From 1990-1992 I lived in Geneva, doing research work for my Ph.D at CERN. It's a very big-name particle physics laboratory, which produces a steady stream of Nobel prizes — a point worth remembering since, these days, it's probably as well-known for the technology it produces as the science. It's also a point of vital importance to the story below.

One day after work, I think in summer 1991, I was walking home on their Meyrin campus. I happened to look up and saw a UFO, some distance off in a generally easterly direction towards the airport. It consisted of four or five separate glowing orange-red discs, rather like fireballs. They travelled slowly, roughly horizontally, and right away it struck me that there was something odd about the perspective. They moved in a peculiar rigid way, arrayed and more like a projection than a group of real objects.

As far as I know, no one never figured out what they were. I'm still curious, and if you have any good insights please send them in! However, that isn't the point of this story.

The next day I went in and found a message circulating, from one of the physicists. He had seen it too, figured many people there must have, and had the idea that if we combined all the sightings from all the scientists there we could probably get a good idea of its trajectory and maybe figure out what it was.

Well, I typed up a quick report, then went off to take my morning break before hitting "send". While doing that I noticed other people talking about it, grumbling "bah this is silly" and similar things. I began to have second thoughts. Remember, I was a grad student then, and like many grad students what I wanted most was to finish and get out — preferably without getting further tangled up in the backbiting academic politics that plagued our group.

So, I cancelled my report and declined to participate in his worthy experiment. For the rest of my time there, I did manage to avoid getting tangled in any nasty disputes and I did get my Ph.D and get out of grad school. Then I kept going, all the way out of physics and academia forever, disgusted with the whole corrupt, hypocritical mess. Not because of this incident, of course; it's just an interesting footnote... but it does crystallize my objections, into one key pointed question:

What kind of scientist thinks it's silly to want to explain something strange that you saw?