“Extra-terrestrial beings may be living underground or in a base inside the Moon, according to a new Harvard Study”, reads the headline from a tabloid website that I had never heard of, but a similar headline from the American Mirror also pointed to a “Harvard Study” about the same subject. Well, probably-AI-written clickbait article, you almost had my attention, but then guerrilla skeptic Susan Gerbic posted a link about the same subject, so now I’m curious.
The first thing I want to share about the subject is that there is a difference between a “Harvard Study” and a study by people who have some kind of affiliation with Harvard University. The former is a study either run or funded by the university. The latter is not a “Harvard Study” any more than we might consider Texas Senator Ted Cruz a Harvard lawyer. Sure, he graduated from the school, but he’s not employed by them or endorsed by them.
The difference is important, because the latter trades on the respect of the former. We call something a Harvard Experiment (or I’ve seen the same thing happen with Oxford) so that people think “Oooh, a Harvard experiment” – if even they think that… But this isn’t a Harvard study, it’s a research paper. And, like the former distinction, this distinction is also important.
I’m a philosophy academic so I don’t generally write studies; I write research papers. The impression that “study” gives is that there exists some physical artifact or biological entity – some concrete thing that was looked at. A research paper is a survey of the previously written work that draws a conclusion. I’m being a bit glib, but there’s a lot to unpack here and we’ve not even gotten to the paper yet. These are all false impressions that the headlines is designed to generate, so let’s find the actual paper.
The paper itself appears in the Journal of Philosophy and Cosmology, a peer-reviewed academic journal dealing with the intersection of Philosophy and Cosmology. Nothing seems wrong or suspect here. This isn’t a pay-to-play journal, or some AI-generated journal for the specific purpose of fooling people. In fact, the bland title is a good indicator. Academic journals with the most boring titles are often the best regarded. A journal about the physical world, “Nature”, a journal about medicine, “The New England Journal of Medicine” (as that is where both Harvard and Yale are located); the Lancet is an outlier but that is because its original purpose was to cut out (with a lancet or scalpel) medical malpractice, charlatans, and quackery.
Everything about this paper seems legitimate, except for the content of the paper itself. Right away I will dispense with the false claim in the headline from above. The paper is not arguing that that a secret race of beings is living on the moon or in caves underneath us. It is, however, claiming that we should take the possibility of such a claim seriously. They argue, ostensibly, that “in a spirit of epistemic humility and openness” we ought not to dismiss the explanation out of hand. The context of this paper is the popularity that UAPs enjoyed last summer.
This paper was written to buttress the possibility that maybe the UAPs are not coming from above, but from below… or to the side.
The Cryptoterrestrial Hypothesis
The Cryptoterrestrial Hypothesis (CTH) seeks to accommodate the existence of UAPs as originating from a non-human intelligence, while at the same time trying to argue away those pesky problems that extraterrestrials pose. The paper points out, rightly, in one of its broken clock moments, that the CTH does not have “to appeal to interstellar space travel – an extraordinary technological feat for any species – to account for UAP.”
I would further add that a UAP, if they’re real craft and not odd anomalies, is unique in that there exists zero trace of the craft (radiation, exhaust, impact on the surrounding environment) once the UAP has left the blurry image of the recording. CTH does not get around this problem, but it does solve the travel issue.
The paper is a testament to the informal fallacy of argument from ignorance. This is the fallacy that makes a conclusion based on the lack of evidence otherwise. The best examples are those that claim aliens have been captured and are interred at the US military base known as Area 51. Since we don’t know what is there, the conclusion must be that aliens are.
The paper wants to claim a veneer of epistemic honesty, but it does so under false pretenses. The problem is the central claim it wishes us to consider – that there exists a sentient intelligence that has been living undetected among (or under) us. The paper’s claimed point is not that this possibility is true, but that it is possible that it could be true. This is where the title of this article comes from; they want us to accept that there exists the potential for the suggestion that this hypothesis is true. This is a dodgy claim because we don’t need extraordinary evidence to accept a possibility, but we do need some evidence.
There are some concessions that the authors make a few times where they admit that even they think some of this stuff is too crazy to accept, but, you never know… I doubt the sincerity of these concessions, and I think this is merely a ploy to mitigate our incredulity at what they are saying. They place the possibility of the CTH hypothesis being true at 10%, which they confess is an increase from 1% before last year.
The problem with this percentage is that we are given no documentation for the increase. Statisticians (or people who understand how statistics work) should be demanding the dataset. Even I, who cannot do maths with more than one letter in it, would like to take a look at it as well. I may not be able to compute advanced maths, but I do know that in an academic paper, if you have a number indicating a probability that sometimes is true and that number goes up, you should be able to demonstrate why. Instead, we are left with the same kind of statistical analysis an android provides about navigating an asteroid field. The number is just there to look impressive.
Our main problem, as skeptics, should be that such an incredible claim ought to have some kind of evidence in favour of it. Yes, I’ve butchered the Carl Sagan quote but I did so because this paper is allegedly not claiming that the CTH is true but that we should take seriously that idea that it could be.
Yet, what we are left with is a very long-winded exercise in the special pleading fallacy. This fallacy is committed when an argument asks you to overlook certain restrictions on an earlier premise so that the conclusion can be considered true. Here we are being asked to believe that a non-human intelligence lives either among us or underneath us without having first established that such an intelligence exists in the first place.
