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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Jumping on the bandwagon

There's a peculiar twist on confirmation bias -- which is the tendency to accept without question poor or faulty evidence in favor of a claim we already believed in -- that is just as insidious.  I call it the bandwagon effect.  The gist is that once a sensational or outlandish claim has been made, there'll be a veritable tsunami of people offering up their own version of "yeah, I saw it, too!", often supported by factual evidence that (to borrow a line from the inimitable Dorothy Parker) "to call it wafer-thin is a grievous insult to wafer-makers."

The best example of this I've ever seen is the "Rendlesham Forest Incident," which has sometimes been called "Britain's Roswell."  It occurred in December of 1980 in a forested area between Woodbridge and Orford, Suffolk, England, and UFO aficionados are still discussing it lo unto this very day.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Simon Leatherdale, Supposed UFO landing site - Rendlesham Forest - geograph.org.uk - 263104, CC BY-SA 2.0]

Here are the facts of the case.

On 26 December 1980, U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt, working as part of an American unit stationed at the Royal Air Force Base at Woodbridge, saw lights descending into Rendlesham Forest.  He took some of his men to investigate the site where it appeared to land, and upon arrival saw "a glowing orb that was metallic in appearance with colored lights" that moved through the trees as they approached it.  Simultaneously, some animals on a nearby farm "went into a frenzy."  One of the servicemen who was with Halt called it "a craft of unknown origin."

Police were called in at around four A.M., and they found some burned and broken tree branches, and three small indentations in approximately an equilateral triangle.  They also found an increased radiation level, on the order of 0.03 milliroentgen per hour (for reference, that's a little more than the total from a typical dental x-ray, spread over an hour's time).

Halt revisited the site in the early hours of 28 December, and reported that he'd seen three point sources of light, two to the south and one to the north, that hovered about ten degrees above the horizon.  The brightest of these, he said, "beamed down a stream of light from time to time."

The incident was reported in the news -- and then the bandwagon effect kicked in.

There were several reports of domestic animals acting oddly, and one witness said he heard "a sound like a woman screaming."  Multiple people reported that they, too, had seen lights in the sky that night, and one person said what he'd seen "was so bright it could have been a lighthouse."  The USAF and RAF people at Woodbridge had their hands full over the next few weeks trying to figure out which of these accounts were true (if, perhaps, misinterpreted) and which were made up by folks who were simply trying to get in on the fun.

In the end, there was no further evidence uncovered.  So for something touted as "Britain's Roswell," we're left with... not much.

But what about Halt's testimony?

It seems likely that Halt himself was caught up on the bandwagon.  He did undoubtedly see something -- probably a meteor -- and after that, each subsequent piece of "evidence" simply added to his conviction that he'd witnessed something otherworldly.  The colored lights Halt and his men saw were probably the flashing warning lights of a distant police car; in fact, a U.S. security policeman working at Woodbridge, Kevin Conde, later confessed that he'd contributed his own bit to the confusion by driving through the forest in a police vehicle with modified lights. The indentations in the ground were found to be scrapes dug by rabbits.  The agitated domestic animals were simply because that happens when you have a lot of frightened people running around through farm pastures at night with flashlights.  The "hovering point sources of light" Halt saw when he revisited the site were almost certainly stars; the position of the brightest one he reported, in fact, corresponds to the location of Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky.

As far as the flashing light "so bright it could have been a lighthouse" -- that's because it was a lighthouse.  Specifically Orfordness Lighthouse, which is only about eight kilometers away and is easily visible from any high ground in the forest.

Brian Dunning, writing about the incident in Skeptoid in 2009, states:

Colonel Halt's thoroughness was commendable, but even he can be mistaken.  Without exception, everything he reported on his audiotape and in his written memo has a perfectly rational and unremarkable explanation...  All that remains is the tale that the men were debriefed and ordered never to mention the event, and warned that "bullets are cheap."  Well, as we've seen on television, the men all talk quite freely about it, and even Colonel Halt says that to this day nobody has ever debriefed him.  So this appears to be just another dramatic invention for television, perhaps from one of the men who have expanded their stories over the years.  When you examine each piece of evidence separately on its own merit, you avoid the trap of pattern matching and finding correlations where none exist.  The meteors had nothing to do with the lighthouse or the rabbit diggings, but when you hear all three stories told together, it's easy to conclude (as did the airmen) that the light overhead became an alien spacecraft in the forest.  Always remember: Separate pieces of poor evidence don't aggregate together into a single piece of good evidence.

