Early UFO Skeptics

The stubbornness with which some scientists once held to long-cherished opinions is perhaps nowhere better illustrated than in the reluctance to accept the existence of meteorites ("shooting stars" that actually reach the ground).

It is ironic that one of the more obvious and better-documented natural phenomena was viewed with skepticism by scientists until only relatively recent times. Yet the true origin of meteorites had been recognized by the ancients; among the treasures of a Hittite king in the 13th century BC was recorded a "black iron of heaven from the sky."

Accounts of meteorite falls have been recorded down through history, but after the Middle Ages, the notion that the earth was under bombardment from outer space was regarded by scholars as a vulgar superstition. In the 18th century learned men were unable to believe stories of fiery bodies falling from the sky with loud explosions. Some European museums even discarded genuine meteorites in their collections as relics of a superstitious past.

When Thomas Jefferson, then president of the United States and one of our most ingenious inventors, was told that two Yale University professors had reported the fall of meteorites over Weston, Connecticut in December of 1807, his response was typical of the attitude that prevailed in scientific circles at the time. He said: "I could more easily believe that two Yankee professors would lie than that stones would fall from heaven."

Nevertheless, the body of evidence had been steadily growing. On September 13, 1768, a meteorite fell at Luce, France. The French Academy of Science, then the most prestigious scientific body in the world, sent a commission to investigate the reports. Even after the testimony of numerous eyewitnesses and the presentation of the meteorite itself, the commission concluded that it did not fall from the sky, but that it had been transformed from a rock that had been struck by lightning. An almost identical statement was issued after a meteorite fall in southwest France on July 24, 1790.

France was still in the forefront of meteorite research. But in 1794, Ernst Chladni, a German scientist and lawyer, published a report that began to make the scientists feel a little uneasy about their convictions. Chladni carefully studied the eyewitness reports of these and other meteorite falls and concluded that they were not garbled fairy stories, but the statements of ordinary people who were honestly striving to describe what they had seen.

During the ensuing ten years, the number of European reports and collected samples reached the proportions that scientists could no longer deny that meteorites indeed must come from space (one wonders why the word had not reached Thomas Jefferson). Official science gradually and grudgingly gave in. But it was with such reluctance that Charles P. Oliver was led to say that "In the face of all this evidence...the example should stand for all ages as...a warning to any man who feels that he can give a final verdict upon a matter outside his immediate experience."

That statement is almost a perfect rendition of what is now one of the basic tenets of the scientific method: there is no concept, no matter how valued, that cannot be overturned in the light of better evidence.