Originally Posted by NGCHunter

Stop me if I'm wrong, but he didn't say "only abduct cranks and wierdos," he said "only appear to." My own family had a "close encounter of the first kind" - a silver disc with windows. I find it personally insulting to hear him say that it makes my family a bunch of "weirdos" or "cranks" for believing they saw an alien spaceship buzz their car. You don't have to believe that whatever they saw was a real spaceship or contained aliens, but it's also unneccessary to generalize all witnesses as "cranks and weirdos." Generally, I try not to pay much attention to Hawking's rants when they do not directly pertain to theoretical physics. He may be a genius, but he's not infallible.