Iranian Flying Saucers & Force Fields…So Soon?

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A couple of hat tips go to Doubtful Newsblog and Wired.com for this -

Apparently, after just a few satellite launches, the Islamic Republic has outpaced NASA, JAXA, the ESA, and the RKA in bleeding-edge spaceflight technology! Frankly, this just sounds foolish -

Late last month, Iran put on display what it insisted was a captured American stealth drone. At the time, Tehran claimed it brought down the RQ-170 with a sophisticated electronic attack. Nonsense, says one Iranian engineer who claims to have inside knowledge of the drone-nab. The Islamic Republic used force fields and flying saucers to subdue and capture the unmanned aircraft.

Meet Mehran Tavakoli Keshe, who purports to be the father of the RQ-170 abduction. In a recent post to his eponymous foundation’s online forums, Keshe claims the Iranians used “advanced space technology” that he pioneered. “The craft has been air-picked-up and been put down on its belly through the use of field forces,” Keshe writes — by which he means force fields. It’s feeling a lot like Tinfoil Tuesday, our weekly round-up of the planet’s most insane conspiracy theories.

Insane indeed. I’m going out on a limb here and calling shenanigans on this. Keshe may be making these claims to show his patriotism — I don’t know — but if so doing, he’s discrediting his country with such ridiculous statements. Tinfoil Tuesday for sure.

I wish I could have put this better, but someone has already beaten me to it -

“We have no comment on this individual’s claims,” George Little, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, tells Danger Room, “but tell him the Secretary would like his lightsaber back.”

Mr. Little, you are spot-on…. This is absurd. Nice job on embarrassing your country, Mr. Keshe.

Only 70 years? Surely you’re joking, Professor Hawking!

This coming Sunday will be the 70th birthday of famed cosmologist Stephen Hawking (NOT Hawkins!), a fellow who’s dealt with crippling ALS for decades, someone I consider a mental Zentradi who has done so much for science and science communication, with numerous interviews, his “Universe” series, and some very readable books as well.

I’m kinda partial to “The Grand Design.”

So, happy upcoming birthday, and may you have many more, Professor Hawking…I’d like to hope that my mind remains even close as sharp if and when I reach your age. And yep, women are pretty mysterious to me, too.

Image via Wikipedia

Related articles

• Stephen Hawking: ‘Women are a complete mystery’ (mirror.co.uk)
• Stephen Hawking: ‘Women are a complete mystery’ (telegraph.co.uk)
• Stephen Hawking to turn 70, defying crippling disease (ctv.ca)
• Women are a universal mystery, claims Stephen Hawking (dailymail.co.uk)
• Stephen Hawking to turn 70, defying disease (newsok.com)
• Stephen Hawking to turn 70, defying disease (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Hawking to turn 70 — 50 years after being diagnosed with Lou Gherig’s… (heraldonline.com)
• Stephen Hawking to turn 70, defying disease (thehindu.com)
• A Brief History of Stephen Hawking (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Women a mystery: Hawking (smh.com.au)

2011 Year’s End Roundup: the Good, the Bad, and the Skeptical

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This has been an absolutely vibrant year, with the Arab Spring begun in December of 2010 coming to a boil across the Middle East, and continuing even as I type this.

There was, and is, the terrible trifecta of disasters of earthquake, tsunami and the resulting worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, in Fukushima prefecture, Japan.

But let’s look at some of the highlights in science and skepticism of this year, considering this blog’s theme:

Pastor Harold Camping made the headlines and much headway with the credulous when he predicted, as he had previously done in the 1990s, that Teh Rapture™ would happen on April 21, and when this failed to materialize backpedaled by saying it had happened, but was a subtle event, and reset his prediction for this last October 21st.

This too, unsurprisingly, failed to come to pass, as has every other End Times™ prediction made to date, like clockwork.

There was a rash of mysterious bird deaths, with reportedly thousands of birds at a time falling from the sky, which in many cases turned out to be caused by fireworks which frightened the birds, causing them to crash into things at full flight speed.

