Category Archives: Paranormal
In a world of supernaturals, what would real psychics be like?
Ah, here’s something different, for my 1,600th post! Earlier last evening, some friends of mine were over at my place doing some gaming with me, and of course tormenting Eccles with a laser light pen. Here are some pics from that evening of fun…
The gang’s at the gaming table, and yes, that’s my thumb in the pic (on purpose)!
Spoils of War! We sorted out pieces from my old gaming dice collection for my friends’ use — I’ve no further need for it!
Our almighty GM ponders our characters’ fates during the game!
Mister Eccles is on the prowl, looking to catch the point of red light from our GM’s laser pen!
Last evening, we were playing a 4th edition GURPS RPG campaign set in a world were supernatural beings and forces really exist, but seek to hide themselves from the much more numerous, clever, and fearful, ordinary folk…
…after all, Ceteri, as the supernatural beings are called, are powerful, but humans are many and inventive, and enough mundanes can take down even the mightiest wizard, so the Ceteri work together…or ELSE!
Anyhoo…
In the real world, a psychic is a normal person who plays the role of a psychic using conjuror or mentalist tricks — as far as anyone’s been able to prove, pending the unlikely scientific documentation of genuine psychics — but we speculated on the reverse, what real psychics would do in an otherwise supernatural world of dangerous normals.
An aside: Self-styled psychic Craig Weiler, (whose blog is here) has proposed an interesting mythology of what he calls “psychic people,” an embattled special subset of humanity of which he imagines himself a member, who suspiciously resemble the X-Men, a notion he understandably takes exception to, since I’m sure the comparison strikes a little close to home.
But what if there really were such special people with psychic abilities, and what if they really were wary of persecution by normals? Well, they’d hide in plain sight, and not by announcing themselves as psychics on shows by people like Montel Williams, or Oprah Winfrey, but by posing as skilled normals, and make a healthy, honest living in the process, quite unlike those doing the reverse in reality.
Here’s how that would work:
Psychics whose powers involved telepathic or psychokinetic effects would pose as mentalists or conjurors, in the manner of Banachek, James Randi, or Penn & Teller, but to make their act foolproof, would also have actual magician skills to conceal themselves in the presence of otherwise mundane magicians and supplement their powers with extra things to do on stage.
Such a performer could use genuine powers in the first part of an act, then like in a Penn & Teller “reveal” at the end of the act, avert suspicion by showing how the trick was “really” done to the audience.
Professional camouflage.
Those psychics given to abilities involving prediction could pose as astronomers, meteorologists, statisticians, and other researchers who ordinarily use mathematical models to make predictions in their fields, and these psychics would only have to know just enough math to make their imposture as normals plausible, while keeping their day-to-day predictions believable (to a mundane scientist) while doling out their more spectacular and unusual predictions to other supernatural beings covertly.
In the setting we play in, there is a Council of allied supernatural creatures that works to keep the normals “in the dark” to preserve it’s existence, keep the peace with the normals, and prevent the very sort of embattlement that Mr. Weiler imagines “his people” to be experiencing.
On pain of sounding incredibly arrogant, I’m sure we all like to feel that we’re somehow special and a cut above the rest, but Weiler has it the wrong way around — I think that the genuine psychics, if there were any, and with the situation he believes to be the case, would NOT show themselves to the world on television, in seminars, or giving readings in dark rooms to gullible marks — a blatant display of actual ability would be suicide — but would keep themselves perpetually hidden from a world of normals who would never fully know of their existence, those normals being, to paraphrase Tommy Lee Jones’ character in Men In Black, fearful, panicky animals…and who would definitely not suffer a (real) witch, or a psychic, to live free and unexploited if caught.
Like this:
The Paranormal is Boring.
Why, one may ask, do I commit the unseemly crassness of saying the above?
It’s simple.
Every single time the paranormal has been thoroughly investigated, every time a mystery has been solved, it has been shown to by decidedly something else, something mundane, but not boring, for the truth is hardly boring …NOT mystical, NOT supernatural, and NOT paranormal.
