UFOs in Dixieland

Is it just me, or have the UFO sightings suddenly spiked?

Okay, it might well be the websites I frequent looking for material for Skeptophilia.  It's not like I'm seeing this stuff on the Mainstream Media.  On the other hand, according to Dear Leader what's in the Mainstream Media is all lies, evasions, and coverups.

So there you are.  Q. E. D.

All of these accounts come from MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network, which catalogues (and attempts to explain/account for) sightings.  The first one I ran into yesterday is from Tennessee:

Both of us decided to take a break and go outside...when we saw really bright lights suddenly dim and start pulsating, and coming at us, from the southeast side of the property over the woodlands.  I stood transfixed as [a rectangular object] literally came out of nowhere, going suddenly up and then down at a terrific speed, over the tree line... 

There was a sound with it, that was a deep, low thrumming hum, which really hurt our ears.  Fiancé actually had to cover his; it was painful to him.  But then the sound eased up as it then halted, hovering above us for a few seconds, tilted to its side and then zoomed off straight to the north, so low that I watched it, till it rose up and then dipped back down.  As low as it was, I was sure it was going to crash or something.  I was shaking when we came back in, and this is not the first incident we have had since moving here these last four years.  I only lost sight of the thing when it vanished into the north.

There was a remarkably similar sighting in Alabama, but without the noise:

As husband and I were driving home from his place of work, after 9 p.m., we saw in the sky directly over and in front of our car a black rectangular object with red glowing bars of light on the short sides of the rectangular shape.  Also, there was a blinking red light following.  It was silently gliding across the sky - no noise at all.  We pulled over to get out and look, but being in the middle of downtown it disappeared behind some buildings, as if it had descended straight down.  My husband's cell phone was not working properly afterwards.  I don't currently have one so nothing else to report other than I woke continuously from my sleep throughout the night with nausea and still felt the same the next morning and throughout the earlier part of the day.

Then there's the one from Florida:

It was still blue skies with no clouds when I looked up and saw a black disc flying from the north coming over my house as it was flying.  It turned over and over from left to right about three times in a second, maybe a second-and-a-half, and did the same thing going the other direction.  It hovered in one place just south of the house for about 10 seconds and then continued south.  There was no vapor trail, no lights that I could see of any kind except for a glow of a turquoise-orange that I could see when the object was flipping over left to right and right to left... 

An aircraft doing tight turns like that would probably make the pilot pass out from the G-forces and the plane would probably fall apart if it was a normal airplane.  I was wondering if maybe the government has an experimental craft.  I have seen a stealth bomber and fighter flying overhead.  This did not look anything like that.  I lost sight of the object as it went over some trees headed southeast.  Maybe the Tampa Airport saw something on their radar.  If it's not an airplane, then I think I just saw my proof that we are not alone in the universe – even though I am intelligent enough to know that the percentages are high enough to know that we probably aren't alone anyway.

Weirdest of all is a report from South Carolina:

Noticed a really bright, red light coming from the south headed north.  I was looking for blinking lights to identify it as a plane or helicopter, but this object was round, solid red in the middle, with short gold rays coming out of it all around the circle.  It was perfectly silent and moving along about as fast as a little Cessna plane would.  As it moved directly in front of me, it was only about 700 to 800 feet from me.  The front two-thirds of the object disappeared and then a split second later the rest disappeared also.  It kind of looked like it was moving into another dimension or something, the way the front part seemed to go through, then the back of it a split second later.  I did not see it after that.  After the incident, two words have been stuck in my head, alpha and belvedere.  Don’t know what it means, if anything, but wanted to let you know.

Okay, let's think about this for a moment.

What immediately jumps out at me is that all four of these accounts are from the Southeast, which not only heavily supports Donald Trump, but also has drive-through daiquiri stands.  (And those two may not be unrelated, either.)  Now, I'm not insinuating that any of the witnesses were drunk or MAGA-types or both, but I thought it worth mentioning.

In all seriousness, I'm struck with the frequency of UFO reports -- something the third witness mentions.  Yes, it's extraordinarily likely that the vast majority of them are hoaxes, or ordinary astronomical objects, or purely terrestrial phenomena; but I agree with Michio Kaku, who says that if even 1% of all the UFO sightings are inexplicable by any conventional answer, then that 1% deserves serious investigation.

The problem is -- to quote another physicist, with a reputation not quite so far-out as Kaku's -- as Neil deGrasse Tyson says, "In science, we need more than 'you saw it.'"  Given the number of sightings that have turned out to be accountable by perfectly ordinary explanations, if the only evidence you have is your eyewitness account, there's not much I can do but shrug my shoulders.  (And that's not meant to cast any aspersions on your reliability or honesty; as Tyson also has said, "There's no such thing as good eyewitness testimony.  It's all bad.")

So that's today's curiosity.  Despite the fact that I know my sightings would not be any more scientifically credible than the next guy's, I would dearly love to see a UFO.  Although I'd like to have something more interesting stuck in my head afterward than "alpha" and "belvedere."

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Back in 1989, the United States dodged a serious bullet.

