Mind the gap

Aficionados of Star Trek: The Next Generation might recall the fourth-season episode "In Theory."  It had to do with the usual technobabble about spatio-temporal anomalies disrupting the fabric of spacetime, which (if you were to believe the scriptwriters) is about as sturdy as wet Kleenex, given that such disruptions seemed to happen every single week.

So it's a decent episode, but kind of the usual fare.  If you remember it, it's probably for one scene, which is way up there amongst the most disturbing they ever depicted.  Lieutenant van Mater is walking along discussing the problem with Chief Engineer Geordi LaForge, and suddenly, one of those spatio-temporal anomalies happens -- right underneath her.  She falls through the floor, but because the effect is ephemeral, the missing piece of floor quickly rematerializes.

And slices her in half.

I don't recall much of the rest of the episode, including how they resolved the situation, but I've never forgotten the horror of that one scene.

I was, somewhat unwillingly, reminded of Lieutenant van Mater's fate when a friend of mine asked if I'd ever heard about the "Philadelphia Experiment."  I responded that I'd heard of it -- seen references here and there on sketchy, conspiracy-theory websites -- but didn't know much about it.

"You should read up on it," he said.  "I doubt you'll believe a word of it, but there's no denying it's a very weird story."

Well, I couldn't resist a come-on like that, so I checked it out.

The story goes that back in October of 1943, some U.S. military scientists wanted to see if they could make a ship invisible to radar.  They picked the U.S.S. Eldridge, at that point docked at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, to experiment upon.

Naturally, if such a thing were real, it's unlikely anyone would find out about it, because it would be classified; so right away, I was a little dubious.  But according to the story, news of the experiment broke in 1955 when a prominent UFOlogist, Morris Jessup, received a manuscript in a package labeled "Happy Easter!" containing a copy of Jessup's own book -- with copious annotations in the margins by commentators who identified themselves as aliens, and warned that Jessup better cease and desist his research because he was "getting too close to discovering [their] technology."

Well, this was the moment Jessup had been waiting for his entire life, and he took the bait.  Shortly afterward, someone identifying himself as "Carlos Miguel Allende" -- he admitted pretty quickly that this was a pseudonym, and his name was actually Charles Meredith Allen -- started corresponding via letter with Jessup, leading him on, and feeding him bits and pieces of the supposed experiment in Philadelphia twelve years earlier which, he said, relied on "captured alien technology."

The experiment, Allen/Allende said, had succeeded too well.  Initially intended to be a more thorough version of degaussing -- where a metallic object's magnetic field is canceled, or at least reduced to the minimum possible -- the procedure had actually made parts of the ship vanish temporarily, with walls and floors replaced by a "greenish fog."  Allen said he'd actually been a witness to the experiment and its aftereffects.  Several crewmembers, he told Jessup, had been "frozen in place" for minutes or hours, and when they'd reanimated, large chunks of their memories were erased.  Others had simply "gone bananas."  Worst of all, more than one had fallen through temporary gaps in floors and bulkheads, only to be trapped inside (and killed) when the solid barriers rematerialized.

See why I thought of the unfortunate Lieutenant van Mater?

Well, Jessup was just thrilled.  This corroborated everything he'd believed for years -- that aliens existed, we had (some of) their technology, and the military was using what they knew for Big Clandestine Stuff.  There were even some hints that the whole thing rested upon "unpublished theories Einstein knew about" having to do with a Unified Field Theory.

In what has to be the best example I've ever run into of confirmation bias -- someone being taken in by flimsy evidence that strengthens belief in something they already believed -- Jessup apparently never even considered that Allen could have been lying.  He wrote the whole story up, and tried to get it published.

The publisher, presumably smelling a rat, turned him down.

Then the (actual) Navy got involved.  Jessup and his claims had somehow come to the attention of the Office of Naval Research.  He dutifully brought out the annotated copy of his book, and it was pointed out to him that the handwriting in the annotations looked suspiciously like the handwriting on Allen's letters.  At this point, the light began to dawn on Jessup that he'd been hoodwinked.  The ONR declared the whole thing a hoax, and decided Jessup was weird and gullible but basically harmless.  He gave a few more half-hearted attempts to find a publisher, but met with zero success.

The sad postscript is that Jessup, despondent over having his life's work crash down around him because of a hoaxer, committed suicide in 1959 by running a hose from his car's exhaust in through the window.

As far as Allen, he confessed that he was responsible for duping the unfortunate UFOlogist, saying he'd done the whole thing to "scare the hell" out of Jessup.  Then... he recanted his confession.  The Philadelphia Experiment was real, he said, and he'd been coerced into pretending it wasn't.  Then, bizarrely, he confessed again that it was a complete hoax.  After this he more or less disappeared, refusing all interviews, making oblique claims of being harassed into silence by the Men in Black.  He died in 1994 at age 68, leaving -- as usual -- the True Believers still believing, and the skeptics still dubious.

It's a weird, sad story, and further reinforces something I've said before: I fucking hate hoaxers.  Not only do they muddy the water, pushing the needle on just about everyone's skepticism dial toward "cynicism" -- making us more likely to dismiss all evidence for odd claims because a huge amount of it is bogus -- the fact is, it's just small, nasty, and cruel.  It may be unfair to put all the blame for Jessup's suicide at Allen's feet, but it seems to be undeniable that he contributed greatly to Jessup's downward spiral.

