“The assumptions must be thrown away before a serious investigation can be started.”
I can see that angle, but I don’t think he’s quite correct. Science wouldn’t assume that there can’t be some other undetected civilization out there responsible for the phenomenon. That’s not one of the basic assumptions of science, or a conclusion that would derive from any basic assumption of science.
Science probably would assign that a lower likelihood and a lower priority to investigate, but the beauty of the method is that eventually, as the higher priority and more probable explanations are ruled out by the method itself, those lower priority explanations would naturally take precedence. So there is no need to dump the scientific method, since just following it will still get you to the same place in the rare circumstance where the apparently higher probability solutions are false, and in most cases, the higher probability solutions are true, so following the method, on the whole, is more efficient.
The problem is that “scientific method” today is not the “scientific method” of the 1800s.
Today the “method” is in the context of huge bureaucratic institutions, government, university, large corporations—so all the prejudices become frozen in place.
This lesser known part of Eisenhower’s farewell address explains it very well:
“Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields.
In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research.
Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.
For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientifictechnological elite.”