Twilight of the Skeptics, Part I

A ‘Skeptic’ Aims at Kecksburg’s UFO and The New Yorker — and Misses

Skeptical Inquirer ‘debunker’ Robert Sheaffer uses obfuscation and omission to dismiss an exhaustively documented UFO case.

This is the first article in an occasional series Trail of the Saucers will publish this fall looking at Skeptical Inquirer magazine’s latest fusilade against anyone who dares entertain the hypothesis that non-human intelligence might be behind the UFO phenomenon. — The Editors

Skeptical Inquirer, the “magazine for science and reason,” put UFOs on the cover of the September/October issue under the banner of “UFOs (or UAPs) Hit the News.” Inside are nearly half a dozen articles taking on the “credulity” of mainstream media coverage of UFOs, which exploded this year in the run-up to the Pentagon’s report on UAPs, and extolling the virtues of “skepticism.”

Collectively, it’s a steaming brew of flawed thinking, obscurantism, evasion, disingenuousness and pure snark. The phrase “doth protest too much” comes to mind. The reader is almost overwhelmed. There’s so much there — and so much wrong with it — that it is impossible to untangle and unpack in a single article.

So we’ll take this one step at a time.

WE begin with a single fragment of one article, UFO “debunker” Robert Sheaffer’s indignant attack on The New Yorker magazine for their “very misleading article” last spring about the Pentagon and UFOs. The New Yorker published How the Pentagon Started Taking U.F.O.’s Seriously online in late April and then in the May 10 print edition. It’s a lengthy, well-written report by Gideon Lewis-Kraus that effectively and responsibly introduces the UFO topic to an audience that might not otherwise be familiar with the fascinating history. “I guess the purpose of all this is to show that UFO sightings and UFO controversies have been around for a long time,” Sheaffer laments.

Journalist Leslie Kean figures prominently in The New Yorker’s report— necessarily so, as she is the one who broke the UFO story open in 2017 in The New York Times.

This particular nugget of Sheaffer’s prose, amounting to just twenty lines in a four-page article, nicely illustrates how sloppy skepticism distorts, conceals and ultimately leads one away from the truth. For that reason, we kick our series off with it.

Sheaffer’s article, The New Yorker’s Credulous Article on Pentagon UFOs, accuses Lewis-Kraus of presenting nothing less than a “hagiography” of Kean. To spare readers a dictionary trip, the word is commonly used to refer to “the writing of the lives of saints” [OED]. It’s a cheap shot, and unwarranted. If Sheaffer really wants to unpack hagiographical prose, the Jan/Feb 2021 issue of Skeptical Inquirer offers a smorgasbord: Remembrances of the late “Amazing” James Randi — a stage magician and scientific skeptic who frequently challenged paranormal and “pseudoscientific” claims in the magazine before he died in 2020. [Editor’s note: The first version of this article gave an incorrect date for the year of Randi’s death; we corrected it.]

Nearly half of Sheaffer’s article, which was first published at the blog BadUFOs, is devoted to sweeping aside several UFO cases The New Yorker mentions briefly as representative of those that intrigue serious investigators like Kean. Here’s the excerpt from The New Yorker piece Sheaffer uses as a springboard to swat at four UFO incidents that have been (in his mind) “debunked.”

Once it was clear that U.F.O.s were going to be her life’s work … Kean chose to focus on “the really good cases” that had been reported since the close of Blue Book, including those that involved professional observers, such as pilots, and ideally multiple witnesses; those that had been substantiated with photos or radar tracks; and especially those in which experts had eliminated other interpretations.

Sheaffer then rips into the first “really good” (Kean’s words) case The New Yorker mentions: the Rendlesham Forest incident — surely one of the strangest and exhaustively documented UFO cases of the 20th century. It is sufficiently complex that we’ll deal with Sheaffer’s handling of it in a future article. For now, we’ll focus on one of the lesser-known cases: the Kecksburg incident, sometimes referred to (with good reason) as Pennsylvania’s Roswell. The transparently disingenuous manner in which Sheaffer dismisses it as little more than a ufologist’s fever dream reveals a lot about how professional UFO “skeptics” get to where they want to go. Sheaffer writes:

For another “really good” case, Kean selected an incident that occurred in Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, a rural hamlet southeast of Pittsburgh, on December 9, 1965, in which an object the size of a Volkswagon Beetle allegedly hurtled from the sky. According to multiple witnesses, the acorn-shaped bulk had been removed from the woods on a flatbed truck as service members guarded the area with guns.

Allegedly. The problem is, we know exactly what people saw in the sky near Kecksburg — and indeed, across the entire region. It was the Great Lakes Fireball of December 9, 1965, well documented in Sky and Telescope magazine (February 1966) and other astronomical publications. This has been pointed out repeatedly by skeptics for decades, but somehow the word doesn’t seem to have reached Kean.

First of all, to declare that “we know exactly what people saw in the sky near Kecksburg” does not mean that the object, whatever it was, was identified. It was not identified. It was described as “a fireball” and presumed to be meteor.

Sheaffer does not (and, more to the point, cannot) direct readers to any museum or academic institution where one might gaze upon definitive proof that the Great Lakes Fireball was, in fact, a meteor — because there isn’t any.

