The case of the missing scientists

Our capacity for seeing patterns is absolutely critical.

It's easy to see how survival in a risky world could hinge on noticing clues in the environment, then putting them together correctly.  The key, though, is the word correctly.  When you have a built-in mechanism for interpreting sensory cues and recognizing danger, it can easily go awry.  But -- and here's the most important point -- in general, the evolutionary cost of overreacting is almost always way less than that of underreacting.  To use the oft-quoted example, for your average proto-hominin on the African savanna, it's better to hear a rustle in the grass, take fright and bolt, and have it turn out to be a fluffy bunny, than to shrug it off and stay put when it's a hungry lion.  

Or, worse still, not to notice it at all.

This tendency remains with us, lo unto this very day, and it's astonishing how badly it can backfire.  We look around us, assemble the information we have, and all too often put the pieces together wrong -- especially when the pattern that emerges is scary.

And especially especially when we're encouraged to do so by sensationalist media who make their money from clicks, and politicians who benefit by keeping their constituents frightened and distracted.

Take, for example, the current kerfuffle over all the scientists who have allegedly disappeared (or died) recently.  They all, we are told, worked with classified secrets.  The words "mysterious circumstances" have been thrown about.  The implication -- sometimes, the explicit claim -- is that the scientists' fates are all linked, part of a massive conspiracy to silence "people who know too much," or (perhaps) who were about to blow the whistle on some even bigger conspiracy and implicate Important People.

The story hit the news when a retired United States Air Force general, Neil McCasland, left his house in Bernalillo County, New Mexico on foot in late February, and never returned.  A search was conducted, but no trace of him was ever found.  McCasland, they said, was "involved in UFO research," and this was somehow relevant to his disappearance.  Then there's Monica Jacinto Reza, who was director of materials processing at NASA/JPL, who vanished while hiking in the Angeles National Forest in June of 2025.  I'll admit her disappearance was odd; she was an experienced hiker and was accompanied by two other equally able friends, had been seen about ten meters back on the trail and had smiled and waved, but when her friends looked back shortly afterward, Reza was gone.

Once again, searchers came up empty-handed.

Carl Grillmair, an astronomer and exoplanet researcher at Caltech, was murdered in mid-February of this year.  Nuno Loureiro, a plasma physicist at MIT, was shot and killed in December of 2025.  Here are a few others that often get thrown into the mix:

• Amy Eskridge, died in June of 2022; Eskridge was an "anti-gravity researcher"
• Michel David Hicks, a planetary researcher at NASA/JPL, died in July of 2023
• Anthony Chavez, of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, disappeared in May of 2025
• Jason Thomas, assistant director of chemical biology at Novartis, drowned in Lake Quannapowitt, Massachusetts in December of 2025

So the relevant question here is: does this make a pattern?

The answer is no.  Not even close.  Okay, McCasland and Reza are curious circumstances, to say the least; but McCasland had medical problems, and even his wife wrote a piece pleading with people to stop the "misinformation circulating about Neil and his disappearance."  As far as Reza... well, I'm an experienced back-country hiker myself, and the wilderness is a big, big place.  If you don't think it's possible someone -- even a dedicated backwoods-explorer -- could get inextricably lost and die out there, you haven't actually experienced what the back country is like.

How about the rest?  Well, the police actually arrested the perpetrator of Grillmair's murder, and it was pretty clearly a burglary that went badly wrong.  Loureiro's killer was almost certainly Cláudio Manuel Neves Valente, who knew Loureiro personally and seems to have had a grudge against him -- Valente had gone to college with Loureiro and graduated first in his class, but unlike Loureiro, his career never took off.  Valente was described as "often unhappy or even angry," and eventually snapped; the day after killing Loureiro, he went to Brown University, killed two students and wounded nine others, then turned the gun on himself.

