Spin cycle

Well, The Daily Mail Fail is at it again, this time with a claim that the CIA has declassified a book predicting the end of the world (which is going to happen soon, of course).  Illustrating the fact that there is no conspiracy theory so blatantly idiotic that there won't be people passionately espousing it, the whole thing has the End Times crowd running around making excited little squeaking noises, while the rest of us are wearing expressions like this:

The book is called The Adam and Eve Story, which should put you on notice immediately that we're not talking about hard science, here.  It's by a guy named Chan Thomas, a "former U.S. Air Force employee, UFO researcher, and self-acclaimed psychic," for whom, we're told, "there are no official records of [his] working directly for the CIA."

So we're definitely off to a flying start.

I guess there's no doubt that the guy's book, which was written in 1966, was considered classified until 2013, and only appeared on the CIA's database of declassified documents about a month ago -- and then, only 55 pages out of the two hundred or so in the original manuscript.  Why it was classified in the first place is uncertain, although it may be nothing more than the fact that anyone who worked on any sort of sensitive-to-security projects -- which Thomas apparently did -- automatically has anything they write classified until it can be reviewed and shown not to give away anything that needs to stay secret.

My surmise is the fact that it languished after that because no one at the CIA took it seriously enough to bother reviewing.

Anyhow, Thomas's claim is that there have been cataclysms on the order of every six thousand years, and we're currently overdue.  What happens during these catastrophes illustrates the fact that Thomas shoulda stuck with UFO research, or at least paid better attention during ninth grade Earth Science class, because the first thing that jumps out at me is that he does not understand the difference between the Earth's rotational axis and its magnetic poles.  This leads him to conclude that when the magnetic poles flip -- something that happens around every three hundred thousand years, not six thousand, so he's off by a factor of fifty, but who's counting -- it somehow affects the rotational axis, throwing continents and oceans around like a washing machine on spin cycle.  

The results are hella scary.  Thomas writes:

In a fraction of a day all vestiges of civilization are gone, and the great cities — Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Dallas, New York — are nothing but legends.  Barely a stone is left where millions walked just a few hours before...  Winds with the force of a thousand armies will shred everything in sight with a supersonic bombardment, as a Pacific tsunami drowns Los Angeles and San Francisco as if they were but grains of sand...  Calamity will overtake the entire North American continent within three hours, as an earthquake simultaneously creates massive cracks in the ground that allow magma to rise to the surface.

So I think we all can agree that this would be bad.  By the time it's all over -- in seven days, he says -- everything will be rearranged, with Antarctica at the equator (melting its huge ice caps), and the Bay of Bengal at what is now the North Pole.

By now you may be wondering what historical cataclysms "every six thousand years" he's basing this on.  I know I was.  You ready?

The Flood of Noah, and six thousand years before that, something about Adam and Eve.  (You might have guessed the latter based on the book's title; I have to admit by that point I'd already forgotten it, so this got an all-new eyeroll from me.)

Scholars of the Bible might be objecting by now that the Book of Genesis doesn't describe any kind of worldwide catastrophe centering around Adam and Eve, just some malarkey about a serpent and an apple and whatnot, and their being the ancestors of all humanity despite supposedly being the first people and having only sons.  But Thomas seems sufficiently detached from reality that this is only a minor quibble compared to some of the other stuff he says.

Despite the fact that the claim is (in a word) ridiculous, I've already seen three videos on TikTok that seem to treat the whole thing as deadly serious, with the fact that three-quarters of the original manuscript is still classified being used as evidence that the CIA is "hiding something" and "they're trying to prevent mass panic."

Trust me, the only people out there panicking over this are ones who see messages from God on their grilled cheese sandwiches.  And it hardly bears pointing out that you can't use pages you've never seen as proof of anything, given that by default we don't know what's in them.

Sometimes absence of evidence really is evidence of absence.