Which is it exactly.  But unfortunately, human nature is such that once the ball starts rolling, it's hard to stop -- and there are all too many people who are eager to contribute their own little push to keep it accelerating.

As I've said many times before, no one would be happier than me if we got unequivocal evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial life, at least until one of them decides to vaporize me with their laser pistol.  But unfortunately, Rendlesham just isn't doing it for me.  I tend to be very much in Neil deGrasse Tyson's camp when he says that as good skeptics, we need something more than "you saw it."  "Next time you're abducted," he said, "grab something from the spaceship and bring it back.  Then we can talk.  Because anything of extraterrestrial manufacture, that has crossed interstellar space, is gonna be interesting."

But until then, we'll just have to keep waiting.  And always, guard as well as we can against the inevitable biases that all humans are prone to.  Because sometimes -- unfortunately -- a lighthouse is just a lighthouse.

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Crying wolf

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Ancient UFOs

One argument against UFOs being alien visitors from other star systems is that the number of UFO sightings has risen in direct proportion to our knowledge and awareness that there are other star systems -- suggesting that they're largely a combination of overactive imagination and misinterpreting natural phenomenon (or such human-made creations as satellites and military aircraft).  The whole UFO craze, in fact, really took off during the 1940s and 1950s, when our scientific knowledge of space was accelerating rapidly.

And unsurprisingly, this was also when science fiction tropes in fiction really caught on in a big way.

Prior to the Enlightenment, the conventional wisdom in the Western World was that the skies were the domain of God and the angels, and as such were ceaseless and changeless.  (Which is why such transient phenomena as comets and novae got everyone's knickers in a twist.)  The planets weren't even considered to be places, as such; they were manifestations of powers or forces.  And if you think all that, there's no particular reason you'd look up and expect to see visitors from there, right?

So what we see, perhaps, turns out to be what we expected to see.

But it turns out that a handful of very peculiar UFO-ish incidents do come from the pre-technological world.  Now, I'm not saying any of these are actual extraterrestrial visitations, mind you; I still very much come down on the side of there being natural, no-aliens-required explanations for these phenomena.  But the fact remains that they're interesting accounts, even so.

Let's start with one observed in the days of the Roman Republic.  In 73 B.C.E., Rome was involved in the Third Mithridatic War against King Mithridates VI Eupator of Pontus and his allies.  The Roman senator Lucius Licinius Lucullus was charged with overseeing the war effort, and had decided to engage the Pontic army near Nicaea despite being outnumbered.  But then -- according to Plutarch -- the following happened:

But presently, as they were on the point of joining battle, with no apparent change of weather, but all on a sudden, the sky burst asunder, and a huge, flame-like body was seen to fall between the two armies.  In shape, it was most like a wine-jar (pithos), and in color, like molten silver.  Both sides were astonished at the sight, and separated. This marvel, as they say, occurred in Phrygia, at a place called Otryae.

Understandably, both sides decided this was an omen worth paying attention to, and called off the battle.  (I guess there was no indication of who the omen was against, so they both decided to play it safe.)  The delay didn't help Mithridates, ultimately; the Romans under Lucullus went on to fight on another day when there were fewer flaming wine-jars in the sky, and Pontus was resoundingly defeated.

So, what was this apparition?

Well, the likeliest answer is that it was a bolide -- a meteor that bursts in midair.  It's understandable how in those highly superstitious times, when omens were detected even in the entrails of slaughtered animals, such an occurrence would have sparked quite a reaction.

An even stranger one is the tale of the "Airship of Clonmacnoise," an account of a sighting that occurred in around 740 C.E. near Teltown, in County Meath, Ireland.  Here, the problem is sorting out what people actually saw from later embellishments.  The earliest versions of this story simply state that several "flying ships with their crews" were seen in the skies, but very quickly it grew by accretion.  In later iterations, the multiple ships coalesced into a single huge one, which was halted over the Abbey of Clonmacnoise when its anchor snagged on the roof of the abbey church.  A "sky sailor" climbed down a rope ladder to free it (shades of the Goblin Ship in the most recent episode of Doctor Who!), and told the astonished monks he was "in danger of drowning in the thicker air of this lower world."

