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)

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

Blinded by the Light (of the Jerusalem UFO)

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:

It has now been over two weeks since I broke the story and spoke (to) key witnesses regarding the Jerusalem UFO that hovered over the Dome of The Rock/Temple Mount before shooting up and away.

But wait! This is inconsistent with the following statement later in the post…

Meanwhile none of the witnesses are talking at all, to anyone(emphasis mine). This seems more indicative of a cover-up than a hoax. The fourth video was filmed by a group of Israeli teens Yuli Cohen, Michael Naumkoff and Dor Tibi. Even the vaguest mention of the UFO event is eerily absent from all their facebook pages. Why? Do teen hoaxers really behave this way?

Why yes, evidently they do, and the above statement also contradicts both itself and this…

Debunkers are also clinging to the untruth that there have been no additional witnesses beyond the videotographers (sic). At least three other witnesses have come forward and their testimonies appear pretty credible.(emphasis again mine)

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!

An orthodox Jew has posted on an Israeli forum that he and four other friends saw the red lights in the sky but not the desending (sic) UFO: That sounds about right for the vast majority of possible locations in Jerusalem where the Dome or the glowing UFO would certainly not have been visible. Interestingly, a Palestinian woman paying respects at the Al-Aqsa Mosque (at the Dome of the Rock) has claimed she saw a glowing orb floating above the Mosque months before the event and even asked the Mosque’s Grand Imam about it.

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*

Astronaut UFO Sightings & Photos

Astronauts — Wouldn’t they logically be among the best UFO eyewitnesses, especially because conditions outside the atmosphere would be much more likely to render UFO sightings much more convincing than those seen on ground or in the air? After all, certain common ways of misidentifying mundane aerial phenomena just wouldn’t be there, such as misinterpretations of ordinary things like aircraft, birds, clouds, and balloons.

Claimed sightings and pictures of UFOs liberally pepper the literature, but nowhere else in the same is there anywhere near such an enormous amount of blatant fraud and deception by those UFO proponents personally engaged in distortions of the real reports of astronauts and doctoring, even totally fabricating the photographs offered as alleged supporting evidence for their claims.

A thorough scrutiny of astronaut UFO sightings gives a very strong indication, if not certainty, that every alleged UFO report attributed to astronauts is simply and unequivocally false.

First off, those reports claimed to be genuinely made personally by the astronauts are shown to have been distorted by the UFO media when examined closer, despite the fact that conventional explanations would be obvious. Even if an object in space isn’t a star or planet, this doesn’t strengthen the case for it being a UFO or anything else extraordinary.

Secondly, UFO proponents will often selectively ignore or omit an astronaut’s own description of what they actually did see, persuading some of those who read these reports to believe that any particular sighting was much more mysterious than it actually was.

Mystery-mongering is endemic to the pseudosciences, and UFOlogy is certainly no exception.

In manufacturing these sightings, UFO proponents show themselves greatly untrustworthy by engaging in this often deliberate deception of their readers, making up absurdly sensationalistic claims which they then substitute for the genuine but conventional reports and actual images taken. But it’s usually those UFO magazines with low circulation and those in the UFO community who lazily and poorly if at all research their facts who are prone to doing this. Mostly.

Considering the clearly evident star-power of astronauts, like any appeal to celebrity, and assisted by the often knowing and purposeful deception by some UFO enthusiasts, this situation casts a great deal of doubt on the claim that UFOs are anything more than just a terrestrial psycho-cultural phenomenon and not truly something exotic, like aliens or psychic projections, however seemingly boring and mundane this fact might be.

Referrences –

Pseudoscience and the Paranormal, by Terence Hines, pp. 188-190, published by Prometheus Books, 1988.

Contrasts: SETI & UFOlogy

UFO believers who wish to claim an air of scientific legitimacy, or on the other hand perhaps as a sort of tu-quoque argument, will often compare UFOlogy with the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program. It seems to me that they are vastly different, and hardly comparable. Any attempt to compare them is a false analogy.

First, the questions they ask are logically distinct, for where SETI basically asks “Is there intelligent life elsewhere in the universe?,” and answers this with “Perhaps,” UFO ‘experts’ ask “Are we being visited by intelligent life from elsewhere in the universe?,” and answer this with an unequivocal “Yes!” The tentative thinking of the one, and the certitude of thought of the other alone is enough to set them apart.

SETI doesn’t presume the existence of aliens, it merely concedes that they are possible, and probable, unlike UFOlogists who presuppose the existence, and in a further logical leap, the visitation of Earth, of and by intelligent beings from other worlds as a given by definition.

