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UFO Sightings: The Evidence
Engaging and entertaining, UFO The Evidence is the most up-to-date overview of the UFO phenomenon, a controversy that gains strength with each new report of strange happenings in the sky. Written from the skeptical perspective, and applying the scientific method to the cases explored, this book differs greatly from the proparanormal tomes widely available today."Most broad survey UFO books contain absolutely uncritical presentations of sensational claims," says author Robert Sheaffer. "Typically, pro-UFO books deliberately omit all facts that tend to discredit the cases."UFO Sightings is unique because it gives the reader a broad overview of the world of UFOlogy, dealing with most major cases and trends, while offering references and commentary to provide a clear perspective. Incidents and photographs are scrutinized within a framework of objective science.Included are the Jimmy Carter UFO sighting; the "abduction" of Betty and Barney Hill; the incidents at Exeter; the Men in Black; messages from space; mothmen, wolf girls, and transparent apes; films; the UFO blitz of Mexico; and the comparisons to sightings of fairies and witches in colonial times.
348 pages, Hardcover
First published August 1, 1998
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April 10, 2025
SHAEFFER GOES FAR BEYOND HIS FIRST BOOK, IN HIS CRITIQUES
Author Robert Shaeffer (who is also a skeptic about ‘climate change,’ by the way, and resulted in him resigning from the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry [CSI], of which he had been a founding member) wrote in the Author’s Preface of this 1998 book, “It was December 1980 when the finishing touches were placed on the manuscript of ‘The UFO Verdict,’ the predecessor to this book. Much has changed in the world of UFOlogy since that time. The most obvious change can be summed up in one word: Roswell…
“In 1980, the modern myth of the Roswell crash was still in the early stages of its construction… and it had not yet entered the public’s consciousness… Another very visible difference is in the manner that alleged ‘UFO abductions’ are supposed to occur. In the 1960s and 1970s, UFO abductions were depicted as being of an ordinary physical nature. Aliens would wait until some unwary person wandered … into a lonely place… and snatch them up. in the 1980s, however, given society’s developing obsession with all kinds of newly discovered ‘victims,’ UFO abductions took a radically different turn… alien abductors … would come right into your bedroom at night to grab you…
“What is remarkable is how little substance has been set forth by UFOlogists … between then and now. Scientific publications such as ‘The New Scientist’ and ‘Telescope’ praised ‘The UFO Verdict,’ while UFO believers either ignored it or fulminated against it… [Yet] they still have no tangible evidence of any kind to prove the reality of the alleged UFO phenomenon… We have very large numbers of people reporting encounters with small humanoid beings … but still not nearly as many as those who claim encounters with angels… We have claims of supposed ‘artifacts’ from UFO crashes---yet not one such object has ever been shown to consist of anything other than materials that are common on this earth. We even have claims of alien implants… yet not one alleged ‘implant’ has ever been demonstrated to be of some unknown intelligent design, and most are simply ‘misplaced’ before they are ever analyzed.”
He explains in Chapter 1, “[In] 1947… the famous … sighting by pilot Kenneth Arnold… Arnold didn’t say that they LOOKED like saucers… he said that they looked like boomerangs… that ‘they flew erratic, like a saucer if you skip it across the water.’ However, the reporter’s account called them ‘flying saucers.’ … [And so] it was ‘flying saucers’ that people reported seeing, not ‘flying boomerangs.’ … Seldom has the power of suggestion been so convincingly demonstrated.” (Pg. 15)
He suggests, “The Air Force should have left the matter … with its 1994 report on Roswell… The Air Force unfortunately dragged its own credibility still lower when it released another report to coincide with the hoopla over the 50th anniversary of Roswell in 1997, claiming that the bodies reportedly seen by Roswell witnesses were probably crash dummies dropped over the desert… during the late 1950s. This suggestion is absurd for a number of reasons. First, the bodies were allegedly seen in July 1947… in the context of other reported Roswell events that are, at best, highly dubious.” (Pg. 58-59)
Of the Betty and Barney Hill case, he comments, “The Hills reported seeing two starlike objects, one of them the UFO. But two starlike objects were near the moon that evening---Jupiter and Saturn; Mrs. Hill’s description of the relative positions and brightness of the objects almost perfectly describes the two planets. If a genuine UFO had been present, there would have been THREE objects near the moon that night: Jupiter, Saturn, and the UFO… What Mrs. Hill was calling a ‘UFO’ was in fact the brilliant planet Jupiter.” (Pg. 64)
