Customer Reviews

The Science of UFOs: What If They're Real?

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

The author, who has a background in astronomy and is a science professor, admits at the outset that he is a skeptic and is "extremely doubtful" that aliens have visited earth (although he purports to have an open mind). His message is directly out of the Gospel According to Carl Sagan -- i.e., scientists already understand 98% of the way that the universe works, and anything inconsistent with their current understanding has an infinitesimal chance of being real. When he confines himself to a discussion of the "hard science" of UFOs -- meaning the way that the typical behavior of UFOs fits with our current understanding of the laws of physics, which is "not very well" -- the book is readable and worthwhile in the same way that Fred Alan Wolf's books are readable and worthwhile. Throughout, however, there is the consistent theme that this poor fit between the behavior of UFOs and our understanding of physics inevitably means that UFOs aren't real. This is the Sagan Gospel -- UFOs can't be real because we, who can explain everything, can't explain them (and because they aren't anything like we would build and don't act they way we would act). This nearsighted approach fails to do justice to the sheer strangeness of the subject, and the author seems to be woefully uninformed about other paranormal phenomena and the way that UFOs relate to them. There is also a consistently snide and dismissive tone -- witnesses' motives are always suspect, eyewitness testimony can't be trusted, etc., etc. Again, the Gospel of Sagan. When the author moves away from hard science into brief discussions of topics such as the abduction phenomenon, the tone remains snide and dismissive and the discussions are too shallow to be worthwhile. What I really object to is the misleading nature of the book: The author takes to task those who "commercialize" the UFO phenomenon for profit, yet his own book misleading blares on the cover "An astronomer examines the technology of alien spacecraft, how they travel, and the aliens who pilot them!" (and on the back cover "Where could they come from, and how could they have traveled here? What advanced technology must they possess to execute the fantastic maneuvers they are routinely reported to make?") -- when his actual message is, "There ain't no such thing, folks." For a devotee of the Gospel According to Sagan, this book will fit nicely in your library. For everyone else, the book is of marginal value as a readable discussion of the challenge that UFOs pose to current scientific paradigms. Bear in mind, however, that the author is a debunker in sheep's clothing. (Some of the photographs are extremely interesting and are ones that I hadn't seen before -- I would've much preferred an in-depth discussion of THEM, but there is no discussion whatsoever.) Do yourself a favor and buy Richard Hall's "The UFO Evidence, Vol. 2," and see if the sheer weight of the evidence doesn't overwhelm everything this author has to say.

One of a new breed of books along the lines of Peter Sturrock's "The UFO Engima" written by degreed Physics Ph.Ds at respectable institutions which approach the phenomenon scientifically without bias. Rather than forming an opinion one way or the other, like Sturrock he makes a clear-headed best effort attempt at fitting the available data from the various reports, whatever they may be, to the science that we know about today and where we currently believe that it might head. The author has the gift of Fred Alan Wolf to clearly communicate scientific concepts in a way for non-scientists to understand. Especially enlightening is the author's frankness and clear grasp on what is and isn't known yet in modern physics. For each of the reported things considered, the author makes an excellent attempt at extrapolating existing science as far as a practicing researcher can realistically go. In some cases the extrapolations clearly fall off a scientific cliff, so to speak, as he notes each time. In a few cases the extrapolations lead to results that are surprisingly plausible given our recent emerging understanding of membrane (string) theory and quantum effects such as the quantum entanglement of light. I highly recommend this book!

