Tuesday was the poster child demonstrating that elections, apathy and putting one's trust in evil disguised as good have consequences. From (to date) the hundreds of Web pages comprising George M. Eberhart's profoundly educational online (free) .pdf, "UFOs and Intelligence: A Timeline" I found this, noting something "timely" from 25 years ago -- though we hasten to mention that we strongly disagree with Sagan's views about UFOs:
1995 — Astronomer Carl Sagan publishes The Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark, in which he aims to explain the scientific method to laypeople and encourage them to learn critical and skeptical thinking. He explains methods to help distinguish between ideas that are considered valid science and those that can be considered pseudoscience. Sagan states that when new ideas are offered for consideration, they should be tested by means of skeptical thinking and should stand up to rigorous questioning. He argues that the chances of extraterrestrial spacecraft visiting Earth are vanishingly small. However, he does think it plausible that Cold War concerns contributed to governments misleading their citizens about UFOs, and writes that “some UFO reports and analyses, and perhaps voluminous files, have been made inaccessible to the public which pays the bills ... It’s time for the files to be declassified and made generally available.” He cautions against jumping to conclusions about suppressed UFO data and stresses that there is no strong evidence that aliens are visiting the Earth either in the past or present. He worries that fake news and conspiracy theories will become the reality of the future, predicting: “I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World )
(Again, we remind readers that Eberhart's .pdf may be accessed at both the NICAP and CUFOS Web sites.)
