Roswell redux

Sometimes, I swear the universe is listening to me.

In my post yesterday, a story about the "Falcon Creek Incident" in Manitoba, I mentioned that the story was a lot more credible than Roswell.  So it is only fitting that less than an hour after I hit "publish," I found that Jocelyne LeBlanc over at Mysterious Universe had just posted a story...

... that UFOlogists are reopening the Roswell case.

My first thought was that I've read a lot of accounts by UFOlogists, and my impression was that the Roswell case was not, and in fact never will be, closed.  You've all seen the famous "alien autopsy" video, which was sold to television stations in thirty-three different countries by a guy named Ray Santilli (who said he had gotten the film from an anonymous military officer), but what you may not know is that a filmmaker named Spyros Melaris admitted that he and Santilli had faked the entire thing.

All this got from the UFO enthusiasts was a wiggle of the eyebrow that says, "of course you know that if someone admits it's a hoax, it has to mean that they've been threatened by the Men in Black."  In other words, evidence against something is actually evidence for it, if you squinch your eyes up and look at it sideways.

My visit to Roswell.  I'd tell you more, but I've been sworn to secrecy.

But you should prepare yourself for the whole thing rising from its shallow grave, ready to swallow the brains of True Believers everywhere, because there's just been a claim of a 2001 "leaked memo" involving physicists Kit Green and Eric Davis, and aerospace tycoon Robert Bigelow, and the memo says the autopsy video was real.

Green supposedly was briefed three times on the subject of the crash and the video, and was shown photos back in 1988 of the alien cadaver taken at the crash site.  The memo concludes, "The Alien Autopsy film/video is real, the alien cadaver is real, and the cadaver seen in the film/video is the same as the photos Kit saw at the 1987/88 Pentagon briefing."

Better yet, Bigelow et al. claim there are still tissue samples from the alien being held at the Walter Reed-Armed Forces Institute for Pathology Medical Museum, located in Washington, D.C.

But I haven't told you how all of this stuff became public:

Linda Moulton Howe.

As soon as I saw this name, my eyes rolled back so far I could see my own brainstem.  Howe is one of the "ancient alien astronauts" loons, a protégé of Erich von Däniken, about whom RationalWiki has the following to say:

Howe's gullibility and deceptive "reports" have caused even staunch Ufologists to give her extremely low marks for credibility... She occasionally asks real scientists for opinions on these matters, but then promptly dismisses or rationalises them away.

In fact, the site UFOWatchdog.com is even more unequivocal:

Someone once summed up Howe very well with two words: ' Media entrepreneur '.  While having been a major player in the cattle mutilation mystery, Howe's credibility has gone way downhill as she sensationalizes everything from mundane animal deaths to promoting Brazilian UFO fraud Urandir Oliveira and the Aztec UFO Crash Hoax while selling alien books, videos and lectures.  Howe dabbles in all things strange including Bigfoot, crop circles, alien abductions, and UFOs.  Howe also sits on the board of advisors to the Roswell UFO Museum along with the likes of Don Schmitt.  See Howe's site, which she actually charges a subscription for in order to access some stories.  Also see Howe turning an explained animal death into an encounter with Bigfoot.  A leap not even Bigfoot itself could make.

So yeah.  There's that.  I know I was pretty charitable with the Falcon Lake Incident yesterday, but this one is just making me heave a heavy sigh of frustration.  No one would be happier than me if alien intelligence did turn out to be real; in fact, it might even make me feel better about the lack of intelligence I so often see down here on Earth.  But much as (in Fox Mulder's words) I Want To Believe, this one's just not doing it for me.

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In August of 1883, one of the largest volcanic eruptions in human history (literally) obliterated an island in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra.

The island was Krakatoa (now known by its more correct spelling of "Krakatau").  The magnitude of the explosion is nearly incomprehensible.  It generated a sound estimated at 310 decibels, loud enough to be heard five thousand kilometers away (sailors forty kilometers away suffered ruptured eardrums).  Rafts of volcanic pumice, some of which contained human skeletons, washed up in East Africa after making their way across the entire Indian Ocean.  Thirty-six thousand people died, many of whom were not killed by the eruption itself but by the horrifying tsunamis that resulted, in some places measuring over forty meters above sea level.

