There is a reason why an eyewitness testimony from an ordinary person might have just as much weight or more weight than something claimed by a scientist. Scientists have very often shown a tendency to report finding things that are not really there. This goes on all the time in the worlds of neuroscience and evolutionary biology, where scientists use all kinds of statistical tricks and wishful interpretations to summon up things that were probably not really there. The same thing can happen in cosmology and astronomy. An example is the report of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus. It was made by one team of scientists, and quickly disputed by other scientists who said there was no actual evidence for phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus. As I explain in this post, scientists have many ways of conjuring up phantasms of their own creation. But such tricks are unknown to the ordinary man. An ordinary person's report of seeing something much different from anything he had ever seen before may therefore have just as much weight or even more weight than some scientist's claim of finding something that showed up after elaborate statistical transformations or data massaging or wishful data analysis, particularly if the ordinary person had nothing to gain by making such a report. Conversely, scientists often have much to gain by interpreting something in some dubious way, such as when a professor writes a book claiming some barely visible speck seen at the observational limits of telescopes is an extraterrestrial spaceship.
A July document by Loeb has this laughable comment about the "high-resolution multi-detector" machines proposed for the Galileo Project: "A megapixel image of the surface of an unusual object will allow us to distinguish the label: 'Made in China' from the alternative: 'Made on Exo-Planet X' ". So we'll be able to tell if something is from another planet because the UFO will have an English label telling us which planet it came from? Hilarious.
The July document by Loeb that I quote is one that takes for granted that some closeup telescope photo of a UFO would allow us to tell whether it was from Earth or some other planet. But there is no photo of a UFO that would allow us to know that it was from another planet. Drones are incredibly advanced these days, as we saw at the Olympics opening ceremony when an army of flying drones formed a globe shape with the earthly continents. With drones being so advanced, humans can make almost any imaginable appearance for an object in the sky (for example, a huge flying saucer shape like the lifted-by-a-black-helicopter saucer shape that appeared in the sky during the 1984 Olympic closing ceremonies). You could presumably tell whether something was from beyond Earth if you tracked motion that no object of earthly origin is capable of. But telescopes aren't suitable for tracking incredibly fast-moving objects in the sky.
It is the right of every person to make potentially important observations of mysterious phenomena. When scientists try to suggest that UFO observations don't count unless they are made by fancy expensive equipment only used by scientists, it smells like an elitist move in which the privileged few try to keep power exclusively in their hands, wrongly denying a slice of power to the common masses. It's like some guy at the New York Times saying, "It doesn't count if the news report came from a small town paper; it only counts if it originated in the New York Times or the Washington Post."
Strangely, referring to observations of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, Loeb says that the Galileo Project will "not seek data from government-owned sensors that were not designed for this purpose." Ignoring observations of something from instruments that were not designed to see that particular thing is not a defensible principle. It's like saying, "We should ignore exploding bombs seen by our security cameras, because our cameras were not designed to see exploding bombs." Also, in his July document "Getting a Megapixel Image of UAP," Loeb refers to no instruments but telescopes that were themselves not designed for photographing UFOs or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.
Loeb's subtitle brags about "reproducible scientific observations." "Reproducible observations" is a phrase correctly applied to laboratory experiments that produce the same results each time they are run. But UFOs appear only very rarely. Some fancy machines dedicated to observing UFOs will not have much more of a tendency to produce "reproducible scientific observations" of UFOs than will some small-town club of ordinary persons photographing the sky each night from their back yard.
According to Loeb, this Galileo Project may grow into an "AI/DL system" (an artificial intelligence/deep learning system), and we should be very excited because "ultimately, we may launch our AI/DL systems for interstellar travel towards distant destinations, such as habitable planets around other stars, where they could reproduce themselves with the help of accompanying 3-D printers." This far-out fantasy is at least much more credible than a recent Scientific American post by Loeb warning us of the danger of Earth being instantly destroyed by an attacking interstellar dark energy heat wave (a danger that he proposed that we reduce by entering into a treaty with nearby extraterrestrials, like someone who had forgotten that the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact did not prevent the Soviet Union from being invaded in 1941).
Loeb brags that "if there is something out there, we will find it." But it is by no means clear that people who are not scholars of UFO sightings will have a high chance of solving UFO sightings because they have fancier equipment. The first sentence of the project goal statement of the Galileo Project manages to insinuate that no one has previously scientifically and systematically studied UFOs. That's the kind of misimpression you may get when people who are not scholars of UFOs talk about UFOs.
The idea of using telescopes to photograph UFOs may excite you until you consider a few facts. It has been estimated that there are between 200,000 and 500,000 amateur astronomers in the US alone, and there may well be millions of such amateur astronomers in the world. Such people are typically equipped with telescopes that are linked to cameras. What's the first thing someone with a camera-linked backyard telescope is going to do when he sees a UFO in the sky? He'll zoom in and try to get a telescopic photo. But we don't have much in the way of impressive UFO photos produced by telescopes. So it would seem that the odds are not very good for a project trying to use telescopes to produce a close-up photograph of a UFO.
Is this how Ivy League professors view things?
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