In Response to: Science Under Attack [6]

Published online July 6, 2017

As a former CBS radio show host, I interviewed Seth Shostak ’65 several years ago regarding his work at the SETI Institute.

His basic beef with the American public is that we are no longer capable of discerning the truth about things – as scientists can: “I’m astounded by how many people are willing to accept that any bright dot of light in the night sky is convincing proof that alien spacecraft are sailing overhead, or that the Egyptians used extraterrestrial consultants to build the pyramids.”

If he had seen what I saw in the night sky over a large city in New Jersey, he might speak with less contempt for the reality of nonscientists. On June 19, 2011, I witnessed a massive boomerang-shaped spacecraft covered with 20 to 30 orange lights, the size of a football field, sitting motionless in the sky above a mall, roughly 500 feet in the air. Then the entire craft then dematerialized in three phases. This event was also witnessed by my adult daughter.

I am not an attacker of scientists. My father was an internationally recognized, well-published medical scientist who also graduated from Princeton.

Seth fails to recognize that science does not have a monopoly on truth. Scientific “truth” is as much a theoretical construct overlaying our collective reality as anything else. Science represents a small, but mostly valid, sliver of reality. It never deserved a monopoly on truth. No one is attacking science. People are merely becoming far more sophisticated about respecting a much larger reality than mere science.