Seth Shostak On UFOs: A Few Comments: Part Two

Dr. Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer at the SETI Institute in California has authored or co-authored a trio of books to date about life in the universe in general and extraterrestrial intelligence in particular. It’s difficult to address these topics without having to mention either in passing or at length the subject of UFOs and possible association with extraterrestrials. This Dr. Shostak has done, but painted with a very skeptical, perhaps in places with a misleading, paint brush. This trilogy, and my abbreviations for them throughout this essay are as follows.

Sharing the Universe (STU)

Cosmic Company (CC)

Confessions of an Alien Hunter (CAH)

For complete bibliographic details, see at bottom.

While Dr. Shostak’s book trilogy isn’t the sum total of his opinions on the UFO phenomena, they no doubt represent a solid representation of his UFO philosophy, and since these tomes are readily accessible to the general public, they form as good a source as any.

Continued from Part One.

Motivation (CC, CAH)

Dr. Shostak can’t seem to find a real motive(s) for why UFOs (as ET) would want to be here and waste their time out in our galactic boondocks. Some of the obvious candidates as related in sci-fi are apparently off their agenda, given the lapse of time since the ‘modern’ UFO era’ began – 1947 to date. For example, it’s highly unlikely by now that invasion is their motive or have a motivation as in ‘take me to your leader’ or establishing diplomatic and/or trade relations. The obvious parallel is do wildlife biologists establish these sorts of relationships with elephants (a highly intelligent mammal, unfortunately probably soon to be driven to extinction); do you establish these sorts of relationships with your pet companion animals?

Dr. Shostak notes that it is highly unlikely advanced high-tech aliens are coveting and stealing our technology and industrial secrets. Industrial espionage isn’t their agenda either though maybe through quirks in their industrial revolution they missed out on smart phones, amplifiers, plastics and the ability to brew beer. Dr. Shostak equally and correctly IMHO notes and that’s nicking our natural resources isn’t on their agenda either as anything Planet Earth has or our solar system has can be found closer to ET’s own home. We’re not likely to journey to Alpha Centauri for ices or minerals when there is an entire local asteroid belt, Oort Cloud and Kuiper Belt to tap, enough to last humanity a very, very long time.

But there is one resource local to Planet Earth that aliens can’t find closer to home and that’s terrestrial biochemistry, a resource we exploit for the pharmaceutical industry. Exactly why aliens would want to harvest terrestrial biochemistry is beyond me (maybe for their drug or pharmaceutical needs?) but I’m not prepared to rule it out entirely even if it is a far out in left field. [See also Human-Alien Sex]

Among the other negatives, ET doesn’t appear to be here as missionaries come to promote even ram their alien religious philosophy down our collective throats. ET doesn’t appear to be interested in helping humanity achieve universal peace or provide us with new and improved environmentally friendly technologies, like the key to controllable nuclear fusion.

So what is the motivation of our potential UFO-related aliens? Well, and I’m sure Dr. Shostak can appreciate this, it is SETI! Of course in this case the “S” has been achieved and we’re their “ETI”. I find it strange that Dr. Shostak doesn’t acknowledge or list the possibility that their motivation is exactly the same as his very own calling card – scientific exploration. In Dr. Shostak’s case it is via radio telescopes. In the case of aliens, it is more like the Star Trek scenario – the boldly going scenario that Earthlings can appreciate given our past history of boldly going, finding new lands and new peoples.

Why Now (CC, CAH)

Dr. Shostak asks the very logical question about the UFO/alien presence here on Earth – why now, now being 1947 to date. He means, given the age of our planet and the probability that aliens could come visiting anytime during that interval; it would be highly improbable that it would be ‘now’. He correctly points out that unless aliens were already in our neck of the woods (think here the film scenario of Star Trek: First Contact) then UFOs have bugger-all to do with recent (say first half of the 20^th Century) human activities since they would have to be too far away to witness same and still get here by 1947.  

Dr. Shostak briefly discusses and dismisses the ‘ancient astronaut’ issue even though it partly answers his own ‘why now’ objection  which is that it defies probability that UFOs would become a presence and a force to be reckoned with just in the last several decades plus. For the here and now, the ‘ancient astronaut’ issue is another essay for another time but I’ll just say I ground the reality of ‘ancient astronauts’ based on universal mythologies, not archaeology. Sufficient to say that the answer to ‘why now’ is that the alien presence has been an ever ongoing one (even if token), so it’s not just here and ‘now’. It’s that biosphere argument. We’re interesting on an ongoing basis, not just now, not just a quickie visit every million years or so.

