What level of proof is adequate proof, then?

SF: I talk in terms of evidence. The legal profession recognizes certain
standards: in a civil court, "preponderance of the evidence;" in a criminal
court, "beyond a reasonable doubt." I think there is, right now, quite
sufficient evidence. Given the physical trace cases, the radar sightings, the
photographs and the eye-witness testimony from people all over the world, we
have quite sufficient evidence to conclude that our planet is being visited by
manufactured objects behaving in ways that we Earthlings cannot yet duplicate,
and that therefore were produced someplace else.  Now, the reason for that
little kicker about not being able to duplicate: every government in the world
would love to be able to duplicate UFO flying capabilities. If we could build
these things, we would be building them. So, if they weren't built here, they
were built someplace else. There's nothing exotic about that. It's not
charismatic handwaving, it's perfectly good reasoning. We have an adequate
amount of evidence today to clearly establish that some�I emphasize some�UFOs
are alien spacecraft. And I would take on anybody who says we don't. I would say
it's entirely because they haven't reviewed that evidence, which is very
different from saying there is no evidence.

Question: Give me some examples. What are some of the strongest cases on record
that you know of, and why do you find them so convincing?

SF: I feel the Roswell evidence makes a very strong case. We've talked to more
than 240 
(now over 350) people about that case; people at the Roswell Army Air Force
base; people out at the rancher's site, including Mac Brazel's neighbors, his
son, his daughter, and his daughter-in-law. We've talked to people who handled
pieces of the wreckage at the base; we've talked to the people who were in Texas
where it went; people who were crew members on the planes that carried some of
the wreckage. I've talked to somebody who saw the bodies, people who were
threatened by the government�that's being kind�to shut up about this whole
thing. So that's an excellent case.

But I'm also impressed by cases like the one that occurred over George Air Force
Base in California. Two jets had just finished maneuvering practice and were
coming back to base. Both were flown by experienced pilots who had fought in
Korea. The pilot in the lead plane spotted an object in the distance. It looked
peculiar because it was standing still, so he radioed the ground. The ground
control guy went outside with binoculars and watched the two planes go after
this thing, meanwhile still talking to them by radio. And, as the lead pilot
reported, the object was standing still, and in three seconds it was going a
thousand miles an hour. It moved a pretty good angle through the sky, then
stopped dead again. The pilot switched direction a little bit, going after it,
and it went back the other way. Again, in just a couple seconds of acceleration,
it's going, he says, a thousand miles an hour. Stops dead. Zigzagging, in other
words, back and forth across the sky. The lead pilot saw it, the pilot in the
second plane saw it, and the guy on the ground watched this whole thing while
listening to the radio conversations. Finally, the thing zipped away at very
high speed. Now, what do you do with a case like that? These are military pilots
reporting to a military control tower operator in broad daylight. You can't say
they're lying. What for? This was a classified report. It makes no sense. And
there are loads of cases like that. (Including Gordon Cooper's similar case
described in his new book "Leap of Faith")

I'm also impressed with some of the abduction cases; for example, the Betty and
Barney Hill case.  I was technical advisor on a television movie about this case
called "The UFO Incident," and I've spent time with the Hills. These two people
underwent individual medical hypnosis sessions weekly for three and a half
months. Betty was a social worker and supervisor in the welfare department,
State of New Hampshire. Barney worked for the Post Office and was on the
Governor's Civil Rights Commission. Our whole society would fall apart if we had
to say that people like this who report anything strange must either be nuts or
else have some crazy angle to what they're doing. We have standard procedures
for accepting eyewitness testimony. These people and lots of other abductees
certainly meet those standards for providing acceptable testimony.