New exoplanets were discovered, bring the number past 700, and only a few weeks ago the discovery of more roughly Earth-sized planets, including one in the habitable zone of it’s home star, Kepler 22-b, sighted by and named after the Kepler space telescope, a new world with roughly twice the diameter of Earth — I said Earth-like, not Earth identical!

More supermassive black holes were discovered including an uncharacteristic and most properly pumped-up one in a dwarf galaxy, Henize 2-10, an irregular galaxy 3000 light years across.

Astrologers got a bug up their butts when Professor Brian Cox and Dara O’Briain publicly and quite rightly made unfavorable comments on the validity of astrology, calling it “rubbish” and “nonsense,” which given my obvious skeptical bias, I’m inclined to agree with.

Ken Ring was making headlines with his overly-publicized and discredited claims of earthquake prediction, credulously promoted by the media.

Doomsayers were making the rounds with predictions of disaster allegedly following the dreaded Supermoon, a silly idea more hype than fact…

…predictions which flopped when the event came and went, of course.

After decades of use, NASA’s space shuttle program was finally retired, unfortunately with, at the time, no real replacement to succeed it.

In June, two new elements, neither found in nature, 114 and 116, were added to the periodic table – Mendeleev would be proud. It will be interesting if industrial uses for these can be found once more stable isotopes are produced.

In my home state of Virginia, the first notable earthquake in a long time happened in August, at about 5.8 on the Richter scale, and I can honestly say, “I felt that.”

In September, headcase Pastor Mike Stahl suggested a registry for atheists, comparing them to sex-offenders and terrorists in a classic and typical show of religiously-motivated bigotry, which just induced a Picard facepalm with me.

In October, former Apple CEO Steve Jobs passed, may he be forever at peace, with a controversy in the skeptical community over his use of alternative medicine in treating his cancer, and the whether to discuss it as a lesson in the dangers of Alt Med so soon after the announcement of his death.

In November, a research team funded by the Koch brothers confirmed the reality of global warming, surprising because it was a confirmatory study conducted by global warming skeptics, not proponents, but skeptics who permitted themselves to be convinced by the data.

Of course, other AGW skeptics backpedaled on earlier statements that they would accept the results, now claiming them fatally flawed, and calling the head researcher a closet warmist instead.

Typical.

Earlier this month, the Curiosity rover, the Mars Science Laboratory vehicle, blasted off flawlessly to the Red Planet, while the Russian Phobos-Grunt probe bound for one of Mars’ moons got stuck in orbit, likely falling back to Earth next year.

This month also saw an event I dreaded but knew was going to happen, the death of “the Hitch,” Christopher Hitchens at age 62, in my view the greatest rhetorician of his time, from pneumonia after struggling with esophageal cancer since the Spring of 2010.

Mr. Hitchens was an inspiration for me, like Carl Sagan, and like the host of Cosmos, he will be sorely missed.

Here’s a bit of wishful thinking that the coming year is just as much in the way of “interesting times” as this one, though without the tragedies, but wishful thinking is just that, and I’m not really betting on it.

Yet Another Ancient Astronaut Claim in the News

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Well, isn’t this nice… A report on Reuters alleges that “Mayan Documentary Will Show Evidence of Alien Contact”, and truth be told, I’d be much more inclined to take this seriously if they planned to show something like, oh, I don’t know… genuine artifacts of indisputably alien technology or even ET mummies, or something.

Due to the immense technological requirements of interstellar travel, such artifacts, if actually found, would have to be unlike anything on Earth, even from our most bleeding-edge research, and the biology of any alien bodies would also be unmistakably extraterrestrial, impossible to confuse with our own sort of life except by the most rank incompetent…

I would have hoped for something that we haven’t seen before…Sadly, it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen, according to the report.

No, instead they’re going to be showing the same crappy evidence as in works of fiction like “Morning of the Magicians,” and “Chariots of the Gods?,” misconstruing it with the same tired old arguments from ignorance, though it appears that they’re spicing it up by latching onto the whole 2012 Mayan calendar nonsense.

James Randi was so on point with his idea of unsinkable rubber duckies, since even long-debunked claims never go away for long, they just rise from the ashes given new life.

