"Yes, the world would be a more interesting place if there were UFOs lurking in the deep waters off Bermuda and eating ships and planes, or if dead people could take control of our hands and write us messages. It would be fascinating if adolescents were able to make telephone handsets rocket off their cradles just be thinking at them, or if our dreams could, more often than can be explained by chance and our knowledge of the world, accurately foretell the future." Just one nice passage among many, many in Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World" (available in the campus library and most public libraries). Well, Dr. Sagan, if the world would be more interesting if the unexplained UFOs were in fact space aliens, if we could communicate with the dead or space aliens, etc., why are you scientists such stuffy, party-poopers, insisting that the evidence is not good enough to prove that these things exist? With thousands of eye-witnesses, what more do you need? Sagan wrote that passage above just before he discussed pseudoscience in "The Demon-Haunted World". If we understand the difference between real science and pseudoscience, perhaps we can understand the view of many scientists and skeptics that the UFO research is pseudoscience.
"Pseudo" means "not genuine; sham", something pretending to be something else that it is not. Pseudosciences "purport to use the methods and findings of science, while in fact they are faithless to its nature—often because they are based on insufficient evidence or because they ignore clues that point the other way" (Sagan, 1996). We are awash in pseudoscience from all around us because "pseudoscience is easier to contrive than science" ("contrive" is a pretty strong word choice by Dr. Sagan). With pseudoscience, the standards of argument and what is allowable as evidence are much more relaxed than what you find in science.
This is not to say that all of science is correct. No, there have been plenty of mistakes in science, plenty of blind alleys. No, reality is messier, more unpredictable than the best detective/murder-mystery novel. With science, hypotheses are framed in a way that they can be tested by experiment and observation. Nature has the final veto power in whatever explanation we come up with but scientists are human (yes, they are) and subject to emotional attachments to their explanations. They too can be offended when their pet explanation doesn't pan out, when Nature has vetoed it.
Pseudoscience is just the opposite. Hypotheses are often framed in a way that makes them untestable. "Practitioners [of pseudoscience] are defensive and wary. Skeptical scrutiny is opposed. When the pseudoscientific hypothesis fails to catch fire with scientists, conspiracies to suppress it are deduced" (Sagan, 1996). Ah, yes! How many times have we heard that the science journals won't publish the UFO research with charges of bias and close-mindedness on the part of the science "establishment"? Such charges are part of the conspiracy mindset. I'm sorry, but it is not a conspiracy. It is because the UFO evidence is not of the caliber needed to base conclusions upon and less fantastic alternative explanations that don't involve space aliens are not addressed or explored by the author of the proposed paper. Not every truly scientific paper makes it into the journals either but the scientist doesn't complain of a conspiracy. No, the paper was probably rejected because more data needed to be gathered to improve the signal (the confidence level) above the ever-present statistical fluctuations of reality in order to deduce the conclusion reached by the author. Sometimes, too strong a conclusion is deduced from too weak a data set. Another likelihood is that the author did not explore an alternative explanation because they failed to see the assumptions that they were operating under. Our filters can blind us to the obvious.
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