Legitimacy and UFO studies

It's interesting that most of the media coverage about the 2011 Canadian UFO Survey has been fair and unbiased. The Daily Mail story today was pretty good, all things considered.


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2179685/UFO-sightings-Canada-reach-record-high.html

Sure, their lead suggests that there haven't been UFOs reported in Canada until now, but that's about par for the course. But beyond that, there wasn't an injection of silliness about "alien rectal probes" and things like that (as some media have done in the past). Considering we stayed away from speculation about extraterrestrials, that was good. (Although they did use stock photos of saucers, none of which were from Canada.)

But others are not so sensible.

In fact, one skeptic's comment on a news blog noted:

Giving fancy names like "Ufologist", "Ufology Research Centre", etc. is just an effort to make you think these are legitimate scientists.  If they want to be legitimate scientist I challenge them to follow standard scientific methodologies and PROVE that we have been visited by aliens by providing hard evidence that can be independently verified by other scientists instead of challenging real scientist to disprove their existence.  You would think that with all the reported crashed UFO's around the world that there would be some sort of physical evidence...which makes me think...these UFO's travel billions of miles or cross inter-dimensional space to get here only to crash on the lump of rock we call home.  Seems to me that either the pilots are incompetent or their crafts are pieces of junk.  Lastly...why is there so much interest in "Ufology"?  Just follow the money.

This is so ridiculous on so many levels, it wouldn't normally be worth discussing at length, but it does raise an important issue about the legitimacy of UFO-related research.

What is "Ufology Research," anyway? It's not based at any academic institution, and not affiliated with any think tank or corporate entity such as the Bilderbergs, so does anything that Ufology Research have to say of any value? Obviously, the poster doesn't consider us "legitimate scientists," either, or we wouldn't study UFO reports.

As for following "standard scientific methodologies," the poster has likely not read the study. In fact, that's obvious because we make it clear that we are not talking about extraterrestrials or trying to "PROVE" that aliens are visiting Earth. And we're certainly not challenging scientists to disprove anything. We're providing data on observations of objects.

So is the Canadian UFO Survey "legitimate?" In the sense that we have examined about 1,000 actual reports submitted in 2011 by individuals puzzled by their observations, our analyses of these reports are completely legitimate: true and accurate. We even provide the actual data so that others can check the calculations.

So, "legitimate?" Sure.

Is it worth anything? Maybe.

Does it prove UFOs and aliens are real?

Huh?

[Oh, and what's this about "follow the money?" Did NASA send me a cheque that got lost in the mail?]