Skeptic of UFO craze criticizes prominent 'believers’ as driven by media attention, not science

American writer and documentarian Brian Dunning said UFO "believers" are driven by media attention and sensationalism instead of science in an interview with Fox News Digital.

Dunning targeted a recent congressional hearing on UFOs, also called unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs), for platforming three witnesses "who have been speaking at UFO conferences for many years." Former Navy pilot Ryan Graves, ex-Navy commander David Fravor and former U.S. intelligence officer David Grusch testified before a House of Representatives subcommittee focused on UFOs back in July. 

"They're UFO believers first and veterans second," Dunning said, adding that it’s "very easy to find UFO believers who are veterans." Dunning hosts the nonprofit "Skeptoid" podcast that delves into the science behind urban legends. 

Americans for Safe Aerospace founder Ryan Graves did not respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital. 

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When asked why major figures in Congress have called on the federal government to release what information it has on UFOs, Dunning said that they were easily convinced. 

"You've got people in Congress who are not scientifically minded, who are not well-versed in subjects like astrobiology and astrophysics. And when they are told that, ‘hey, here's some military pilots who have some UFO reports,’ they tend to take it very seriously, as I think most people would," he said.

But underlying this conversation, Dunning said, was the "foundation of belief in alien visitation." 

He continued: "Once you start from that foundation, it's very easy to take the next step and say, ‘we'd better interview these people and take it pretty seriously.’ That doesn't mean that it has any factual or scientific foundation."

Dunning claimed the UFO hearings in front of Congress and a number of New York Times articles "have all been driven by the same core group of UFO believers since they had their first big PR success getting their article published in The New York Times in 2017," which he said has driven public belief in aliens to around 50 percent, according to some polls. 

"It's really quite astonishing how easy it's been for the UFO people to sort of steer the public's belief in this subject," Dunning said. 

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When asked about some of the most prominent physicists and extraterrestrial life advocates in the scientific community, Dunning specifically criticized Harvard Professor Dr. Avi Loeb. 

"You have guys like Avi Loeb showing up in the newspapers and on TV all over the place. Harvard physicist," he said. "And it sounds very impressive. What they don't mention is he is completely alone in his belief system. Virtually nobody else in the entire astrophysics field agrees with the things he's been saying. They never present that perspective on TV because it's not fascinating. It's not sensational."

Dunning said that while "the overwhelming consensus in the astronomy community" is that there is "probably life" elsewhere in the universe, that is not the same as determining whether that life has made it to Earth. 

Prof. Loeb told Fox News Digital that he was not alone in studying the possibility of extraterrestrial life. "The Galileo Project that I lead includes about a hundred scientists, so I am hardly alone in studying whether any of the objects near Earth might be of extraterrestrial technological origin."

"Allowing for the possibility that an anomalous interstellar object is technological in origin is not a wild speculation given that we launched Voyager 1 & 2, Pioneer 10 & 11 and New Horizons to interstellar space over the past five decades, which are a fraction of one in a hundred million of the age of the Sun," he said. "There are hundreds of billions of stars like the Sun in the Milky Way galaxy alone, and most of them formed billions of years before the Sun. It takes less than a billion years for a Voyager-like probe to cross the entire Milky Way disk from side to side. It is therefore arrogant and unwise to suggest that we are alone."

Dunning posed the question of extraterrestrial life and contact with Earth directly. 

"Has Earth been visited by aliens?" he asked. "All of the mathematics that we know, all of the physics that we know, all of the evidence that we have suggests that, no, that's probably not ever going to be possible and certainly hasn't happened before."

Dunning, who is considered a "scientific skeptic," in that he favors having empirical evidence before reaching conclusions, said he is in favor of "applying the scientific method to new beliefs or new claims or unusual observations that people make." 

"So when we're talking about things like alien visitation, a skeptical perspective would be things are probably as the laws of physics tell us they are, unless we find evidence that aliens have visited the Earth. So far, we haven't. And so we stick with the default assumption, which is that no, things are as the laws of physics tell us they probably are, and we haven't been visited."

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