Customer Reviews

Ufo's: A Scientific Debate (The Norton library, N739)

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For those of you trying to find information on UFO sightings, I would recommend UFO: The Complete Sightings. This book, which is good in its own right, delves deeply into the scientific basis behind UFO's, and some chapters involve some pretty heavy math. Of course, if you're into that sort of thing then by all means buy this book.

Carl Sagan actually used to be fairly "open" to the possibility of extraterrestrial contact (see the book he co-wrote with Russian astrophysicist Iosef S. Shklovskii, Intelligent Life in the Universe.

The genesis of this current book is that in 1969, Sagan and NASA research associate Thornton Page organized a symposium on UFOs that was sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, that was eventually published in 1972 as this book. The invited scientists critically examine several famous UFO reports, and examine such "witnesses" from sociological and psychological perspectives.

My personal favorite of all the articles included in this collection is Sagan's own paper, "UFOs: The Extraterrestrial and Other Hypotheses," which details all of the unlikelihood of an extraterrestrial civilization being able to even FIND our civilization, as well as the difficulties in actually TRAVELING here (it would take years to make a round trip to even the very nearest stars; despite Star Trek and Star Wars' notions of "warp speed," etc.).

The only criticism I have is that only one "believer" was invited: J. Allen Hynek, who was an excellent choice, however: Hynek was the scientific consultant to the Air Force's Project Blue Book, as well as the guy who had to give the press the absurd `marsh gas' explanation for one sighting in Michigan in 1966; but he ultimately became one of the strongest champions of the notion of the extraterrestrial reality of UFOs.

There are much more recent treatment of such subjects, but this collection is still well worth reading, for both skeptics and "believers."

I have recently finished the book. He not only made me aware of the misuse of UFO reports but also on Project Bluebook.