SETI, unlike most UFO organizations, employs a rigorous approach to evidence, and upon the reception of any seemingly anomalous signals from space, first attempt to eliminate and isolate as many conventional sources of random noise and signal aberrations as are then conceivable, before accounting for all and even then, do not rush to declare to the media the announcement of alien contact, employing multiple independent confirmations and cross-checking before making a statement.

After all, if alien intelligence were a certainty, why look? A good example of the process is described in Carl Sagan’s novel Contact, which describes it in more detail than I can go into here.

This is in stark contrast with many UFOlogists, who not only express a certainty of the existence of ETIs, but declare that they are already here, and that impending evidence to reveal the Truth™ of the alien presence by the governments of the world is ‘just around the corner.’ They’ve been saying that for decades now, conspiratorial claims and all.

This, in spite of what we have good reason to think we know at present of the size and age of the universe, the evolution of life on Earth, and the limits on interstellar, much less intergalactic, travel imposed by distance and currently understood physical laws, even near-light velocity travel.

SETI is science, using probabilistic thinking, scientific methodology, and logic, employing an extremely high bar for evidence, for the stakes of the discovery of alien intelligence would be high, and would have a monumental impact on human society. If they are to confirm such contact, they must make sure that no mistakes are made, because the world is watching.

UFO mythology, on the other hand, is pseudoscience, declaring as a proven fact alien visitation and employing at times near-nonexistent standards of evidence, conspiracy theories, logical fallacies, and otherwise unscientific reasoning. It is also a pronounced failure of the human imagination. And this is supplemented by a naive, sometimes callous, disregard for the human fallibilities of even the most dependable eyewitnesses and the anecdotal testimony they relate, not realizing that a mountain of crappy evidence is still crap.

Mind you, I’m not anti-alien, and as a science-fiction fan I would be delighted if we made such contact. But if it comes down to either declaring alien visitation every time there’s an odd light in the sky, or using science and reason to confirm genuine extraterrestrial contact beyond a reasonable doubt, I’ll opt for the latter, thank you very much.

Modern Mythic Parallels: Fey vs. Grey

My troythuluness just loves folklore, especially the traditional kind involving various sorts of supernatural beings, as well as modern tales of the paranormal. I’ve noticed some interesting parallels between the lore of the Wee Folk and those of modern science-fiction and popular UFO mythology.

No, don’t worry, I’m not gonna go all Sir A.C. Doyle on you and profess to a belief in the literal existence of faeries, as I have certain standards to maintain. Despite the content and tone of my last April Fool’s post, this is still a skeptical blog, so chill.

I’ve noticed a lot of similarity between the various tales told concerning the Fair Folk, and those accounts people have given of UFO abductions and sightings, these things the same in structure and generalities, and differing only in the cultural context, the trappings that they use.

It appears that only the window-dressing differs. Yes, those ‘classic’ and ever-popular Failures of the Human Imagination™, the alien Greys that all too commonly and banally populate the UFO literature are simply the Good Neighbors repackaged and given a new lease on life in today’s world, as are many of the earlier aliens of science-fiction.

What is the essential distinction, for example, between people being taken to the Land of Faerie while alone, and the typical Barney-and-Betty-Hill style abduction scenario, also of physically isolated people, other than the cosmetic details? I would hasten to say none at all. Both, for example, involve the subjects being somehow incapacitated (by faerie magic or alien technology…), taken away to a strange place while in this state, often interacting in some fashion with their captors (whether as interviewees, guests, or test subjects…)and both involve the story element of “missing time.”

There’s also a lot of similarity between the relatively diminutive size of (not always, but over the last couple of decades, most commonly in the popular consciousness…)the aliens and that of some of the more ‘elfin’ Fay, such as the Bogans and the ever popular (and not evil, but dangerously indifferent to the human condition…)Dark Grey Man, the Bodach Glas of the British Isles, or the more malignant Duergar, or Grey Dwarves.

Many of these beings are depicted in both tradition and modern fantasy fiction as being psychologically alien to humans, displaying at times behavior that seems bizarre by most mundane standards, as do the seemingly dispassionate Greys when they are claimed to eviscerate random livestock, press intricate designs in grain fields in oddly futile attempts to ‘communicate’ with us, or subject humans to embarrasing medical experiments, none of these for any apparent logical reason.

I could go on with further points of similarity, but I think you get the idea. It seems apparent to me that this is just one piece in a larger picture showing that the UFO phenomenon is much more likely to be a psycho-cultural one than it would be truly extraterrestrial in nature. It seems to be a phenomenon that has been with us for a very long time in one form or another, and the devil is in the details. Very cool, and very interesting indeed.

The Skeptic’s Guide: Fake Alien Video