One hundred wild monkeys were imported for experimental purposes, and housed in a laboratory facility in Reston, Virginia, outside of Washington DC.  Soon afterwards, the monkeys started showing some odd and frightening symptoms.  They'd spike a fever, become listless and glassy-eyed, and at the end would "bleed out" -- capillaries would start rupturing all over their body, and they'd bleed from every orifice including the pores of the skin.

Precautions were taken, but at first the researchers weren't overly concerned.  Most viruses have a feature called host specificity, which means that they tend to be infectious only in one species of host.  (This is why you don't need to worry about catching canine distemper, and your dog doesn't need to worry about catching your cold.)

It wasn't until someone realized the parallels with a (then) obscure viral outbreak in 1976 in Zaire (now the Republic of Congo) that the researchers realized things might be much more serious.  To see why, let me just say that the 1976 epidemic, which completely wiped out three villages, occurred on...

... the Ebola River.

Of course, you know that the feared introduction of this deadly virus into the United States didn't happen.  But to find out why -- and to find out just how lucky we were -- you should read Richard Preston's book The Hot Zone.  It's a brilliantly-written book detailing the closest we've come in recent years to a pandemic, and that from a virus that carries with it a 95% mortality rate.  (One comment: the first two chapters of this book require a bit of a strong stomach.  While Preston doesn't go out of his way to be graphic, the horrifying nature of this disease makes some nauseating descriptions inevitable.)

[Note:  If you purchase this book through the image/link below, part of the proceeds will go to supporting Skeptophilia!]

The truth is out there. Probably.

I've always been dubious about reports of UFOs.

To me, they always seem to come back to anecdotal evidence, which is lousy support for what is essentially a scientific conjecture.  As eminent astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, "If you're ever abducted, steal something from the spaceship, and bring it back with you... because then you'll have something of alien manufacture.  And anything that's crossed interstellar space is gonna be interesting.  But until then, we can't have the conversation... 'I saw it' just isn't enough."

The problem is, UFO sightings are incredibly common.  MUFON -- the Mutual UFO Network -- is devoted to keeping track of all the UFO sightings reported worldwide, and it's a full-time occupation.  (In the first half of 2018, there were 3,627 UFO sightings reported to MUFON, of which 647 were labeled "unknown" -- in other words, not accounted for by conventional explanations, at least in their opinion.)

Michio Kaku, the Japanese-born astronomer who has become a familiar face on documentaries about alien life, has weighed in on this, and has an interesting take on things.  "Ninety-five percent of all UFO sightings can be immediately identified as the planet Venus, weather balloons, weather phenomena, swamp gas.  You name it, we've got it nailed.  It's the other five percent that give you the willies.  Five percent remain totally unexplained...  We're talking about generals, we're talking about airline pilots, we're talking about governors of states, who claim that this is beyond our understanding of the laws of physics...  We've got multiple sightings from multiple sources.  Pilots, other eyewitnesses, radar.  These are very hard to dismiss...  And those are worth investigating with an open mind."

Which, I have to admit, is a good point.  However, it bears mention that Kaku himself has come under fire for his unorthodoxy, and in fact many of his colleagues think he's seriously gone off the rails, either because he's honestly crazy or because he knows that sensationalist pseudoscience sells.  (An especially scathing critique is the seriously unflattering RationalWiki page on Kaku and his claims.)

But this hasn't discouraged both the true believers and the skeptics who agree with Kaku that despite the complete lack of hard evidence, there's still something here worth investigating.  And they've found a couple of unlikely allies recently -- a retired intelligence officer named Luis Elizondo, and (of all people) Tom DeLonge, former front man for the rock band Blink-182.

Elizondo and DeLonge are unequivocal that we need to look into this further.  "Despite overwhelming evidence at both the classified and unclassified levels," Elizondo wrote, "certain individuals in the Department remain staunchly opposed to further research on what could be a tactical threat to our pilots, sailors, and soldiers, and perhaps even an existential threat to our national security."

It bears mention that Michio Kaku (in the interview I linked above) also emphasized the potential threat.  Any civilization that had mastered interstellar travel would likely be ahead of us, technologically, by thousands or even millions of years, and would view us much like we view an anthill -- as being not only not that interesting, but essentially expendable.  "There's no reason an advanced alien civilization would come bearing gifts and ask to be taken to our leader, any more than we bring crickets to ants and ask to speak with the queen."

DeLonge's involvement is curious, not because he's a true believer -- heaven knows, a lot of celebrities have odd ideas -- but because Elizondo and the others trying to convince the government to look into UFOs more seriously are mostly ex-government staffers and scientists, such as Jim Semivan (formerly of the CIA's National Clandestine Service), Robert Bigelow (a Nevada-based defense contractor), Chris Mellon (Deputy ­Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations), and Hal Puthoff (formerly employed by the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency).  Including a musician makes for a little bit of an odd partnership.

And honestly, DeLonge seems to be involved mostly to get the message out, especially to younger people.  Elizondo is very cognizant of his sales pitch, and his quest is to reach as many influential people as possible.  Having a rocker on your side never hurts, publicity-wise.