And every mystery not solved is simply not solved, due to a lack of sufficient explanatory data, hints and clues, and only that…
…not anything in support of paranormal claims at all, merely the unexplained, not the epistemically unexplainable.
“Paranormal,” like its synonym “supernatural,” is merely a placeholder for ignorance, and by itself explains nothing. It is just a label for what we don’t know, what we don’t understand, not a profound description of what we do.
If I may be so bold, I would even go so far as to say that, stealing a page from Michael Shermer, there probably isn’t anything supernatural or paranormal, only what’s normal, natural, and whatever things we haven’t explained just yet.
You cannot rightly declare anything unexplainable unless and until you make an honest, persistent, and systematic attempt to look first, before writing it off as an insoluble conundrum and a genuine mystery.
Even then, there may be an explanation for it that you or someone else are not resourceful enough to find, or imaginative enough to conceive.
There are limits on human abilities in the realm of knowledge-gathering and understanding, but those abilities still work with some reliability when used well — We do not and cannot know everything, but that does not mean we know nothing at all.
But aren’t I being a little harsh in saying that the paranormal just doesn’t meet the standards of coolness that it could?
Not at all.
Paranormal research hasn’t been completely useless, and I think it should be carried out so we can discover more about the human mind and how it works, such as mechanisms of self-deception and how we form and support our beliefs as personal truths, however misguided we may be.
Paranormal research has led to many new discoveries, especially those detailed in Richard Wiseman’s recent book, “Paranormality”… I recently finished, and highly recommend it to the genuinely curious.
But none of those discoveries support claims of the paranormal as they are offered by proponents and adopted by believers.
I’d put the paranormal into three groupings; Phenomena, Critters and Arcana.
Phenomena are those alleged forces, events, and places like UFOs, hauntings, out-of-body and Near Death experiences, poltergeists, spontaneous human combustion, Atlantis, the Bermuda Triangle, ESP, claims of ancient astronauts, and crop circles.
Critters get a bit more personal and concrete, but no less questionable, ranging from alien encounters, Loch Ness monster sightings, Bigfoot sightings, the Chupacabra, the Jersey Devil, and Springheel Jack, among many others.
Arcana are those “arts,” performed by humans claiming special knowledge and abilities, or animals claimed* by humans to have these, such as divination techniques including dowsing, astrology, automatic writing, and channeling human spirits, dead Martians or 35,000 year old Atlanteans, for starters.
*I’m looking at you, Punxutaney Phil, you little furry precognitive bastard…
What do all of these things have in common?
Consistently, each time these claims have been examined, when they have, an alternate, a more plausible explanation has been forthcoming, brushing aside the cobwebs of mystery to reveal what’s really going on, or looking closer into the origin of the claim to show there’s nothing deep or ineffable to groove over.
More often than not, at least to me, the truth turned out to be more interesting than the original claim, and it was the claim, not what’s really happening, that seems uninteresting and dull.
This is especially so when reading good fiction, when, even if the phenomena in the story aren’t spectacular in their effects, they are often unambiguous, perhaps even self-evident in their genuineness, not the result of hoaxing, illusion, delusion, sensory misinterpretation, flawed reasoning, or any one or more of a number of other confounding factors.
Even when such phenomena in a well-written fictional setting aren’t flamboyant, much less ridiculous in their obviousness, they are extremely difficult, even impossible at times, for a conjurer or mentalist to replicate in a performance and successfully pass such trickery as the real thing.
In the realm of the paranormal, there are few genuinely original and new claims, just the same old thing regurgitated over and over, recycled from generation after generation, and maybe it’s that fact that makes claims of the paranormal, at least at face value, hardly interesting in the long term to those without a rigid fascination for them.
For my part, the findings of science are much more interesting, elegantly parsimonious, intellectually challenging, and better, more evidentially supported than the claims of proponents by far.