I wish I could return this book to recover my money, but unfortunately I have lost forever the time taken to read it. To people untrained in science he may seem convincing, but to me, as an electrical engineer with an excellent technical reputation, having worked in aerospace and robotics and having been trained in the nuclear field and possessing an excellent background in physics, his book rapidly got very dissapointing, and I only read it to the end hoping he would give the subject minimal credible coverage. He's a debunker, and a poor one at that if you apply any scrutiny to his arguments which are mostly a collection of cursory analyses, and on top of it in several places his hasty assumptions and/or conclusions are just plain wrong; I wish I had more than 1000 characters to demonstrate it in this review, but here's a sample: look up magnetohydrodynamics or MHD, and you'll have a possible explanation for UFO sightings where supersonic speed is involved without a sonic boom; by the way, MHD is not taken out of UFO folklore, it happens in Tokamak experiments and within our own Sun. The thought that came to mind most often as I read was that Alschuler's reasoning was amazingly similar to that famous so-called expert's who put his foot in his mouth a long time ago by saying that humans could not survive the speed of a locomotive. Take note that I'm not sold to the reality of UFO's, as I just despise as much hardcore UFO believers that won't accept a simple explanation when it's obvious. What really frustrated me was the misleading title and backcover reviews; that's why I wrote this review. Don't even expect a good scientific crop from that book; instead, read about wormholes, warp theory and zero point energy elsewhere, for the little interesting content that the book sporadically presented.

Are scientists EVER even mildly literate about the scientific method or UFOs before they write such books? William Alschuler certainly shows NO evidence of ever reading hardly a thing about UFOs or any cases, nor having ever learned the basics of the scientific method. One of the most truly worthless books in the massive pantheon of worthless UFO books, this is possibly THE most egotistical and narcissistic book on UFOs since Col. Corso's _The_Day_After_Roswell_.

Nowhere does data about UFOs or sightings appear, and in no place therein is the scientific method ever applied to ANY data, this book is merely an ego-piece by an Earthly technophile (NOT scientist) who believes that the conventional Newtonian physics of 300 years ago and emotionally-comfortable conventional thinking hold the answers to all the mysteries of the universe we need ever look at or examine. We never needed Einstein and can throw away anything everything learned since American slaves were freed. Any data that makes scientist professional culture emotionally uncomfortable can be discarded and ignored. That is step 1 of Alschuler's model of the scientific method, as it is with almost all authors who self-glorify by claiming to offer a "scientific" look at UFOs (in a World of people with smaller minds who don't comprehend science properly).

Dr. Alschuler proceeds down the garden path of narcissism to define for all of us little people what technical proof HE would accept as solid evidence of an alien visitation (Did anyone ask and does anyone care what he thinks? Do the greys care?) Since the entire volume is a series of "It is my opinion that....", it is an interesting exploration of the number of English-language variants to beginning a sentence thusly, such as "It would appear that," "It is likely that," "The aliens probably," if/then statements and billions and billions of other variants having no relationship to science whatsoever.

This book is above all an insult to the scientific method. Another good title would be _What_I_think_is_most_likely_about_UFOs_ Doesn't sound very authoratative or scientific, that, but it would be an HONEST title. Such honesty is apparently beyond Dr. Alschuler or his publisher. St. Martin's Press should be ashamed for publishing this trash.

Though it is refreshing to see a scientist look into the subject this one produces only useless drivel. His other book on the subject is even worse. Reading them is like talking to someone who never shuts up and never says anything worth knowing. But then of course until one comes and eats my garbage I don't beleive in Black Holes.

Thoroughly dissapointing. Alschuler starts out with hard science and ends with debunking driven by inductive logic. It became painful to finish and left me with a sense of loss, of my time and money. He even has the audacity to question the integrity of Dr. John Mack and Bud Hopkins. Both of which have dedicated thier lives to the subject while maintaining open minds and objectivity. Alschuler clearly has done neither. He fortifies the argument that our scientific community isn't well along toward better understanding of the nature of the universe but that our scientific community is but a mear toenail removed from the dark ages.
Amazon.com's Rob Lightner says that Alschuler tackles the issue of UFOs without dammaging his credibility. How could anyone that relies upon this many assumptions rooted in rudimentary paradigms have credibility?