So, I get irked when I hear people say there isn't any evidence. We've got
things like the University of Colorado study, the Condon Report, in which 30% of
117 cases studied in detail couldn't be identified. Bluebook Special Report 14
does a cross-comparison between 600-plus unknowns and the balance of 2000plus
cases that could be identified. They looked at six different
characteristics�apparent size, color, shape, speed, etc. �to see if there was
any chance that the unknowns were just missed knowns. It was less than one
percent. They did a quality evaluation. They found that the better the quality,
the more likely to be an unknown. That's exactly what you'd expect if we're
dealing with something different. Because they had other categories: not only
"unknown," but insufficient information, aircraft, astronomical, balloon,
psychological aberrations. The unknowns were different. And the differences were
in the direction of being able to move with much greater maneuverability and
much greater speed, to have a different shape, to have different lighting. What
do people want? We're dealing with vehicles in the air, many of them observed in
the early 1950s or late '40s, doing things that we certainly could not do. So,
the evidence, for anybody who wants to take the time,�and it does take time�is
overwhelming that some UFOs are alien spacecraft and that we're dealing with a
kind of "Cosmic Watergate." No question.

Question: We also have a situation of extremely high strangeness associated with
a lot of UFO sightings.  Stories where people floated through walls by aliens,
or where beings seem to just appear in a room and then disappear--things that
are absolutely fantastic.  And yet, some of these abduction cases are among the
most reputable ones.  How do you account for that?

SF: Arthur C. Clarke once said it very well: "Advanced technology is by
definition magic." If you tried to show your great-great grandfather a
television set, it would have been magic. Utterly impossible. There must be
midgets inside. And yet, when humans landed on the moon�a remarkable thing in
itself�we could watch it in real time, as it happened. Quite extraordinary. A
pocket calculator today represents an enormously sophisticated kind of device.
What about a hologram? You want crazy stuff! If you've ever seen a big hologram,
you know you can put your hand through the darn thing, but it sure looks like
there's something there. That's magic.

So, what I'm saying is, I don't have the faintest idea how to float somebody
through a wall, but the way of science is to recognize that the observations are
real, though the explanations may be all wet. And that's a problem for a number
of ancient academics, fossilized physicists. If they don't understand how
something happens, it can't be. The sun has been fusioning up there, the primary
source of energy for all our society, since the beginning. We figured out in
1937-38 how the sun works, that it's fusion, not burning gas. But could anybody
in his right mind suggest that it was fusioning until we knew about fusion? Of
course not. So, you have to have a tolerance for ambiguity, for mystery, and a
recognition that there are things we don't know. The more questions we ask, the
more we don't know, because there's more we can dig into. The true scientist
recognizes that. He'll say, "Gee, that's intriguing, that's different, how could
we do that?" The false scientist says, "That's impossible, I'm going to ignore
it." I'm reminded of Simon Newcomb, a great American astronomer of the 19th
century, who published in October, 1903, a long detailed paper considering the
possibility of man flying in a vehicle. His conclusion was that the only way man
would ever fly would be in a lighter than-air vehicle, a balloon. This was two
months before the Wright Brothers' first flight, and when told about that, he
said, "Well, maybe a pilot, but it'll never carry a passenger." He didn't know
anything about flight. It's the basic assumptions that mattered. A little over
20 years later, another great astronomer "proved" it would be impossible to give
anything sufficient energy to get it into orbit around the earth. All he proved
was that he had made the wrong assumptions. Finally, the example that kind of
teases me the most is Dr. Campbell, a great Canadian astronomer, who published
in 1941 a long detailed paper proving that the required initial launch weight of
a chemical rocket able to get a man to the moon and back would be a
million-million tons. We accomplished it less than thirty years later, with a
dumb old chemical rocket whose initial launch weight was 3,000 tons. He was off
by a factor of 300 million. Why? Because he didn't know anything about space
flight! All his assumptions were wrong.

We're stupid, we're silly, we're ridiculous, we're unprofessional. And that's
the kicker here. Because we don't have explanations, because we cannot
duplicate, doesn't mean that it cannot happen. Friedman's Law, if you will:
technological advancement almost invariably comes from doing things differently
in an unpredictable way. The future is not an extrapolation of the past. A great
scientist, Max Planck, once said, "New ideas come to be accepted, not because
their opponents come to believe in them, but because their opponents die and a
new generation grows up that's accustomed to them." So, I get upset at
professional people who put their pride before their science. They can't figure
out how something could happen, so it couldn't, and that's the end of that. And
that's not science, that's pseudo-science.