Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
of Nature and the fallibility of observers - get the same kind of
information from the same spot in the sky do you seriously
consider that you have detected a genuine signal from alien
beings.
There's a certain discipline involved. We can't just go off
shouting 'little green men' every time we detect something we
don't at first understand, because we're going to look mighty silly
- as the Soviet radio astronomers did with CTA-102 - when it
turns out to be something else. Special cautions are necessary
when the stakes are high. We are not obliged to make up our
minds before the evidence is in. It's permitted not to be sure.
I'm frequently asked, 'Do you believe there's extraterrestrial
intelligence?' I give the standard arguments - there are a lot of
places out there, the molecules of life are everywhere, I use the
word billions, and so on. Then I say it would be astonishing to me
if there weren't extraterrestrial intelligence, but of course there is
as yet no compelling evidence for it.
Often, I'm asked next, 'What do you really think?'
I say, 'I just told you what I really think.'
'Yes, but what's your gut feeling?'
But I try not to think with my gut. If I'm serious about
understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain,
as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble.
Really, it's okay to reserve judgement until the evidence is in.
I would be very happy if flying saucer advocates and alien
abduction proponents were right and real evidence of extraterrestrial
life were here for us to examine. They do not ask us, though,
to believe on faith. They ask us to believe on the strength of their
evidence. Surely it is our duty to scrutinize the purported evidence
at least as closely and sceptically as radio astronomers do who are
searching for alien radio signals.
No anecdotal claim - no matter how sincere, no matter how
deeply felt, no matter how exemplary the lives of the attesting
citizens - carries much weight on so important a question. As in
the older UFO cases, anecdotal accounts are subject to irreducible
error. This is not a personal criticism of those who say they've
been abducted or of those who interrogate them. It is not
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