Crying wolf

There's a bias that's a bit like an inverted appeal to authority: anyone who repeatedly and stridently makes claims that prove to be unsubstantiated, far-fetched, or outright false eventually finds that people simply stop listening.  At that point, even if they did come up with something reasonable and insightful, it's doubtful that anyone would pay attention.

We've seen a number of people who've exhausted their credibility in that fashion here at Skeptophilia.  Some notable examples:

• Geneticist Melba Ketchum, who has claimed several times to have hard evidence of the existence of Bigfoot (including its DNA).  She wrote a paper about her findings that she finally was able to get published -- but only in a "scientific journal" she herself started for the purpose.  Worse still, it turned out that most of the citations in the paper were bogus, including one that says in the cited paper itself that it was written as an April Fool's joke.
• Author Richard C. Hoagland, who despite having (direct quote from the Wikipedia article about him) "no education beyond high school level... no advanced training, schooling, or degrees in any scientific field" has become famous for a variety of loony pseudoscientific ideas, my favorite one being that the hexagonal cloud patterns on Saturn are "produced by the same phenomenon that causes crop circles."
• Journalist Jaime Maussan, who says he has conclusive proof that some mummies found in Mexico aren't human -- i.e., are aliens.  Surprising absolutely no one -- well, no one rational, at least -- the mummies that have been DNA tested are one hundred percent Homo sapiens, and the ones Maussan is the most convinced are aliens show signs of recent tampering to make them look less human.
• Mark Taylor, a prominent evangelical inspirational speaker, who claims that having orchestral instruments tuned to A = 440 Hertz is a secret plot by the Freemasons to alter your DNA so that you will hate Donald Trump.  I'd like to be able to say that this is the most insane thing that Taylor has said, but that unfortunately would be a lie.

All four of these people have found that restoring your credibility once it's shot is about as easy as getting toothpaste back into the tube.  Although in the case of Taylor, I suspect he doesn't care -- part of his shtick is that he's a Lone Voice Crying In The Wilderness, so he probably falls back on the impeccable logic of "Many brilliant truth-tellers have been considered crazy -- people consider me crazy, so I must be a brilliant truth-teller!"

In any case, the latest in this Parade of Shame is Luis "Lue" Elizondo, who was a U. S. Army Counterintelligence Special Agent and worked for the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, and now is a prominent member of the UFO/UAP Truthers community.  Lately we've seen lots of claims that the U. S. government has concrete proof of extraterrestrial intelligence; a year ago there was a big hearing in Congress where people like alleged whistleblower David Grusch said they'd not only seen, but participated in the recovery and testing of, "non-human biologicals" and the spacecraft that allowed them to get here.  My point then, as now, was: fine, you want us to believe you?  Let's see the goods.  Turn at least some of it over to independent unbiased scientists for study, under peer review, and then we can talk.  But of course instead we have additional claims of an X Files-style coverup because of issues of national security, and so far what we've seen is bupkis.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons MjolnirPants, Grey Aliens Drawing, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Now, Elizondo is publishing his memoirs, and you can bet they'll be replete with claims of UFO shenanigans.  The problem is, skeptic Jason Colavito got a hold of some advance excerpts, and besides the usual Cigarette Smoking Man antics you'd expect, Elizondo is making a whole bunch of other clams that make his UFO stuff look like Nobel Prize material.

One of the weirdest is that Elizondo says he's been haunted for decades by "glowing ghost bubbles."  There are green ones, clear ones, and blue ones -- the green and clear ones are harmless, he says, but the blue ones are "malevolent."  Then he launches into a bizarre passage about the veracity of the Book of Enoch -- one of the biblical Apocrypha, about which I wrote last year, and which (to put not too fine a point on it) is really fucking bizarre -- and in these excerpts he has a lot to say about our old friends the Nephilim:

Enoch's journey is filled with heavenly accounts, including descriptions of angelic and demonic hierarchy, God's throne, God's inner circle of guards, and even the language of the supernatural.  On paper, Enoch's travels don't sound that dissimilar to reported nonhuman encounters.  We also looked at the sixth chapter of Genesis.  That's the chapter that contains the story of Noah's ark.  Before we get to Noah, verses 1 through 4 of that chapter quickly share that otherworldly beings came to earth and mated with human women. Some translations call these offspring giants, while others refer to the visitors by the original Hebrew word, Nephilim, which some scholars say means something like fallen angels, or beings that cause others to fall.

