Hawkins recent exhalations about UFO's being the province of wackos reminds me of how many physicists I personally know whose reputed love for hard science and data suddenly evaporates when looking into the subject of UFO's. Many of the most diehard and mouthy skeptics haven't looked very deeply into the data at all. Essentially they find the subject threatening to their typically giant (read childish) egos which might crumble when confronted with the idea that there might exist a species of intelligence vastly ahead of us in scientific knowledge, so they just ignore the research which doesn't prevent them from holding forth on the topic anyway.
Not to cruelly generalize about scientists, but many of the best are ridiculously childish especially emotionally which means that they tend to wall off huge swaths of reality as a defense mechanism, and is probably what makes them so good at focusing on specific tasks. They don't call MIT "Aspergers U." for nothing.
Bo Long