Criticism
Essays

In the early days of Ufology, researchers appeared too eager to verify sightings, which they then interpreted as evidence of 'nuts and bolts' spacecraft piloted by intelligent EBEs. Like numerous deities and other extraterrestrial visitors, EBEs are generally held to be concerned about human conduct. This concern was widely reported in the spate of UFO sightings after the Second World War and the beginnings of the nuclear age. Sensationalist reports merging with Hollywood fantasy led to a distancing of orthodox science from Ufology. Explanations offered by Ufologists frequently ignored Occam's razor, which is a rule against multiplying entities or - in general terms - a rule which says don't involve extraordinary hypotheses until the ordinary ones have been eliminated. The apparent resistance to falsification also contributed to Ufology's lack of credibility. However, modern Ufologists, such as Jenny Randles and Paul Fuller of the British Unidentified Flying Object Research Association (BUFORA), are strict adherents to Popperian-inspired scientific methodology, enthusiastically seeking to falsify EBE explanations and providing explanations which are acceptable to orthodox scientific opinion. In this respect the modern Ufologist is a debunker rather than a myth-spinning believer. Explanations in terms of atmospheric phenomena, hallucinations or hoaxes are generally expected from BUFORA publications. Over the years the BUFORA standpoint has been vindicated. So much 'confirmatory' evidence has been demonstrably unreliable. Photographs, which were once considered as hard evidence, are now held to have zero credibility because of the likelihood of fakes. With the advent of sophisticated image-manipulation computers whose work is undetectable, photographs unsupported by other reliable confirmatory evidence are unacceptable. Eye witness reports are also problematic as they are frequently influenced by psychological and cultural factors.

Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, in the Deep South-East of the United States in 1925. Her adolescence was marked by the death of her father, from whom she later inherited the disease, deadly enemy with whom she…

Corporate governance comes in a variety of forms and may be adapted to the specific needs of the company under discussion. The model has changed in some cases for different reasons, and the rise of e-commerce and online…

What is the underlying philosophical paradigm of the practice theory? Why do you think this is the philosophical paradigm underlying this theory? Link the major assumptions of the theory to the ontological, axiological,…

Film as a form of cultural expression-." The modern film is a genre of its own that expresses a huge variety of cultural experiences through a fluid continuum. Film expresses the entire gamut of human emotions and…

Comparative Analysis of Karl von Clausewitz's theory and Sun Tzu's art of war

America is the melting pot of the whole world, the New World, seen by the rest of the world as the land of opportunity, the land of the free, the green pastures, and the crossroads where virtually all nationalities and…

How do the methods of 19th Century Evolutionists explain the development of marriage, family, political organization, and religion?

Critical Thinking in the Workforce: An Overview

Running through the literature of classical late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century sociology are themes of isolation, of the poverty of life lived in isolated cells, of the fragility of a life in which we can almost never make authentic connections with other people, in which we are lost even to ourselves. We have – and this "we" includes the entire population of the industrialized world, or at least most of it – have raised the act of rationalism to an art form, but along the way we have lost so much of our humanity that we can no longer form or maintain a community. Four of the major social critics of the twentieth century took up these themes for essentially the same reason: To argue that while ailing human society could be transformed in ways that would give it meaning once again. They differ significantly, however, in what the nature of that transformation should and what meaning humans should be intent on seeking.