At this point he seems to be aware that he's doing a synchronized skating routine with Erich von Däniken on very thin ice, because he goes on to say, "To be clear, I'm not advocating the ancient astronaut hypothesis that many today believe.  I'm simply drawing some interesting parallels."  Which is the woo-woo equivalent of making some loony claim and then excusing it by saying you're "just asking questions" (which a friend of mine calls "JAQing off").

The problem, of course, is that if Elizondo wanted anyone to take him seriously other than people who think Ancient Aliens is a scientific documentary, this kind of nonsense is not doing him any favors.  Admittedly, I haven't read the memoirs -- they're not available yet -- only the excerpts Colavito provided.  But honestly, given their respective track records, I'm much more likely to trust Colavito's perspective than Elizondo's.

And that's coming from someone who would dearly love to see hard evidence of extraterrestrial life.

So there you have it.  One more example of the Boy Who Cried Wolf.  Like any other bias, it can lead you astray; the whole point of the fable is that eventually there was a wolf, no one believed the boy, and the boy got turned into a lupine hors-d'oeuvre.  But even if it's a bias, it's an understandable bias.  If Elizondo really does have good evidence of aliens but has blown his own credibility to the point that no one is listening any more, he has only himself to blame.

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The train to CrazyTown

It always astonishes me how much it takes for people to say to some nonsense-spouting pseudo-pundit, "You are nuttier than squirrel shit, and I am no longer listening to anything you say."

Or, more accurately, I don't know how much it takes, because it almost never happens.  Once people have decided they like someone's views, it seems like it's damn near impossible to get them to change their minds.  Said pundit could go on national television and say, "Scientists have found that the mantle of the Earth is not made of molten magma, it's made of my Grandma Betty's Special Tasty Banana Pudding," and I swear, 95% of the followers would just nod along as if this was a revelation from the Lord Almighty Himself.

It may come as a significant surprise that for once, I'm not talking about Donald Trump.  No, this time the person who has given strong evidence that he's been doing sit-ups underneath parked cars is Tucker Carlson, disgraced ex-Fox News commentator, who despite being too obnoxiously racist even for Fox, is still somehow finding venues for his insane vitriol.  (One of them, unsurprisingly, is The Social Media Platform Formerly Known As Twitter, because Elon Musk appears to be as much of a bigot as Carlson, if arguably a bit saner.)

The latest missive from Tucker Carlson, though, amazingly has nothing to do with how brown-skinned immigrants are coming for all of us white people.  It concerns UFOs (or UAPs, as I guess we're now all supposed to call them), and springboards off the kerfuffle the last few months about government cover-ups of what David Grusch elliptically referred to as "non-human biological entities."  (Fer cryin' in the sink, if you mean the A-word, say the A-word.  And yes, I'm being deliberately ironic by not saying the A-word myself.)

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Carlson, though, has no such sense of delicacy, but he thinks they're not extraterrestrial species -- at least in the conventional sense.  Here's what he said, as part of a two-hour interview which I made it through about fifteen minutes of, before my forehead hurt so much from faceplanting that I decided discretion is the better part of valor and gave up:

It’s my personal belief based on a fair amount of evidence that they’re not aliens.  They’ve always been here, and I do think it’s spiritual,  There are forces that aren’t human that do exist in a spiritual realm of some kind, that we cannot see, and that when you think about it, will sorta make you think we live in an ant farm...  I do know that informed people have said that the U.S. government has an agreement with these entities.

The whole thing smacks of the "prison planet" hypothesis, whose most vocal supporter is Ellis Silver, about whom I wrote here at Skeptophilia a while back.  The idea is that humans evolved elsewhere in the universe, and our ancestors were transported to Earth because we're so violent, and we're stuck here until we learn our lesson.  (Given recent world events, we don't seem to be catching on very quickly.)