In any case, I wouldn't lose any sleep over this.  But I will appeal to the conspiracy theorists: can you please try and give me better material to work with?  Because this one was kind of bottom-of-the-barrel.  Time to step up your game, folks.  It's positively making me pine for the good old days of HAARP and Nibiru and the Annunaki and "Birds Aren't Real."

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Freebird

A friend and long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia tagged me in a post on Facebook a couple of days ago, with a link and the single line "Wake up, Sheeple."

The link was to a site that is called, I shit you not, "Birds Aren't Real."  My first thought was that the name would turn out to be metaphorical or symbolic or something, but no; these people believe in Truth in Advertising.

They are really, literally saying that birds are not real.

He's awfully pretty for being imaginary, don't you think?  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Eleanor Briccetti, Flame-faced Tanager (4851596008), CC BY-SA 2.0]

On their "History" page, which you should read in its entirety because it's just that entertaining, we find passages like the following:

On June 2nd, 1959 operation “Water the Country” was born.  This was to be the secret code name given to the program from 1959 to 1976, when it was renamed to “Operation Very Large Bird” (the individual in charge of naming the program didn’t want to get into any copyright trouble with the popular PBS show Sesame Street by naming the project Operation Big Bird.)  Within the next 6 years, 15% of the bird population was wiped out.  During these first few years, bird prototypes were released by the hundred million.  The term ‘drone’ was not used at this time, and instead they were referred to as Robot Birds.

It also quotes Alvin B. Cleaver, Internal Communications Director for the CIA, as saying, "We’ve killed about 220 million so far, and the best thing is, the Robot Birds we’ve released in their place have done such a good job that nobody even suspects a thing."

Oh, and I didn't mention that the whole thing is underneath a header that says, "The only way to properly explain this is with words."  Making me wonder if we had another choice, such as interpretive dance.

So anyhow, I'm reading this, and my expression is looking more and more like this:

This has to be a spoof, I'm thinking.  No one in their right mind would believe this.  So I started to look, first on the website itself, then somewhere in the media, trying to find a place where someone, anyone basically went, "Ha-ha, we were just kidding."

But no.

Birds Aren't Real is the brainchild of one Seth McIndoe of Memphis, Tennessee, and to all appearances he's entirely serious.  There are now chapters of the "Bird Brigade" in fifty cities around the United States, dedicated to convincing people that by 2001, the government had replaced all real birds with robotic drones.  "We hope to achieve public unity through disbelief in avian beings," McIndoe says.

When told that some of the people in the Bird Brigade are doing it for the laughs and don't really believe it's the truth, McIndoe just shrugs and says, "We're living in a post-truth era."

Whatever the fuck that means.

He's nothing if not thorough, though.  He's suspicious of each and every bird, from the Bald Eagles soaring the Colorado Rockies to the Song Sparrows nibbling sunflower seeds at your bird feeder.  "I see them every day," McIndoe says.  "Every bird I see I am aware it is a surveillance drone from above sending footage, recordings to the Pentagon."

If you're inclined to agree with McIndoe, I should point out that there's a whole line of "Activism Apparel" on the Birds Aren't Real website, featuring t-shirts (several designs), hoodies, bumper stickers, and baseball caps, so you can advertise your allegiance to this fairly dubious cause.  My favorite one has a picture of Sesame Street's Big Bird and is labeled "Big Propaganda."

So McIndoe, apparently, is less concerned with trademark infringement than the CIA is.

What made me facepalm the hardest, though, was that after perusing the website, I dropped onto social media for a few minutes -- and saw three advertisements for Birds Aren't Real merchandise.  That's how long it took.  I clicked on one site, and five minutes later, I've already been pegged as some kind of Avian Truther.

Or Post-Truther.  Or whatever.

To the friend who started all this, allow me to say: thanks just bunches.  Like I need more crazies aiming their targeted advertisements at me.  I already regularly see ads for items like the SasqWatch (a wristwatch that has a band shaped like a -- you guessed it -- big foot), Cryptids of the World Coasters, a MothMan Running Team t-shirt, and an Ogopogo mug, to name just a few.

