Skeptophilia (skep-to-fil-i-a) (n.) - the love of logical thought, skepticism, and thinking critically. Being an exploration of the applications of skeptical thinking to the world at large, with periodic excursions into linguistics, music, politics, cryptozoology, and why people keep seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches.
Thanks to my friend, the ever-sharp-eyed author Gil Miller, I now have a giant bruise in the middle of my forehead from doing facepalms.
Gil's contribution to my ongoing struggle against brain damage came about because of a website called The Living Sky, wherein we're told that there is a "new scientific answer to the mystery of UFOs." Naturally eager to find out what this "scientific answer" might be, I started poking around the site, figuring I'd find that despite the word "new," it'd turn out to be the usual stuff about alien visitations and spaceships and faster-than-light travel.
Nope.
UFOs, we are told, aren't super-high-tech crafts that have crossed interstellar space to visit a planet that, frankly, more resembles a cosmic lunatic asylum than anywhere I'd want to visit. UFOs aren't, in fact, crafts of any kind.
They're...
... lord have mercy, I'm having a hard time even writing this...
... they're sky jellyfish.
Well, that is new, I have to admit.
I wish I was making this up. But wait... they have proof! Here it is:
Welp, I dunno about you, but I'm convinced.
Oh, but not all of them are sky jellyfish. Some of them are flying squid.
The... um, logic... goes something like this.
Marine invertebrates are some of the most common life forms on Earth. They come in all shapes and sizes, and are "ideally suited to move in a fluid habitat." Which, I think we can all agree, is lucky for them.
Many marine invertebrates have appendages like flaps, tentacles, and tails. Some are bioluminescent. Some are venomous, and encounters with them can cause injury or (in extreme cases) death.
The atmosphere is sometimes called "an ocean of air."
Okay, how about UFOs?
UFOs have been spotted in all shapes and sizes, move around quickly, and often have lights and what appear to be appendages. Some people who have had close encounters with UFOs have sustained injuries. The parallels are obvious
Also, one mustn't forget that crop circles are circular (as advertised), as are jellyfish.
So q.e.d., as far as I can see.
I should also mention that the site includes pages about "aerobiology" and "aerial plankton."
The whole thing reminded me (rather reluctantly) of the first episode of the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Encounter at Farpoint." I have to admit it had its moments -- notably, introducing John de Lancie as Q -- but the downside was the rather ridiculous premise of a base on a planet that turned out to be an unlimited energy source because it was actually alive. When Jean-Luc Picard et al. figure this out, and stop the evil base administrator from taking advantage of the creature's powers, it lifts off, and reveals itself as...
... you guessed it...
a Sky Jellyfish.
Me, I thought this was fiction, but what the hell do I know.
What strikes me about all this is that apparently the Living Sky people took a look at the aliens-and-spaceships claims, and said, "Nope. That's not nearly loony enough. Let's jettison the whole idea of technology entirely, and blame the whole phenomenon on flying squid."
I dunno, dude. I've yet to see a crazy idea that becomes more plausible when you add stuff to it that makes it even crazier.
Anyhow, that's our dip into the deep end for today. Just keep yourself alert, okay? If you see any suspicious tentacles coming out of the sky toward you, seek shelter immediately. I hear those things can pack a nasty sting.
Yesterday a friend sent me an article from Sentinel News by Charles Magrin entitled, "A Real Phenomenon, A Cultural Taboo," that revolves around the question of why the scientific community doesn't take UFOs more seriously, and asked, "What do you think of his argument?"
I encourage you to read the essay in its entirety, but to summarize, Magrin's reasoning seems to boil down to four main points:
UFOs (or, as we're now supposed to call them, UAPs) are rejected as visitations from extraterrestrial intelligences because to accept them would overturn our place as the smartest species in the known universe. "[T]he phenomenon cannot be accommodated without unsettling the very foundations of the modern political order," Magrin writes. "It challenges sovereignty, anthropocentrism and the monopoly on defining reality. It is not disturbing because it is false, but because it challenges our frameworks of understanding."
There's an active governmental coverup of the actual evidence for visitation. Magrin gives a number of examples of various inquiries into UAPs by the United States government that were either classified as top secret and filed away or else scotched, and quotes UAP investigator J. Allen Hynek as saying, "The investigators seem to have been directed to find a conventional explanation for each case, no matter how far-fetched it might have been."
Belief in extraterrestrial intelligence is part of the cultural system of many Indigenous peoples, and for us here in the United States to accept that it's real would "challenge Christian monotheism." Inevitably, the Dogon people came up, a claim which I addressed in a previous post here at Skeptophilia. *heavy sigh*
We can't handle incredulity, and "aliens coming here in spaceships" is just too far outside of our worldview even to consider.