Does the observational evidence cited by the February 1966 Sky & Telescope and other scientific publications support the hypothesis that the Great Lakes Fireball was a meteor? It would certainly seem to, and that’s all Sheaffer apparently needs to plant his flag of certainty and claim ownership of the truth. The “proof” that enables him to “debunk” the idea that the fireball was anything other than a meteor basically boils down to: There were some astronomers who, based on descriptions by witnesses (whose credibility is always suspect if they report anything strange) of what they saw in the sky, concluded that it must have been a meteor … so it was a meteor! Case closed, end of story.

But that is not the end of the story; it’s just the opening chapter. Sheaffer leaves out huge swaths of the story’s fascinating middle and ironic epilogue, all of which he’s aware of but omits from his retelling simply because it doesn’t fit neatly inside the epistemological sandbox he wants to play in.

To be as precise and accurate as possible, we don’t “know exactly” what happened in the sky over Kecksburg on Dec. 9, 1965. We know a great deal, however, about what happened on the ground. Skeptics are quick to question people’s descriptions of unusual aerial phenomena because it is, after all, easy for an untrained eye to misidentify things. But the most intriguing facts about that night were not to be found in the sky, but in and around the woods outside Kecksburg.

What happened in Kecksburg?

It’s beyond the scope or intent of this article to relitigate every detail of the Kecksburg incident. Those who are interested in learning more might check out Kean’s 2005 article in the International UFO Reporter. Also, one would do well to watch UFO investigator Stan Gordon’s 2004 documentary, Kecksburg: The Untold Story. The film is available on DVD and streaming on Amazon.

To be sure, the latter is an unpolished, low-budget affair and is frequently accompanied (unnecessarily) by eerie music for dramatic effect. But those problems aside, the film is a surprisingly sober account, an act of bearing witness. Had it aired virtually intact as a special 90-minute edition of PBS’s flagship investigative program Frontline, the national conversation about the government’s knowledge of UFOs would have been taken to a whole new level.

In the film, nearly two dozen Kecksburg residents, all but one interviewed on camera, describe what they saw and heard in and around the woods and in Kecksburg during the chaotic hours and days after whatever it was that was seen in the sky hit the ground.

They tell a fascinating story, which is in part supported by contemporaneous press accounts and radio broadcasts.

Several people, including a state police trooper, a journalist, and a volunteer fireman, saw the object up close: About 10–15 feet long, smooth and metallic, shaped like an acorn or the Liberty Bell, with unusual writing on it. Pennsylvania State Police descended on the scene, followed by the U.S. Army and Air Force. Those who saw the object were ordered out of the woods, which was cordoned off. Citizens who tried to enter from different locations were turned back by armed men. The radio journalist, John Murphy, told his wife over a CB radio that he’d taken photographs of it, only to have the film seized.

Military personnel, some garbed in the sort of protective clothing one might wear in an area where radiation was present, hauled equipment into the woods. Military vehicles and personnel were seen everywhere by scores of people. Multiple witnesses in several locations reported seeing a departing flatbed truck carrying something (not “nothing”) that was literally under wraps. The official explanation, depending on who was talking, was that it was a meteor and/or that “nothing” was found in the woods.

So much excitement over a piece of space rock!

These things happened. They are part of the historical record, not “drunk history,” as Sheaffer cynically calls it. The activity was seen and documented at the time by professional journalists. Some witnesses, frightened by what they saw or intimidated by authorities, spoke of their experience only years later with trusted friends. (On a personal note, as a lifelong journalist, the story of Murphy and the life-altering nightmare he was subjected to is both tragic and infuriating.)

The bottom line: Quite a bit more happened in Kecksburg on Dec. 9, 1965 than just a bright light in the sky. It is also clear, based on Gordon’s (and Kean’s) unsuccessful attempt to obtain official documents about the incident, that the government has not been completely forthcoming about what happened.

So what does a seasoned skeptic like Sheaffer do with this wealth of material? What leads does he follow? How does he deal with it?

Simple. He ignores it.

Actually, in the years that Sheaffer has written elsewhere about Kecksburg in greater depth, he’s gone one better. In January 2014, a Canadian television series on strange events aired an episode in which the Kecksburg incident was re-enacted. Sheaffer unloaded a few days later on his blog. This may be a leap on my part, but based on his account of what played out on screen, it sounds like the TV program was faithful to known facts.

Sheaffer then issues his verdict:

“Such an incident of undeclared martial law would, of course, fly in the face of all American legal tradition and would itself be a matter of far greater concern than any falling acorn capsule. If it really happened, that is.”

Where to begin?

First of all, temporarily cordoning off a patch of woods for a few hours where an aircraft of some kind has possibly crashed is not “undeclared martial law.” But putting aside the laughable idealization of “all American legal tradition,” (the same tradition that gave us slavery, Japanese internment, illegal wars, squeezing indigenous peoples into reservations, Gilead-style laws targeting women and doctors in Texas, etc.) Sheaffer then wades into Trumpian levels of reality denial, essentially branding an exhaustively documented event that was experienced and described by dozens of people in extraordinary detail as … fake news!