So honestly, I guess one more won't hurt.  It'll give me something interesting to wear on my next birdwatching trip.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a really cool one: Andrew H. Knoll's Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth.

Knoll starts out with an objection to the fact that most books on prehistoric life focus on the big, flashy, charismatic megafauna popular in children's books -- dinosaurs such as Brachiosaurus, Allosaurus, and Quetzalcoatlus, and impressive mammals like Baluchitherium and Brontops.  As fascinating as those are, Knoll points out that this approach misses a huge part of evolutionary history -- so he set out to chronicle the parts that are often overlooked or relegated to a few quick sentences.  His entire book looks at the Pre-Cambrian Period, which encompasses 7/8 of Earth's history, and ends with the Cambrian Explosion, the event that generated nearly all the animal body plans we currently have, and which is still (very) incompletely understood.

Knoll's book is fun reading, requires no particular scientific background, and will be eye-opening for almost everyone who reads it.  So prepare yourself to dive into a time period that's gone largely ignored since such matters were considered -- the first three billion years.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Turned to stone

Let me say up front, both for my skeptical and not-so-skeptical readers, that I'm not saying I believe the account I'm about to tell you.  I'd need way more hard evidence even to consider the possibility of whether it's true (the ECREE principle in action -- extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence), although it definitely makes a bizarre story, and opens up the question of what possible motive the major players would have to lie.

The incident in question happened in 1993 in Russia.  Here's the abbreviated version of it, but you can read more about it on the original report or at a (quite sensationalized) account at the site UFO International Project.

A troop of soldiers were out on routine training maneuvers when "a quite low-flying spaceship in the shape of a saucer" flew over.  One of the soldiers panicked and shot at it with a hand-held surface-to-air missile, and the spaceship slammed to the ground nearby.  As the soldiers approached the wreck, a gap opened in the side, and five humanoid aliens came out.

So far, not so different from a lot of accounts of close encounters of the third kind.  But here's what happened next:

It is stated in the testimonies of the two soldiers who remained alive that, after freeing themselves from the debris, the aliens came together and "merged into a single object that had a spherical shape."  That object began to buzz and hiss sharply, and then became brilliant white.  In a few seconds, the spheres [sic] grew much bigger and exploded by flaring up with an extremely bright light.  At that instant, 23 soldiers who had watched the phenomenon turned into... stone poles.  Only two soldiers who had stood in the shade and were less exposed to the luminous explosion survived.  

The remains of the "petrified soldiers" were transferred to a government lab near Moscow.  The CIA got wind of the event -- the report doesn't say how -- and called it "extremely menacing... if true."  But if you looked at the original report, you may have noticed that the only media outlet that reported on it when it happened, was...

... the Weekly World News.

Which, by the way, they call "authoritative."

Yup, the Weekly World News, that venerable purveyor of such believable stories as "Kim Kardashian Pregnant With Bigfoot's Love Child."  (Okay, I made that title up, but I've seen ones that bad and worse.)  So immediately I saw that, I went into eyeroll mode.

On the other hand, don't forget what happened to Lot's wife.  (Statue by sculptor Hamo Thornycroft, 1878) [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Hamo Thornycroft (1850-1925), Hamo Thornycroft-Lot's Wife, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Equally eyeroll-worthy was the last comment in the UFO International Project website, which wondered if the Chinese terracotta army was also made of people who were petrified by aliens.  Which, even if you buy the Russian story whole-cloth, is idiotic.  The terracotta army is, unsurprisingly, made of terracotta, which is a low-fired ceramic clay.  The statues were also made from molds (which they've found examples of), in several pieces, and put together afterwards.  They were painted with colored lacquer, remnants of which are still on some of them.

None of which you'd expect if these were the remains of people flash-petrified by aliens.

Leaving me wondering why I'm even wasting my time replying to that bit.  But as a side note to whoever wrote the UIP piece; if you're making a wild claim, it does not help your cause to support it with an even wilder one.  If you say you've rid your house of evil spirits by waving around quartz crystals, your credibility is not enhanced by then claiming you'd also accomplished the same thing with a salami.

