Written by Gautam Peddada

If you've heard it once, you've probably heard it a million times: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

That ancient adage has become the skeptic's go-to response to allegations that threaten to upend their worldview. And it's an excellent one for one reason: they're correct.

How Skeptics Move Goal Posts

However, some surprising back-room manoeuvring may take place behind this fighting over the would-be exceptional. As the debate over what precisely comprises the required evidence heats up, the rules of the game are often rewritten hastily. The ground rules are gladly altered for the would-be exceptional, for the outlandish claim on the brink of scientific achievement.

This technique, known colloquially as "Moving the Goal Posts," is a remarkable occurrence in and of itself and needs to be recognized. Perhaps because of ego or doubt. In the face of the unknown, paradigm changes always necessitate going above and beyond the rational evidence because of what it might imply for the present regime.

The term conjures up images of goal posts in a football game, say, progressively being pushed to the back of the field, or beyond, as one side threatens to score. In an all-out attempt to avoid defeat, the opposing team resorts to cheating by altering the laws of the game.

Once upon a time, the government was responsible for recognising the existence of anomalous vehicles inside the Earth's atmosphere. With the establishment of a permanent office by the Department of Defense, the goalposts have moved once again.

Jason Colavito, a well-known UFO sceptic and popular culture critic, claims that a tiny number of UFO enthusiasts plotted to have legislation passed through the United States Congress and Senate in order to steal money from taxpayers. Perhaps the abnormalities in the air are the goal posts themselves, which are shifting.

History Shows That Sceptics Will Desperately Dismiss Evidence To Save Face

It's unlikely to happen in football, but here's how it works in science. I'll use two instances from geophysics and linguistics to demonstrate this "changing the goal posts" phenomena, although the same behaviour can be seen in a variety of less conventional fields, such as parapsychology. I'll start with a geophysical example. The Big Splash (Birch Lane Press, 1990; Avon, 1991) is a book on Louis A. Frank. Frank is a physicist at the University of Iowa who is well-known in the space science community. He discovered evidence in satellite pictures in 1986 that the Earth was being battered by about twenty house-sized comets every minute. He claims that since these ice comets are so tiny, they break up and convert to water in the upper atmosphere. And, Frank reasoned, throughout the course of the Earth's history, these arriving tiny comets would be responsible for all of the water in our seas and then some.

The astronomers' reaction to Frank's finding was not surprising. "We would have noticed these things if they existed," they said. Of course, scientists had never imagined that comets could be that tiny, since they are usually measured in kilometres. They had also never searched for near-Earth objects, which might have indicated the presence of such tiny, dark approaching objects. But, in any case, astronomers had little interest in looking for these objects since they already knew the result.

One scientist, on the other hand, resolved to disprove the hypothesis the old-fashioned way: by undertaking a telescopic search. Clayne Yeates was the physicist's name. In the late 1980s, he worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California as the project manager for the Galileo mission. Yeates, who has since died, received money from JPL and leased the University of Arizona's Spacewatch Telescope at Kitt Peak. A search in January 1988 yielded some amazing results: real pictures of the tiny comets.

However, when the pictures were shown to experts at a conference of the American Geophysical Union a few months later, many were sceptical. They mistook the so-called tiny comet streaks in the pictures for noise—fluctuations in the data caused by chance. In astronomy, the standard of evidence is to have two pictures of the same object.

When Yeates submitted a manuscript reporting the findings of his search, the editor of Geophysical Research Letters told him that, "the reviewers must be persuaded that you have observed the same object in two successive exposures for your article to be approved for publication."

Yeates, it turned out, had previously performed such a search and had gotten exactly what he was looking for—two successive pictures of the same item. He really had six such pairings of pictures. Yeates then sent the editor of Geophysical Research Letters a pair of consecutive exposures of the same item. The referees of Yeates' article, however, must have been taken aback when they saw the double pictures, since they decided to alter the laws of astronomy especially for him.

Yeates' article was rejected despite meeting the editor's proof criteria. One of the referees said that he needed three successive pictures of the same item to realize the streaks were not noise.

Yeates was furious, and rightly so. It seems that astronomers abruptly decided to alter the usual norms of confirmation. Rather of having two pictures of the same object, astronomers determined that three were required at random. But if Yeates had produced three, astronomers would have demanded four. And if he'd had four, they'd have demanded five.

While researching the history of science, this was my first encounter with the apparent "shifting of the goal posts" phenomena. Since then, I've come across many more examples, most notably in a heated linguistics debate: Can chimps really learn to use language?

Animal language researchers' assertions were debunked a decade and a half ago as overblown self-delusions.

The opponents argued that such assertions were nothing more than wishful thinking. They claimed that you can train animals to perform incredible things, such as training bears to ride motorbikes. They claimed that the chimpanzees had learnt nothing more complex than how to push the correct buttons or speak the proper words to entice people to give them bananas and M&Ms.

Before closing the door on the topic in the early 1980s, opponents decided that there is no proof that the chimp utterances even slightly matched the language skills of a young kid.

However, major research by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and other scientists at Georgia State University's Language Research Center in Atlanta seems to contradict that notion.

Her pigmy chimps, who some scientists think are more intelligent than the ordinary chimps examined in previous "flawed" language studies, seem to have learnt to comprehend complicated phrases and to converse spontaneously using symbolic language. Her chimps have the basic understanding abilities of two-and-a-half-year-old toddlers.

Of course, the critics will have none of it. And all the claimants can do is shake their heads in disappointment. Stuart Shanker, a philosopher at York University in Toronto and co-author of a new book alongside Savage-Rumbaugh, claims that linguists are using a double standard to this new study.

The opponents reject abilities such as combining a noun and a verb to create a two-word phrase, which they would consider embryonic language competence in a young kid. "The linguists continued raising their expectations, and Sue kept fulfilling them," Shanker told George Johnson of the New York Times in a June 6, 1995 article. "However, the linguists keep shifting the goalposts."

Despite Promises Of More Extraordinary Evidence, The UFO Community Should Not Expect To Covert The Skeptics Anytime Soon

Yes indeed, close followers of the UFO topic as a whole are obviously familiar, if not annoyed, with this "moving of the goal posts" foolishness.

Yes indeed, close followers of the UFO topic as a whole are obviously familiar, if not annoyed, with this "moving of the goal posts" foolishness.

Extraordinary evidence often seems to indicate a change in the basic rules of the game, a shift in the proof standards. While claimants feel this is unfair, and I understand why they do, such an action might be permitted if the rules were changed ahead of time.

Regrettably, it seems that the rules are often changed while the game is being played. All of this lends a really amazing meaning to the phrase "exceptional evidence."