“If it really happened”? This is skepticism? Seriously?

What’s the alternative? WHJB’s John Murphy made it all up and got the The Greensburg Tribune-Review to play along? The military wasn’t there? (A similarly lame takedown of Kecksburg in the Spring 1991 issue of Skeptical Inquirer makes clear that investigators from the 662nd Radar Squadron based near Pittsburgh were, in fact, present.) Anyone who saw anything lied about it? Made it up? Dozens of witnesses experienced a complete breakdown in their ability to remember anything accurately? The military tramped into the woods, and after finding “nothing,” sent in more personnel with equipment?Witnesses weren’t told to leave? “Nothing” was on the truck that raced out of town so fast it might have killed someone — or there was no truck?

This is confirmation bias write large, drenched in cynicism.

For Sheaffer, the inconvenient facts of the chaos outside of Kecksburg and the army’s intense interest in the event are breezily assigned to the realm of myth-making. These things didn’t really happen, of course; they “allegedly” happened. “Highly-publicized UFO cases,” he snorts at the end, “like fine wines, often improve with age.”

This last line, by the way, is one variant of a time-honored tradition in UFO skepticism, the cynical suggestion that any testimony that dribbles in later is suspect. Why did the witnesses wait to say anything? Why are we only hearing this now? The absurdity of such a counterattack is made clear when applied to literally anything else: The so-called “Central Park Jogger” who was raped in New York in 1989 didn’t reveal her identity and tell her story in a book until 2003 … so should we just throw that out? Why did she wait 14 years? Would it even occur to Sheaffer to cast doubt on the recollections of those courageous souls who told their stories of surviving Nazi death camps in Claude Lanzmann’s monumental 1985 documentary Shoah because they didn’t give interviews until 40 years later? If memory is so fallible, why interview anyone about anything that happened more than an hour ago? Why summon witnesses to testify in trials? Why ask war veterans to speak to students about their experiences? It doesn’t take much for this cynical brand of so-called “skepticism” to vanish down the rabbit hole of nihilism.

The Epilogue

Skepticism holds that ufology’s fatal flaw is permitting aliens to be the go-to solution. “Skipping past ‘unidentified’ to land on ‘aliens’ is sloppy, unscientific thinking,” writes Guy P. Harrison elsewhere in the magazine. “Why are aliens the default answer, anyway?” We’ll dive deeper into this legitimate question in a future article

That position provides amusing context for an embarrassing postscript to Sheaffer’s rage-writing about Kecksburg. For all of Skeptical Inquirer’s criticism of UFO investigators gravitating to (or even considering) aliens, it’s worth noting that of the nearly two dozen individuals Gordon interviewed for his documentary, it’s the token ufologist, of all people, who posits that the Kecksburg UFO was most likely terrestrial in origin! Toward the end of the film, MUFON’s Scott Crain speculates that a crashed Soviet satellite (which reportedly fell out of orbit a few hours before the fireball was spotted) may have been what drew the military to the woods so quickly.

So with that in mind, here’s the postscript: In 2005, NASA announced that fragments from the Kecksburg UFO had, in fact, been been found, and that they were pieces of a Soviet satellite!

The Kecksburg case is sufficiently complex that it should be noted: The Soviet satellite theory is something of a rabbit hole in and of itself; NASA couldn’t document the assertion, because they “lost” the records. But the larger point remains: NASA, the federal government’s go-to agency on all matters astronomical, essentially said — unequivocally — that the “Great Lakes Fireball” was not a meteor.

Sheaffer has opined about Kecksburg at least twice on his blog in recent years and again in Skeptical Inquirer. Curiously, he doesn’t mentions NASA’s latest explanation (true or not) that contradicts the solution that he has — without a shred of tangible evidence, one might add — clearly settled on.

NASA’s announcement is valuable from another angle. If it’s true that experts found fragments of a Soviet satellite (or the entire thing) that crashed outside Kecksburg, then official claims of “nothing” in 1965 were lies and virtually every word of citizen testimony makes sense. Why? Because international law held that it should have been returned to the origin country, and if the U.S. planned to instead stow it away for study, of course they’d want to keep that a secret. So much for the U.S. government’s allegiance to those hallowed legal traditions. And if untrue, why say anything at all? Particularly when you can’t back it up with evidence or records, as NASA surely must have known it would be asked to.

Sheaffer’s blind receptivity to 55-year-old declarations by government officials that nothing was found in the woods reveals an almost Pollyannaish degree of naivete. If your “debunking” of a UFO case (or anything else) means ignoring or denying 90 percent of the evidence and uncritically accepting whatever the government tells you, you haven’t debunked anything and should have no expectation that your “skepticism” be taken seriously by any sensible person.

Skeptics like to remind people that the “U” in UFO stands for “unidentified.” It’s a fair point that Sheaffer might take to heart. The Kecksburg UFO is still a UFO, no matter how determined he is to believe otherwise.

Twilight of the Skeptics, Part II

Trail of the Saucers, created by Bryce Zabel and co-edited by David Bates, focuses on UFO/UAP news, history, culture, and analysis, including these three related articles —