But despite all that, it's still a weird story, because the report is actually a CIA document, released as part of the government's declassification (and FOIA).  So if the Russian account is a hoax (probable), and it got reported to the CIA as true by some external source that also leaked the story to the Weekly World News (really probable), why did the CIA even give it this kind of undeserved credibility?

From what I've read, the CIA pretty much has to record every claim reported to them, reasonable or not, but it still strikes me as odd and extremely specific.  Clearly the claim didn't originate with the Weekly World News; the CIA report states that the information (and photographs, not included in the FOIA release) were directly from a KGB inquiry.

So while (as I said) I still think the great likelihood is that it's a hoax or fabrication, it's kind of peculiar one.  If there are any readers who have greater knowledge of government document policy than I have (kind of a low bar, honestly), let me know what you think in the comments.

In any case, the take-home message is, if you see a low-flying spacecraft, don't shoot it down with a surface-to-air missile unless you fancy being turned into a large rock.  Don't say I didn't warn you.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a tour-de-force for anyone who is interested in biology -- Richard Dawkins's The Ancestor's Tale.  Dawkins uses the metaphoric framework of The Canterbury Tales to take a walk back into the past, where various travelers meet up along the way and tell their stories.  He starts with humans -- although takes great pains to emphasize that this is an arbitrary and anthropocentric choice -- and shows how other lineages meet up with ours.  First the great apes, then the monkeys, then gibbons, then lemurs, then various other mammals -- and on and on back until we reach LUCA, the "last universal common ancestor" to all life on Earth.

Dawkins's signature lucid, conversational style makes this anything but a dry read, but you will come away with a far deeper understanding of the interrelationships of our fellow Earthlings, and a greater appreciation for how powerful the evolutionary model actually is.  If I had to recommend one and only one book on the subject of biology for any science-minded person to read, The Ancestor's Tale would be it.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Oarfish, earthquakes, and shadow people

I'm perpetually astonished at how little it takes to get the woo-woos going.

I suppose, though, that's the definition of confirmation bias -- taking thin evidence (or skimpy anecdote) as incontrovertible support for what you already believed.  Me, I try to approach stuff with more caution -- I'm not perfect, but I do my best when confronted with a strange or intriguing story to stop and think, "Wait a moment, how do I know this is true... and means what people are saying it means?"

I ran into two particularly good examples of that yesterday.  In the first, we have people saying that the appearance of three dead oarfish in coastal Japan is indicative that they're in for a major undersea earthquake and tsunami.  Now, there's no doubt that seeing an oarfish would make you sit up and take notice; they live in deep waters and are usually only seen when they're dead or dying, and can get up to eleven meters long.  (Yes, I double-checked that statistic, and it's correct.)

American servicemen displaying a dead oarfish they found off the coast of California in 1996 [Image is in the Public Domain]

So I suppose it's no wonder that people stop and say, "Okay, that's weird," when they see one.  But oarfish are not uncommon, despite seldom being seen; and there are lots of cases of dead oarfish washing up on shore that were not followed by geological catastrophes.   "I have around twenty specimens of this fish in my collection so it’s not a very rare species, but I believe these fish tend to rise to the surface when their physical condition is poor, rising on water currents, which is why they are so often dead when they are found," said Hiroyuki Motomura, professor of ichthyology at Kagoshima University.  "The link to reports of seismic activity goes back many, many years, but there is no scientific evidence of a connection so I don’t think people need to worry."

Which, of course, will have precisely zero effect on the woo-woos.  What the hell does some silly scientist know about, um, science?  There will be an earthquake, you'll see!  (Of course, it helps that the oarfish were found on the coast of Japan, because Japan is -- stick with me, here -- a freakin' earthquake zone.)