The author, like most folks, including most professional "physicists," fails to understand (or if he understands, fails to disclose) the actual nature of mass, inertia, and gravity, and of the "vacuum" or "zero point energy field" or "fabric of space-time' or "QED sea" or "aether" or whatever other term you prefer, that refers to the "sea" of mass-energy that is the substrate for "everything." UFO's are field propulsion vehicles and they exploit the fundamentals of the unvierse to do just what they do, which as you may notice, are quite consistent from one report to the next. (See Paul Hill's book for a rudimentary treatment.) Occupants of these craft - including certain privileged members of the human race - can tune the characteristics of the field they are in so that they and their craft have "zero mass," if they wish, and thus travel at any velocity they like (including "superluminal") vis a vis any given reference point. They "engineer the space" around them and "fall" into a relative vacuum of EM flux that they propagate in the direction they wish to travel, simultaneously reducing their inertial mass by means of a rapidly rotating a/o precessing EM field. (They also reduce the density or resistance of any material fluid in their path, be it air or water, and thus no "sonic boom" or shock wave. They are like surfers who can generate the waves - and their respective direction and other characteristics - that they wish to surf. Read articles by Haisch, Puthoff, Rueda, et al to (begin to) understand. The "truth" really is "out there," and it doesn't take a PhD to understand it, but you do have to ask, seek, and knock, and persist through a mountain of nonsense of which this book is but one small piece. Look into plasma physics, "electrogravitics," MHD, anything to get started; it will all become clear eventually.

Like the worst of the "debunkers," Alschuler ignores that vast bulk of the "observational data" of the phenomena (eyewitness accounts & their consistencies) as he plays intellectual gymnastics with endless theorizing worthy of the worst of the recreationalist "true believers." Perhaps a better title would be "What if we hand picked 8 % of the data and used it to convince ourselves of how scientifically educated and smart we are (AND LIBERAL for accepting that 8% of the data for the sake of argument), while ignoring the 92% of the data which might provide some answers." The goal is clearly NOT to WORK on any answers, but to PLAY with concepts and the inadeuqate and incomplete scientific assumptions du jour (or du 20th Century). Try Hopkins _Sight_Unseen_ instead, which compatibly applies what is seen repeatedly to the latest theories of new physics and discoveries of science.

Alschuler's book is a fascinating one, though it might prove a difficult read if you cringed during science class. The most interesting part is that it shows how weird our universe really is, but at the same time showing that this "weirdness" cannot fully explain the UFO sightings he examines. While his analysis does lean towards the skeptical side of the ledger, he gives the pro-UFO side of things more credence than do a lot of scientists. His use of science fiction stories throughout helps to illustrate his points. I highly recommend this book to science fiction writers as well as people interested in the scientific opinion of the UFO phenomenon.

After reading another book on the science of UFO's, I couldn't satisfy my lust for more of this kind of information. To this end, I did a Amazon search and come up with a number of books. By the subject and by the apparent content, this seemed to me to be exactly the kind of book that I was waiting for.

But then I read the reviews. All very poor. Well, I disregarded the reviews. I bought the book and took it with me on a long business trip. I figured that I would be able to finish this book easily on the 13 hour flight from San Francisco to China. Boy was I wrong.

Do not buy this book. You are wasting your time.

Here are my impressions. These are impressions only. I get the strong impression that this was written by a egocentric graduate student with red suspenders, overweight, with a Michael Moore stubby face. His pompous opinion of his self is irritating to say the least. He covers simple concepts with great verbosity and makes it seem so complex. So much so that he is insulting. He then takes genuine complex processes and takes on the additude of a know-it-all over simplifying and looking down the nose to an inferior peer.

His research is faulty. His assumptions, invariabily erronous. His explainations of certain processes absolutely wrong. Some of the concepts that he refers to are so out of date, at I wonder whether he actually researched any aspect of his book.

I am angered and insulted after reading this book. It is nonsense and worthless. Buying this book is perhaps the worst mistake I have made this century.