Ryan Purkey

Dear Adam, I will repeat my question. I am asking because, in your essay, you appear to claim that I was treated well by other astronomers on the basis that I was invited to present at one meeting. The very first action taken against me because of my collaboration with Geoff Marcy came from a conference at Penn State University. Here is the official letter I received in 2021 from Sofia Sheikh, who was leading the conference organization, barring me from presenting the VASCO project because of my coauthorship with Geoff Marcy. It was signed by her and five other organizers, most of them junior researchers. The letter referred to a very specifically tailored paragraph in the Code of Conduct -- one that appeared to have been created expressly to prevent me from presenting. The abstract I had submitted did not even mention the paper with Geoff. At the time, Sofia worked for Breakthrough Listen, under the leadership of Pete Worden and Andrew Siemion. Pete, a former U.S. Air Force general who leads the Breakthrough Initiatives, is arguably one of the most influential people in the SETI community. He had assumed leadership after Geoff resigned as head of Breakthrough Listen in 2015, sharing that responsibility with Andrew. When I forwarded the matter to Pete and Andrew, I received no reply. Since then, there has been a “community effort,” centered around you, Jason Wright, and your shared circle of friends, to ostracize me and excommunicate me from the community. I will not recount all the events again, but instead refer readers to this essay I wrote in 2023: hxstem.substack.com/p/a-test… As a result, I even left the SETI mailing list in the autumn of 2023. SETI meeting organizers not only stopped inviting me but also found inventive ways to reject my submissions. For example, when I registered for the Breakthrough Discuss conferences in both 2023 and 2024, and submitted an abstract in 2024, my registrations and abstract were subsequently “lost.” I confronted Pete Worden about this, but that is another story. Multiple sources have told me about your involvement both in this matter and in my broader excommunication from the community. I would appreciate it if you could clarify what role you played in my exclusion from the Penn State meeting and in the development or application of the Code of Conduct, as well as what communications or agreements took place among you, Jason Wright, Sofia Sheikh, and Pete Worden regarding my exclusion from the community. I am including Jason Wright’s essay describing his decision in the matter: sites.psu.edu/astrowright/20… If we want this to be about “science” and “peer review” only, then the process must be clean. Finally, let me make my central point: by ignoring and downplaying the arXiv preprints that support the VASCO work, you are deliberately misleading the media and the general public. I look forward to your clarification. @AdamFrank4 @bigthink @guardian

Steve gave me an idea, even if unintentionally. This is something we genuinely need to address, Avi. The mantra “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” is damaging science. It is not a philosophically well-founded evidentiary standard; it is a rhetorical device that allows subjective prior beliefs to determine how much evidence is deemed sufficient. Perhaps it is time for an open letter to the NAS and major editorial boards arguing that this phrase has no place in scientific peer review. Claims should be judged by the quality of the evidence -- not by how extraordinary they appear to the reviewer.