The other story comes from a perusal of some twelve million documents that were declassified two years ago by the CIA.  This started all the conspiracy theorists sifting through them, because of course if the CIA wanted to keep an evil conspiracy secret, the first thing they'd do is declassify all the files surrounding it.  But even the wooiest woo-woo takes a while to go through twelve million files, so it was only a couple of weeks ago that we found out that in the files were photographs of...

... "shadow people."

We're told about how spooky and eerie these photographs are, and how they could be aliens or ghosts, or connected to MKUltra or the Illuminati or god alone knows what else.  "The silhouettes are composed of visual noise, almost like television static," we're told, "and have empty voids where their faces should be."  There were two of them, we find out, and each silhouette has a number on it -- 1569 on one, 1572 on the other.

I thought, "Okay, that does sound pretty creepy."  And naturally, I wanted to see the images myself.  So I clicked the link, and here's what I saw:

And I said -- this is a direct quote -- "You have got to be fucking kidding me right now."

This isn't a photograph, it's a drawing.  And not even a very good one.  (In the interest of rigorous research, I looked at the other one, which is identical except for saying "1572" and facing the other direction.)  It is mildly curious that these would be in CIA files, although I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that the CIA people stuck 'em in there when they declassified the files in order to watch the woo-woos leap about and make excited little squeaking noises.

Which is exactly what happened.

The universe is a wonderful, complex, intriguing, mysterious place.  There is plenty to investigate, plenty to be amazed at, without making shit up or stretching pieces of observable evidence to the snapping point.  So let's all calm down a little, okay?  I'm sure Japan will eventually have another major earthquake (cf. my previous comment about earthquake zones), and I'm also sure there'll be weird random things in the CIA files, whether or not my surmise about people sticking them in deliberately to stir the pot turns out to be true.  But grabbing those little pieces of data and running off the cliff with them is not advisable.

Confirmation bias, unfortunately, makes a terrible parachute.

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A particularly disturbing field in biology is parasitology, because parasites are (let's face it) icky.  But it's not just the critters that get into you and try to eat you for dinner that are awful; because some parasites have evolved even more sinister tricks.

There's the jewel wasp, that turns parasitized cockroaches into zombies while their larvae eat the roach from the inside out.  There's the fungus that makes caterpillars go to the highest branch of a tree and then explode, showering their friends and relatives with spores.   Mice whose brains are parasitized by Toxoplasma gondii become completely unafraid, and actually attracted to the scent of cat pee -- making them more likely to be eaten and pass the microbe on to a feline host.

Not dinnertime reading, but fascinating nonetheless, is Matt Simon's investigation of such phenomena in his book Plight of the Living Dead.  It may make you reluctant to leave your house, but trust me, you will not be able to put it down.

Sheeple update

Sometimes I have to check in on the r/conspiracy subreddit just to see what new nutty conspiracy theories are out there.  I try to make sure that I've girded my loins and stiffened my spine beforehand, because the level of complete batshit insanity demonstrated by the regular contributors really has to be seen to be believed.  On my most recent visit, I was not disappointed -- there are not one, nor two, but three truly amazing new conspiracy theories, if by "amazing" you mean "ideas that you would only come up with if you have a single Cheeto where most of us have a brain."

First, we have astronomer Paul Cox inducing multiple orgasms in the Planet X crowd by making a joke while analyzing a video of the recent transit of Mercury across the Sun.  "See that mysterious bright glow on the right side?  What do you suppose that is?" Cox asks, pointing to what is clearly a lens flare.  "Do you think it's the mysterious planet Nibiru?"  He then goes on to say, "We don't cover things up like NASA does."

Well, you don't joke about such matters, not when people like YouTube contributor "EyesOpen37" are listening.  "EyesOpen37" doesn't believe in lens flares.  "EyesOpen37" thinks it's much more likely that a vague, diffuse glow is unequivocal evidence that a huge planet inhabited by our reptilian alien overlords is coming into the inner solar system for a visit, and NASA is desperately trying to make sure that no one finds out about it.