To me, the only one that deserves serious consideration is #2. The government clearly does cover things up in cases where it involves national security, or (as we're currently experiencing) in cases where to expose the truth would result in putting the president and many of his top staff members in prison for life. Could the United States government be hiding evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence? It's possible, although given how many times we've had impassioned testimony from "whistleblowers" like David Grusch and promises by Trump and others to come clean about alien visitations, all of which have amounted to zilch, I'm perhaps to be excused for feeling dubious.
As far as the rest of his reasons, I'm calling bullshit.
Starting in the fifteenth century, science has pushed deeper and deeper into what's called the Copernican Principle -- that we not only aren't the center of the universe, we're not really the center of anything. In fact, our position, both literally and figuratively, is nowhere special. From what we can see looking out into space, the universe appears to be homogeneous and isotropic -- approximately equal matter/energy density everywhere, and pretty much the same no matter which direction you look. The idea that there's a gigantic conspiracy on the part of scientists to preserve our central place in the universe is a ridiculous claim, given that it's the scientists who have shown that the Earth isn't the center of the Solar System, the Solar System isn't the center of the Milky Way, the Milky Way isn't the center of the Local Group, and so on. (And, incidentally, that humans are just another animal in the vast tree of life, all originating from a common single-celled ancestral species.)
Magrin also makes a quick slide from talking about people who doubt UFOs/UAPs to those who doubt "NHIs" -- "non-human intelligences." This brings to mind astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson's quip that we should "remember what the 'U' in 'UFO' stands for... If something is unidentified, then that's where the conversation should stop. You don't then go on to say 'so it must be' anything." While I think that Tyson is being a little categorical here (mostly for humorous effect), he's got a point. Maybe the conversation shouldn't end, but we need to be very cautious about swinging from "we don't know what this is" to attributing it to whatever our favorite explanation is. Sure, continue to investigate, continue to examine the evidence, and -- as Carl Sagan put it -- "Keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out." The problem is that the UFO enthusiasts have a tendency to want us to go from an abject statement of ignorance to an abject statement of certainty.
Plus, I think Magrin is being disingenuous, here. There are a couple of other much better reasons why scientists are hesitant to jump on the UFO/UAP bandwagon. The first is straightforward and obvious; there simply is no hard evidence that's available to study. Whether this is because the government is hiding it is immaterial; you can't expect a scientist to espouse a particular model if there's no data there to analyze. What "evidence" we do have, in the form of grainy photographs, blurred video clips, and various first-hand accounts, does not meet the minimum standard of what science accepts as sufficient.
Second, hoaxers and liars abound. Oh, how I fucking hate hoaxers. There's a spectrum of belief, from the gullible on one end (believe even if there's no good evidence) to the cynical on the other (disbelieve even if there is good evidence). I've made the point here before that I think we should all aim for the midpoint, skepticism -- believing if and only if there's reliable evidence, and keeping your mind open otherwise. The problem here is that we're all human, scientists included, with the natural proclivity to get completely fed up if we're fooled over and over. The prevalence of hoaxers (or, less culpably, people making reports of UFOs/UAPs where it turns out they've misinterpreted perfectly natural phenomena) has understandably tilted a lot of scientists' needles toward the "cynical" side of things. It's not a good thing; and the best astronomers out there (David Kipping comes to mind) stubbornly resist having their emotions swamp their rational faculties in either direction, whether it's their excitement over the possibility of extraterrestrial life or their frustration over how many times the purported evidence has turned out to be a bust.
And that touches on another thing that Magrin conveniently ignores; the vast majority of scientists would love to have their prior understanding overturned. This is a common misapprehension amongst laypeople; that the scientific establishment is devoted to guarding the status quo like crazy, and will destroy anyone who dares to challenge the edifice we already have. In fact, exactly the opposite is true. Can you imagine how the scientific establishment would react if there was incontrovertible evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence? Or Bigfoot, or ghosts, or telepathy, or precognition, or any of a dozen other fringe-y claims? They wouldn't be trying to suppress it; they would be trampling over each other to be the first to submit a paper to Nature about it. Actual overturnings of the dominant scientific paradigm are rare, but when they occur, it's how careers are made, how tenured professorships are achieved, how Nobel Prizes are won. Consider the names we all remember, science nerd and layperson alike; Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Mendel, Einstein, Schrödinger, Bohr, Hubble, Matthews & Vine, Watson/Crick/Franklin, Rubin, Hawking. They were not afraid to challenge the prior understanding, and what they accomplished secured their reputations amongst the greats of scientific history.