Color me disappointed on this one…There just doesn’t seem anything interesting to anticipate.

Yet another example of the media giving too much coverage and false balance to pseudoscience.

Apocalypse Again – Let’s keep this puppy rollin’…

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Peeps who are horny for the apocalypse disturb me.

I mean, after last week’s failed rapture prediction, its originator, preacher Harold Camping, is backtracking by saying after the fact that his biblical numerology, (which he was so certain about being perfect before both his 1994 prediction and the one just this month), was wrong and that he now says it’s October 21st instead.

People have done this sort of thing for centuries, and the story never changes: Clergyman uses something resembling math to calculate something from a book of the Bible, predicts the End of Everything™ and like clockwork, the End passes by without even a single hallelujah by the ascending Elect, awaiting the next guy to make the next prediction, etc…

Mister Camping…Why is it that you, like everyone else who uses contrived pseudo-mathematics to make these sorts of predictions, have such authoritative confidence in your claims until after the fact?

Why don’t you, you know, check the math before you make your claims?

All it does is fill people susceptible to these claims with false hope and needless fear, and often results in serious harm being done to themselves and others in senseless acts of violence.

Why bother? Is the money you get in donations worth it? This merchandising of fear and confusion?

I ask this because it’s massively irresponsible… immoral even… to spread claims like this…

I find this appalling, for what sort of truly moral person wants people who don’t share his beliefs to suffer in eternal torment or destruction?

Why convince people to want this?

Why only be good in anticipation of reward in paradise as opposed to those of us without religion, who see value in being good for its own sake, not just fear of punishment nor hope of reward for what we neither desire nor believe even exists?

I predict that the next End Times prediction will fail, and when it does, it puts yet another nail in the coffin of religion’s credibility and relevance in a world that can do well enough without it.

Just sayin’…

Related articles

• Rapture Predictor Harold Camping: Apocalypse Rescheduled for October 21 [Oops] (gawker.com)
• That Nutjob: Rapture Happened ‘Spiritually’, Apocalypse Still Slated For October 21st (geekologie.com)
• Harold Camping: Apocalypse Rescheduled For October 21 (gizmodo.com.au)
• Apocalypse now (ladyashlie.wordpress.com)
• Preacher Harold Camping apologizes for lack of apocalypse, reschedules Rapture for Kim Kardashian’s birthday (popwatch.ew.com)
• Harold Camping Moves Goalpost: October 21 is the New Rapture (towleroad.com)
• Watch: Harold Camping Emerges From His Home The Day After His Failed Rapture Prediction (towleroad.com)
• Apocalypse still imminent: Rapture now coming in October (guardian.co.uk)
• Harold Camping: May 21 Judgment Day Did Happen (newsfeed.time.com)

Communist – Nazi Mutant Pseudoaliens? Hardly.

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Recently, news journalist Annie Jacobsen has written a book provocatively titled Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base, and here are a few reviews of the book (Here), (Here) , and a much more questionable but entertaining source (Here), quoted below…

I raised a skeptical arched eyebrow or two about about it and while I find this amusing, even considering much journalism today, it’s going to confuse a lot of already gullible people.

I thought that I’d offer a little commentary of my own about it, unread debunker that I am…

The article on that last link above (emphasis on quotes on that site attributed to the author…) says:

In her new book, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base, Jacobsen, a contributing editor at the Los Angeles Times Magazine, writes without any mystery about the numerous thermonuclear tests that went on, the secret CIA stealth projects and — shockingly — the often-scrutinized alien hoax. She collected the bulk of her new information by interviewing individuals who used to work at Area 51, a group of people described by the author as a “formerly secret group of scientists, engineers and physicists… with different levels of need-to-know on different projects.”

I think that this, rather than being without any mystery, is really with quite a bit of it…More on that below…Also, the claim that the government has never acknowledged area 51′s existence is hardly true, as it doesn’t really deny it, it just doesn’t discuss it either.