Simon Winchester, a British journalist and author, wrote a book about the lead-up to that fateful day in summer of 1883.  It is as lucid and fascinating as his other books, which include A Crack at the Edge of the World (about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake), The Map that Changed the World (a brilliant look at the man who created the first accurate geological map of England), and The Surgeon of Crowthorne (the biographies of the two men who created the Oxford English Dictionary -- one of whom was in a prison for the criminally insane).

So if you're a fan of excellent historical and science writing, or (like me) fascinated with volcanoes, earthquakes, and plate tectonics, you definitely need to read Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded.  It will give you a healthy respect for the powerful forces that create the topography of our planet -- some of which wield destructive power greater than anything we can imagine.

Pondering Project Serpo

In today's episode of You've Got Mail, I recently got an email that poses an interesting question.  Here's the relevant bit:

Dear Mr. Skepticism: 

You talk a lot about how the only way to know something is evidence.  What if the only evidence you have is someone else's word?  Yes I know you can't believe everything people say, but your position is more that we have to start out thinking everyone's a liar.  Guilty until proved innocent... 

I've been interested for a long time in Project Serpo.  I don't know if you've heard of it.  It's probably something that a person like you would dismiss immediately.  But that's not skepticism, because you can't prove it's not real, even if I can't prove it is.  You should look at the link I'm sending with an open mind. 

Some people's stories are going to be true.  Not everyone's a liar...  We should be taking claims like Project Serpo seriously unless they get proved to be hoaxes. 

sincerely, 

Greg T.

First, I'm kind of honored that Greg T. calls me "Mr. Skepticism."  It's a title I wouldn't mind adopting, and certainly is better than some of the other salutations I've seen in my fan mail, which have included "Dear Asshole" and "You Worthless Wanker."  So we're off to a good start.

But he does ask an interesting question.  Are we really stuck with either dismissing all anecdote out of hand, or else accepting it all with equal abandon?  Is there a way to winnow out fact from fiction when all we have is someone's word -- or are we left with Neil deGrasse Tyson's pronouncement, "If you tell me, 'You gotta believe it, I saw it,' I'm gonna tell you to go home.  In science, we need more than 'I saw it.'"

So I looked at the Project Serpo link that was kindly provided, and it does turn out to be an interesting case in the sense that we have zero hard evidence for a pretty wild, and quite detailed, claim.  The site turns out to have the Wall O' Words format, so it's a lot to sift through; the gist, if you don't feel like spending an hour scrolling through text, is that in the Roswell UFO incident, one of the aliens survived.  The government sent in specialists who eventually were able to communicate with him, and it turns out that he and his less-fortunate shipmates came from a planet they call "Serpo" that orbits the star that terrestrial astronomers know as Zeta Reticuli.

UFO enthusiasts undoubtedly will recognize this name.  It's the star that figures prominently in the wild tales of Zecharia Sitchin, who said that it was home to the Grays, the bald, big-eyed aliens of the type made famous in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  But since Greg's question was about determining the truth value of a single claim, and not all of the other stuff that gets appended to it, let's stick to only what was in the Project Serpo site itself.

Because the Project Serpo goes beyond the usual Roswell crash stuff; this claims that the surviving alien told scientists on Earth how to go to Serpo... and we sent a successful manned mission to the planet to study it, staying there for ten Earth years and afterwards bringing home a load of information on another planet's civilization.

A denizen of Serpo

What I look for, in evaluating such material, is anything I can hook onto that seems either (1) well-supported by evidence outside the claim itself, or (2) contradicted by known science.  And in this case, we have a lot of material to test by those standards.  The more we find that fails this test -- the more bits we run into that are contradicted by what is known to be true -- the less plausible the entire claim is.