As far as the others, Eskridge wasn't a government employee at all, just a fringe-y pseudoscience content creator; she'd been in chronic pain for years, and it's nearly certain she committed suicide.  Hicks died of natural causes from a chronic medical condition.  Chavez wasn't a scientist, but a construction foreman, and hadn't worked for Los Alamos for years.  Thomas, a medical researcher who had zero to do with space science, suffered from long-term depression, and his drowning death was ruled as an accident.

So what looked like a pattern turns out to be nothing much at all.  But of course that's not calming anyone down.  Karoline Leavitt, who hasn't been within hailing distance of reality for years and wouldn't recognize the truth if it came up and bit her on the ass, says there are "legitimate questions about these troubling cases" and that "no stone will remain unturned" in unmasking the conspiracy behind it all.  Especially if it turns out to have nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein.  Podcaster Walter Kirn goes further, saying "What is going on seems to be an enemy action...  [The missing individuals were involved] in the most advanced realms of space-rocket propulsion and, you know, Air Force–NASA–type endeavors."  House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer said that "something sinister could be happening."  Then Missouri Representative Eric Burlison got involved -- you may recall that last year, Burlison made a name for himself by claiming that the Nephilim were real, and the Smithsonian Institute was covering it up, so his grasp on reality is even more tenuous than Karoline Leavitt's -- and said the whole thing had to do with the fact that all of the victims, alleged and otherwise, knew classified stuff about UFOs.

And we're off to the races.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons SkepticalScience, Conspiracy Theories Fallacy Icon, CC BY-SA 4.0]

It's pretty clear that what we have here is a consortium of the usual kooks and conspiracy theorists teaming up with a bunch of politicians who are desperate to distract everyone from the fact that their policies have directly led to an economic disaster, and that the upper leadership was involved in a vicious sex trafficking ring, so they're putting 2 and 2 together and coming up with 54.

Like I said... as usual.

In any case, if you see anyone posting this nonsense as serious evidence of a huge conspiracy, I'd be much obliged if you'd set them straight.  You can even send 'em a link to this post, if you think it'll help.

After all, we have enough real stuff to worry about at the moment.  There's no need to make shit up.

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It's a bird! It's a plane! No...

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.

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Losing the plot

What strikes me about the last ten years isn't just the slow slide into fascism, the grift, the corruption, the attempted codification into law of misogyny and bigotry and homophobia and transphobia, but just how fucking weird these people are.

I swear, if I time-traveled back a decade and presented a manuscript to my publisher that was a verbatim transcript of everything that has happened since 2016, he would reject it out of hand on the basis of being ridiculously implausible.

Let's start with disgraced former Representative Matt Gaetz, who this week came out with the announcement that the United States government is forcibly mating humans with aliens to produce "beings capable of communicating with extraterrestrials."  

"I had someone come and brief me who was in a military uniform, worked for the United States Army, that was briefing me on the locations of hybrid breeding programs where captured aliens were breeding with humans to create some hybrid race that could engage in intergalactic communication," Gaetz said. "An actual uniformed member of the United States Army briefed me on that."

There are six of these breeding programs scattered across the country, Gaetz said.

And the person who was interviewing him, ultra-conservative talk show host Benny Johnson, nodded sagely instead of saying what I would have, which is, "Maybe you should consider getting back on your meds, Matt."

Gaetz has said some outrageous things before, but this one has to take the prize.  On the other hand, considering the fact that he has about three acres of forehead, perhaps he knows about all this from first-hand experience:

Then we had the Vice President himself, J. D. Vance, blathering on about aliens as well, but explaining that they're not visitations from intelligent extraterrestrials, they're actually demons from hell.

Because that makes ever so much more sense.

"I don’t think they’re aliens," Vance said, once again apparently in complete seriousness.  "I think they’re demons anyway, but that’s a long discussion.  When I came in, I was obsessed with the UFO files, and you start getting really busy worrying about the economy and national security, and things like that.  But I’ve still got three years left as vice president.  I have not been able to spend enough time on this to really understand it, but I am going to.  Trust me, I’m obsessed with this.  I’m more curious than anybody, and I’ve got three years of the very tippy top of the classification."