Consider an Antarctic penguin seeing his (or her) first human wildlife biologist that’s about to abduct, tag, and release it. The penguin might ask ‘why now’ and gee-whiz aren’t I ‘lucky’ to be so special as to have such an advanced being interested in little old me right here and ‘now’. Of course the penguin might say ‘why me’ and ‘why now’ instead of why not some other penguin from fifty years ago. What the penguin wouldn’t know is that humans (and wildlife biologists) have had an ongoing presence in Antarctica for decades and decades. Humans didn’t arrive in Antarctica just ‘now’ and there probably really was some other penguin from fifty years past who also asked ‘why me’ and ‘why now’ and there might be another penguin fifty years from now who will go through the same ‘why me’ and ‘why now’ process.  

Evidence (CC)

If there is one phrase or mantra repeated again and again by UFO skeptics is “show me the evidence” for the UFO ETH, though apparently by his own admission there’s sufficient evidence to convince some scientists that there really are “alien rocket jockeys” here and now.

Unfortunately, Dr. Shostak has a very narrow definition of what evidence is, and it’s not eyewitness testimony – the profession and the quality of the eyewitness is irrelevant, it’s not multi-eyewitnesses, it’s not radar, it’s not eyewitnesses combined with radar, it’s not photographs, it’s not films, it’s not physiological effects or electromagnetic effects or ground traces. One thing and only one things qualifies as really real evidence and that’s a physical something that he can put on the slab in his lab. That’s it. Pity he couldn’t use that criteria in a courtroom as to what constitutes real evidence.

But that’s not the real point. The real UFO issue is that there’s more than sufficient evidence that something really, really interesting is going on and ongoing. Maybe it’s psychological, maybe it’s pathological, maybe it is sociological or a cultural phenomena. Maybe it’s human time travelers from our future or maybe it is terrorists (or hippies) lacing our water with hallucinogenic drugs. Maybe it really is ET buzzing our aircraft and/or doing agricultural graffiti and/or abducting Joe and Mary Citizen for Frankenstein-like experiments. But something INTERESTING is going on and scientists, or so I thought, love to investigate INTERESTING things, topics, subjects, whatever.  

The Condon Report (STU)

Dr. Shostak loves the USAF sponsored University of Colorado study of UFOs that was done (after quite some considerable difficulty in coming up with an academic institution willing to take the money on offer) under the direction of physicist Edward U. Condon – thus oft referred to as the Condon Study and Condon Report. Why? It nailed shut the door on the UFO ETH (extraterrestrial hypothesis) and that UFOs had any legit connection with all things scientific. UFOs were pseudoscience; the Condon Report said as much. Therefore, the USAF could bail out of the UFO business (a PR headache) with head held high. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out quite so cut and dried as Dr. Shostak might have his readers believe.

Dr. Shostak got one thing right (STU) in quoting Dr. Condon in Condon’s summary/conclusions preface to the report proper. That is, that summary/conclusions section was entirely all Condon’s work. None of his staff saw before-the-fact the conclusions section which were personally Condon’s and Condon’s alone. The staff only read Condon’s conclusions after the entire report had been published. Dr. Shostak neglects to mention the historical and well documented fact that the Condon Study was wracked with internal dissension not the least because Condon had gone public with his anti-UFO conclusions while the study was still in progress.

Dr. Shostak notes that the National Academy of Sciences endorsed the Condon Report, but fails to mention that the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) gave it the thumbs-down, as did the scientific consultant to the USAF’s various UFO investigations (Projects Sign, Grudge and Blue Book), the late Dr. J. Allen Hynek. In fact Dr. Shostak seems to have been unaware there ever was a Project Sign and a Project Grudge before Project Blue Book as he only notes the latter (STU). That must have been pointed out to him by someone since Projects Sign and Grudge get a mention in a later book (CAH).  

Finally, Dr. Shostak fails to mention that fully 30% of the UFO cases studied by Condon’s staff (Condon himself never got his hands dirty with actual on-site investigation) could not be explained and thus remained bona-fide UFOs. Now I wonder why Dr. Shostak didn’t mention that little tidbit and how that contradicts Condon’s own conclusions.  