"I wonder if these guys are using this transit of Mercury to warn us about Nibiru?" muses "EyesOpen37," in a tone of voice that indicates that the answer is obviously "yes."  And the people who posted comments on his YouTube submission agree wholeheartedly.  Here's a sampling:

• Thank you so much for uploading this video!!  And I'm so glad a reputable person has finally spoke out!  Paul Cox is a good person and so are you to release this info!! :)
• I hope you have this video backed up so you can keep re-posting if it gets deleted!!  WOW!!
• Want to know how it'll end?  Read Revelation 8:8 on.  Repent and seek your Saviour.  God bless.
• It's controlled.  How many dead astronomers do we have to date?  Maybe a joke is the only way he can put it out there. Bottom line....he was deliberate.

Yes, there are lots of dead astronomers.  Aristarchus, Hypatia, Nicolaus Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, Edmund Halley... the list goes on and on.  There's only one possible answer -- they were all killed to keep them silent about the Planet Nibiru.

Speaking of dead people, our second conspiracy theory is about how Osama bin Laden is still "alive and well and living in the Bahamas."  And of course, there's nothing that lends credence to a wacko idea like saying "Edward Snowden says so."  (The only thing that's better would be saying "Nikola Tesla says so.")  According to the site Humans are Free, Snowden had the following to say about it:

I have documents showing that Bin Laden is still on the CIA’s payroll.  He is still receiving more than $100,000 a month, which are being transferred through some front businesses and organizations, directly to his Nassau bank account. I am not certain where he is now, but in 2013, he was living quietly in his villa with five of his wives and many children. 

Osama Bin Laden was one of the CIA’s most efficient operatives for a long time.  What kind of message would it send their other operatives if they were to let the SEALs kill him?  They organized his fake death with the collaboration of the Pakistani Secret services, and he simply abandoned his cover. 

Since everyone believes he is dead, nobody’s looking for him, so it was pretty easy to disappear.  Without the beard and the military jacket, nobody recognizes him.

Of course, at the bottom of the page, we read the following disclaimer:

Note: The original source of this information has not been validated nor confirmed by any other source.

In other words, even though we're not sure if it's true, you're clearly a KoolAid-Drinkin' Sheeple if you don't believe it.

And since bin Laden is still alive, it must therefore follow that lots of other Big Bad Guys are, too.  For our last dip in the deep end of the pool, we go to the site OrionStar 3000, wherein we learn that Josef  "The Angel of Death" Mengele is not only still alive, he is also the "Zodiac Killer"  who killed seven people in the late 1960s in California.

Now, you might be thinking, "How can Mengele be alive?  He was born in 1911.  He'd be 105 years old by now."  But this just shows that you're not thinking outside the box.  (And by "the box" I mean "anything that makes sense.")  Here's what he looked like in 2001, when he was a mere 90 years old, in a photograph taken at a "Brotherhood of Aryan Nations/KKK/ Bush Fundraiser in Hernando, Florida.":

Which, you have to admit, is pretty good for a 105-year-old.  Here's Mengele during World War II:

So I think we have a definitive match.

As far as how Mengele could still be so spry despite his age, we're told, "Mengele looks much younger than he really is due to years of face-lifts, anti-aging hormone injections & alleged cannibalism!"

And if that wasn't enough, we also find out the following alarming stuff:

• [SS Lieutenant Colonel] Otto Skorzeny faked Hitler's death!  Nazi Germany Really Won WWII!
• Hitler lived to be the oldest man in America until he died at the age of 114 years in 2/2004 in the Bethesda, MD Naval Hospital.
• The son of Tesla's illegal immigrant German Born accountant George H. Scherff Sr., SS Nazi spy George H. Scherff Jr. aka: US Navy Pilot: George H.W. Bush murdered his two TBF Avenger crew members by bailing out of his perfectly good airplane.  Bush became a heroin junkie to try to escape his guilty conscience.

Scarier still, this site doesn't have a disclaimer.  So it must all be true, right?

Of course right.

