This is the mess that is left when a star explodes. The Crab Nebula, the result of a supernova seen in 1054 AD, is filled with mysterious filaments. The filaments are not only tremendously complex, but appear to have less mass than expelled in the original supernova and a higher speed than expected from a free explosion.
Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Hester, A. Loll (ASU); Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin (Skyfactory)
Not only does Neil D. Tyson put the onus of presenting evidence about UFOs entirely on those who believe, he also discusses at length a principle called the argument from ignorance, which is often repeated as a means to perpetuate the widely-held claim of the existence of UFOs.
Basically, you can use UFOs to discuss the argument from ignorance in its most basic form: When someone sees an unidentified object in the sky and tells everyone about it, he may say, "I just saw something in the sky and have no idea what it is; it must be aliens coming to visit us from another planet." What Neil Tyson says is that the argument should end at "no idea what it is". Extrapolating the individual testimony into something else is a logical fallacy and has no more credence than any other kind of witness account.
Human beings are only partially rational, and it's common for us to move from the complete unknown to absolute certitude, as we do with entities like God. If we can't explain it with the evidence we hav now, it must be GodAnd on and on. Scientists, on the other hand, have to hold the measure of evidence to much higher standards than eyewitness testimony, and thus the data we have on UFOs does not hold up very well to scrutiny.
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