And right away, we have a few pieces that raised my eyebrows.  Let's start with a bit about "pentagen," supposedly used as a fuel on Serpo:

Pentagen is the fifth isotope of Hydrogen. It is radioactive with a half life of .34222 seconds.  However, with a complex containment and storage system, Pentagen can be collected for an extended period of time...  This storage vessel is where the Pentagen is finally collected and stored.  The interior of the Vessel is lined with an alloy of Beryllium.  The Vessel contains several complex "collection" tubes that collects, cools and stores the Pentagen during the final production process.  The final product is collected in liquid helium, which is charged with gamma radiation.

There are two problems here.  First is that there is not even a fourth isotope of hydrogen, much less a fifth one.  Ordinary hydrogen (hydrogen-1), deuterium (hydrogen-2), and tritium (hydrogen-3) -- and that's it.  But maybe, you might be saying, the Serpons (or whatever they call themselves) have found something outside the realm of our own discoveries?  That's possible, yes?

Yes, but take a look at two other statements -- that cooling the "pentagen" increases its stability and thus its half-life, and that it's collected in liquid helium that has been "charged with gamma radiation."  Both are obvious falsehoods.  Temperature has no effect on radioactive decay rate; this claim has been tested extensively.  In fact, there is no known physical process that has any effect at all on half-life.  And there is no way to "charge something with gamma radiation."  Gamma radiation is high-frequency electromagnetic radiation -- i.e., light.  You can't charge something with light, because photons move.

At the speed of light, in fact.

Then, we have statements like this:

It was determined that Kepler's Laws did not apply to that solar system [Zeta Reticuli]. So, one of the things our Earth-based scientists learned was not to apply Earth's laws of physics in a universal way.

Whenever we're told that the laws of physics are different somewhere else, it always brings up lots of red flags.  From Earth-based observation of the motions of stars and galaxies, we are driven to the conclusion that the mathematical rules governing forces and motion are universal across the cosmos -- so the idea of Zeta Reticuli being some kind of Kepler's-Laws-free zone sounds pretty sketchy.  In the immortal words of Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott, "Ye canna change the laws o' physics."

Also suspicious is the fact that although we're told that the Away Team eventually was able to understand and speak 30% of the Serpon language, we're not told anything about it except that it's "tonal."  Why would the returning researchers not share what they developed in the way of a Serpon-English dictionary?  Surely that would be easy enough to do.  The fact that we're not given any information about this rather easy-to-relate bit of information is curious, isn't it?

But why is this suspicious?  Because it's really hard to fake an authentic language -- if we were given even 10% of the Serpon language to study, linguists could tell if it was real or made up.  This looks, unfortunately, like they're withholding information for the very good reason that it would give away the game.

And on and on.  These are only a couple of points, selected for the sake of brevity from dozens of sub-claims that were implausible enough to call the entire thing into question.  And even the study of the site that I've done is only skimming the surface.  There's lots more there, and I invite anyone who's interested to delve into the site and find other bits and pieces that shoot holes in the claim.  But my point is, to return to the original question; we're not obliged either to accept anecdotes without question, or reject them without question.  There's a third way, which is to engage our logic centers and knowledge of science, and see if what's being claimed makes sense.

And in the case of "Project Serpo" -- I'm afraid the answer is no.

Two takes on a drunk driving accident

All media is biased.

Even the most conscientious news sources and the most unflaggingly even-handed reporters introduce a bias into the stories they give us -- if from nothing else, from what they decide is news.  They can't report everything, and by making the decision for us that we need to hear story A and don't need to hear story B, we're getting only part of the picture.

But it's often worse than that.  There's the sort of unavoidable bias I describe above, and then there's deliberate slant.

And then, of course, there's downright sensationalist trash.

I found a great example of the last-mentioned yesterday.  To tell you about it, I'd like to show you the same story, done two ways, and see which one you go for.