Sure, J. D.!  Whatever you say!  I bet you have a whole filing cabinet full of stuff labeled "Tippy-Top Secret"!

If all that weren't enough, enter Gregg Phillips, who has been tapped to lead FEMA's Office of Response and Recovery, claiming that he was once teleported to a Waffle House.

"I was with my boys one time, and I was telling them I was gonna go to Waffle House and get Waffle House," Phillips said.  "And I ended up at a Waffle House – this was in Georgia, and I end up at a Waffle House like fifty miles away from where I was.  And they said, ‘where are you?’ and I said, ‘a Waffle House.’  And: ‘a Waffle House where?’  And I said: ‘Waffle House in Rome, Georgia.’  And they said: ‘That’s not possible, how can you be at a Waffle House in Rome, Georgia, you just left here a moment ago.’  But it was possible.  It was real."

Or maybe he was just trying to beat a record for the number of times someone said "Waffle House" in one conversation.

I'll admit I've often wished we had Star Trek-style transporters, so I could do stuff like beam over to Tokyo for a nice sushi lunch every so often, but according to Phillips, it's not the joyride you might think.  "Teleporting is no fun," he said.  "You know it’s happening, but you can’t do anything about it, and so you just go, you just go with the ride.  And wow, what just an incredible adventure it all was."

Yeah, I'm sure it was, Gregg!  *backs slowly away, keeping my eyes on him at all times*  I hope you really enjoyed your waffles in the Waffle House in Rome, Georgia!  Waffle House Waffle House Waffle House!

*once there's enough distance between us, turns and runs like hell*

You know, this stuff would all be high comedy if these weren't the people currently influencing policy in the United States, people who have held (or are still holding) public office, and who have the amazingly-regenerated ear of Donald Trump.  And the scary part is that Trump, who is not exactly Rhodes Scholar material himself, is remarkably easy to sway as long as you stroke his bloated ego, which explains how certifiable wingnuts like RFK Jr. ended up in cabinet-level positions.

But it's not just him, of course.  The entire administration, and their hangers-on and cheerleaders and sycophants, appear to have completely lost the plot.

One of the criticisms of Joe Biden was that he appeared bland and boring -- people called him a "do-nothing" because most of what he accomplished wasn't accompanied by horns blaring and all-caps self-congratulatory posts on Truth Social.  But you know what?  I liked bland and boring.  I liked not having to worry when I turn on my laptop over my morning coffee what the latest lunatic pronouncements from Washington D. C. were going to be.  I would love it if we had leaders who just calmly, quietly, and intelligently did their jobs, instead of violent nutcakes like Pete Hegseth, who appears to believe it's his sacred duty to usher us into the End Times so that Jesus will come back, presumably wearing camo and toting an AR-15.

Deus vult, baby.

On the other hand, to go back to my starting point, I have to wonder... is any of this believable?  There's an element of surreality to the entire world right now that brings back to mind a comment I've made before; that maybe we're all in a computer simulation, and the aliens in charge have gotten drunk and/or stoned, and now they're just fucking with us. 

Or as Mark Twain put it, "The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to be believable."

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The absence of evidence

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:

1. 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."
2. 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."
3. 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*
4. 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.

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Counting to three

Because in the last ten years saying, "Well, things can't get any weirder" has been a losing proposition, now we have: Donald Trump telling us the United States federal government is going to go full disclosure on UFOs.

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.

...three.

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On the loosh

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.

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Gone in a flash

Sometimes being a skeptic means answering the question, "So what happened?" with the rather unsatisfying response, "We don't know and may never know."

That was my immediate reaction upon reading a report out of Argentina, over at the website Inexplicata. (Here are the links to part 1 and part 2 of the report.)  The gist of the story is as follows.