Area 51 is one of the most well-known secret bases in the world…

Considering the well-kept secret of former President Clinton’s affairs in the oval office and the equally well-kept attempts at secrecy by the last Bush administration to cover up it’s own scandals, we all know how bad governmental entities are at keeping secrets…Yes, sometimes they do succeed, but this is just way over the top.

I’m suspicious of the veracity of this. Just a wee bit…

“The plan, according to my source, was to create panic in the United States with this belief that a UFO had landed with aliens inside of it. And one of the most interesting documents is the second CIA director, Walter Bedell Smith, memos back and forth to the National Security Council talking about how the fear is that the Soviets could make a hoax against America involving a UFO and overload our early air-defense warning system, making America vulnerable to an attack.”

“The child-sized aviators in this craft were the result of a Soviet human experimentation program,” Jacobsen said, making a point that this was information from an eye-witness source and one she trusts completely, “and they had been made to look like aliens à la Orson Welles‘ War of the Worlds” using “genetic and surgical” procedures.

Annie Jacobsen is keeping her eye-witness source anonymous, saying he has “nothing to gain and everything to lose” for talking about this. She describes him as the last of five engineers who worked on this “horrific rogue program,” says that he knows that it was wrong, but also calls him a hero who has done much for American aviation.

I’ve heard that last over and again for a while now. If the alleged source has “nothing to gain and everything to lose,” why submit to an interview to someone you don’t know who may possibly be a government plant to, oh, I don’t know, entrap you by pumping you for information which you shouldn’t be talking about? Why talk about it at all? To anyone?

Of course, questions still abound. Were the 13-year-old pilots trained or was the craft on some kind of autopilot? Where did it launch from? Why did flying disks not take off as a more common form factor for aircraft, and how come this hover-and-fly tech hasn’t been replicated yet? There’s VTOL used by Harriers and the upcoming Joint Strike Fighter, but this sounds fancier than that. (Then again, the saucer did crash, which may take a lot less effort.) The direction the U.S. body modification tests took isn’t clear from Jacobsen’s interview, either.

Really? Considering that the alleged source, the most interesting one in the book, is not named, and is claimed to have been on a covert project straight out of a James Bond movie, how does she even know of this project enough to identify, locate and interview her source if it is a secret?

After all…His identity like the project itself, is a secret!

Considering this, the book, and this alleged and unreferenced source from teh sooper sekrit projekt (sic), actually shows a great imagination at work. This, and the author being a respected journalist rather than a known conspiracy theorist.

Why try to explain what really happened at Roswell and Area 51, already well-explained as the crash of a Project Mogul balloon intended to use sonar to detect Soviet nuclear tests, by proposing explanations of details of the event that never really happened to need explaining?

This book raises far more questions to me than it answers a few of which are addressed (Here) by Jon Stewart, and I for one I highly recommend this book as a gripping work of conspiracy-themed science-fiction.

Related articles

• Those weren’t aliens! They were communist-Nazi mutants! (scienceblogs.com)
• Books of The Times: A Military Post’s Secrets: Espionage, Not Aliens (nytimes.com)

Goodbye, Sarah Jane…

Just this evening, Elizabeth Sladen (1948-2011), the actress who played long-time companion of the Doctor known as Sarah Jane Smith, has passed on after a battle with cancer at the age of 63.

There is a good article on her on the Doctor Who wiki.

I don’t know what to say…except to ask, ‘Who will K-9 have now to tell him, “Good Dog?”‘

Goodbye, Sarah Jane, you were my favorite Companion, and the Doctor Who universe will be a much colder place without you.

Related Articles

• Elisabeth Sladen, Doctor Who’s Sarah Jane Smith, Has Passed Away (wired.com)
• “Elisabeth Sladen, Sarah Jane Smith of Doctor Who has passed away” and related posts (scifistorm.org)
• Elisabeth Sladen, Doctor Who’s Sarah Jane Smith, Dies at 63 (omg.yahoo.com)
• Elizabeth Sladen (gregoryhamel.net)
• Elisabeth Sladen: Dr Who actress dies aged 63 (mirror.co.uk)
• Dr Who star Elisabeth Sladen dies (bbc.co.uk)

Now Go Away, or We Shall Taunt You a Second Time!