Let's start with the version of the story done by the Plains-Valley Online News, an outlet from southeastern New Mexico.  In it, we hear about an unnamed driver and his passenger, who spent way too much time drinking in a bar on US 70, and rolled their car.  But the police arrived on the scene to find that the driver and his friend were AWOL.

State Police Officer Lieutenant Emanuel Gutierrez said that they tried to find the accident victims, without success.  But seven hours later, they got a second call to the scene, after the two drunk guys woke up from their bender and wandered back to the road.

"The driver stated that he and his passenger were drinking at Way Out West and doesn’t remember what happened next," Gutierrez said.  "The driver also stated that he woke up in a field next to some donkeys."

The driver was charged and released, and was treated at a local hospital for minor injuries to his hand and shoulder, placing him squarely in the "damn lucky" department, and reinforcing what my mother used to say, that "God protects fools and drunks."

So far, you're probably wondering why this ended up in Skeptophilia.  A couple of drunks wreck their car -- so what?  But let's move on to our second source for this story...

... The Daily Mail.

Yes, somehow this rather ordinary and uninteresting little piece was picked up by the notorious British news outlet.  Why, you might ask?

Well, take a look at the headline they gave it:  "Mystery As Two Men Missing For Seven Hours After Car Accident Outside UFO Capital Roswell Wake Up In Field of Donkeys With No Memory of the Night Before."

Let's start with the fact that it's not a mystery.  If you read the original story, you find out that they were sleeping off being drunk. And like many drunks, they had no memory of the night before, because being drunk will do that to one.

Of course, the reporter over at The Daily Mail de-emphasized that point, slipping in a mere passing mention that the driver "admitted he'd been drinking."  What came out much more clearly was the MYSTERY about how these men DISAPPEARED for seven hours and afterwards COULDN'T REMEMBER ANYTHING.  And it all happened near *cue scary music* Roswell, New Mexico.

And for the low-IQ reader who still doesn't understand what they're (wink-wink-nudge-nudge) implying, here's how the story in The Daily Mail ends:

Roswell, New Mexico sprang to international fame on July 8, 1947, when the local newspaper reported the capture of a 'flying saucer' by government officials in the town. 

Over the decades since the discovery, conspiracy theorists have insisted that the debris came from an alien spacecraft, and that the fact was covered up by the military. 

The continuing belief of alien activity in the area led the Air Force to launch an investigation into the crash in 1995. 

Officials concluded that the 'UFO' was part of a balloon launched into the atmosphere as part of a secret government surveillance programme aimed at the USSR. 

However, many have refused to accept that explanation, alleging a conspiracy to hide the existence of extra-terrestrial life.

So what are we left with?  Time slips, and aliens, and abductions.  We've gone from two drunk morons wrecking their car to allegations of the paranormal, driven in with the subtlety of a jackhammer.

Never mind that close to 50,000 people live in Roswell without ever seeing a UFO or being abducted.  Let The Daily Mail get a hold of anything that happens nearby, and it turns into a trash piece about aliens.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Needless to say, this kind of bullshit journalism makes me crazy.  It's hard enough to get people to think skeptically without this sort of nonsense -- even though a good many folks recognize The Daily Mail for the click-bait garbage it is, there is still a sizable number who read this muck and believe it.

But if you needed an example of why you have to question what you read, this should serve as a good cautionary note.  Don't ever turn your brain off when you're reading the news, whatever the source.  Always find out if the claims hold water, and cross-check facts.

And for cryin' in the sink, don't trust The Daily Mail.  I swear, if they reported that grass was green, I'd want to go out in my front yard to check for myself.

Revisiting Roswell

A couple of years ago, I went to visit my cousin's family in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and while in the state I insisted on making the drive out to see the International UFO Museum in Roswell.

Yes, it was campy, but it was fun.  My wife spent most of the visit rolling her eyes, but I did get a poster for my classroom, and an opportunity to have my photograph taken having a nice drink in an alien bar that would have only been improved by having a band like the one in Mos Eisley spaceport.