As for me, I don't think there's anything wrong with further investigations.  After all, there could be something to some of those sightings.  Even though I tend to be in Tyson's camp, and believe that most UFO sightings are explainable from purely terrestrial causes (including the propensity of people to make shit up), I also agree with Kaku that if there's five percent -- hell, if there's one percent -- of the UFO sightings that are legitimate and have defied conventional explanation, they're worth looking into.

Plus, there's just the fact that I would really love it if intelligent aliens existed.  There's a reason I have this poster on my classroom wall:

I would rather it if the aliens turned out to be friendly, of course.  I could do without having Earth invaded by Vogons, the Borg, the Draconians, the Cardassians, Shoggoths, the Slitheen, Xenomorphs, or the Tcho-Tcho People.  Vulcans would be more what I'm hoping for.

But I guess in these circumstances, you shouldn't be picky.

So I'll keep hoping, however the skeptical side of me keeps telling me not to hold my breath.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun one.  If you've never read anything by Mary Roach, you don't know what you're missing.  She investigates various human phenomena -- eating, space travel, sex, death, and war being a few of the ones she's tackled -- and writes about them with an analytical lens and a fantastically light sense of humor.  This week, my recommendation is Spook, in which she looks at the idea of an afterlife, trying to find out if there's anything to it from a scientific perspective.  It's an engaging, and at times laugh-out-loud funny, read.

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

Cryptid menagerie

It's been a busy week, here in the cryptozoological wing of the Skeptophilia research offices.  We're currently tracking three stories about alleged spine-chilling, bizarre, non-human life-forms, and we're not even talking about the cast of Jersey Shore.

First, we've got a story from The Examiner about an old man in the Philippines who was attacked by a shape-shifting monster called an "aswang" or "manananggal," which attacks humans and eats their livers.  The still photographs show, lo and behold, an old man being confronted by someone who looks like he's wearing one of the rubberized monster heads from the movie Alien:

So, anyway, the story goes on to say how there's a video of the incident but it "hasn't been released yet," which sounds kind of fishy right from the get-go.  Also a bit sketchy is the lack of detail; the victim wasn't named, although it does say that the victim's brother "José" filmed the entire incident.  Which raises the question of why he didn't run to help, instead of standing there with a video camera while his brother had his liver eaten.

Then, I noticed that the guy who went to the Philippines to gather information for the report was none other than Blake Cousins, who appeared in Skeptophilia just last week -- as the "investigative reporter" who did the video clip about the 12-year-old boy from Australia who made himself an "Atlantean copper headband" that allowed him to talk to spirits from inside the Hollow Earth.  In fact, even the site Phantoms and Monsters, not generally the most skeptical of sources, called this story "possible buffoonery."  (Here)  So given those two strikes against it, this story is almost certainly a non-starter, especially considering the credibility Cousins has, or the lack thereof.  So let's move on to our next story, which takes us to the dry hillsides of Utah.


The UK Daily Mail is reporting on a story about some hikers near Ben Lomond Peak in Weber County, Utah, who saw... a goat man.

In fact, one of them, Coty Creighton, took a photograph of Goat Man:

Creighton told reporters at the Utah Standard Examiner that he "...thought it was a deformed goat. It was clumsy, not nimble…  He was on his hands and knees, crawling along the mountainside."

In a separate communication with Salt Lake City's CityWeekly.Net, Creighton said, "I was racking my brain trying to figure out what other type of animal it could be.  An albino bear?  A honky Sasquatch?"

At this point, I had to stop for a moment to clean the coffee spatters off my computer screen.

Creighton, however, got out binoculars and took a closer look, and found out that it was none of those things.  It was...

... a guy in a custom-made goat suit.

Creighton stared at the guy for about five minutes, and at some point, the Goat Man realized he was being observed, and stopped moving -- and just stared back.  Creighton got creeped out, and said he wasn't going to get any closer, because "Something was definitely off with that guy."

I'd say that's a major understatement.  So if you're going to be in Utah any time soon, make sure you keep your eyes peeled for Goat Man.


Our third report comes all the way from the Moon, via MUFON (the Mutual UFO Network) and the site Ghost Theory.  (Source)  It shows a still photograph, and a video clip, of a pulsating, cloudlike "anomaly" hovering over a lunar crater.  Scott McMan, of Ghost Theory, writes, "The person who submitted the video seemed as confused as I was because he could only make the following statement: 'I don’t know what to make of this object.'"  People who've analyzed the video say that the "entity... moves in a lifelike fashion."

Well, I'm a bit at a loss myself, but my initial reaction is that it looks like a stationary object whose image is being distorted by the passage of the light rays from it through the Earth's atmosphere.  This effect, similar to the heat shimmer you see above a hot roadway on a clear day, is caused by light bending as it passes through media with different indices of refraction, warping the image, and (if the medium itself is moving) making it appear that the object itself is moving.  I'll admit, though, that it's pretty bizarre-looking.  And even though I strongly suspect that this has a perfectly natural explanation that has nothing to do with an alien entity moving in a lifelike fashion, at least it doesn't shout out "hoax!" to me.

Which is more than I can say for the "aswang" photographs and the Utah Goat Man.