And toward what end?  The entire "Philadelphia Experiment" seems to have been a lie from beginning to end, concocted purely to make Morris Jessup look like a fool.  Yes, okay, there are still conspiracy theorists who still believe it's real (at least some parts of it), but the majority of folks who've looked into it think the entire story came from Allen's fertile, if mean-spirited, imagination.

Anyhow, there's our twisted tale for the day.  I have to wonder if "In Theory" was inspired by the Philadelphia Experiment, or if Carl Allen and the Star Trek scriptwriter came up with the ideas independently.  If so, that's two people creating visuals I'd rather not think about.

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UFO report overhaul

New from the "Well, At Least They're Going About It The Right Way" department, we have: the US Navy's new guidelines for reporting UFOs.

Apparently, this rewrite was spurred by an uptick in reports of strange sightings, although the powers-that-be state in no uncertain terms that they're not saying any of these are alien spacecraft.   "There have been a number of reports of unauthorized and/or unidentified aircraft entering various military-controlled ranges and designated air space in recent years," the Navy said in a statement in response to questions from POLITICO.  "For safety and security concerns, the Navy and the [U.S. Air Force] takes these reports very seriously and investigates each and every report.  As part of this effort, the Navy is updating and formalizing the process by which reports of any such suspected incursions can be made to the cognizant authorities.  A new message to the fleet that will detail the steps for reporting is in draft."

While I do tend to agree with Neil DeGrasse Tyson's view that the eyewitness testimony of pilots, policemen, ships' captains, and other people wearing uniforms isn't inherently better than that of the rest of us -- "it's all bad," he says -- I do have some niggling doubts about including pilots on that list.  After all, Tyson goes on to say that the frequency of reports of UFOs from astronomers is lower than that of the rest of the population because -- another direct quote -- "We know what the hell we're looking at!", ignoring the fact that pilots spend a lot of time looking up, too.  My guess is that a seasoned pilot wouldn't be taken in by such uncommon but perfectly natural phenomena as noctilucent clouds, lenticular clouds, sun dogs, sprites, STEVE (strong thermal emission velocity enhancement), and fallstreak holes.

And honestly, much of what pilots have reported don't admit of easy explanation.  According to Chris Mellon, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, a large percentage of the sightings were of objects "flying in formation" and "exceeding the speed of the airplane."

I'm in agreement that those sightings deserve investigation, and there needs to be a lessening of the stigma of even making the report.  Mellon says that a lot of pilots who've seen UFOs have chosen not to report them because of fear of ridicule or of actually hurting their careers.

So far, so good.  But then Luis Elizondo, who runs the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, got involved, and took the new recommendations and leapt right into hyperspace.  "If I came to you and said, ‘There are these things that can fly over our country with impunity, defying the laws of physics, and within moments could deploy a nuclear device at will,’ that would be a matter of national security," Elizondo said.  "This type of activity is very alarming, and people are recognizing there are things in our aerospace that lie beyond our understanding."

Now just hang on a moment.

There's about a light year's distance between "I saw an unexplained light in the sky" and "this is a spacecraft that defies the laws of physics and is just waiting to deploy a nuclear device against us."  I mean, on the one hand, I think what Elizondo is saying is that by the time an alien spaceship did deploy a nuclear weapon, it'd be too late to do anything about it, which is true as far as it goes; but don't you think the first step would be to establish that what people have seen are alien spaceships before we go into collective freak-out mode?

And I am absolutely sick unto death of people claiming that these alleged aliens can "defy the laws of physics" and "are beyond our understanding."  Maybe I'm being a little cocky and defensive, here, but the laws of physics are pretty damn well established, and I'd be willing to bet cold hard cash that if there are aliens out there, they obey the same laws of physics we do.  I'd also be willing to wager that even if there is some hitherto-unknown bit of physics that is allowing the aliens to do their aerial gymnastics, it's not "beyond our understanding."  Physicists are by and large pretty smart women and men, and my guess is they would be perfectly capable of understanding it, if the aliens would just land their spaceships and sit down and discuss it with them.

So simultaneously mythologizing and catastrophizing these sightings isn't very productive, or even very realistic.  Yes, they should be investigated.  I'm also with Michio Kaku that if even one in a hundred credible UFO sightings are unexplainable as natural terrestrial phenomena, that 1% is worth looking into.  But we need to keep our heads on our shoulders and not assume that everything we haven't explained will turn out to be something we can't explain.

I think the US Navy has the right idea, though, in making it part of their policy to take UFO sightings by pilots seriously.  And hell, maybe one of the reports will turn out to be evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence.  Believe me, no one would be more thrilled than I am if this turned out to be the case.  But it's important to keep looking at these things skeptically, always questioning and looking for alternate (natural) explanations, especially if the more out-there explanation is something we'd very much like to be true.

Because everyone -- even pilots, astronomers, and people in the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program -- are subject to confirmation bias.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is for any of my readers who, like me, grew up on Star Trek in any of its iterations -- The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence Krauss.  In this delightful book, Krauss, a physicist at Arizona State University, looks into the feasibility of the canonical Star Trek technology, from the possible (the holodeck, phasers, cloaking devices) to the much less feasible (photon torpedoes, tricorders) to the probably impossible (transporters, replicators, and -- sadly -- warp drive).

Along the way you'll learn some physics, and have a lot of fun revisiting some of your favorite tropes from one of the most successful science fiction franchises ever invented, one that went far beyond the dreams of its creator, Gene Roddenberry -- one that truly went places where no one had gone before.