In any case, Carlson takes it a step further, hybridizing Silver's ideas with the Book of Enoch and various episodes of The X Files to create a new brand of batshittery all his own.  In short, he seems to have taken on a job as conductor of the Express Train to CrazyTown, and a significant slice of Americans are just thrilled to hop on board.

So I encourage you to watch the interview (linked above), if you've got the stomach for it.  Myself, I have a hard time watching Tucker Carlson even with the sound turned off, because in my opinion he's only beaten out narrowly by Ted Cruz in the contest for the World's Most Punchable Face.  But given that Carlson has been floated seriously as a contender for the vice presidential choice for whomever the Republican nominee is for president in 2024, and a possible candidate for president in his own right in 2028, it behooves us all to be aware that he appears to be a few fries short of a Happy Meal.  To quote skeptic Jason Colavito, "That a leading contender for high office and one of the most influential figures on the right believes in some variation of Nephilim Theory is depressing.  That a powerful network of advocates has infiltrated both political parties to spread ancient mythology as though it were scientific revelation, and government and media cheer them on, is terrifying."

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The aliens of Mexico

Because my reputation has apparently preceded me, I have now been sent a link five times to a news story about an alleged governmental meeting in Mexico which one-upped the recent U. S. congressional hearing on UAPs/UFOs by bringing out some bodies of mummified aliens.

The story (and the pictures) are now making the rounds of social media, but were supposedly part of a press release from Mexican governmental officials.  So without further ado, here's one of the aliens:

You can't see in this photo, but the alien bodies have three fingers on each hand and foot, and have necks "elongated along the back."  They are said to come from the town of Nazca, Peru, which immediately gave all the Ancient Aliens crowd multiple orgasms because this is also the site of the famous "Nazca Lines," designs drawn on the ground that (when viewed from the air) can be seen to be shaped like monkeys and birds and whatnot.  Alien visitation aficionados claim that the Nazca Lines are an ancient spaceship landing site, although I have no idea why the fuck aliens would build a landing strip shaped like a monkey.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Diego Delso, Líneas de Nazca, Nazca, Perú, 2015-07-29, DD 49, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Needless to say, I'm a little dubious, and my doubt spiked even higher when I read that one of the scientists involved, one Jaime Maussan, was "able to draw DNA data from radiocarbon dating."  This is patently ridiculous, given that DNA extraction/analysis and radiocarbon dating are two completely different techniques.  So Maussan's statement makes about as much sense as my saying "I'm going to bake a chocolate cake using a circular saw."

Maussan also said that his analysis showed that "thirty percent of the specimens' DNA is unknown" and the remains "had implants made of rare metals like osmium."

The problem is (well, amongst the many problems is) the fact that Maussan has pulled this kind of shit before.  Back in 2015 he went public with other Peruvian mummies, which upon (legitimate) analysis turned out to be the remains of ordinary human children.  Some of them looked a little odd because they had undergone skull elongation rituals -- something not uncommon from early Peruvian cultures -- but their DNA checked out as one hundred percent Homo sapiens.  Add to this the fact that Maussan has repeatedly teamed up with noted New Age wingnut Konstantin Korotkov, who claims to have invented a camera that can photograph the soul and specializes in "measuring the human aura," and we have yet another example of someone who has just about exhausted any credibility he ever had.

So while the people weighing in on TikTok and Reddit seem to be awestruck by the Alien Mummies, reputable scientists are less impressed.  There's no evidence these are anything but the remains of human infants, and there are credible allegations that some of them have been deliberately (and recently) altered to make them look more non-human.

I..e., it's a fraud.

If so, the whole thing really pisses me off, because it's hard enough making good determinations based on slim evidence without some yahoos faking an artifact (not to mention desecrating human burials from indigenous cultures) to get their fifteen minutes of fame.  Regarding the whole alien intelligence question, I've generally adopted a wait-and-see policy, but with this kind of bullshit it's really hard not to chuck the whole thing.  We skeptics have sometimes been accused of being such habitual scoffers that we wouldn't believe evidence if we had it right in front of our noses, and there might be a grain of truth there.

But if you really want to fix that, stop allowing the phonies, frauds, and cranks to dominate the discussion.  And that includes shows on the This Hasn't Actually Been History For Two Decades Channel.

