Spaceships on ice

I love science, and am delighted with the progress we've made in understanding the universe.  This has come along with a lightning-fast improvement in the quality of our technology, and although most of my friends consider me a Luddite, I'm actually in favor of that, too.

However, there are times when our technology gets ahead of our good sense.  When, in fact, it becomes apparent that in some ways, our devices are smarter than we are.  And one of those instances has to do with the geographical close-mapping project, Google Earth.

As our ability to create detailed aerial photographic maps of our planet has improved, so has our knowledge about places that are inaccessible to conventional human exploration.  But the problem is, the photographs are becoming detailed enough that we're falling prey to our perceptual biases, and coming up with some pretty wacky explanations for what we're seeing.  Here are a few examples:

• The discovery of a peculiar pattern of lines in the deserts of western China, that some people believed were mimicking the streets around the White House, in preparation for an attack.
• A digital artifact that made it look like there was a grid of giant squares on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, leading to claims that the Google Earth people had discovered, and then covered up, evidence of the Lost Civilization of Atlantis.
• A five-pointed star in Russia that was variously described as a training camp for children of the Illuminati, a refuge for Satanists, an alien landing site, or a sign from Mother Earth that she's not happy with us, and actually turned out to be the remnants of a Soviet-era lakeside campground.

So you can see that we don't have a very good track record of interpreting what Google Earth is finding.  Add to that all of the misidentifications made by people pawing through NASA photographs from Mars (where various wingnuts have found "evidence" of a thigh bone, a flip-flop, a skull, a fossilized gopher, and a vicious-looking Martian bunny), and it's understandable that I'm not ready to lend much credence to the latest "discovery"...

... which is a crashed spaceship in Antarctica.

The UFO enthusiasts are leaping about making excited little squeaking noises over an image from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, more specifically from 80°34’08.4″S 30°05’19.3″W, which showed the following:

See that diagonal mark in the middle of the image?  That, we find out, is no geographic feature.

It's a downed spaceship.

What evidence do they have?  Well, you're looking at it.  Everything else is just taking the above image, magnifying it until it gets really blurry, and finding bits of that blurred image that look like metallic reflections or spacecraft windows or hatches or whatever.  Next thing you know, they'll be claiming that this is rising up out of the snow:

As long as no one expects me to get on my Tauntaun and ride out to investigate.  I'm not taking a chance of freezing my ass off and then having to get shoved inside some smelly animal's abdominal cavity just in order to survive, all in the name of exploration.

But the guy who discovered the image, Russian UFO hunter Valentin Degterev, is adamant that we doubters are wrong. "I think there is very large disc-shaped flying machine amongst the frozen ice," Degterev said.  "It is definitely not a polar station, nor a plane (as there aren’t any airplanes or helicopters this big in the world).  There also aren’t any ships lost in Antarctica. It seems this is an artificial object from the distant cosmos."

Because, apparently, that's the only other option.  British UFO hunter Nigel Watson thought Degterev was spot-on, however. "It’s hard to tell if this ‘classic’ saucer sticking out of the ice, or whether it is a break in the ice," Watson said.  "Antarctica has a long tradition of being the resting place of crashed saucers or a base for their operations."

How convenient, given that Antarctica is so inaccessible to conventional exploration -- and verification of your claims. 

Pretty sneaky guys, those aliens.  Never crash-landing their saucers in places that are thickly inhabited.  Can't you see the discussion, as the ship is going down?

Alien 1:  "Our guidance system is failing!  The inertial dampers are offline!  We're going to crash!" 

Alien 2:  "No!  We can't crash here!  We're over Newark, New Jersey!  If we crashed here, then everyone would find out about our existence!  We can't have that!" 

Alien 1:  "I have it!  We'll stay aloft for another ten thousand kilometers, and then dive headfirst into an ice sheet in Antarctica." 

Alien 2:  "Brilliant!"

So if the mark on the ground in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet isn't an alien spaceship, nor an Imperial Probe Droid, what is it?