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Okay, this makes Troythulu feel a cold, eldritch snark coming, and cosmic amusement at this latest example of the searing, blazing surge of neocortex-numbing idiocy that sometimes calls itself humanity, with mindlessness on a scale dwarfing even that of Mighty Azathoth itself. Ia!

This is a matter of which Troythulu does not wish to lend any sense of credibility to the culprits.

Nope, this is going to be one long, ridiculing, ad hominem ramble…

It seems a tiny village in southwestern France is being beset by unwelcome visitors, in the form of UFO believers descending upon this quaint little place in droves, more than it can reasonably support, and who believe not only the completely imaginary claptrap about 2012 being the end of the world, an idea even the Maya laugh at as the claims of stupid Westerners imposing their apocalyptic religious myths onto their Long Count calendar, but also that the local mountain is a UFO parking garage, the occupying craft in which will leave our doomed (DOOMED, I SAY!!!) planet and take some fortunate believers with it when it leaves.

I told you this was stupid, though not burning enough to require the showing of “That Image…”

Sometimes I’m amazed at the extremes people go to in acting on their beliefs, even to the point of forcing the locals to call in the military to keep them out.

Why the need?

It’s so they can’t overcrowd and ruin this rather scenic place during their wait, until and when both fictional UFO and apocalypse fail to appear as they no doubt shall.

Superstition is endemic to the human species, no matter what you call it.

It’s no surprise that end of the world scenarios have that annoying (to believers) tendency to fail, save perhaps the real end of the world about, oh, I don’t know, five f*cking BILLION years from now, when the sun gets ready to die and we’ll all be long gone, or evolved into something else.

About the Maya calendar predictions…Did anyone ever inform these peeps that calendars aren’t used for prophecy, and the Long Count calendar is cyclical, not linear…

All that reaching the end of the current cycle means is a reset of the calendar date to zero. But you’ll never hear that from mystery-mongers, since that might cut into their bestseller hardback royalties…

Oh why do I bother?..

But for the residents to be forced to request that the French army step in to keep out unwelcome guests so they won’t destroying the locals’ quality of life?

I feel for them, and know their pain as property values plummet, and the area’s scenic beauty is ruined by minor acts of spiritually-motivated vandalism, so I say, “Go for it people. Do what you need to keep the whack-jobs out of your living space.”

*Sigh*

To think it all started when one local guy, now deceased, posted a claim about seeing a UFO in the area, among other silly assertions…

…and it only takes one to spoil it for all…

It’s at least a good thing the locals are, well, skeptical of the whole thing, since it’s their home that’s being invaded, (but not by ET) and its ambience ruined by the decidedly unwelcome guests.

Well, I don’t know about you, but I plan on being around long after 2012, and smirking evilly at the disappointed folks who will be forced to reschedule their timetable for Armageddon yet again, and maybe this next wait, to stay out of places they aren’t wanted.

Related Articles

• French Village Wants Army to Keep Apocalyptic UFO Weirdos Away [Visitors] (gawker.com)
• Don’t come to my village for the end of the world, says mayor (theprovince.com)
• Mayor of French village threatens to call in army to deal with influx of UFO hunters who believe nearby mountain is ‘alien garage’ (dailymail.co.uk)
• Apocalypse, Eventually (randi.org)
• UFO tourism irks French villagers (msnbc.msn.com)

Quantum Coolness (w/out Woo Woo)

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Quantum mechanics…long the subject matter of both legitimate science and quasi-mystical crank theory, has recently seen a new and interesting development–two of its principle features, the Uncertainty Principle and nonlocal “spooky-action-at-a-distance” through Entanglement have now been linked (Click Me Here) as integral and essential to each other.

Quantum physics is solid science, well-accepted by mainstream researchers and is strongly upheld by literally millions of experiments to date.

It’s the theory behind all electronic technology.

In a new article published in the journal Science (Click Me Here, Too), uncertainty limits the quantum weirdness of nonlocality, and explains why quantum entanglement is no weirder than it is.

Sorry, Psychics-R-Us need not apply. No X-Men to be found here.