Related articles
- Americans’ Beliefs in Paranormal Phenomena (Infographic) (livescience.com)
- Common Brain Mechanisms Underlie Supernatural Perceptions – Richard Wiseman – Scientific American (richarddawkins.net)
- Richard Wiseman discusses Paranormality on For Good Reason (randi.org)
Like this:
Nice fractals, but you’ve got my baloney detector on red alert!
Image via Wikipedia
Hat Tip to @emilyhasbooks on Twitter.
This was pointed out to me last night, and I chilled my evil fractalicious heart with thoughts of Benoit Mandelbrot spinning in his grave in agony:
It’s a blog page [Here] on a New Agey site called Human Angels, with some nice fractals, but very little in the way of valid factual substance, allegedly using religious lore from Hindu, Mayan, Hopi and Jewish scripture, the long-since debunked Bible Code, the Mayan calendar 2012 nonsense, with a a bit of the appeal to quantum physics fallacy and the silly invocation of the geological record to make claims of predicting the future, presumably in ways impossible for mainstream science.
The first sentence of the page I have no issues with:
A fractal is “a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole,” a property called self-similarity.
Okay, there’s nothing off about that, but after that, the text goes down the proverbial rabbit-hole and into the land of meaningless word-salad immediately following:
All of the manifested universe can be described as fractions of dimensions, or fractalic, while the whole dimensions themselves are of infinite measure. From the whole dimensions are derived the finite dimensional parameters which define what we know of as space/time.
I’m tempted to say WTF??, though I’m aware that the universe is NOT fractal, but is largely relativistic on the macro-level and quantum on the micro-level (Individual bosons, like photons, are discrete packets of energy as shown by experiment, not infinitely divisible into self-similar parts.) as far as anyone can show at present.
Never mind that New Age claims, like those of Old Time religion, lean heavily into bald assertions of knowledge that is not and cannot possibly be actually known given the fact that wishful thinking to the contrary, believers don’t really have any special powers the rest of us don’t.
This one really did it for me…
Part of the make-up for a fractal, is the idea of a pattern repeating within a pattern. This is how Gregg Braden explains the cyclic patterns of time experienced on the earth. Basing it on two major cycles; the 5,125 year cycle that it takes the earth to once again cross the galactic equator of the Milky Way, and the 25,625 year cycle that represents the progression of the equinoxes, Braden paints a picture of the possible changes life on this planet faces.
Sorry, nice metaphor, but it means nothing. The claim of passing through the galactic “equator” every 5,125 years is based on a false premise, two actually: The Earth will not be passing through the plane of the galaxy’s disk in 2012, though as far as the sun is concerned, it does cross the equator twice each year, and there’s nothing at all special about it, and no evidence that space-time is fractal – See Planck length and Planck time for the reasons why…
…These are not the droids you’re looking for…
Second, and finally, this idea that ancient civilizations knew more than we is literally old and illogical, an appeal to antiquity fallacy:
The Mayans didn’t have nearly the knowledge we do of the age, nature, and shape of the galaxy, and even we don’t know it precisely, so any claim that their calendar took into account Earth’s passage through the mid-plane of the galaxy’s rotation is simply silly. No credible archaeologist would make such an assumption of facts not in evidence. We know now far more than they, and their ancient writings and monuments have value as historical records and artifacts only.
As tempting as it is to cut loose with the snark, I’ll have to refrain from indulging myself this time to file this one away in my collection of amusing and possibly unsinkable misunderstandings of reality.
Related articles
- Fractal Friday it is… (buddhakat.wordpress.com)
- Fractal Friday… (buddhakat.wordpress.com)
- The Fractal Dimension of ZIP Codes (wired.com)
- Inside The Incredible World Of Fractals, The Beautiful Patterns That Investors Use To Understand Charts (businessinsider.com)
Like this:
A planet-sized starship chillin’ next to Mercury? I suspect not.
