> History shows that many scientists are indeed closed-minded. Here's a quote from Lord Kelvin, who was a very prominent (and good) scientist, from 1895: "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible."

If your definition of close-minded includes scientists not believing that everything is possible, then I agree with you. But science does not require that one believe every thing is possible. One can be open to new ideas while being highly skeptical of them.

> Pronouncements like this tend to occur because many people make the mistake of thinking that because something is impossible today, and will probably be impossible 10 or 100 years from now, means that it will always be impossible.

How else do you expect science to work? Should we assume that anything is possible just because it might be? We build theories, test their predictions, and over time accept those theories as true after they've held up. Until we notice problems with good theories, why should we put much stock in things that are theoretically impossible?

If I told you that humans can counteract gravity just by concentrating hard enough, would you believe me? Why not?

> Dave also mentioned Einstein. But he rejected the idea of quantum mechanics because he didn't like some of the things that it predicted.

The Einstein/QM debate is one of the great examples of how science works well. The most prominent scientist of his time, Einstein, was a very vocal critic of QM. If we believed that scientists as a group were really too close-minded, why did QM research continue and become accepted theory?

Also, Einstein didn't just decide he didn't like QM and plug his ears. He spent a lot of time thinking about it, conducting experiments and writing papers critical of the theory. In fact, his famous 1935 paper (with Podolsky and Rosen) critical of several QM aspects is something of a landmark in our understanding of QM. The critics published their criticisms, the proponents of QM responded by incorporating the criticisms into the theory and their response was eventually backed up by controlled experiments.

Daniel, I think you are confusing skepticism of new ideas with close-mindedness. The principles of science say scientists should be open-minded but highly skeptical. I don't see this as a bad thing.

> Another topic: UFO's. Many scientists will readily admit that intelligent life probably exists elsewhere in the universe. They just don't think that it's visiting us. Why?

Because there's no evidence for it. Let me repeat: there is no evidence for it. In fact, the total lack of evidence for intelligence anywhere is a major stumbling block for those of us who find it likely that intelligent life exists elsewhere.

> Because feasible space travel is not possible for the human population, and will not be for many years. Therefore, they flatly state that "true" UFO's cannot exist.

This is a strawman of the worst sort. This is a ridiculous contortion of the skeptical position on UFOs. The difficulties of intersolar travel certainly make it less likely that anything is visiting us, but that's not why scientists don't believe it's happening.

It is because there is no evidence. None. Zip. Nada. Unless you think a bunch of antecdotes and a few scraps of metal pulled from the legs of people is evidence of extraterrestrial visitation. But the evidence for leprechauns and fairies is just as great.

> But in their mad rush to discredit all sightings, some scientists will say, for example, that the witness saw Venus without even bothering to check if Venus was visible in that direction at that time. Another example of this slapdash "science" is the Marfa Lights in Texas. A group of sceptics "proved" that the lights are reflections of car lights on a nearby highway.

You are confusing some people in a group with the group. Because some scientists or skeptics make mistakes hardly mean the entire group is flawed in the same way.

> And finally, many scientists absolutely refuse to look at or consider studies done on certain subjects, such as UFO's, no matter how rigorously done, simply because the subject is not "scientific."

Oh? Do you have proof for this claim? "Many" is my favorite weasel word, too, but in this context I'd like a bit more clarity.

Let me suggest why there is no big scientific movement interested in studying UFOs. People have been studying the possibility of extraterrestrial visitors since at least the 1940s. In 60 years of study, what discoveries have been made in the field? What experiments have been done? What hypotheses have been falsified? What theories have come out of the research?

Once again: zero, zip, nada, none. It's a field populated almost entirely by quacks because nobody has ever discovered anything useful or interesting by studying it[1]. If you were a researcher, would you want to spend your career never making a single study, one way or the other? Sooner or later you're expected to make some conclusions or at least design an experiment.

So if scientists are resistant to looking at new research done in the area, it's because the field is full of quacks at this point. They don't dismiss the "research" because they're biased against it; they dismiss the research because it really is junk pseudoscience being done by crackpots and frauds.

If you, however, have the one piece of evidence (please no blurry photographs or videos of lights in the sky nor links to eyewitness testimony) that shows aliens are visiting us, by all means provide it.

Stephen

[1] Well, maybe we have made some interesting findings about mass psychology in terms of why people think they've been abducted and we've learned about why hypnosis and "recovered" memories are unreliable as tools for scientific inquiry. But that's not exactly the goal of the UFOlogists.