So, perhaps it isn’t all that surprising that Dr. Shostak drops the mention of Condon from his later UFO coverage (CC, CAH). The light bulb about how bad the Condon Report was probably came on since his first book (STU). 

Surveillance: Detection from the Top on Down (STU, CC, CAH)

Dr. Shostak makes an apparently valid point when he notes that all of our surveillance of terra firma via those spy and other satellites like weather satellites, Google Earth images, all that massive 24/7 surveillance coverage from the top (space) down (ground level) hasn’t reveled diddly-squat in terms of spotting any UFOs. Conclusion: there are no UFOs to spot! Well one can ignore the spy military surveillance since anything unusual detected could be, probably should be, classified. As to the rest, well there’s a relatively easy answer – stealth technology.  If you know enough physics to cross interstellar space, you know enough physics to adapt physical principles into stealth technologies if it is to your advantage to do so and given the human track record of shoot-first-and-ask-questions-afterwards stealth technology is a wise precaution. If you can use stealth technologies to absorb radar photons (make yourself invisible to radar) you can adapt that sort of high-tech to absorb light photons (make yourself invisible to the eye, the camera, etc.) By analogy, terrestrial stealth technologies and ever ongoing R&D of stealth technologies are part and parcel of every advanced military nation (the US, Russia, China, etc.). Nations are using and are working on stealth technologies, and not necessarily 100% towards military applications. Law enforcement makes use of such advancements too. So, if we do stealth technology, why not ET?  

But just because commercial satellites have apparently not photographed UFOs (have all images been examined in exacting detail with that objective in mind?) doesn’t mean UFOs don’t exist. UFOs are not a fixed feature on the landscape, unlike say the pyramids at Giza or Easter Island. Any UFO would have to be in exactly the right spot at exactly the right time and that’s relatively unlikely as the numbers of alien craft are probably very few and far between. What? Multi-thousands of eyewitness sightings and there are just a few craft? Yes! Subtract all those IFOs from the UFOs and then note that one craft could be witnessed hundreds of times over the many decades. There are vastly more sightings of aircraft than there are aircraft since one aircraft can be witnessed multi-thousands upon thousands of time over the lifetime of that aircraft. If there were only a dozen or so bona-fide UFOs shared around the globe what odds one will be in the right place at the right time to have its picture taken by a satellite?  

To be continued.

Bibliographic Details:

Shostak, Seth; Sharing the Universe: Perspectives on Extraterrestrial Life; Berkeley Hills Books, Berkeley, California; 1998:

Shostak, Seth & Barnett, Alex; Cosmic Company: The Search for Life in the Universe; Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K.; 2003:

Shostak, Seth; Confessions of An Alien Hunter: A Scientist’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence; National Geographic, Washington, D.C.; 2009:



UFOs: Bits and Pieces: The Condon Report

With both the existence of pure theory and applied evidence supporting the plausibility of the UFO extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH) – where the UFO remains a UFO after appropriate expert analysis has failed to find a more terrestrial explanation – lets look at a few snippets of the phenomena this time the rather famous, or infamous, University Colorado UFO study under project director Dr. Edward U. Condon which ultimately provided the reason for the USAF to get out of the UFO business.

Assuming one or more extraterrestrial civilizations with advanced, interstellar spaceflight capability exists; then they know about Planet Earth. Say ‘hi’ to those pesky UFOs, a concept either dismissed or ignored by the general scientific community. Part of that scientific snub is in no short order due to what’s commonly called ‘The Condon Report’, a scientific study into UFOs undertaken by the University of Colorado on behalf of the U.S. Air Force (USAF).

From the early days of the modern UFO era (1947+), the United States Air Force (USAF) took charge of investigating the flying discs or saucers, later tagged ‘unidentified flying objects’ on the grounds of national security and coming to terms with violations of American air space.

But at the height of the Cold War era, the military had to downplay any possibility that the flying discs could be foreign technology – reds under the beds sort of stuff; the McCarthy era. Thus, the military put the emphasis on hoaxes, natural phenomena, misidentifications, anything but nuts-and-bolts that could belong to a foreign power.

