Hey. Anybody still there? Hello?
It occurs to me, as I scrape the crust from my eyelids and glance at the March calendar over there, that I haven’t posted a single item this month. So I have a confession to make. I blacked out on March 4, somewhere around the second sentence of a blog by Alan Boyle on NBC’s website. The part where it said “Surveys consistently show that about a third of all Americans think alien spaceships are real.”
Boyle posted a link to a 2012 National Geographic Channel survey about UFOs — not “alien spaceships” — in which 36 percent of respondents said they “believe” in UFOs, whatever that means. To fill up the rest of the white space, he threw in the old appeal-to-authority fallacy with this graph:
"'Why is the evidence so poor?’ said Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute and director of the Center for SETI Research. ‘One really good case might clinch it for them.’" I remember reading that part just before I hit the floor. (Shostak has made a career of saying there’s no good UFO evidence, but when presented with evidence, he recuses himself from reviewing it on the grounds that he’s not an expert.)
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