On Tuesday, November 15, a woman from the town of Jacinto Araúz went missing.  A search was launched in the area where she was last seen, but there were no traces -- no signs of a struggle, no note, no vehicle missing that she might have taken if she'd run away from home.  The search, in fact, turned up nothing.  Trained search dogs were brought in, and they easily picked up the woman's scent trail near her house, and then abruptly lost it after only 150 meters.  Neighbors said that there was no way she'd simply walked away -- her physical condition was poor, and a leisurely one-kilometer walk was enough to tire her out.

The mystery deepened when several relatives received messages from the woman's cellphone number, but the messages contained nothing but a mechanical buzzing noise and static.

Then, twenty-four hours later, she turned up again -- in Quinto Meridiano, sixty-five kilometers away.  She had a cut on her forehead, but otherwise was physically unharmed.

She seemed to be in a profound state of shock, however, and wasn't able to (or at least didn't) speak a word to authorities.  She was taken to a local hospital, where she wrote down what she claimed had happened to her.  She said that on Tuesday, she'd been in her house when she'd heard a noise.  She went outside, and there was a sudden, blinding flash of light.  When her vision cleared, she was in Quinto Meridiano -- with no apparent lapse of time.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Grelibre.net, Spectre Brocken, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The report, of course, made all the UFO aficionados start jumping up and down making excited little squeaking noises.  The area around Jacinto Araúz is a "hotspot," they said.  I saw a reference to the "Dorado Incident" in the report, but I wasn't able to find a good account of it; apparently it was some sort of UFO sighting twenty-odd years ago.  The report mentioned other sightings in the vicinity that have included spacecraft that landed, leaving scorch marks on the ground, and a "red-eyed creature" that has been seen more than once nearby.

But that's about all there is to the woman's story.  She's missing for a day, then turns up with a superficial injury, apparent emotional shock, and a strange tale of vanishing in a flash of light.

So what really happened?

Seems to me there are five possibilities:

• Her story is substantially true, and she was teleported (for want of a better word) from Jacinto Araúz to Quinto Meridiano more or less instantaneously by some unidentified, possibly extraterrestrial, agent.
• She's lying -- she made the whole thing up for her "fifteen minutes of fame."  She went to Quinto Meridiano by one of the usual means of transport, and invented the flash-of-light stuff.  The dogs lost her scent because that's the point at which she got in a car and drove (or was driven by an accomplice) away.  The phone calls with the buzzing noise were manufactured.
• She's mentally unbalanced, and got to Quinto Meridiano somehow but doesn't remember how.  Sixty-five kilometers would be a significant walk in twenty-four hours even for someone in good shape, but there's no reason she couldn't have hitchhiked.
• She was kidnapped -- knocked on the head (thus the injury on her forehead, and possibly explaining her perception of a flash of light), and then driven to Quinto Meridiano, where she was dumped by the kidnappers.
• The people who reported the story made it up, and the mysterious and unnamed woman doesn't even exist.

All of these explanations, however, leave some serious unresolved problems. In order:

• Instantaneous transport, or even something very close to it, seems to break just about every law of physics we know.
• This all seems like quite an ordeal to put oneself through just to give UFO enthusiasts multiple orgasms.  Not only do we have an apparently weak, unwell woman taking off for the next town for a day, but giving herself a deep cut on the forehead, for no other reason than to fool a bunch of people and worry the absolute shit out of her friends and family.
• If she is simply mentally ill, and hitched a ride from Jacinto Araúz to Quinto Meridiano, why hasn't anyone turned up saying that they'd seen her or given her a lift?  According to the sources, her disappearance was widely publicized -- it seems like someone would have reported seeing her.
• Why was she kidnapped?  There's no mention of her being robbed or raped.  It seems like there's a complete lack of any plausible motive for kidnapping.
• It's possible the story is made up from stem to stern, but there's been enough mention of it in other news sources (such as here and here), with enough details about which police departments were involved in the search, that if it was an out-and-out hoax, it would have been debunked by now.

As I asked before: so, what really happened?