Anyhow, as far as Magrin's claims, I'm predictably unimpressed. Okay, maybe the government is up to shenanigans with respect to UFOs/UAPs, and "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," as historian William Wright famously said. The problem is, absence of evidence isn't evidence of anything. So as I've said before, I'll happily turn into a True Believer once I have hard data to base it on. But until someone brings out a chunk of an alien spacecraft, I'm solidly in the "dubious" column.
Here's a direct quote, from his propaganda outlet Truth Untruth Social:
Based on the tremendous interest shown, I will be directing the Secretary of War, and other relevant Departments and Agencies, to begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and any and all other information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters. GOD BLESS AMERICA!
And the timing of this announcement, I am certain, has nothing to do with a bunch of moving walls labeled "Epstein Files" closing in around Trump and his cronies. Sure sure. Nothing whatsoever.
Guess Pam Bondi got a hold of the UFO files first
In fact, what's so intensely infuriating about this nonsense is exactly the same thing that's intensely infuriating about how the Epstein files are being handled; there's all this talk, and then nothing happens. I'm reminded of a college friend whose uncle had at the time three small children. The children were apparently very badly behaved and the uncle completely permissive. His strategy was the "I'm going to count to three" method of parenting. So when the kids were acting up, the following happened:
Uncle: "Don't make me count to three... I mean it... I'm gonna count to three... One, two... Seriously, kids, I mean it... One, two... You need to stop it right this instant or I'll count to three... One, two... I'm serious... One, two..." etc. etc. etc.
The entire time, the kids kept doing whatever they'd been doing, ignoring the uncle completely. My friend told me that none of his kids ever had a clue what would happen if their father did get to three, because he never got there, and the youngest didn't know there was a number beyond two until he got to third grade.
Same here, isn't it? "If there isn't a serious investigation into the vicious pedophilia Trump et al. have been accused of, I'm gonna (choose one): read the unredacted Epstein files on the floor of Congress, release them online, make public some damning photographs and/or videos of Trump raping children, provide incontrovertible evidence of what Trump did during visits to Epstein's Island." And then... it never happens.
UFOs have been handled the same way. The next hearing is gonna be the blockbuster revelation where we find out that the government has been hiding alien tech, maybe entire alien spacecraft, or alien bodies! Even the skeptics will be convinced!
Really, it'll happen at the next hearing.
One, two...
I'm gonna make a prediction right here. The "Secretary of War" will release a few files, because Dear Leader told him Thank You For Your Attention To This Matter, and it will turn out to be the same fucking grainy photographs and "I swear it really happened this way" first-hand accounts from Sources That Would Prefer To Remain Anonymous that we've seen over and over.
And over.
So I don't think any of us are fooled, either about Epstein or about the upcoming UFO revelations. At least nobody who wasn't already fooled by *waves hands vaguely around at everything*. I don't know if Trump is going to go into it at tonight's State of the Union address -- lately, any time you put a mic in the man's hand, it's anyone's guess what batshit lunacy is going to come out of his mouth -- but I wouldn't be surprised. Chances are, it'll go something like what happened in Berke Breathed's brilliant Bloom County when a creationist sued to get creationism declared as scientific, and put the director of the "Institute of Scientific Penguinism" on the witness stand:
It's the problem with the message delivery being put in the hands of someone who is, not to put too fine a point on it, a few fries short of a Happy Meal.
But whatever. Since we're condemned to live in "interesting times," I suppose it'll be "interesting." And it'll at least take our minds off the rising tide of fascism, the headlong rush toward worldwide environmental degradation, and the impending economic collapse.
There's a general rule-of-thumb that if you are trying to get people to believe some outlandish idea, you do not increase your chances of success by altering it to make it even more outlandish. If, for example, your particular shtick is that the Earth is a flat disk, you will not sound more plausible by adding that it was put in motion by the god Frisbeus, and during the End Times the Devil will alter its orbit so it gets stuck up on the Celestial Roof.
This goes double if you give your idea a silly name. Frisbeeterianism, for example.
This is a rule-of-thumb that the UFO/UAP crowd seem not to have taken to heart, given an article I've now been sent three times by well-meaning loyal readers of Skeptophilia, to the effect that the rumor now circulating amongst "whistleblowers" is that the aliens are using the Earth as a "misery farm," getting things set up so as to generate maximum despair, because they feed off negative emotional energy.
Called "loosh."
Apparently loosh has been around for a while, originating in 1985 with a dude named Robert Monroe who was seriously into out-of-body experiences. Monroe, however, envisioned loosh as nice stuff; the "essence of universal love." This kind of energy (using the latter term in its non-scientific sense), Monroe said, is nourishing to the soul, and therefore our benevolent alien overlords want us to produce as much as possible, then share the stuff around.