Anyhow, I'm thinking the "alien bodies" will turn out to be just the latest in a very long line of evidence for little more than human gullibility and the capacity for deception, including self-deception.  A pity, really.  At this point, if aliens actually do arrive, I'm so fed up with how things are going down here that I'll probably ask if I can join the crew.

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The first step

The UFO community -- and, honestly, a great many other people -- are buzzing today because of the U.S. congressional hearing on Wednesday about what we are now supposed to call "UAPs" -- "unidentified aerial phenomena."

While I still do tend to agree with Neil deGrasse Tyson's comment that "if they're unidentified, that means you don't know what they are... and if you don't know what they are, that's where the conversation should stop," I have to say that even I and other folks who are accustomed to giving the side-eye to the hype are paying attention.  What strikes me about the people who testified are that they are not your stereotypical wild-eyed "I saw it in my back yard and no one believes me!" types.  They're staid military men with excellent reputations, who have now put those reputations on the line to bring to the attention of Congress -- and the public -- that there has been a coverup for years not only of sightings of UAPs, but recovery of material from downed craft.

Including what one of the whistleblowers, David Grusch, called "non-human biologicals."

It's kind of amusing how reluctant they are to use the "A" word or the "E" word, because as my wife pointed out, our dogs are "non-human biologicals."  But it was abundantly clear what -- or, rather, whom -- he was talking about.

I have to admit that some of the testimony was pretty eye-opening.  Navy pilot Ryan Graves, one of the people who testified, said that he and the people in his squadron had "frequently encountered objects... dark gray or black cubes inside a clear sphere," and that "if everyone could see the sensor and video data I witnessed, our national conversation would change."  Graves said he saw himself one of these cube-within-a-sphere objects hovering perfectly still -- in hurricane-force winds.  Another, David Fravor, said the craft he had personally seen were "far superior to anything that we had at the time, have today or are looking to develop in the next ten years."  

The members of Congress who attended the hearing all seemed to be taking the testimony completely seriously, which is itself a little shocking considering the partisan rancor accompanying damn near everything these days.  These craft -- whatever they are -- are being treated as a serious security concern, which I have to admit is accurate enough even if they aren't extraterrestrial in origin.  

I'm not ready to say we're being invaded by the Daleks or Skithra or Slitheen or what-have-you, but I have to admit that if what these people saw is of human make, the reports are downright peculiar.  Assuming the multiple sightings aren't simply fabrications or misinterpretations of natural phenomena -- and there are so many detailed accounts and records like radar and video footage that I don't see how you could discount them all -- the only other option is that they're advanced human technology (presumably not from the United States).  But it's a little hard to imagine some other country (China and Russia are the two whose names come up the most frequently) having technology that much more advanced than ours.

If I'm right about that, and I hasten to state that I'm no expert, we're thrown back on two possibilities.  Either these are some combination of glitches, misinterpretations, and lies, or they really are of non-human origin.

See?  Even I don't want to use the "A" word or the "E" word.

But unfortunately, a lot of the details -- including the hard evidence, like the pieces of downed craft and the "non-human biologicals" Grusch mentioned -- are still classified, and all three of the men who testified were very elusive about giving details in public.  And, of course, therein lies the problem; until we actually have material (biological or not) of extraterrestrial origin available for scientists to study, and written up in peer-reviewed journals, there aren't many of us skeptics who are going to be convinced.

Still, it's definitely grabbed a lot of people's attentions, including ones who ordinarily scoff at claims of UFOs and aliens and so on.  I hope that whatever comes out of this, we can drop some of the secrecy and bring out into the open whatever actual evidence there is.  If we really do have alien spacecraft buzzing about and keeping an eye on us -- if even some of the claims, going back to 1947 and the Roswell Incident are true -- then it seems like the public has a right to know.

So as a first step, the hearing was great, but it can't just stop there, or worse, conclude inside closed doors.  All that fosters is The X Files-style conspiracy theories, wild speculation by people who don't honestly have any solid facts, and more frustration from us skeptics who would just like to see, once and for all, whether there is evidence, and if so, what it actually is.

