Why NASA cannot see UFOs and alien life forms

Every day I try to run new queries to see what I’ll stumble across in search results. When you get away from commercialized searches, you find some pretty astounding stuff (and realize just how difficult it is for a search engine to find relevant content). As I’ve noted before I often check out Science Daily for the latest science articles. Sometimes I use that site as a springboard onto the Web.

Today’s journey took me into the depths of government Web sites. Mostly I was just browsing NASA sites because, well, because I read a story about Harvard University researchers who feel they have developed a valid set of tests to determine whether extra-sensory perception exists. The Harvard psychologists are using “ESP stimuli” such as displaying images on a remote screen that volunteer test subjects cannot see to determine if their test subjects have extra sensory perception.

There is a serious flaw in this approach, which is the Harvard University researchers’ assumption that they know what extra sensory perception is, how it works, and how it can be measured. If the news article hasn’t omitted any relevant information about the study, all that can be concluded is that the Harvard researchers have ruled out the use of neuroimaging on randomly selected individuals as a means of proving that extra sensory perception is real (there is no way to prove that it is NOT real).

It’s interesting that these psychologists apparently did not recruit recognized psychics whose powers have been measured through various electromagnetic field thingamajigees. For example, so-called paranormal researchers have allegedly filmed electromagnetic fields reaching out from active psychics. If I were wanting to test for the possibility of extrasensory perception, rather than demanding that someone tell me what was being displayed on a screen in another room, I’d want to try to replicate some of these alleged Psychic Reading Events.

Even if your fully biased goal is to debunk claims of psychic powers, you’ll establish more credibility by attempting to replicate conditions that have supposedly been documented than asking people to read computer screens they cannot see. Last time I scanned the Web about psychic phenomena, I didn’t find any sites discussing how psychics and paranormal researchers try to read computer screens outside their fields of vision. This kind of testing is equivalent to putting keywords on a page on a brand new domain and asking why the keywords don’t show up in archive.org’s data for five years ago.

There is a total disconnect between the experiment and the phenomenon the experiment is supposedly testing. In fact, in Harvard’s case the phenomenon being challenged hasn’t even been documented outside of university testing events. The principle of not testing what you’re challenging is found throughout human experience, and it is very prevalent in search engine optimization as well as in ESP research. But let me get back to NASA for a moment.

Did you know that you can ask questions of NASA scientists and they’ll answer them somewhere on the Web? I did not. But apparently NASA has been asked about extraterrestrial life many times through the years. The replies tend to come across as jaded, disbelieving, and hypercritical (they even resort to grammar-flames in some of their answers).

One NASA scientist (David Morrison) in their Astrobiology group suggests that since 1,000,000+ amateur astronomers haven’t reported any UFOs, there must not be much evidence of real aliens visiting us. On the other hand, (Dr?) Morrison seems to be unaware that an amateur astronomer’s seriously-worded report received no response from NASA in 1999.

Perhaps you don’t count as one of the 1,000,000+ amateur astronomers if you turn up on a JPL/NASA forum asking for feedback on weird lights in the sky. The truth is that many amatuer astronomers have reported UFOs — often being ignored or chided by the scientific community, who feel like real aliens just would not do some of the things they are reported to do.

Oddly enough, a few weeks back I sat in an office on a Saturday afternoon, staring out the window. Across the street I noticed a couple of objects moving through the air. They swooped, dove, and circled. They were clearly not natural objects. These were not birds and the skies were clear that afternoon so I wasn’t looking at swamp gas, the planet Venus, or the moon (in fact, I’m pretty sure there was no swamp nearby as I was sitting in the heart of a major industrial district here in the Seattle area).

I watched the objects move through the air, doing the kinds of improbable things that nearby commercial aircraft and military aircraft would not be expected to do. This went on for about half an hour.

Now, you can rest assured I have a pretty good idea of what I saw. But what if I had been a small animal, say a dog or a pig (or a chimpanzee) seeing these things swoop around, move in formation, and circle the same spot over the ground? Would these objects have been doing anything that I should have expected them to do?

Which is not to say that I think UFO sightings can be explained by alien model spaceship enthusiasts who just happen to take their toys out for a run in Earth’s bright skies, but it’s rather arrogant for anyone on Earth to suggest that beings who travel to this world would want to do anything we could care about. We travel to distant islands, pluck critters off the rocks, tag them, bag them, and transport them to other islands.

We even have scientists doing some of the tagging and bagging, but a lot of that tagging and bagging is done by farmers, hunters, conservation officers, documentary film crews, etc. There are many industries and professions today that now have an interest in observing wildlife in its natural habitat, in rescuing distressed wildlife, and in communicating with animals. What must the animals think of us with our flying and rolling things that don’t forage in the forest, graze the grasslands, or drink from the rivers and mud puddles where they sustain themselves?

Space aliens are to humans what humans are to animals and what commercialized queries are to non-monetized queries. I can’t make you read the queries that haven’t been hyperoptimized any more than I can make you guess correctly 9 times out of 10 what is displayed on my computer screen every day. But you have the freedom and the opportunity to notice what is happening in your own non-commercial queries.

You’ll learn more about relevance by looking at your recreational searches than by looking at hyperoptimized “competitive” queries that have been manipulated beyond recognition.

The near-sightedness that we humans impose upon ourselves by justifying our prejudices extends well beyond the controversies surrounding supposed alien visitations and powers of the mind. We wear blinders in nearly everything we do, and the only way to remove those blinders is to question the assumptions we make.

Even scientists make unwarranted assumptions that skew the credibility of the answers they give. But at the end of the day even stubborn scientists eventually stop focusing on their contrived realities and they get back to doing what we expect them to do: learn about new things.

Search engine optimization requires us to do pretty much the same thing. If you only study queries you’re already familiar with, you’re passing by millions of opportunities to learn something new about search.

And who knows? Maybe you’ll find some secret government documents that have been accidentally published to the Web, proving that extra sensory perception only works when ghosts and space aliens are present.