Neil deGrasse Tyson on the Argument from Ignorance and UFOs

This is from a while back, but for ten minutes, it’s the most complete, indepth discussion Dr. Tyson’s given on this subject.

Astronaut UFO Sightings & Photos

Astronauts as UFO Eyewitnesses:

Astronauts – Wouldn’t they be among the best UFO eyewitnesses if any? Even more so, as conditions outside the atmosphere would make UFO sightings more compelling than those seen on ground or in the air? Consider: certain common ways of misidentifying ordinary aerial phenomena just wouldn’t be there. That includes misinterpretations of ordinary things like aircraft, birds, clouds, and balloons.

UFO Sightings & Pictures:

Claimed sightings and pictures of UFOs can be found all over the Internet. But there’s an enormous amount of blatant fraud and deception by UFO proponents, those who willfully distort and misrepresent the real reports of astronauts, either doctoring or completely fabricating photos offered as supporting evidence for their claims.

A close look at astronaut UFO sightings strongly indicates, if not with complete certainty, that every alleged UFO report credited to astronauts is simply and unequivocally false.

UFO Reports:

Reports claimed to be made personally by the astronauts show themselves to be distorted by the UFO media when examined closer. And that’s despite obvious conventional explanations. Even if an object in space isn’t a star or planet, this doesn’t strengthen the case for it being a UFO or anything else extraordinary.

Also, UFO proponents often selectively ignore or leave out an astronaut’s own description of what they actually saw. This can persuade some readers of these reports to believe that a given sighting was much more mysterious than it actually was.


Mystery-mongering is rife in the pseudosciences, and UFOlogy is by no means an exception.

In creating these sightings, often from whole cloth, UFO proponents show that they lack credibility by so deceiving their readers, fabricating absurd claims. They then substitute these for credible but conventional reports and genuine images. It tends to be low-circulation UFO magazines and members of the UFO community who badly, if at all, research their facts who most often do this.


The huge star-power of astronauts, like any appeal to celebrity, and helped by knowing and purposeful deception by some UFO enthusiasts casts much doubt on claims that UFOs are anything more than just an earthly psycho-cultural phenomenon, and not anything exotic, like aliens or psychic projections, however boring and mundane that may seem to believers.

Referrences —

Pseudoscience and the Paranormal, by Terence Hines, pp. 188-190, published by Prometheus Books, 1988.

Contrasts: SETI & UFOlogy

UFO proponents who wish to claim an air of scientific legitimacy, or on the other hand perhaps as a sort of tu-quoque argument, will often compare UFOlogy with the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program. It seems to me that they are vastly different, hardly comparable. Any attempt to compare them is a false analogy.




After all, if alien intelligence were a certainty, why look? A good example of the process, with some fictional liberties in the details of the technology, is described in Carl Sagan’s novel Contact, which describes it better than I can go into here.

This is in stark contrast with many UFOlogists, who not only express a certainty of the existence of ETIs, but unequivocally declare that they are already here, that impending evidence to reveal The Truth™ of the alien presence by the governments of the world is ‘just around the corner.’ They’ve been saying that for decades now, conspiratorial claims and all.

This, in spite of what we have good reason to think we know at present of the size and age of the universe, the evolution of life on Earth, and the limits on interstellar, much less intergalactic, travel imposed by distance and currently understood physical laws, the hazards of even near-light velocity travel.




(Republished. Last Update: 2019/3/30)