Image via Wikipedia
This is cute. It’s a composite video taken of a Coronal Mass Ejection, or CME, washing over Mercury and appearing to reveal something previously unseen. According to the narrator, it must be an alien spacecraft, no less one the size of the planet nearby, and cloaked for good measure (Obviously! No other explanation possible, no sirree!).
Never mind the complete dismissal of any plausible alternatives in favor of the preferred explanation, and never mind the statements here that say that the more likely hypothesis is the effect of digital artifacts in the image.
Simply put, the ‘cloaked’ spot was were Mercury itself was at during the previous day, with no need to invoke Klingon birds of prey, Borg cubes, or for that matter, Zentraedi fleet command vessels at all!
Related articles
- Mysterious Planet-Size Object Spotted Near Mercury (space.com)
- “Mysterious Planet-Sized Object” Is… A Planet! (skepticalteacher.wordpress.com)
- Mysterious Planet-Size Object Spotted Near Mercury (livescience.com)
C0nc0rdance – The Global Consciousness Project
In posting this, I hereby cheerfully affirm my lack of sophistication with the New Age intricacies of Noetic Science™
Seriously, though, this is a good take on what to many looks deceptively like valid science, but not so valid when you pull back the curtain to see what’s going on in peoples’ heads concerning misjudgments of probability, and the use of occult statistics, to support those errors.
How They Staged the Morristown UFO Hoax, Part 1-3
This is just way too awesome: A test of peoples’ responses to atypical but mundane phenomena and it’s effects on their beliefs. This is how good skepticism should be done – not mere debunking – by studying the nature of belief in unusual situations, in this case, using balloons and road flares as faux UFOs…While documenting it on video.
Courtesy of MichaelShermer’s YouTube channel & Joe Rudy and Chris Russo
producer: Joe Rudy
producer: Chris Russo
Make Mine a Granola with Almonds…
This is about something that one of my Twitter friends, @Tao23 sent me a while back. It’s pseudoscience with an emphasis on the “pseudo-” and this is just one of the things that pisses me off about many promoters of woo woo.
‘Energy bars’ in your head that let you magically fulfill your every ambition if only you learn to access them?? WTF?? I’m not sure what to make of this.
I don’t know how to express the contempt they seem to have for the intelligence of their clients, and no, it doesn’t matter how much of this they really believe themselves.
Nope, even being totally sincere in making claims like these is no excuse…
…Never mind that the only energy bars that actually exist are the ones you unwrap and eat.
It’s normally my policy not to do this, but this truly deserves “that image” since anything less would give this too much credibility, so here it is peeps…
Related Articles
- Please, Don’t Appeal to Quantum Mechanics to Propagate Your Pseudoscience ” Exposing PseudoAstronomy (kestalusrealm.wordpress.com)
- A Philosophical Scrivener Speaks on Pseudoscience (kestalusrealm.wordpress.com)
Sanal Edamaruku Skeptically Pwns Tantrik on Live Television [Reposted]
Sanal Edamaruku, President of Rationalist International and the Indian Rationalist Society, challenges tantrik Pandit Surendra Sharma, to use his magical powers to kill him on national television, and seems most amused throughout the attempt, even to third part where the tantrik, with some assistance, tries the Ultimate Destruction Ritual™…to no effect on Sanal, who remains very much alive as of this writing… Woo… gotta love it.
A Modeling of the Core Argument for Psi
Parapsychology has yet to be taken seriously as a scientific field, primarily for a lack of real progress in establishing its findings, though I’m sure there are many serious researchers attempting to earn respectability for it, and the acceptance of their claims by the scientific community, and a look at history shows it has been this way from the beginning.
Parapsychology is an almost exclusively statistical field, and the whole of the data-set throughout the field’s more than 100 year history consists of little more than statistical quirks and seeming oddities, anomalies of statistical significance that to proponents of psi implies something of scientific importance…
…psi ability…The thing that will overturn the dominant paradigm of materialism…the science of the New Age…
The holy grails of psi-research are the development of an experimental protocol that can put parapsychology on the footing of an accredited science by producing reliable, consistent positive results no matter who is running the experiment or what they believe, and the development of a generally agreed upon theory of psi that would give them some idea of what they are actually looking for and how to find it.
