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

5
Spoofing and Secrecy
Trust a witness in all matters in which neither his
self-interest, his passions, his prejudices, nor the love of the
marvellous is strongly concerned. When they are involved,
require corroborative evidence in exact proportion to the
contravention of probability by the thing testified.
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895)
When the mother of celebrity abductee Travis Walton was
informed that a UFO had zapped her son with a bolt of
lightning and then carried him off into space, she replied incuriously,
'Well, that's the way these things happen.' Is it?
To agree that UFOs are in our skies is not committing to very
much: 'UFO' is an abbreviation for 'Unidentified Flying Object'.
It is a more inclusive term than 'flying saucer'. That there are
things seen which the ordinary observer, or even an occasional
expert, does not understand is inevitable. But why, if we see
something we don't recognize, should we conclude it's a ship from
the stars? A wide variety of more prosaic possibilities present
themselves.
After misapprehended natural events and hoaxes and psychological
aberrations are removed from the data set, is there any
residue of very credible but extremely bizarre cases, especially
ones supported by physical evidence? Is there a 'signal' hiding in
all that noise? In my view, no signal has been detected. There are
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