So that's our fun excursion through CrazyTown for today.  I hope you enjoyed it.  Myself, I'm wondering if I can get a hold of any of that anti-aging stuff.  I'm hoping I don't have to resort to cannibalism.

Flying saucer data dump

The alien conspiracy theorists and cover-up-o-philes must have experienced a serious "WTF?" moment after the release a week ago of official reports of UFOs...

... by the CIA.

Thanks to a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, I was able to peruse the CIA.gov link entitled "Take a Peek into our 'X-Files'," which begins thusly:

The CIA declassified hundreds of documents in 1978 detailing the Agency’s investigations into Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs). The documents date primarily from the late 1940s and 1950s. 

To help navigate the vast amount of data contained in our FOIA UFO collection, we’ve decided to highlight a few documents both skeptics and believers will find interesting. 

Below you will find five documents we think X-Files character Agent Fox Mulder would love to use to try and persuade others of the existence of extraterrestrial activity. We also pulled five documents we think his skeptical partner, Agent Dana Scully, could use to prove there is a scientific explanation for UFO sightings. 

The truth is out there; click on the links to find it.

We are then not just invited, but positively encouraged to peruse the files on such cases as the sighting of flying saucers in East Germany in 1952 and the report from the same year describing UFOs over a uranium mine in the Belgian Congo, not to mention the report of the Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects filed with the CIA in 1953.

Then, if that wasn't wonderful enough for you, we are directed to a page called "How to Investigate a Flying Saucer" wherein we are told all about Project Blue Book.  It's as if the CIA had a sudden attack of conscience and decided to come clean on everything that the UFO world holds dear:

Before December 1947, there was no specific organization tasked with the responsibility for investigating and evaluating UFO sightings. There were no standards on how to evaluate reports coming in, nor were there any measurable data points or results from controlled experiment for comparison against reported sightings. 

To end the confusion, head of the Air Force Technical Service Command, General Nathan Twining, established Project SIGN (initially named Project SAUCER) in 1948 to collect, collate, evaluate, and distribute within the government all information relating to such sightings, on the premise that UFOs might be real (although not necessarily extraterrestrial) and of national security concern. Project SIGN eventually gave way to Project GRUDGE, which finally turned into Project BLUE BOOK in 1952.

We then are led through a systematic way to study such sightings, including methodologies for eliminating "false positives," how to identify (terrestrial) aircraft and other natural phenomena, how to gather data (and what data is critical), and how to file an eyewitness report.

I cannot begin to imagine how a diehard UFO conspiracy theorist would react to reading this.  My guess is that the reaction would largely be a scoffing dismissal of the entire site -- the stance being that of course the CIA is still covering up its knowledge of aliens (Roswell!  Groom Lake!  Dulce Base!  Area 51!).  This release of a few reports is only meant to persuade the weak-minded that the CIA has nothing to hide.  The real stuff on alien autopsies and grotesque alien/human hybridization experiments is still being covered up.

It's especially amusing that the release of these documents has coincided with the reboot of The X Files.  I do not think this is an accident, and it indicates something that I had not known before, namely that there are government intelligence agents who have a sense of humor.  If you've seen either of the two new episodes that have been aired so far, you will know that Chris Carter et al. have basically pulled out all the stops, and threw every conspiracy trope in the world into two fifty-minute shows.  And, no spoilers intended, the CIA and Department of Defense do not come out looking like heroes.

So anyway.  Anything that can induce some cognitive dissonance into the minds of conspiracy theorists is okay by me.  I don't think that the CIA is telling us everything they know -- being that "top secret" designation happens for a reason -- but it's nice to have access to at least some of the original documents.  Now, you'll have to excuse me, because I have some UFO reports to read.

Half-baked lunacy

A couple of days ago, I wrote about the fact that Cliven Bundy and his Gang o' Morons out in Nevada were a gauge of something more than just stupidity -- that it was a symptom of the galloping paranoia that has been fostered by alarmist pundits on the extreme right fringe shrieking about how America As We Know It is threatened.  Bundy, and the abortive "ten million strong protest" that conspicuously failed to materialize in Washington D. C. last week, are the leading edge of a worldview that is based in fear.