Unsheathing Occam’s Razor
Let’s examine the CTH for what it is: an untenable claim on its own. The paper wants us to accept the claim that it is possible an underground race/species (the difference matters here) has been living among/below (again the difference matters) us and has escaped detection. Ok, fine, but we need some kind of evidence for it.
The authors lean on a few different archaeological finds for proof. None of these are salient to the CTH’s possibility. Their chief piece of evidence is the settlement of Gobekli Tepe in modern Turkey. The site, recognised by UNESCO, is famous for being a human settlement much earlier than was previously thought. The site is estimated to have been settled around 9500 BCE, just after the end of the last ice age. Does this prove that the CTH is true? No. Does it prove that the CTH is worthy of legitimate inquiry? Again, no. What it proves is that humans were settling down in an era that predates the Ussher chronology. It also shows us that there are swathes of human history that we are ignorant of – but I don’t think that is news to anyone with a curiosity about the history of human civilisation.
Their other evidence doesn’t fare any better. They point out a discovery in Kolombo Falls, Zambia, where “researchers in 2019 discovered an example of wood craftsmanship and technology – involving two pieces of wood fashioned to ‘interlock’ together…”, which they claim is dated to 500,000 years ago. This would place the wood objects before the emergence of Homo Sapiens. If we accept this discovery, it just means that we(?) have had wooden tools for far longer than known. It does not argue, or even imply, that a different species of intelligence currently exists on this planet.
Occam’s Razor posits that between two explanations, the one with the fewest assumptions is superior. There are, of course, different interpretations of this, and I should stress that it is not a hard rule. Sometimes those assumptions pan out, but the assumptions need to be “discharged” from being assumptions.
What our authors are claiming is that, because Gobekli Tepe and these wooden tools exist, we should take seriously the notion that an advanced species lives undetected among us. Their assumption is that the people in Zambia, who were not Homo Sapiens, evolved along a different branch line, were able to create flying objects that fool our best methods of detection, and then continue to remain undetected among (or below) us.
The other alternative is that the few anomalous UAP encounters are just that: anomalous unknown events. This is just another argument from ignorance, not knowing what it is does not allow us to make any claim we want. If they’re going to posit a different evolutionary line, why don’t they just claim that dinosaurs survived and evolved to fly the UAPs. Well, about that…
The Troodon Conspiracy
My biggest issue with the paper, of many, is that they pull a bait and switch a bunch of times. The largest comes toward the end of the writing (the paper is 42 pages long but the writing only pushes 17 pages) when we begin a very strange and detailed divergence into considering whether or not David Icke has a point: “Even so, it is intriguing that ‘reptilians’ have long been associated with the UAP topic, with speculation that some such species does indeed represent an NHI that may be responsible for some UAP.”
They make the assumption but then later rest their entire contention on that assumption. David Icke just picked lizard people for his Non-Human Intelligence because they’re sufficiently different to us, and they reference people’s latent fear of snakes. Spiders would have been more universal, but it’s more difficult to fit spiders inside skin suits. I’ve never considered that Icke would be correct because his theory requires way too much, but here we have an academic journal publication that wants us to consider that Icke’s lizards could be real. And if you’re wondering, do they really mean lizard people? Well, yes, they do.
The contention that they want us to consider as plausible is an alternative evolutionary branch where dinosaurs evolved into sentient creatures alongside and completely hidden from their primate counterparts. The article does offer some support in the form of the dinosauroid hypothesis from Russell and Sequin (1982), as well as the possibility that the “Silurian hypothesis” is true from a later paper by Scmidt and Frank (2019).
The 1982 paper has eluded me, but the 2019 paper has not. That paper argues that finding evidence of an industrial society in the geologic record would be difficult… it does not argue that a race of underground sword-wielding Victorian detectives exists (that was a fun sentence to write).
While Troodons are the smartest dinosaurs (here’s one explaining how a time-traveling train works) there are several devastating issues with this claim. The Russell and Sequin “dinosauroid” was criticised heavily from the start. The form of the creature was criticised as being too human. While the Troodon could have evolved into a sentient creature, making the Super Mario Bros. movie essentially a documentary, it is unlikely to have gone unnoticed in a competitive environment during the ice ages.
I’m going to skip the section on how magical beings might be responsible for UAP phenomenon, because I could easily write another few thousand words on that and I have to limit myself. I’ll only say that, while I don’t think it’s Troodons, at least Troodons really existed, unlike faeries. I’m also ignoring the stuff about the Moon, because that makes even less sense to the CTH.
The paper’s point is to argue that we should take seriously the CTH as a possible explanation for UAP. As someone who researches conspiracy theories, I read a lot of alternative explanations for things. The CTH as an explanation for UAP is an alternative explanation’s alternative explanation.
The CTH suffers because it rests too much on special pleading. The dinosauroid alternative, for example, requires us to assent to the idea that not only could a 2.5m-long 25kg dinosaur survive and then evolve into a sentient creature, but also that such a creature could create a society with an infrastructure that could create highly advanced flying vehicles. Further, that all of this would remain undetected by the world at large.
What’s needed is evidence that begins a journey toward the possibility of the CTH. The authors do nothing of the sort.
