form one legitimate one. His mistake was also not a
variety of an appeal to popularity. “A million UFO
true-believers can’t be wrong.” He also wasn’t pointing
to any specific yet to be explained story and saying,
“Maybe you have explained others, but you can’t ex-
plain thisone, so it’s aliens.” (That would be akin to the
mystery therefore magicfallacy.) He didn’t even have a
specific story in mind. And his mistake is not a matter
of failing to embrace the simplest explanation, either.
After all, he likely thinks the simplest explanation for
that one good story he thinks is out there is “it’s
aliens.”
The key to unraveling this mystery came when I
realized that he wasn’t being literal when he said, “they
can’t all be false.” Of course, such stories couldall be
false; that is possible. But if I would have pointed that
out, he would have simply said that he only meant to
suggest that such a thing was unlikely: UFO sightings
are so numerous, it’s improbablethat that they are all
bogus. And then it hit me: the mistake is one regarding
probability. But it’s not the gambler’s fallacy(thinking
that one chance occurrence can affect the probability
of others). It’s a mistake about how probability relates
to evidence. As I put it in my original “Countless Coun-
terfeits” entry for the Bad Augmentsbook:
The true believer mistakenly thinks that whether or
not a piece of evidence is good is a matter of chance,
so that the more pieces of evidence there are, the
more likely it is that one is reliable. “Throw the dice
long enough and eventually you’ll get a Yahtzee.” But
this is not how evidence works. I can’t pile up 1000
pieces of bad evidence that you committed a murder
and claim it’s likely that one proves you did. Whether a
piece of evidence is good is not a matter of chance;
it either is or it isn’t. (p. 142)A large collection of bad evidence isn’t bound to have
some good evidence in it somewhere because whether
a piece of evidence is faulty is not a matter of luck.
For the name Countless Counterfeits, I was in-
spired by another academic who committed this
fallacy named Peter Kreft. In an article on Catholic
belief in ghosts (by Tim Townsend) in the magazine
U.S. Catholic, Kreft argued that the large number of
debunked ghost stories was reason to believe that
ghosts are real. To demonstrate his logic, he gave an
analogy: “The existence of [a great deal of] counter-
feit money strongly argues for the existence of real
money somewhere.” The countless number of coun-
terfeit (fake, false, faulty, fraudulent) ghost stories
was, to him, evidence that ghosts are real because,
in the end, they can’t all be fake!
The mistake goes even deeper, however. Notice
that, not only couldthey indeed all be fake—but
they very likely all are. Given how gullible humans
are, and given how easily fooled our senses are, and
given how faulty our memory is, it is no surprise
that a great number of such stories exist. A bunch
of stories about people seeing UFOs is not a reason
to think that at least one is real; it’s confirmation of
what we already knew: people are easily fooled.
Indeed, the more such stories are debunked, the
more reason I have to for thinking that noneare legiti-
mate. If a young boy, for example, set out to figure out
whether magicians have magic powers, he would not
have to figure out very many tricks before he was jus-
tified in believing that all magic is just trickery (e.g.,
illusion and sleight of hand). Once he has debunked a
few, he has effectively debunked them all. And it mat-
ters not how many other magicians are out there that
the boy has not ever heard of, or even whether there
are tricks that he can’t figure out. He now knows
they are all using naturally explicable methods. In
the same way, once you find natural explanations for
enough ghost stories and UFO sightings, you have
good reason to believe that there is a natural/earthly
explanation for them all. At the least, the burden is
on the other side to show that there is not. Most cer-
tainly, the large number of such stories is not reason
to think that one is legitimate.
The same works for arguments too. There is a
large number of arguments for God’s existence, for ex-
ample. There’s the cosmological, the ontological, the
teleological, the moral, etc.—and there are many vari-
eties of each. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, in her
book 36 Arguments For The Existence of Godhas identi-
fied...well...at least 36. Now, obviously, if each fails
individually (as Goldstein argues they do), you can’t
combine them to form one good argument. (That
could be called the “combining faulty arguments fal-
lacy.”) But you also can’t look at the sheer number,
before you examine them, and say “It’s unlikely
that they all fail. And if just one works, God exists.”
Whether arguments work is not a matter of chance
either, so you can’t rightly think that a large number
of arguments to the same conclusion is a good reason
to think that conclusion is true.
I may be wrong, but as far as I know, no one has
ever identified this particular mistake in reasoning.
I’m even more certain that no one has given it a name.
And in my humble opinion, it needs one. Countless
Counterfeits is,I believe, behind a host of people’s be-
lief in UFOs, ghosts, demons, alternate medicine
cures, and even grandiose conspiracy theories. And as
I am sure readers of Skepticwill agree, all such beliefs
need to be relegated to the dust bin of history.volume 25 number 1 2020 W W W. S K E P T I C. C O M 5 3