Seriously though, all mean-spirited, poopy-head ridicule aside, this is a neat development, and if it pans out with further research, could very well get us one step closer to the formulation of a theory of quantum gravity. This is a major step in our conception of quantum theory, which adds tremendously to our knowledge and the implications of its use.

Related Articles

• Quantum uncertainty controls ‘action at a distance’ (newscientist.com)
• Universe’s Quantum Weirdness Limits Its Weirdness (wired.com)
• Researchers uncover surprise link between weird quantum phenomena (eurekalert.org)
• Surprise link between weird quantum phenomena: Heisenberg uncertainty principle sets limits on Einstein’s ‘spooky action at a distance’ (sciencedaily.com)
• CQT Researcher uncovers surprise link between weird quantum phenomena (yubanet.com)
• Uncertainty Principle sets limits on Einstein’s ‘spooky action at a distance’ (3quarksdaily.com)
• Uncertainty Sets Limits On Quantum Nonlocality (science.slashdot.org)
• Quantum entanglement, meet Heisenberg (arstechnica.com)
• Imabug: Like Fate Of Cat, Quantum Debate Is Still Unresolved – Science News (sciencenews.org)
• Mark Andrew Catton: Quantum world more ordered than thought | COSMOS magazine (markandrewcatton.posterous.com)

When a Satellite Moans…Braiiins!!

Zombies stalk the night…mindlessly shambling about in their unspeakable quest for the brains of the living. But what about a real zombie, as opposed to the Living Dead, one that wanders the night sky, drifting aimlessly in its orbit above the Earth?

That would be a recently incapacitated satellite known as Galaxy 15, whose computer was, to put it one way, fried, when a comparatively mild solar storm of an otherwise particularly nasty sort known as a coronal mass ejection, or CME, hurled a wave of radiation and particles our way.

This had the effect of f**king up the satellite’s control-system while leaving its payload intact, still emitting signals that were earlier feared to be a threat to any orbital transmissions from equipment it drifted too close to.

A CME is a relatively uncommon event, but potentially hazardous, as they are generally much worse than a mere pissant solar flare, emitting copious amounts of X-rays and protons, the equivalent of a hurricane in contrast to an ordinary flare’s tornado. Any astronauts in orbit between us on the ground and the storm would probably be killed as they absorb many, many times the maximum safe limit for radiation exposure.

We got lucky this time though, for at its worst, such an interplanetary storm could result in severe damage to any technically-advanced country’s infrastructure and economy, particularly by destroying orbital facilities, and in a worst-case scenario, the nation’s power-grids, as the electromagnetic pulse produced when the wavefront slams into our atmosphere releases floods of ions that overload even power-lines and stations on the ground.

Just think of the results it would have if it happened to the continental U.S. during peak energy-use months, like July or January…

But I digress… It turns out that the menace of this eeeeevil little zombie-satellite isn’t as bad as formerly supposed, since its owners, Intelsat, have been successful in efforts to keep the danger of any flybys, with other objects to a minimum, first a safe encounter with satellite Galaxy 13 and coming next week, Galaxy 14.

According to company reps, any danger to other orbital objects is minimal because of the unlikelihood of a direct collision, and other satellites have been directed to avoid the now aimless craft’s communications signals.

Also according to the company, it looks as if at the very best, they could reset the computer and de-zombify Galaxy 15, or at worst, have to write it off as a lost cause, perhaps just letting it lose power completely when its batteries are finally exhausted and perhaps fall out of orbit and burn up upon reentry.

Doctor Who? Exactly…

Here’s an interview with Doctor Who’s Steve Moffat, on the new series starring the 11th Doctor, Matt Smith, and the vision charted for the show. This new Doctor may be every bit as dark as Chris Eccleston’s Ninth Doctor, and it looks like the idea of a ‘dark faerie tale’ will make the show very interesting indeed. I look forward to seeing the new episodes when I can get hold of them in the States. Who would have though the series would grow the way it has since it’s resurrection in 2005…

Doctor Who’s Steven Moffat: the io9 Interview

Prelude–The Norway Spiral