Of the famous photos by Rex Heflin, he states, “Unfortunately, the original Polaroid prints of these UFO photos will never be subjected to careful scrutiny, because Heflin claims … he gave the originals to a man… claiming to represent NORAD… No such person had ever been sent by NORAD… GSW [Ground Saucer Watch, a UFO group] performed its computer enhancement on the best set of duplicate prints… and concluded that the incident was a hoax… in the first of the three… which shows the object at its minimum distance from the camera, the object is not in focus, as it is in the other two. Distant objects, however, are in focus in all three. This strongly suggests that the object was small and extremely close to the camera.” (Pg. 91-92)
Of Ed Walters and the Gulf Breeze photos, he recounts that “the Pensacola News Journal reported that the lman who now lives in the house Walters occupied at the time of the alleged alien blitz has discovered a model flying saucer… hidden away under some insulation in the garage attic. Using this model, news photographers were able to create numerous photos of UFOs looking remarkably like those [of] Ed Walters… Walters suggests that the model was probably planted… by some ‘debunker’… If so, one would expect a dastardly debunker to leave the incriminating model somewhere it would likely be found, and not so well concealed that it was not discovered until the current resident… undertook to modify the cooling system.” (Pg. 102)
He argues, “considering the public’s strong interest in extraterrestrial life and space exploration, it would be surprising is we did NOT have reports of UFOs… Most proponents of … UFOs admit that at least 90 percent of the reports are worthless… But it is the remaining [1-10%] that is held to be of great significance… Because of the distortions that creep into the narrative, it is in principle no more possible to raise the 95 percent explanation to 100 percent than it is to build a communication device in which the noise is zero. There need not be ANY ‘genuine’ UFOs for seemingly perplexing ‘high-caliber’ UFO reports to arise.” (Pg. 147-148)
Of the sightings at Exeter, he asserts, “[John G.] Fuller cites two rational adults reporting a craft as large as a jet plane… Yet the pictures they took of the supposedly brilliant object did not come out. This suggests that they grossly overestimated its brightness; it probably WAS the planet Jupiter, which requires an exposure of several seconds to be recorded on film.” (Pg. 158)
He reports, “Even Allen Greenfield stunned his friends in the UFO movement by announcing that he no longer thinks UFOs are ‘real,’ except in the sense of a widespread myth. He writes, ‘Enough cases that I once considered ‘good’ as evidence … have had enough doubt cast upon them that , for me, there is enough doubt about the case for the UFO itself to move me into a skeptical stance.” (Pg. 228)
He adds later, “James W. Moseley adds that he knows personally ‘at least a couple of other well-known UFOlogists who have quietly Lost the Faith, but are afraid to admit it publicly…” (Pg. 228)
This book will be of great interest to those seeking a critique of UFO reports, etc.
Author Robert Shaeffer (who is also a skeptic about ‘climate change,’ by the way, and resulted in him resigning from the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry [CSI], of which he had been a founding member) wrote in the Author’s Preface of this 1998 book, “It was December 1980 when the finishing touches were placed on the manuscript of ‘The UFO Verdict,’ the predecessor to this book. Much has changed in the world of UFOlogy since that time. The most obvious change can be summed up in one word: Roswell…
“In 1980, the modern myth of the Roswell crash was still in the early stages of its construction… and it had not yet entered the public’s consciousness… Another very visible difference is in the manner that alleged ‘UFO abductions’ are supposed to occur. In the 1960s and 1970s, UFO abductions were depicted as being of an ordinary physical nature. Aliens would wait until some unwary person wandered … into a lonely place… and snatch them up. in the 1980s, however, given society’s developing obsession with all kinds of newly discovered ‘victims,’ UFO abductions took a radically different turn… alien abductors … would come right into your bedroom at night to grab you…
“What is remarkable is how little substance has been set forth by UFOlogists … between then and now. Scientific publications such as ‘The New Scientist’ and ‘Telescope’ praised ‘The UFO Verdict,’ while UFO believers either ignored it or fulminated against it… [Yet] they still have no tangible evidence of any kind to prove the reality of the alleged UFO phenomenon… We have very large numbers of people reporting encounters with small humanoid beings … but still not nearly as many as those who claim encounters with angels… We have claims of supposed ‘artifacts’ from UFO crashes---yet not one such object has ever been shown to consist of anything other than materials that are common on this earth. We even have claims of alien implants… yet not one alleged ‘implant’ has ever been demonstrated to be of some unknown intelligent design, and most are simply ‘misplaced’ before they are ever analyzed.”
