It appears that Mike Cifone has done an outstanding job of analyzing Daniel Coumbe’s new book, Anomaly: A Scientific Exploration of the UFO Phenomenon. Cifone explains Coumbe’s qualifications to write such a (short) tome and praises its elegant presentation and scientific procedure. The major flaw in Anomaly is its use of “mostly unscrubbed” data to make conclusions about what we might call “true” UFOs. These are reports that have been exhaustively studied by experts to separate the “wheat from the chaff”—the frighteningly high percentage of UFO reports that can be relatively easily relegated to all the categories skeptics rattle off. Cifone shows Coumbe’s scientific approach on several “bellwether” cases. In Part II of his appreciation, Mike Cifone thanks CUFOS Scientific Director and statistical whiz Dr. Mark Rodeghier for helping him produce what is probably the most understandable yet rigorous short exposition of “practical probability” this reader has encountered. Applying this to the Big UFO Questions Coumbe attempts to answer and a couple other weaknesses Cifone sees in the book, Cifone profitably adds some of his own musings. (WM)
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