Skip to main content

UFO Investigations Manual – Nigel Watson ***

 Buying a Haynes manual is a rite of passage for young car enthusiasts in the UK. These detailed illustrated guides tell you how to service a particular make and model of car. But of late there has been something of tendency to spread the field into entertainment, with manuals on the likes of the USS Enterprise and the Death Star, and more bizarre how-to subjects, including the Zombie Survival Manual.
So, almost inevitably, we get the UFO Investigations Manual. In a sense it is a bit of misnomer. Although there are a couple of pages of appendix on how to make a UFO report, this primarily isn’t a how-to guide at all, but rather an illustrated assessment of UFO history and attempts to explain them.
I ought to say straight away that this less wide-eyed and trusting than UFOs Caught on Film, which merely shows photographs and comments on them with little attempt to rule out alternative causes. There is a section here on non-extra terrestrial causes, for instance. But it doesn’t stop the book repeatedly showing pictures with decidedly overdramatic captions (‘Glastonbury Tor: is it a portal into other dimensions’) and quite often very obvious explanations are not well explored. So, for instance, there is a section on mysterious ‘waves’ of sightings without making the obvious suggestion that people see things because they have heard other people see things. Similarly, the totally discredited concept of hypnotic regression is cited a couple of times as helping people recall abduction incidents without pointing out there is very strong evidence that the technique creates memories rather than restoring them.
One of my UFO fakes
Similarly, though there is quite a lot on the latest ways that UFO photos can be faked (there’s an app for that – really), there is very little about why and how many of the ‘classic’ photos that weren’t simply misunderstood natural phenomena or planes could easily have been faked. I did my own bit of UFO photo faking in my teens just for fun and it very obvious (though I didn’t see it mentioned in the book) that the very easy approach of throwing a metal disk tends to produce exactly the sort of odd flight angles often shown for flying saucers. I have included one of my own efforts here – it is a metal camping plate, thrown frisby style.
Most important of all, the manual lacks the feeling of that old science mantra ‘data is not the plural of anecdote.’ It gives no suggestion that extreme theories require extreme evidence, where Occam’s Razor makes the obvious assumption that UFOs aren’t extra-terrestrial without good evidence that they are. So as science it doesn’t do very well – but it is an entertaining subject, put across in an appealing and entertaining way in this well illustrated volume. Read it like the Zombie title and you are fine – but don’t take it as seriously as you would the Ford Fiesta 1995-2002 manual, because it just isn’t that sort of book.

Hardback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here.  We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...
Post a Comment
Read more