The repeated failures of parapsychology to do these is consistent throughout and characteristic of its history.
I created the diagram below as a representation of the one of the arguments for psi by proponents, in the form of the Toulmin Model of informal argumentation, with a claim, or conclusion, supported by evidence, the premises, or reasons to accept the claim, connected by an inference, or chain of argument, itself supported by a warrant, the component of the argument that justifies the inference to a listener.
Needless to say, it is the inference, and its warrant, that are the main components of the argument that join evidence and claim…
…and it is the inference and warrant that are the most disputed by critics of paranormal claims, the chain of argument that psi proponents use to justify their claims, at least among themselves and to believers.
Nonetheless, that doesn’t stop them from trying…
Did you notice the circularity of the warrant? That’s because of psi’s negative definition, for even the best psi researchers are a little fuzzy on exactly what they’re trying to find, so they define it as something other than chance, other than sensory contact, other than, well, whatever they already know about.
Depending on how you phrase it, the warrant could be either of two logical fallacies, Begging the Question or Affirming the Consequent, with the entire argument being an Argument from Ignorance, and for a more thorough discussion on this, see Bob Carroll’s discussion of the Psi Assumption on the Skeptic’s Dictionary.
Parapsychologists often claim that their lack of replicable findings is due to underfunding, but funding for any research is obtained first by virtue of the momentum of prior results, not just by speculating on metaphysics as if it were science, or doing studies and making unsupported claims with no objectively repeatable results.
And without a useful predictive framework of hypotheses and conception of its main thesis, psi-research will remain dead in the water, and its data, as voluminous as it is, little more than statistical noise implying nothing outside of or beyond science.
Should paranormal research be funded?
In my view, if private institutions want to fund it, I say, “Have at it!” But it’s not something I’d want my government paying for with my tax dollars, especially after the Stargate debacle a couple of decades ago, which was not only an embarrassment but an enormous disappointment.
Related Articles
- I Knew You Were Going to Say That (randi.org)
- Further Thoughts on the Psi Hypothesis (kestalusrealm.wordpress.com)
- The “decline effect”: Is it a real decline or just science correcting itself? (sciencebasedmedicine.org)
- Is the “decline effect” really so mysterious? (scienceblogs.com)
Tales of the Spam Box, w/ Humerosity
Here’s something fun I found in my spam folder just a few days ago. It’s an ad from an oxymoronic professional outlet of online (*drum roll*) psychic consulting services, and I found it rather humerus in content, as fittingly, is the site itself.
Humerus enough to warm my cold, eldritch, inhuman heart…
Were these people even aware of my diabolical skeptic nature? Did they have any idea of the sort of abject cruelty I engage in with this sort of thing?? Unfortunately, I suspect that this was not the case. Muahahahahaha!
“Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our three most powerful weapons are fear, surprise, and a nearly fanatical devotion to the Church! Confess, heretic, or I’ll bring out…the comfy-chair…and the soft pillows!!”
Still, bad Monty Python paraphrases aside, it’s a good idea in my book to be wary of any attempt at looking professional when even the spambots sign what they send to other websites as something too generic, like ‘Expert,’ or ‘Admin,’ and having visited their website I noticed the same sort of thing going on. I mean, what’s wrong with doing what other spam accounts do and use absurdly silly but unique fake screen-names, like Sertiltpytuf, or some such, and impossibly long fake email addresses that never show up when you google them?
What’s up with that?
So I checked out their home-page, and I’d hoped that they would have more rigorous standards of webmastering quality on the site itself. Sadly, I was disappointed.
Well, even I can’t have everything…
Unfortunately, the text that follows is that of the entire comment, with no changes in spelling, punctuation, grammar, capitalization, or syntax…Note the interesting run-on sentence before the main paragraph.