I had hoped that the collapse of Operation American Spring Epic Fail was due to the fact that most people are sensible, and realized that the self-styled "Patriots" who were organizing the thing are insane.  That, and the fact that the leaders were overestimating their support by 9,999,900 or so, an error that would be analogous to my telling a student that he had a perfect 100 in my class when in fact he had an overall average of 0.0001 percent.

You can see how that kind of glitch could happen.

But it appears that my Panglossian optimism might have been premature.  Chez Pazienza, over at The Daily Banter, has done a little digging on conspiracy websites, and has found that there's another reason that pretty much no one showed up, and it can be summed up in a famous line from The Return of the Jedi:

Yup, that's right; these people think that they're so important, so absolutely Public Enemy Number One, that they were walking into a trap -- that in Pazienza's words (which I could not possibly improve on) the powers-that be were planning on "unleashing Obama's jackbooted thugs" who were going to sweep down and arrest all ten million of them while they were together in one place.

Then, it got even weirder.  David Chase Taylor, who's so fucking crazy that even Alex Jones thinks he's nuts, stated that he had word that there'd been a security lockdown because a car was trailing a motorcade carrying President Obama's daughters.  Seems reasonable enough, right?  Well, let's see if you can do a little multiple-choice to guess why Taylor said they ramped up security when that happened:

1. Because it is important to protect the president's family, and anything unusual has to be taken seriously.
2. Because any kind of a security threat could have wider implications to the stability of the government.
3. Because during the lockdown, no one would see that the CIA was planting explosives in the White House so that it could be blown up on May 16, so that President Obama could implicate the "Patriots" in the attack.

The answer is (3), of course.  Taylor, who apparently has a single Froot Loop where most of us have a brain, is convinced that True Patriots should protest the fact that it's too dangerous to protest because the government was going to blow itself up to prove how ultra-sneaky and powerful they are, and blame the explosion on people who weren't technically there.

Or something like that.  It's hard to tell, actually.  I read enough of this stuff that I live in fear of the day when eventually some of it starts making sense.  At that point, I should probably just pack it in.  But the upshot of it is, the government is run by brilliant evil Illuminati geniuses who are simultaneously bumbling lunatics who are so stupid that a wingnut like Taylor could see right through them, post about it on the internet, and get away with it.  "Dammit," I can hear President Obama saying.  "Foiled again!  I'd have succeeded this time, if it hadn't been for YouTube!"

It's like a giant layer cake of crazy, sprinkled with nuts.  And only half-baked.

As I mentioned in Monday's post, I'm still uncertain about what the government should do in response to all of this.  On the one hand, we have armed wackos threatening violent revolution, who will admit up front that they're not afraid to shed innocent blood to accomplish their goals.  But on the other hand, to round them up just because they are blustering on YouTube and the r/conspiracy subreddit would probably be challenged on the grounds of free speech.  In the US, it's not a crime to be crazy, fortunately for David Chase Taylor and Alex Jones.  Jones himself has predicted more than once that he'd be arrested or secretly done away with, and yet there he is, still yammering on, week after week -- a better counterargument for his screeching paranoia than any I could come up with.

Anyhow, it'll be interesting to see how all of this unfolds.  My guess is that the "Patriots" who have made actual threats, including the moron who allowed himself to be photographed aiming a gun through two barriers on a highway, will very likely find law enforcement knocking on their doors sooner or later.  As for the rest, they'll probably still keep bleating about Obama and his thugs trying to take away their guns, despite that Obama has been in office for six years now and has yet to try to repeal the Second Amendment.

All I can say is, Mr. President, if you're planning on some kind of Nazi-style socialist power grab, you'd better get a move-on.  Time's a-wastin'.

(Hat tip to Chez Pazienza for today's story -- here's the link again to his piece, which you should all read, because it's awesome.)