Easy.  It's a crevasse.

The movement of glaciers frequently opens up cracks, and the overlying snow cover collapses inwards, forming a slot-like hole.  (Sometimes it takes a while for the snow cover to fall, which is why hiking over glaciers is so dangerous -- what looks like solid ice can be a thin crust of snow over a hundred-foot-deep plunge.)

So sorry to burst your bubble, UFOlogists, but if you're looking for the smoking gun, alien-wise, this isn't it.  Just as the Chinese lines weren't a mock-up of Washington, DC, the seafloor anomaly wasn't Atlantis, and the star wasn't an Illuminati summer camp, this isn't a downed spaceship.  You'll just have to keep looking.

Back to scanning Google Earth images.  Make sure to tell us what you find.  As long as it isn't vicious alien bunnies.  If you find one of those, I'd rather not know.

Space horse

For this last Christmas, my son got me the second season of the bizarrely campy 1960s television show Lost in Space (I already had the first season; there's one season left, if I survive watching the second with my brain intact).  It's pretty wacky stuff, and I have to wonder, sometimes, if they were really trying to do science fiction, or engaging in an elaborate parody.  Thus far, we've met a cosmic cowboy, a space pirate named Alonzo P. Tucker (complete with an electronic parrot), the CEO of the Celestial Department Store, Kurt Russell in his first role (unsurprisingly, a hyperagressive little boy named "Quano" who wanted to fight everyone he met), and some space hillbillies.

But no episode was quite as loony as the one where Dr. Smith, Will Robinson, et al. ran into Thor.  Yes, that's the Thor, as in the Norse god of thunder.  Dr. Smith happens to be there when Thor's gloves and hammer fall from the sky (Thor having dropped them, apparently).  Dr. Smith dons the gloves, and finds that while wearing them, he can use the hammer to destroy bit-part actors wearing gorilla suits.

But the pièce de resistance of the whole episode was Brynhilde, who appears in a burst of flame and puff of smoke, riding on a massive plastic horse.  No one in the show, including Brynhilde, seemed to notice that the horse never moved, just kind of stood there staring blankly into, um, space.

The reason I bring all of this up is because of something that happened a few days ago in Mexico.  A volcano called Mt. Colima erupted (as volcanoes are wont to do), and a webcam caught an image of a UFO flying around the mountain.  The UFO, they say, looks like a giant flying horse.

Here's a still, so you can judge for yourself:

An "alien enthusiast," Eufrasio Gonzales Carrasco, is quoted as saying that "there has been UFO activity around volcanoes and the latest sighting of the horse-shaped UFO near the Colima volcano adds up to the list...  there is something about volcanoes that probably attracts the attention of aliens." The UFO, he says, "was shaped like a horse with a large body and two legs."

Because, apparently, two-legged horses are a common thing.

But of course, when I saw this I started thinking about space horses, and that led directly to Brynhilde and "The Space Vikings" (which was the name of the episode).  You have to wonder if anyone heard a shrill soprano voice singing "Ho yo to HO!" as it zoomed past the volcano.

But seriously.  The most likely explanation for this appearance of a Valkyrie in Mexico is (1) a semi-distant bird, or (2) a much closer bug.  Both of these have been responsible for UFO sightings in the past.  Because of issues like focal length, when you have a camera focusing on a distant object, nearby objects become blurred and unrecognizable, and this is almost certainly what we're seeing here.

A pity.  I was almost hoping for Odin to go riding by on Sleipnir, his eight-legged flying steed.  And if the whole Norse mythology thing was real, I'd even brave the cold for a visit to Niflheim to see the Frost Giants.  How scary can it be?  Dr. Smith went to Niflheim, and all he met were a couple of creepy little elves who repeated everything he said.

But realistically speaking, I'm doubtful that the gates of Niflheim are in Mexico.  Seems a little warm, especially near a volcano.  Maybe we'd have a better chance of meeting Surt, the lord of the Fire Giants.  That'd be kind of cool.  He sounds like a badass.