The "Roswell Incident" is one of the most talked about and thoroughly studied UFO stories in history.  In 1947, the museum's website says, "something happened" in the desert plains near Roswell.  The government says it was the crash of a high-altitude weather balloon, but there are alleged whistleblowers (most notably Lieutenant Walter Haut) who claim that it was the wreck of an alien spacecraft.  There are famous photographs of an "alien autopsy," traces of material from the wreckage, and dozens of eyewitness accounts.

What does it all add up to?  Not much, is my opinion.  Could the Roswell debris be the wreckage of an interstellar alien spaceship?  I suppose.  Could it be a hoax, a conglomeration of stories that grew by accretion after a completely natural, terrestrial event?  Yes.  What we have thus far does not meet the minimum standard of evidence that science demands, so for me the jury is still out.

Then of course, there's Neil deGrasse Tyson's comment about the whole thing:  "You're telling me that these aliens flew halfway across the galaxy, and then they couldn't land the damn ship?  If those are the kind of alien visiting the Earth, then they can go home.  I don't want to talk to 'em."

But even given the fact that we have all of the evidence that we're likely to get -- meaning that skeptics like myself will remain unconvinced either way, the believers will continue to believe, and the disbelievers will continue to disbelieve -- the whole thing is still debated endlessly.  People look for new angles, however unlikely those are to lead to anything productive.  And some of those new angles are so odd that they make the original arguments of the UFO crowd seem like peer-reviewed research.

Take, for example the article over at The UFO Iconoclast that says we have only one option for continuing our research into Roswell:

Remote viewing.

Because we all know how much more reliable a study becomes when you compound it with pseudoscience.  Not that that's the way they frame it:

The remote view protocol that we use at Spirit Rescue International is defined as ‘scientific’ and/or ‘coordinate’ remote viewing.  In order to apply it to the Roswell Incident there would need to be more monitor control, protocol modification, use of the correct data type and extended sessions.  The sessions would be conducted by remote viewers who have minimal knowledge of the Roswell Incident. We believe these objectives can be achieved.

Which brings up two rather thorny problems:

1. How do you guarantee "minimal knowledge?"  Anyone who can successfully navigate a Wikipedia page can find out all sorts of facts and speculation about the Roswell Incident.   Given the amount of play this claim has had on television and in movies, and the ubiquity of such information online, "contamination" of the "remote viewers" isn't just likely, it's a near certainty.
2. Since the US government is still denying anything paranormal happened in Roswell in 1947, how would you check the information the remote viewers obtained to determine if it was accurate?

This last issue is the hardest one.  Suppose a remote viewing team determined that the pieces of the Roswell crash -- incontrovertible evidence of a downed spaceship -- were being kept in a warehouse in Topeka.  Can't you just imagine the telephone conversation that might ensue?

UFO investigator:  We know the wreckage of the Roswell spaceship is in Topeka.  Can you let us have a look at it? 

Government official:  It doesn't exist, so no. 

UFO investigator:  Topeka does so exist.  My grandmother lives there.  Ha!  We've caught you in a bald-faced lie. 

Government official:  Not Topeka, the spaceship.  There's no spaceship parts, in Topeka or elsewhere. 

UFO investigator:  Your denial just proves that we're hot on your trail! 

Government official:  *click*

So the whole thing is kind of a non-starter, from a variety of angles.

Understand, though, that no one would be happier than me to have undeniable evidence of alien intelligence.  Even if the aliens in question couldn't successfully land their ship.  Hell, I'm 53 and I still have trouble parallel parking, so I'm not going to judge.  But I'm with Tyson on one thing: the evidence thus far is unconvincing.  And that includes any evidence -- if I can dignify it with that term -- that comes from psychics.

You can't use one unproven thing to prove another unproven thing.  Sorry, but logic just doesn't work that way.