Expert
http://www.myspiritualexperts.com
OUR PSYCHICS HELPS YOU THEY ARE TESTED AND TRUSTED
Our psychic always online for chat and e-mail In order for psychic our experts to be authentic they of course have to be able to give accurate readings, and make accurate prediction on future events. In some situations, Our psychic experts will know where a pet or person is, or can find things that are missing. Our experts can do :- love readings psychic readings astrology reading numerology relationship tarot card reading crystal ball reading aura reading angles reading and also career and financial readings.
Now concerning part of that: Just WTF is an ‘angles reading?’ I did a brief search on it, thinking perhaps it was some new sort of occultish divination using geometric forms, but instead was rather depressed to learn that it’s a misspelling of ‘angels reading,’ presumably some sort of cold-reading employing the conceptual element of imaginary divine emissary spirits.
*sigh* At least geometric forms have been shown to actually exist, even if in the abstract…
BTW, I used the [rel="nofollow"] command on that link just because I’m a big blue tentacled meany and don’t feel like doing them any favors.
Aliman, it looks like that prediction you tweeted me in jest just a few days ago came true, but I’m wondering if the ‘psychics’ saw it coming.
I suspect strongly that they did not…
Further Thoughts on the Psi Hypothesis
I was reading one of my copies of Skeptic Magazine, Vol. 16, No. 1 for 2010, and came across an article entitled, The Saturn-Mars Effect: How a Statistical Effect Explains the Astrological Claim for the Power of Mars.
It involved a statistical study using a computer program that looks for correlations in data sets, and which made use of an issue in the field of Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS), known as the problem of multiple comparisons, in which a misleading causative relationship can be alluded to in any statistical analysis involving genes and gene-sequences and the diseases they might code for used in the study, only some of them known and controlled for.
It noted that with any such study in which not all of the potential factors can be known of and controlled for, there is a very real danger of making a spurious causal inference, a Type 1 error, or false-positive, based on the factors not so controlled that could easily produce what seems to be statistically significant p values that are in fact worthless as evidence of a real effect.
This got me thinking about the data set of parapsychology, which interestingly enough consists solely of statistical anomalies from literally thousands of experiments over a period of more than 100 years. While the level of significance of the better done studies is superficially convincing, confirming the psi hypothesis is just as elusive as ever.
Not only have replication attempts by nonbelievers in psi proven ineffective, but even those conducted by believers conscientious enough to improve controls for previously unaccounted for flaws in the study predictably reduce the statistical significance to vanishingly within what could be expected by chance.
Regardless of one’s position on the existence of certain things, and this is true of meta-analyses as well, it’s easy to mislead oneself into equating a seeming numerical quirk in the data as constituting a genuine effect, especially a novel phenomenon not yet explained…or explainable…by science.
This is especially the case in large collections of data from multiple studies with large sample sizes, in which one could reasonably expect flukes in the results that even with adequate randomization could still be the result of thousands of different factors not involving anything outside of science…
…And in any study conducted with limited time and resources, it is simply not possible to account for all of these and rightly claim that they establish beyond rational doubt anything real, because of one underlying flaw in the psi hypothesis: the fact that even after over a century, there is no coherent consensus on a positive theory to tell us what we should expect to find if psi exists, where we should look, what we should fail to see if it doesn’t, or what its limits are.
Psi is defined by what it isn’t, not by what it is…
Until such a theory is proposed and tested, and nonbelievers can successfully replicate the results of such testing, the entire data set of parapsychology from over more than a century implies nothing outside of the normal, and is of no real value in supporting claims of anything beyond the mundane.
Psychic Powers: An Amazing Demonstration
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Psychic Powers: An Amazing Demonstration. From the DVD “Break The Science Barrier” by Richard Dawkins.
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Science is useful but that is not all it is. Science can be uplifting, thrilling, life-enhancing. Originally broadcast on Britain’s Channel 4 in 1996, “Break the Science Barrier” follows the Oxford Biologist Richard Dawkins as he meets with people who have experienced the wonders of science first-hand.