It bears keeping in mind, however, that Monroe also wrote a book about visiting "The Park," which is the Reception Center for heaven, where spirits go immediately after death to recuperate for a while. How Monroe got there without dying first is an open question, so we're kind of in deep water right off the bat.
In any case, loosh got picked up by conspiracy theorist David Icke, and that's where things took a darker turn. Because, after all, you can't have a good conspiracy theory based on a plot to make everyone really nice to each other, whether aliens are involved or not. Icke claimed that Monroe had misinterpreted loosh; it's not the essence of love, it's actually a negative spiritual energy generated when people are miserable. In Icke's view, the Earth is a prison planet, and our alien masters want us to be upset, because then they have more food to eat, or something.
I have to admit that as a model, this works surprisingly well. The last ten years have been not only a non-stop shitshow, but off-the-register weird. It would explain a lot if there are superpowerful aliens who are just fucking with us. I mean, the other option is that Donald Trump and the MAGA movement are some kind of naturally-occurring phenomenon, and I don't know about you, but for me that stretches credibility to the snapping point.
But one thing I'll give the alien overlords: if there really is a plot to make every smart person on Earth extremely depressed, so far it's working brilliantly.
In any case, apparently there are now UFO Truthers out there who not only want the government to 'fess up about alien spacecraft sightings, but also to admit that the government is in league with the aliens to keep us all trapped in the Slough of Despond. In some versions, the elected officials themselves are alien shapeshifters (in the case of Stephen Miller, the shape honestly hasn't shifted much). In other versions, they're just collaborators who are hoping the aliens will keep them in power so the feast can continue.
What's vaguely unsettling about all this -- I mean, besides the fact that there are people who take it seriously -- is that this is strangely close to the plot of my novel, Eyes Like Midnight.
In this novel, the Earth is being invaded by the Black-eyed Children, who are evil aliens that can take the form of human children (although they can't manage the eyes for some reason, which come out a solid, glossy black). The Children kidnap humans because they feed on cognitive energy -- so for them, the eight-billion-odd people on the planet are basically an all-you-can-eat buffet. There's even been infiltration of the government with humans who are under mind control, and who are acting as collaborators to allow the Children to take over (and thwarting the heroic few who are fighting back).
It's a really good story, and you all should buy it right now. But let me just emphasize one thing about Eyes Like Midnight:
It is a work of fiction.
Like, I made the story up from beginning to end. It's based on an urban legend that's been around for a while, but that, too, is fiction.
Given all that, I'm inclined to think that "Earth as misery-producing prison planet" is as well.
Or, who knows? Maybe I'm one of the collaborators myself, and by writing this I'm just trying to sow doubt in your mind. Maybe the whole fifteen-year history of this blog has, all along, been one elaborate exercise in misdirection. Each time I post here, I cackle maniacally and wiggle my fingertips in a menacing fashion, just delighted at how many people I'm bamboozling with all this nonsense about "science" and "skepticism" and "rationality."
When the reality is that the Earth is actually shaped like a donut. With sprinkles.
Now, y'all'll have to excuse me, because I think I need to go lie down for a while. You can only exude so much loosh before you start feeling a little light-headed.
A loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me an email asking me what my opinion was about two current candidates for evidence of alien spacecraft -- the Palomar transients and the object called 3I-ATLAS.
First, some facts.
The Palomar transients are some mysterious moving objects spotted on photographic plates taken at Palomar Observatory in the 1940s and 1950s, all before the launch of Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, in 1957. They included both single objects and multiple objects -- in one case, five -- arrayed in a straight line. In-depth analysis ruled out conventional explanations like meteors and flaws in the photographic plates; and curiously, there was a forty-five percent higher likelihood of transient detection within one day of nuclear testing, which was going on pretty regularly at the time. The transients also were a little over eight percent more likely on days when there were UAP reports from other sources -- either visual observation by pilots or on-ground observers, or unexplained blips on military radar. The authors of the paper, which appeared in Nature last week, were up front that the phenomenon was "not easily accounted for by prosaic explanations."
One of the Palomar transients, from July 1952 [Image courtesy of Stephen Bruel and Beatriz Villarroel, Nature, 20 October 2025]
3I-ATLAS is an interstellar object -- that's what the "I" stands for. (The ATLAS part is because it was discovered by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System; but fear not, the closest it will get to Earth is 1.8 astronomical units, so it poses no impact threat.) We know it's an unbound interstellar object because of its speed and trajectory. It's on a hyperbolic path, having come from somewhere in deep space, falling into the gravity well of the Sun, where it will ultimately slingshot its way back out of the Solar System and into deep space once again. From analyses of the object itself, as well as the gas and dust it is currently ejecting, it appears to be an icy comet something on the order of three kilometers across, and mostly composed of frozen carbon dioxide, with small amounts of water ice, carbon monoxide, and carbonyl sulfide.