He explains in Chapter 1, “[In] 1947… the famous … sighting by pilot Kenneth Arnold… Arnold didn’t say that they LOOKED like saucers… he said that they looked like boomerangs… that ‘they flew erratic, like a saucer if you skip it across the water.’ However, the reporter’s account called them ‘flying saucers.’ … [And so] it was ‘flying saucers’ that people reported seeing, not ‘flying boomerangs.’ … Seldom has the power of suggestion been so convincingly demonstrated.” (Pg. 15)
He suggests, “The Air Force should have left the matter … with its 1994 report on Roswell… The Air Force unfortunately dragged its own credibility still lower when it released another report to coincide with the hoopla over the 50th anniversary of Roswell in 1997, claiming that the bodies reportedly seen by Roswell witnesses were probably crash dummies dropped over the desert… during the late 1950s. This suggestion is absurd for a number of reasons. First, the bodies were allegedly seen in July 1947… in the context of other reported Roswell events that are, at best, highly dubious.” (Pg. 58-59)
Of the Betty and Barney Hill case, he comments, “The Hills reported seeing two starlike objects, one of them the UFO. But two starlike objects were near the moon that evening---Jupiter and Saturn; Mrs. Hill’s description of the relative positions and brightness of the objects almost perfectly describes the two planets. If a genuine UFO had been present, there would have been THREE objects near the moon that night: Jupiter, Saturn, and the UFO… What Mrs. Hill was calling a ‘UFO’ was in fact the brilliant planet Jupiter.” (Pg. 64)
Of the famous photos by Rex Heflin, he states, “Unfortunately, the original Polaroid prints of these UFO photos will never be subjected to careful scrutiny, because Heflin claims … he gave the originals to a man… claiming to represent NORAD… No such person had ever been sent by NORAD… GSW [Ground Saucer Watch, a UFO group] performed its computer enhancement on the best set of duplicate prints… and concluded that the incident was a hoax… in the first of the three… which shows the object at its minimum distance from the camera, the object is not in focus, as it is in the other two. Distant objects, however, are in focus in all three. This strongly suggests that the object was small and extremely close to the camera.” (Pg. 91-92)
Of Ed Walters and the Gulf Breeze photos, he recounts that “the Pensacola News Journal reported that the lman who now lives in the house Walters occupied at the time of the alleged alien blitz has discovered a model flying saucer… hidden away under some insulation in the garage attic. Using this model, news photographers were able to create numerous photos of UFOs looking remarkably like those [of] Ed Walters… Walters suggests that the model was probably planted… by some ‘debunker’… If so, one would expect a dastardly debunker to leave the incriminating model somewhere it would likely be found, and not so well concealed that it was not discovered until the current resident… undertook to modify the cooling system.” (Pg. 102)
He argues, “considering the public’s strong interest in extraterrestrial life and space exploration, it would be surprising is we did NOT have reports of UFOs… Most proponents of … UFOs admit that at least 90 percent of the reports are worthless… But it is the remaining [1-10%] that is held to be of great significance… Because of the distortions that creep into the narrative, it is in principle no more possible to raise the 95 percent explanation to 100 percent than it is to build a communication device in which the noise is zero. There need not be ANY ‘genuine’ UFOs for seemingly perplexing ‘high-caliber’ UFO reports to arise.” (Pg. 147-148)
Of the sightings at Exeter, he asserts, “[John G.] Fuller cites two rational adults reporting a craft as large as a jet plane… Yet the pictures they took of the supposedly brilliant object did not come out. This suggests that they grossly overestimated its brightness; it probably WAS the planet Jupiter, which requires an exposure of several seconds to be recorded on film.” (Pg. 158)
He reports, “Even Allen Greenfield stunned his friends in the UFO movement by announcing that he no longer thinks UFOs are ‘real,’ except in the sense of a widespread myth. He writes, ‘Enough cases that I once considered ‘good’ as evidence … have had enough doubt cast upon them that , for me, there is enough doubt about the case for the UFO itself to move me into a skeptical stance.” (Pg. 228)
He adds later, “James W. Moseley adds that he knows personally ‘at least a couple of other well-known UFOlogists who have quietly Lost the Faith, but are afraid to admit it publicly…” (Pg. 228)
This book will be of great interest to those seeking a critique of UFO reports, etc.
Displaying 1 of 1 review