UFOs, the Paranormal, Science, and Taboos

Paranormal versus Artifacts

October 14, 2002

First Part.

Should scientists venture into this most slippery terrain? I answer yes—otherwise it would mean that taboos exist in science. Yet, in principle, there should be none. But in practice, science functions like a religion. For example, an enormous number of scientists have never wanted to touch the subject of UFOs, adopting an irrational attitude. This is precisely why the topic has been abandoned to the "bandar-logs." I can recall an anecdote. I have a friend, an exceptionally courageous and honest researcher. He is one of the men I respect most, in every way. Moreover, he is a scientist of great merit, author of major discoveries. For a quarter of a century, every time the subject of UFOs was mentioned in front of him, he would raise his hand in denial, saying to me:

— You know my views...

Each time, I refrained from pressing further. But a few months ago, I suddenly dared to question him.

— Have you read my books on the subject?
— No...
— Then, have you read any books written by others on this topic?
— Uh... no...

I didn’t press further. It was clear that he found it pointless to learn more about a subject he considered a priori... empty, devoid of substance. He answered me in complete good faith. Yet he has known me for twenty-five years, and is fully aware of my scientific work. It would never occur to him to think I am an unserious researcher, and he has even defended me vigorously on occasion. But astonishingly, he never asked himself: "How is it that Jean-Pierre Petit, whom I regard as a very solid scientist, has devoted so much time to the UFO dossier?"

What caused this man to remain uninterested in this subject? It wasn’t, as is the case for many of our colleagues, fear of negative repercussions on his career. It was simply because he knows nothing about it. In fact, UFOs are generally poorly understood by scientists. We often have a false impression of scientists’ openness. They are specialists, and many of them, even if they excel in their field, are not curious about what might lie beyond their "cognitive horizon." They are just as susceptible as the average person to mass brainwashing.

The world of the "paranormal" is also a scientific taboo. Yet we are all confronted with transcendent questions, and the most immediate of all is death. I have questioned theoretical physicists about how they imagine life after death. To them, it seemed simply... nonexistent—a question devoid of meaning. Many live with a rather naive materialist vision of the entire universe. Some even believe that one day we will discover the famous "Theory of Everything" (TOE or Theory of Everything), and that the entire universe—its past, present, and future—could be deduced from some kind of mathematical formalism, perhaps even a "definitive equation." For example, this is the position of someone like Hawking, who wrote in A Brief History of Time:

— The universe contains itself, and if it has neither beginning nor end, then what use is God?

When one reads such statements, one is tempted to exclaim:

— At a time when metaphysics is in crisis, it is reassuring to see that barroom philosophy is thriving.

Nobel laureate in neuroscience, Edelman, for his part, expresses the conviction that "one day humans will be able to build thinking, conscious robots." With such figures, one gets the impression of finding no philosophical distance at all. The scientist, in truth, is first and foremost a man who believes he has the right to judge anything. Most are completely unaware that any system of thought is merely an organized system of diverse beliefs. Some physicists firmly believe the universe has four dimensions—three of space and one of time. I quote here a phrase from astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky, with whom I had the extraordinary fortune to sail on a boat, who once said:

— If only theorists knew what lies behind an experimental measurement, and if observers knew what lies behind a theoretical calculation, they would take each other much less seriously.

An organized system of beliefs operates through a hypothetico-deductive mechanism:

— If... this and if... this, then... that.

This produces a linguistic machine called a paradigm, which functions like a kind of "hamster wheel" inside which the thinking human pedals unknowingly. Progress in knowledge occurs through paradigm shifts, and is essentially discontinuous. One might even use the word catastrophe, in the mathematical sense. Etymologically, it comes from the Greek kata (beside) and strophedein (to turn). If discourse could be compared to music produced by a phonograph, sometimes the sapphire jumps a groove, and a completely new melodic phrase suddenly takes over, utterly different from the previous one. A quick example: for who knows how long, schools taught that orogeny—the emergence of mountains—was due to what were called "geosynclines." That is how one could explain finding seashells on high mountain ridges. It was a theory very difficult to grasp, one we had to memorize almost by heart. I would be delighted if someone could produce a text from the 1950s evoking this fantastic intellectual fairy tale that once held supreme authority. You know the rest of the story. As soon as the first artificial satellite was launched into orbit, using it to collect echoes and measuring Doppler shifts, the continental drift—long championed by meteorologist Wegener and previously considered the last of absurdities—was immediately revealed. Geophysicists rushed to reconstruct their vision of the planet. But instead of permanently honoring the late visionary (who had not merely noted the similarity in the coastlines of West Africa and South America, but had also established discontinuities in both the nature of the terrain and even in animal species), they preferred to name the new discipline plate tectonics. Thus, those who lived past the age of sixty experienced a fairly significant paradigm shift during their lifetime—since, during their lives, the continents they lived upon suddenly began to move. This is comparable to the abandonment of geocentrism, when the Earth suddenly began to move through space.

What is extraordinary is the way people—starting with scientists themselves—forget these shifts. After only a short time, they live as if their knowledge "had always been there." They have no awareness of the constant flux in their perception of the world. Between shifts, an epochal conformity arises, based on what Reeves often refers to as a "broad consensus."

Modern science emerged "in the century of the...