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The whistleblower

From the make-of-this-what-you-will department, today we have: a well-respected and decorated military veteran and former member of both the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office who has stated under oath to Congress that the United States is in possession of "intact and partly intact craft of non-human origin."

His name is David Charles Grusch, and his shift from intelligence officer to alien whistleblower came as a shock to the people who know him.  An Army colonel who worked with him called him "beyond reproach;" another called him "an officer with the strongest possible moral compass."  He went to Congress with the information, he said, to expose "a decades-long publicly unknown Cold War for recovered and exploited physical material – a competition with near-peer adversaries over the years to identify UAP [unidentified anomalous phenomena] crashes/landings and retrieve the material for exploitation/reverse engineering to garner asymmetric national defense advantages."

The recovered "material," he said, is clearly not of human manufacture.  It is "of exotic origin (non-human intelligence, whether extraterrestrial or unknown origin) based on the vehicle morphologies and material science testing and the possession of unique atomic arrangements and radiological signatures."

Further -- although details were not forthcoming, as the transcript of the hearing was classified -- several current members of the recovery team testified under oath to the Inspector General, and corroborated Grusch's claims.

Grusch has stated that his actions have resulted in retaliation, although it is unclear by whom.

Now that Grusch has come forward, a surprising array of officials have voiced their support.  Jonathan Grey, an intelligence officer specializing in UAP analysis at the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, said, "The existence of complex historical programs involving the coordinated retrieval and study of exotic materials, dating back to the early twentieth century, should no longer remain a secret.  The majority of retrieved, foreign exotic materials have a prosaic terrestrial explanation and origin – but not all, and any number higher than zero in this category represents an undeniably significant statistical percentage...  A vast array of our most sophisticated sensors, including space-based platforms, have been utilized by different agencies, typically in triplicate, to observe and accurately identify the out-of-this-world nature, performance, and design of these anomalous machines, which are then determined not to be of earthly origin."

The whole thing is curious, to say the least.  On the one hand, we have several highly-respected and high-ranking military officials putting their reputations on the line to come forward with this information, and -- thus far -- all of them pretty much corroborating each other's stories.  On the other hand, we still have zero hard evidence that has been made available to scientists.  I am especially curious about the "unique atomic arrangements and radiological signatures" Grusch refers to.  How are we to tell the difference between an odd, but naturally-occurring, material and one of alien manufacture?  Take, for example, quasicrystals -- about which I wrote here at Skeptophilia a few months ago -- which were thought to be only produceable in the laboratory, until a sample was found in a Siberian meteorite.

If we had piece of a spaceship console with lettering in Klingon, I might pay more attention.

Now, I'm not saying I disbelieve Grusch et al., mind you.  I'm merely saying that, to quote Neil deGrasse Tyson, "what I've seen so far does not meet the minimum standard of evidence required in science."

As I've said about a hundred times, nobody would be more delighted than me at having unequivocal proof of extraterrestrial intelligence.  But this -- as of right now -- is still in the category of "equivocal."  So I'm willing to defer forming a definite opinion, pending someone dragging out the "intact craft of non-human origin" and letting us all take a look at it. 

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Analyzing the unidentified

Some of you may have seen the piece done on 60 Minutes a few days ago about UAPs -- unidentified aerial phenomena -- which most of us call UFOs.

It was brought to my attention by a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia, who sent me a link where I could watch the entire segment (it's about fifteen minutes long, and well worth the watch).  What stood out to me was that now that the government has gotten seriously interested in these reports, we're finding out that they're (1) common, and (2) bizarre enough that even a skeptic would have trouble coming up with a sensible scientific explanation.

One particularly compelling example is from the commander of the F/A-18F squadron on the USS Nimitz, David Fravor.  Fravor and three others saw a bizarre UAP in 2004 that included "multiple anomalous aerial vehicles" performing maneuvers including descending 25,000 meters in less than a second.  Best of all, the sightings were backed up by radar tracking.  It started when they noticed an area of roiling whitewater in an otherwise calm sea, and went in to investigate.  Fravor says:

So as we're looking at this, her [referring to Lieutenant Alex Dietrich, who was in another plane flying at Fravor's wing] back-seater says, "Hey, Skipper, do you..."  And about when that got out, I said, "Dude, do you, do you see that thing down there?"  And we saw this little white Tic Tac-looking object.  And it's just kind of moving above the whitewater area...  The Tic Tac's still pointing north-south, it goes, click, and just turns abruptly.  And starts mirroring me.  So as I'm coming down, it starts coming up...  It was aware we were there...  I want to see how close I can get... vAnd it's climbing still. vAnd when it gets right in front of me, it just disappears.