The answer is: we don't know.  Perhaps more evidence will surface that will allow us to eliminate one or more of the explanations in the list, but given all we know at the moment, there's no way to narrow it down further.  We have to fall back on the ECREE principle -- extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence -- which would suggest that the supernatural/paranormal explanation (#1) is less likely than the natural ones (#2-#5), but "less likely" doesn't mean "impossible."

As I used to tell my Critical Thinking classes, you don't have to have an opinion about everything; being a skeptic means that in the absence of conclusive evidence, we have to accept the rather unsatisfying outcome that we need to hold making a conclusion in abeyance, perhaps forever.

So that's our exercise in frustration for the morning.  A peculiar story out of Argentina with no clear explanation.  It'd be nice if everything was neat and tidy and explicable, but we have to accept the fact that there are things we don't know -- and may never know.

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High strangeness in Warminster

Just about everyone has heard about the Roswell Incident, the 1947 discovery of military balloon debris near Roswell, New Mexico that gave rise to a million (and counting) conspiracy theories suggesting that the crash site had actually been pieces of a downed spacecraft, complete with the corpses of the alien crew.  But have you heard about the Warminster Thing?

It's a tale that's even weirder than Roswell, because (1) there were multiple witnesses who seem to have had no particular reason to lie, and (2) there's no good rational/non-alien-based explanation that I've ever heard.  This event got its start in December of 1964, near the town of Warminster, in Wiltshire, England.

Here are the basics of the claim.

In the wee hours of Christmas morning, a woman named Mildred Head was awakened by a strange noise coming from above.  It sounded like something was striking and/or dragging across her roof tiles.  "The night came alive with strange sounds lashing at [the] roof," she later reported.  "It sounded like twigs brushing against the tiles and got louder and louder until it reverberated like giant hailstones."  Alarmed, she got out of bed and went to the window, pulled the curtains, and looked outside.  There was no sign of hail (or any other form of precipitation).  But as she stood there, she heard another sound -- a "humming sound that grew louder, then faded to a faint whisper -- a low whistling or wheezing."

Her husband, who was deaf, slept through the entire thing.

At six o'clock that same morning, another woman, Marjorie Bye, was walking to the early Christmas service at Christ Church in Warminster when she also heard odd sounds.  At first it sounded like crackling, and she thought it might be a truck spreading grit on icy spots on the road.  But as she listened, the sound got nearer, passed over her head, and continued in the direction of Ludlow Close.  Like Mildred Head, Marjorie Bye heard a humming noise and a sound like "branches being pulled across gravel."  The night was clear and starlit, and she saw nothing even when the sounds seemed to be at their nearest.

But the incident wasn't over yet.  As she neared the church, she experienced what she later characterized as a "sonic attack."  "Sudden vibrations came overhead... Shockwaves pounded at my head, neck and shoulders. I felt I was being pinned down by invisible fingers of sound."

A similar report came from Warminster's postmaster, the unfortunately-named Roger Rump. He heard "a terrific clatter, as though the roof tiles were being pulled off by some tremendous force.  Then came a scrambling sound as if they were being loudly slammed back into place.  I could hear an odd humming tone.  It was most unusual.  It lasted no more than a minute."

All told, over thirty people in or near Warminster heard the noises, and the accounts all substantially agreed with each other.

Then, in March of the following year, the events started up again -- and intensified.

There were more reports of noises like rushing wind, something scraping against roof tiles, and loud booming sounds.  People reported flocks of birds being found dead.  "There was a great bouncing and bumping noise over our heads," one man reported.  "As though a load of stones was being tipped against the roof and the back wall of the bungalow.  It seemed like a tonne of coal were being emptied from sacks and sent tumbling over all the place."

This time, though, people began seeing things as well.

