UFOs - Occam’s Razor
William of Occam did not know about UFOs, but he would probably have been against them
 What has a fourteenth century Franciscan friar got to do with UFOs? Well, William of Occam came up with a rule-for-thinking called “Occam’s Razor”. He wielded his razor to slice up some of the favourite theories of his fellow philosophers. The rule-for-thinking he invented was that “entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity”. And no, that was not an early call for family planning! It was friar William’s way of saying that a good scientific theory should rely on as few assumptions as possible about what exists. If someone tries to convince you of something that assumes a lot then maybe there’s something wrong. Occam’s rule-for-thinking was called a razor because it says we should “shave off” (get rid of) as many assumptions about the unknown as we can.
Occam’s Razor can be used to slice holes in some explanations of UFOs. The Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (No.1) makes more assumptions than the Psychological Explanation (No. 18). The Extraterrestrial Hypothesis assumes the existence of aliens able to travel to Earth from outer space. On the other hand, the Psychological Explanation does make some assumptions: it assumes that people can sometimes be seriously mistaken about what they think they see. Which assumption should be shaved off? You decide.
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