Seconds later, the object (or one like it) was caught on radar tracking -- by the USS Princeton, which was sixty miles away!

If this was just one isolated report, it'd be curious enough, but former Navy pilot Ryan Graves says this kind of thing happens every day.  Pilots have been reluctant to speak up about it because of the chance of facing disbelief and ridicule.  But thanks to people like Luis Elizondo, formerly of AATIP (the Pentagon's now-defunct Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program), who has worked to get video and audio evidence of UAPs declassified, the phenomena have come to the attention of the powers-that-be (and not just via such dubious conduits as The History Channel).

It worked.  Senator Marco Rubio, at the time head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, asked for a complete (and unclassified) report to be given to the Senate on these sightings by next month.  He said, "I want us to take it seriously and have a process to take it seriously.  I want us to have a process to analyze the data every time it comes in.  That there be a place where this is catalogued and constantly analyzed, until we get some answers.  Maybe it has a very simple answer.  Maybe it doesn't...  Anything that enters an airspace that's not supposed to be there is a threat."

People who are dubious about these reports having an extraterrestrial origin naturally lean toward it being evidence of advanced technology from rival governments, especially Russia and China.  While I am certainly not ready to leap at "aliens" as the answer either, the idea that the sort of thing Fravor and Dietrich report is Russian or Chinese surveillance technology just doesn't make sense to me.  I grant you there are undoubtedly tech programs over there that we here in the United States don't know about, but we're not talking about technology that's ten years ahead of us; what these reports detail (and Fravor and Dietrich's story is just one of hundreds) comes right out of Star Trek.

I find the whole thing fascinating.  I am reminded, of course, of the line from astronomer Neil de Grasse Tyson, "Remember what the 'U' in 'UFO' stands for.  It stands for 'unidentified.'  Well, if it's 'unidentified,' that's where the conversation stops.  You don't say something is 'unidentified' and then go on to say that it 'must be' anything."

But it leaves us with a mystery.  I don't agree with Tyson's opinion that the conversation should stop here.  Surely such an apparently common phenomenon warrants serious inquiry.  I'm also not ready to jump to Marco Rubio's stance that what we're seeing is a threat; if these things -- whatever they are -- have the capabilities they appear to, they're technologically advanced enough that if they'd have meant us harm, they'd already have done it.  I more tend to agree with investigative journalist Leslie Kean, who said, "Most sightings that people have – Oh, I see something in the sky! – those kinds of sightings can usually be explained: the planet Venus, airplanes, comets, shooting stars, birds.  Let’s say five to ten percent are the cases that any conventional explanation can be ruled out; those are the cases that are of interest.  Those are worth investigating."

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Too many people think of chemistry as being arcane and difficult formulas and laws and symbols, and lose sight of the amazing reality it describes.  My younger son, who is the master glassblower for the chemistry department at the University of Houston, was telling me about what he's learned about the chemistry of glass -- why it it's transparent, why different formulations have different properties, what causes glass to have the colors it does, or no color at all -- and I was astonished at not only the complexity, but how incredibly cool it is.

The world is filled with such coolness, and it's kind of sad how little we usually notice it.  Colors and shapes and patterns abound, and while some of them are still mysterious, there are others that can be explained in terms of the behavior of the constituent atoms and molecules.  This is the topic of the phenomenal new book The Beauty of Chemistry: Art, Wonder, and Science by Philip Ball and photographers Wenting Zhu and Yan Liang, which looks at the chemistry of the familiar, and illustrates the science with photographs of astonishing beauty.

Whether you're an aficionado of science or simply someone who is curious about the world around you, The Beauty of Chemistry is a book you will find fascinating.  You'll learn a bit about the chemistry of everything from snowflakes to champagne -- and be entranced by the sheer beauty of the ordinary.

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