He noted that there were no simultaneous and reliable cases (reported by many witnesses), that they were very exotic (not explainable in terms of reasonably postulated phenomena), and he applied the skeptical standard most associated with his name: “extraordinary claims require extraordinary levels of proof or evidence.” A “baloney detection kit” On the contrary, Sagan emphasized the unreliability of the witnesses, the absence of physical evidence and the explanations that included self-deception and hallucinations. Carl Sagan with a model of the Viking lander in Death Valley. Allen Hynek and James McDonald, argued that unidentified flying objects were visiting the Earth and that, although there were not enough sightings to make a convincing case, the large volume of reports justified the examination and study of the subject.

The first, in 1969, dealt with the study of UFOs. His interest in refuting pseudoscience led him to organize two symposia at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Sagan did not censor himself at the time of asking questions, although he later realized that his hypotheses were unfounded. Despite his temperament as a skeptical and rigorous scientist, many of his first publications were about exobiology, and on several occasions he speculated about life on Venus, Mars, Jupiter and even the Moon. As a researcher, he began his career at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he contributed to the mission of the Mariner 2 probe that arrived on Venus in 1962 and confirmed Sagan’s predictions that it was a dry planet with scorching heat. Since childhood, Sagan was fascinated by the mystery of life in the universe. Carl Sagan was fascinated by the mystery of life in the universe. In the 1980s, through his television series Cosmos, he turned science into part of mass culture, spreading his passion for astronomy to more than 400 million viewers, trying to instill in them the power of logic for skeptical thinking.

But in introducing me simultaneously to skepticism and wonder, they taught me two uneasily cohabiting modes of thought that are central to the scientific method.” This is how the astronomer, astrophysicist and cosmologist Carl Edward Sagan (1934-1996), known as one of the greatest science popularizers in history, recalled his childhood. “My parents knew almost nothing about science.

The demon haunted world