We meet the astronomer who first discovered pulsars, the geneticist who invented DNA fingerprinting, a scientist who discovered a protein that causes cancer, and others. Richard Dawkins interviews famous admirers of science such as Douglas Adams and David Attenborough, and asks them why science means so much to them. We also see how dangerous ignorance of science can be in classrooms, courts, and beyond.
With so many expressing paranormal beliefs and ignorance of science, Dawkins encourages viewers to contrast these ancient superstitions with the power and beauty of our scientific achievements and understanding.
Richard Dawkins is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist and popular science author. He was formerly Professor for Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. He was voted Britain’s leading public intellectual by readers of Prospect magazine and was named one of Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” for 2007.
Dawkins came to prominence with his 1976 book “The Selfish Gene”, which popularised the gene-centred view of evolution and introduced the term “meme”. He is a prominent critic of creationism and intelligent design. In his 1986 book “The Blind Watchmaker”, he argued against the watchmaker analogy, an argument for the existence of a supernatural creator based upon the complexity of living organisms. Instead, he described evolutionary processes as analogous to a blind watchmaker. He has since written several popular science books, and makes regular television and radio appearances, predominantly discussing these topics.
Dawkins is an atheist, secular humanist, sceptic, scientific rationalist, and supporter of the Brights movement. In his 2006 book “The God Delusion”, he contends that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that faith qualifies as a delusion − as a fixed false belief.
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Blinded by the Light (of the Jerusalem UFO)
Feb 17
Posted by Troythulu
I found this little bit of fun in my alerts just last night, an article with the highly original title Jerusalem UFO baffles even skeptics as new details emerge though to be frank, the only thing that this skeptic is baffled by is the complete disregard for facts and credible argumentation that Mr. Cohen shows in this piece.
Loaded with, well, loaded language and all the precision and subtlety of a shotgun, this article is really little more than an apologetic temper-tantrum about we ‘evil debunkers’ concerning the both well-publicized and well-deconstructed series of UFO videos of an indistinct blob of light about 10′-15′ long judging by it’s surroundings and apparent proximity to them.
It’s obviously low-grade CGI effects, or perhaps alien technology that’s so advanced it’s supposed to look like low-budget CGI (Hmmm, how’s THAT for an unfalsifiable hypothesis?), Cohen fails to mention that there were no witnesses previous to the posting of these videos on YouTube, and the excellent work HOAXKiller1 has done in dismantling this shoddy charade definitively shows them to be well, a hoax, and nothing more despite Cohen’s circling of the proverbial wagons on this.
I couldn’t help but notice this statement by him in particular:
But wait! This is inconsistent with the following statement later in the post…
Why yes, evidently they do, and the above statement also contradicts both itself and this…
So which is it, Mr. Cohen? Have or haven’t any witnesses talked? They either did or didn’t come forward with their story, and it seems to me that you’re trying to have your cake and eat it, too! It has to be one or the other, it can’t be both.
Also, in a city the size of Jerusalem, during that time of night, you would expect far more than just “at least three witnesses,” And regarding their testimony, if you can’t mind your own credibility, who are you to judge that of others? I’m highly skeptical that such a heavily populated city’s geography would have restricted the number of possible witnesses to so few. Surely more people would have noticed!
Really?? Why not give the names of the ‘orthodox Jew,’ the ‘Israeli forum,’ his ‘four other friends’ or that of the ‘Palestinian woman,’ and how is her testimony even relevant if the ‘glowing orb floating above the Mosque’ was allegedly seen months earlier and thus has no relevant connection to the videos?
Honestly, Mr. Cohen, is good journalistic fact-checking other than just a dismissive ‘google the topic’ really that difficult? All in all, this doesn’t help my confidence in the fringe media even one bit. Not even a little. *sigh*
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Tags: Commentary, Jerusalem UFO, Nonsense, Pseudoscience, Silly, Thoughts, UFO, UFOlogy, UFOs