Why Did Carl Sagan Dismiss UFOs?

I loved Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World. I read it before looking into the evidence surrounding the phenomena. So when he explained alien abduction accounts as survivors of childhood abuse constructing a psychological narrative to cope, I was convinced he was right.

The reason everyone sees gray aliens is because everyone in the culture expects aliens to look that way. It’s a social contagion, not a real thing.

The centerpiece of the book is the "baloney detection kit," a set of tools for critical thinking. The fact that spends a lot of words on that tells me that Sagan was worried about critical thinking.

And frankly when one sees the stupid, crazy, awful things people write in 2026, he wasn’t wrong to be worried. Sagan writes that credulous acceptance of nonsense costs people money, and that when governments and societies lose the capacity to separate BS from truth, the results can be catastrophic.

Let’s assume Sagan was aware of unexplained UAP and related things. I’ve read the theory that he was co-opted to dismiss these things publicly. Maybe that’s true, maybe it’s not. But what if Sagan knew some of these things were true, and that there was a Phenomena. But to admit it, would be to open the flood gates to all sorts of charlatans. That would be bad and would hurt people. So, it’s safer to help dismiss it and minimize the damage to society, or at least to the part of society that today clicks the phishing links, and after Disclosure will throw their money at every scammer promising psi training or whatever.

But here's where I think Sagan made a mistake. Consider pharmaceutical drugs. We all accept that real medicines exist and genuinely help people. That fact also empowers snake oil salesmen to sell unregulated garbage by borrowing the credibility of real medicine. The solution has never been to deny that medicine works, or to refuse to discuss it seriously. We handle fraud through regulation and education, not by treating the whole category as a joke. The existence of con artists in a domain is not evidence that the legitimate phenomena in that domain don't exist.

That's essentially what happened to UAP. Serious evidence gets lumped in with psychic healers and astrologers as if they're the same quality of claim.

The charitable read on Sagan is that he understood what would happen if a scientist of his stature said there was something real here. It wouldn't just open the door to serious inquiry, it would flood it. Every charlatan with a newsletter would get a boost. The public doesn't neatly separate "we should investigate this rigorously" from "therefore everything anyone has ever said about aliens is probably true." Sagan knew that, and I think he made a calculated decision that the risks of engaging seriously outweighed the costs of dismissal.

When I first started looking into UFO stuff, I saw an interview with Danny Sheehan on YouTube where he talked about the UAP Disclosure Act as part of the National Defense Authorization Act. The law mandates that every government agency collect and review records relating to, quoting directly from the legislative text, "unidentified anomalous phenomena, technologies of unknown origin, and non-human intelligence."

When I first heard this, I was surprised. Shouldn’t this have been the top story on the news for a week or a month or a year? To me the wording of this law is the best evidence that there’s a there there. I can’t vet every self-claimed experiencer to see if they are for real or not. But when the Congress talk about NHI, it should wake everyone up.