Comet 3I-ATLAS [Image licensed under the Creative Commons International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/Shadow the Scientist, 3I-ATLAS noirlab2525b crop, CC BY 4.0]
3I-ATLAS was immediately grabbed by (now rather notorious) astronomer Avi Loeb, whose unfortunate habit of shouting "IT'S ALIENS!" every time something unexplained happens has brought up repeated comparisons to The Boy Who Cried Wolf. Not long after 3I-ATLAS was confirmed to be an interstellar object, Loeb and a couple of collaborators published a paper on arXiv in which they said its "anomalous characteristics" indicate it's an extraterrestrial spacecraft, and might in fact be hostile. The claim was equally quickly shot down by a large number of exasperated astrophysicists who are sick unto death of Loeb's antics. One, Samantha Lawler, said, "while it is important to remain open-minded about any 'testable prediction', the new paper [by Loeb et al.] pushes this sentiment to the limit... [E]xtraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but unfortunately, the evidence presented is absolutely not extraordinary."
What strikes me here -- especially with regards to the (many) folks who have weighed in on the possibility that these are evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence -- is the need for a rush to judgment. (Nota bene: this is in no way meant as a criticism of the reader who contacted me with the question; she was just interested in my take both on the facts of the case, and people's reactions to them.) In the case of 3I-ATLAS, I think the evidence very strongly suggests that what we have here is simply a large comet of interstellar origin, so something of great interest to astronomers and astrophysicists, but unlikely otherwise to be earthshattering in any sense including the literal one. As far as the Palomar transients go -- well, we don't know. The most recent of them occurred seventy-odd years ago, and all we have is some old photographic plates to go by. They're certainly curious, and I'm glad they're being looked at, but... that's about all we can say for the time being.
"Well, what about the Menzel Gap?" I've seen asked multiple times. Isn't that suggestive? The "Menzel Gap" refers to the fifteen-year block of missing plates attributable to actions by Harvard Observatory astronomer Donald Howard Menzel, a prominent scoffer about aliens and UFOs, who became notorious for ordering the destruction of hundreds, possibly thousands, of astronomical photographic plates stored there. Menzel cited considerations of storage space, claiming we'd already learned as much from them as we could, but UFO aficionados hint at something darker. Menzel had top secret security clearance, they say; he led a "clandestine life as an elite member of the U. S. intelligence community" and was systematically covering up evidence of aliens visiting the Earth in the fashion of Cigarette-Smoking Man on The X Files.
Why he and others would go to all that trouble to stop the public from finding out about aliens is never really explained. "They were just that evil" is about the clearest it gets, often along with vague claims that it was to prevent panic amongst the populace.
As if what the government was openly doing at the time, and that made headlines worldwide, wasn't equally bad.
In any case, back to the original question: what do I think about all this?
Well, the truth is, I don't think anything. I simply don't know. It seems likely that whatever the Palomar transients were, they were not all due to the same cause; it could be that some were debris from nuclear testing, but that clearly doesn't account for all of them. Menzel might have been a misguided bureaucrat, or might have been destroying the plates to prevent their being co-opted by the UFOs-and-aliens crowd, or may have had some other motives entirely. In any case, it's okay to say "we don't know," and then just leave it there. Perhaps researchers will find more evidence, perhaps not; in either case, the best thing is to hold the question in abeyance, indefinitely if need be.
So that's where we have to leave it. I know that's disappointing; believe me, I've been waiting since I was a six-year-old breathlessly watching Lost in Space for unequivocal evidence of aliens. At the moment, what we've got simply doesn't amount to much. But if you're as intrigued by the possibilities as I am, I have two suggestions.
First, learn some actual astronomy and astrophysics. You're less likely to fall for specious claims if you have a good command of the facts and current scientific models.
Second, keep looking up. As has been commented many times, "It's never aliens... until it is." I still think it's likely that life is common in the universe, and although the distances and scale (and the Einsteinian Cosmic Speed Limit) make it unlikely they've come here, it's not impossible. Maybe there have been extraterrestrial spacecraft passing by, or even landing on, our planet.
Wouldn't it be fun if you were the first to know? Make sure and take lots of pictures, okay?
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.
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.
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 Newscommentator, 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."
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.
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.
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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