Patricia Philips, the wife of the vicar of Heytesbury, a village near Warminster, saw a "cigar-shaped object" in the sky that was visible long enough for her husband and all three children to watch it through binoculars.  Two months later, a woman named Kathleen Penton saw "a shining thing going along sideways in the sky.  Porthole-type windows ran the entire length of it.  It glided slowly in front of the downs…it was the size of a whole bedroom wall.  It was very much like a train carriage, only with rounded ends to it.  It did not travel lengthways but was gliding sideways."

By the end of summer, the incidents seemed to taper off, but not before one man -- Gordon Faulkner -- was able to photograph what he claimed was a UFO near Colloway Clump, north of Warminster:

By this time, a journalist named Arthur Shuttlewood had become obsessed with figuring out the answer to the mystery, and interviewed dozens of people who had strange experiences between December 1964 and August 1965.  He ended up with eight notebooks filled with accounts -- and no answers.

So, what's going on here?

There are a few possibilities, but I have to admit there's no particularly good reason to subscribe to any of them.  The first is that the noises were military equipment tests from the Land Warfare Center, a British Army training and development base near Warminster.  The military, of course, denied all knowledge of the source of the noises and (later) sightings, but if they were testing sonic weapons that were classified, there could well be another reason for that.

On the other hand, it's hard to imagine why the military would choose Christmas morning to test a sonic weapon near a town where fifteen thousand people live.

A second possibility is that Arthur Shuttlewood, the journalist who brought the whole story to light -- and who popularized it thereafter, eventually writing a book about the incidents -- exaggerated, or (perhaps) even spun from whole cloth, the lion's share of the "personal accounts."  Shuttlewood was never accused outright of falsifying evidence, but his colleagues at The Wiltshire Times said he was not above embellishing reports of local events "for dramatic effect."  It bears mention here that even if Shuttlewood started out fairly reliable, he kind of went off the rails later in life.  He reported telepathic communications, and even telephone calls, from "natives from the planet Aenstria" who were behind the whole thing.  They warned Shuttlewood of various dangers we were facing as a species, but said not to worry, because Christ would return in 1975 and fix everything.

Well, I was fifteen years old in 1975, and what stands out about that particular year is that there was no sign of the Second Coming, and everything is still as unfixed as it ever was.

In any case, Shuttlewood lived until 1996, swearing to the end that what he'd said was nothing less than the unvarnished truth.  (If you want to read Shuttlewood's own account of his interactions with the Aenstrians, you can check it out here.  I'll warn you, though -- don't expect to come away from it with an improved opinion of his veracity.)

So what we have here is another unfortunate case of a curious unexplained incident getting into the hands of someone who was either an obsessed attention seeker or completely unhinged, or both -- similar to what happened with the famous case of the haunting of Borley Rectory.  When this occurs, any evidence we may have had becomes tainted with misrepresentations and dubious additions from people who also want their fifteen minutes of fame, to the point that it becomes difficult to tell what is true, what is due to human suggestibility, and what is an outright fabrication.

Myself, I'm most inclined to credit the first few accounts as being the most credible, and the most in need of an explanation.  Mildred Head, Marjorie Bye, and Roger Rump, all of whom made their reports before the furor started, had no particular reason to make their stories up; in fact, Bye initially didn't want her name attached to it, until so many other people came forward that she figured it was safe.  

The later accounts, though -- and especially the infamous photograph taken by Gordon Faulkner -- are all too likely to be the result of people eager to jump on the bandwagon of what had by then become a nationally-reported incident.  That's not proof, I realize -- "they could be hoaxes" is a long way from "they are hoaxes" -- but at the very least, those later reports should be looked at through a (really) skeptical lens.

The "Warminster Thing" taken as a whole, though -- it's a curious story, but there's honestly not enough hard evidence there to make a certain determination about anything.  We have to leave it in the "unknown, and we probably will never know" category.  Maybe aliens did visit Wiltshire in 1964 and 1965.  Maybe they were even from "the planet Aenstria."  But at the moment, I'm much more confident that the incident -- whatever it was -- had some purely rational, and terrestrial, explanation.

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The rush to judgment

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?

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