Alien Induction

Michael Kadish
10/5

The second essay, on page 296, by Curtis Peebles goes about disproving the existence of flying saucers by induction, trying to invalidate the various claims and stories involving the phenomena. Throughout the article, various assumptions are made, and claims go unsupported that give the reader more reason to believe in aliens than before reading it. Whether or not there are extra terrestrials that visit us, Peebles has a faulty argument, and an even faultier piece of dissuasion for UFO believers.

For instance, the second paragraph says that the airforce, the president, and the CIA have assured the people that there are no flying saucers, or extra terrestrials. That doesn't really prove much. That may not be his main argument, but to lead off with a pro-hominum argument by people who the paranoid community trust the least, will not do much do bolster support for him.

However, most of his argument is simply inductive, insulting various points of the phenomena. Justification of the decades, claiming that each time period that had its own ulterior motive for claiming aliens is cute, but highly unsubstantial. He claims that it started in the 50's do to post war paranoia. The paranoia that he is referring to, I suppose, the Red Menace, and McCarthyism did manage to spook the nation, however, the foremost mentioned UFO sighting was in 1947, the notorious Roswell incident, before McCarthy, or even Korea.

His arguments against the testimonies due to their similarities to science fiction stories are problematic at best. He is claiming that since a story came first, then the similar stories are merely retellings of old Twilight Zone episodes. However, that also is hardly proof against the aliens. This is an attack on some of the encounters, and thereby inductively, an attempt to debunk a whole field. However, there are a lot of simple responses to his claim, such as SOME of the accounts may be contrived, but that does not invalidate all; the aliens created by the special effects designers came from some visualization, perhaps an encounter of their own; or most importantly, simply having a story beforehand does not mean that it cannot occur afterwards. It does not take a prophetic vision to write a story, than have vague elements from it come forth. Jules Verne may have had a special ability of this, but with Feebles pointing to a recount that had a civilization dying, and then say that it was simply a rip off of War of the Worlds, due to the similarity, he could then call into question most of history which is vaguely similar to some story that has at one point been told. The minuteness that he take the scifi shows is comparable to the OJ case being "a retelling" of Othello. One minute detail of the story does that resembles another does not necessarily mean that the first was plagiarized.

Peebles has more of a claim when he calls into question the dreams and the procedures of hypnosis. If the situations can al be faked, then there certainly would not be much basis for the belief in UFOs. This method of induction would be effective iff all of the cases were brought forth only by hypnosis, or by recalling dreams. However, with some abductees baring scars, and others having true psychological trauma, which is not attained by dreams, his argument again fails.

Claiming that hallucinations are more wide spread than we thought is a push as well. If Jimmy Carter, who had an encounter, had merely hallucinated, then we need to rethink our concepts of hallucination. People who are in good mental and physical health do not generally hallucinate. Furthermore, he ignores testimonies of people who experience the same incident at the same time. He can ridicule the procedure, and various encounters, but his argument is not convincing.

It's very difficult to prove that something does not exist. Pointing to the illegitimacies due to a few of the circumstances is not the way to go. Inductive reasoning should eliminate all possibility of the larger. This essay did not come close.