Ultimately that proved to be a PR disaster when it became fairly obvious that many official explanations of UFO sightings as prosaic phenomena were more far out than the UFO ETH. By the early 1960’s, the public’s perceptions of the USAF competence in handling their UFO investigations (under the code name Project Bluebook) was proving to be a public relations nightmare, capped off by the J. Allen Hynek (who was the main scientific consultant to the USAF on the UFO issue) ‘swamp gas’ fiasco or debacle.

That ‘swamp gas’ episode was a turning point for now the USAF UFO Project Bluebook investigation was becoming a real public relations disaster. The more the Air Force tried to downgrade the issue, the more the public smelled whitewash. Since the USAF knew the UFOs were not a national security issue – no alien invasion had resulted after two decades – it was time to exit gracefully from any involvement relating to the UFO issue. The question was how to accomplish that in an apparently open and in the public eye manner. Well, what about a totally independent study by an established university headed by a well known and respected scientist (or at least someone well known and respected by the scientific community – most scientists don’t tend to be household names).

So, in order to bring in qualified, independent, experts, restore credibility (and get a reason to get out of the UFO business) the USAF turned to the University of Colorado, and respected physicist Edward U. Condon, to look into the UFO issue.

Unfortunately, Dr. Condon, as head of the independent investigation, proved to be more a liability than an asset. Staffers uncovered a memo by his higher echelon team that strongly suggested that he had already made his mind up even before the formal and serious study began, that UFOs were a non-issue. That produced such dissention in the ranks, and media publicity, that the internal politics just about shattered any credibility to the investigation. Some members quit and offered scathing rebuttals to the inner workings of the University of Colorado study. True to form, the final report apparently dumped poo on the subject, or at least the introductory / summary chapter written by Condon himself.  

Now of course when you issue a 1000+ page report to the press, who have deadlines to meet, all they have time for is to digest the introductory / summary and write their articles from what that says. What is says is that there’s no meat on the bone; the USAF should stop wasting time on the subject – which is exactly what the USAF wanted to hear – bail out from this PR nightmare. Subject closed. Unfortunately, things didn’t quite turn out that way.

Now Condon was clearly 100% anti-UFO before the study even began, but any read of the lengthy actual report relative to Condon’s summary (what the press, etc. took note of being short and first up) - well Condon said there was nothing to the UFO ETH; but the actual report compiled by his staff couldn’t explain over 30% of the cases it studied.

So there is no similarity between the questions the actual report raises and the summary conclusions reached as given in that first chapter. Few people have taken the time to separate the wheat from the chaff in the Condon Report. The first chapter is the chaff; the bulk of the report contains the wheat.

What you’ll find in the non-Condon written bulk of the University of Colorado report is that case after case (well about 30% of cases in fact) are unexplainable. How Condon can say that there’s nothing to the subject in the summary, while his team suggests that 30% of what you’ve investigated is anything but ‘nothing’, remains a perplexing historical mystery – except for that earlier leaked memo which showed that Condon, despite being a scientist, had a closed mind on the subject.  Contrary to popular opinion, the Condon report proved the need for heightened UFO investigation, not the need to abandon UFO investigation.

But in hindsight the Condon Report proved to be a pivotal point in the history of UFOs. It provided a reason for the U.S. Air Force to get out of the UFO business – publicly at least; it provided a disincentive for scientists to further seriously study the UFO issue. Condon set back the scientific study of UFOs by decades – it probably still hasn’t recovered from the debacle. And thus, to this day, scientists shy away from the UFO ETH issue. As far as the scientific community is concerned, the case is closed, and Condon closed it.

Further readings regarding the (University of Colorado) Condon Report:

Fuller, John G. (Editor); Aliens in the Skies: The New UFO Battle of the Scientists: The Scientific Rebuttal to the Condon Committee Report: Testimony by Six Leading Scientists Before the House Committee on Science and Astronautics July 29, 1968; G.P. Putnam’s Sons, N.Y.; 1969:

Harkins, R. Roger & Saunders, David R; UFOs? Yes! Where the Condon Committee Went Wrong; Signet Books, N.Y.; 1968: [Saunders was a member of the University of Colorado UFO Study.]

University of Colorado & Gillmor, Daniel S. (Editor); Final Report of the Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects Conducted by the University of Colorado Under Contract  to the United States Air Force; Bantam Books, N.Y.; 1969: [The Condon Committee Report.]