DOSSIER 3ec46b7691122687ddb9d95cf551f6f2
Q: Could this all be coincidence?
A: Yes, but the coincidence model has stopped being parsimonious.
The committee’s working position was, for many years, that the body of evidence could be explained by a series of unrelated coincidences. The committee no longer holds this position.
The coincidence model required the committee to assume that:
- A daguerreotypist in 1844 happened to be in exactly the right place to photograph a meteorological phenomenon that was not a meteorological phenomenon.
- A 19th-century Catawba watchman happened to be on the river at exactly the moment a “thing of polished metal” descended.
- A Utah geophysics team happened to measure, at three of fourteen sites, radiation readings that were 15× background.
- A 1986 BYU graduate student happened to find plutonium-239 in two of eleven seer-stone fragments.
Each of these events, taken alone, is explainable. The committee is no longer confident that the conjunction of these events is explainable by anything other than a common underlying cause.
This is, of course, an argument from inference to the best explanation. It is not a proof. The committee does not claim it is a proof. We claim it is the least unsatisfying explanation currently available.