The attractiveness of cults

One of my failings is my inability to comprehend how people can find themselves still being suckered in by ideologies that are obviously, demonstrably false.  Now, mind you, I get why people stick with what they were taught as children; if you grew up being told, for example, that the world is 6,000-odd years old, and that people are bad because the first woman on Earth got tricked into eating a piece of fruit by a talking snake, and that (furthermore) the talking snake is still around trying to trick you, too, it's unsurprising that you wouldn't listen to the likes of me.

What is completely incomprehensible to me, though, is how anyone from outside the system, who had seen other ways of thinking, would look at something like that and say, "Wow!  Now that makes intrinsic sense!"  Yet I know two former students, both extremely bright young men, who did exactly that, rejecting science and logic and rationality for biblical literalism.

My incomprehension, though, turns to incredulity when I see people voluntarily espousing ideologies that are not just flat-out wrong, but destructive, abusive, and (frankly) scary.  Cults, in other words.  And here I am, of course, referring to the Church of Scientology.

I've long avoided mentioning Scientology in this blog, largely because I'd rather not have Tom Cruise show up at my house and start jumping on my sofa.  For another thing, the hopeful part of me keeps assuming that this cult has to be on the way out, what with all of the bad press it's gotten the last few years -- more than one exposé by investigative reporters, not to mention the whole kerfuffle over the anti-Scientology episode of South Park.  (You might remember that the episode "Trapped in a Closet" resulted in Isaac Hayes, who voiced the character Chef, leaving South Park in protest, and Tom Cruise threatening Viacom that if they didn't pull the episode, he would withdraw from the cast of Mission Impossible III.  Viacom caved, and cancelled a rebroadcast of the episode; and Cruise, satisfied, went ahead with the movie, which went on to net a total of $2.56 in the box office.)

All of this makes Scientology seem ridiculous -- and certainly a good many of their beliefs fall into the "no, really?" category -- but there is a darker side to the organization.  People who have investigated church leaders have been harassed, sued, and threatened.  Wikipedia finally had to resort to closing off the main pages about the church and its leaders in 2009, because true believers wouldn't stop altering the pages to remove critical or negative passages.  The church continues to pour money into converting people in other countries, a move that some governments have resisted.  Just four days ago, a story in the Atlantic Wire describes charges being filed in Belgium against the church, including "extortion, fraud, privacy breaches, and the illegal practice of medicine."

People, however, continue to join, which baffles me.  Church leaders boast that Scientology is "the fastest-growing religion on Earth."  Given their secrecy, it's hard to get accurate numbers, but Janet Reitman, who did an investigative report for Rolling Stone in 2011, estimates their membership at between 100,000 and 200,000 worldwide.

So I must ask: what about this ideology do people find appealing?  It's a pretty bizarre amalgam of claims -- involving alien spirits ("Thetans"), an intergalactic overlord named "Xenu," a cult of personality about the founder that borders on hero-worship, and something very much like brainwashing.  Consider all of the negative press in recent years -- including an allegation that L. Ron Hubbard founded Scientology after making a bet with science fiction writer Robert Heinlein that he (Hubbard) could become filthy rich by making up his own religion.  (Hubbard won, obviously, but probably didn't need to collect, given how rich he did become.)

And yet people still join.  And donate.  Just yesterday, an article appeared in the online Australian news source The West entitled "Scientologists Build Underground 'Space Alien Cathedral,'" about a recently-discovered subterranean bunker near Roswell, New Mexico, which allegedly houses (in a thermonuclear-weapon-proof vault) an electronic copy of all of the writings of L. Ron Hubbard and his disciples.  Further, the shape of the bunker as seen from space is supposed to be a symbol recognizable to "Xenu," so if humanity tanks, the galactic overlord will still be able to find Hubbard's sacred texts.

Which, of course, means that they still somehow have the kind of cash and manpower at their disposal that would allow them to build something this complex.

This is absolutely beyond me, and in fact I'm finding it hard to think of any insightful commentary I might be able to add.  I'll just finish up by saying that as an aside, my dogs are trained to bite anyone who jumps on our sofa, so you might want to take that under advisement.  In fact, it might be best if you just stay in your bunker where it's safe.  Thank you.