Here's an account from thirteenth century monk and scholar Gervase of Tilbury:

The people were amazed, and while they discussed it among themselves, they saw the rope move as if [the crew] were struggling to free the anchor.  When it would not budge for all their tugging, a voice was heard in the thick air, like the clamor of sailors vying to recover the thrown anchor.  Nor was it long until, hope in the effectiveness of exertion having been exhausted, the sailors sent down one of themselves – who, as we have heard, dangling from the anchor rope, came down it hand over hand.  When he was about to disengage the anchor, he was seized by bystanders: he gasped in the hands of his captors like a man lost in a shipwreck, and died suffocated in the moisture of our thicker air.  But the sailors overhead, surmising that their comrade had drowned, cut the anchor rope after having waited for an hour, and sailed away leaving the anchor.

Of course, it's worth mentioning that by now the scene of the incident had shifted to London, because there's no way a good Englishman like Gervase could let such an exciting tale take place in a remote spot like central Ireland.

This one is probably just a tall tale -- although I do find the bit about the air down here being "thicker" curious, because that certainly wasn't widespread knowledge back then.

Then we have the events of the morning of April 14, 1561, when "many men and women of Nuremberg" witnessed something very peculiar.  The incident caught enough attention to be written up in a widely-circulated broadsheet the following week.  Here's how it was described by the witnesses:

In the morning of April 14, 1561, at daybreak, between 4 and 5 a.m., a dreadful apparition occurred on the Sun, and then this was seen in Nuremberg in the city, before the gates and in the country – by many men and women.  At first there appeared in the middle of the Sun two blood-red semi-circular arcs, just like the Moon in its last quarter.  And in the Sun, above and below and on both sides, the color was blood, there stood a round ball of partly dull, partly black ferrous color.  Likewise there stood on both sides and as a torus about the Sun such blood-red ones and other balls in large number, about three in a line and four in a square, also some alone.  In between these globes there were visible a few blood-red crosses, between which there were blood-red strips, becoming thicker to the rear and in the front malleable like the rods of reed-grass, which were intermingled, among them two big rods, one on the right, the other to the left, and within the small and big rods there were three, also four and more globes.  These all started to fight among themselves, so that the globes, which were first in the Sun, flew out to the ones standing on both sides, thereafter, the globes standing outside the Sun, in the small and large rods, flew into the Sun.  Besides the globes flew back and forth among themselves and fought vehemently with each other for over an hour.  And when the conflict in and again out of the Sun was most intense, they became fatigued to such an extent that they all, as said above, fell from the Sun down upon the Earth 'as if they all burned' and they then wasted away on the Earth with immense smoke.  After all this there was something like a black spear, very long and thick, sighted; the shaft pointed to the east, the point pointed west.

Like the apparition that stopped the Roman/Pontic battle, this was interpreted as an omen -- in this case, that God was even more pissed off than usual, and everyone should immediately repent and promise not to be naughty hereafter.  So once again, everyone interpreted what they saw based on their cultural context -- which, honestly, is pretty universal.  But from a more scientific standpoint, what the hell was this?  

An illustrated news notice from April 1561, showing a drawing of the phenomenon [Image is in the Public Domain]

Unlike the Airship of Clonmacnoise (or Teltown or London or wherever they finally decided it happened), it's hard to dismiss this one as a tall tale.  The accounts are numerous, detailed, and -- most important, from a scientific standpoint -- all agree substantially with each other.  Skeptic Jason Colavito says that he believes the account is consistent with the atmospheric phenomenon called sun dogs, in which high-atmosphere ice crystals cause light refraction when the Sun is low in the sky, creating two bright spots (sometimes with a rainbow sheen, and often with a partial or complete halo) on either side of the Sun.

The problem is, I've seen many sun dogs, and nothing about them moves -- they can be kind of eerie, but they just hover near the horizon and eventually fade.  I've never seen a sun dog that "fell from the Sun down upon the Earth and then wasted away with immense smoke."  So for me, this one is in the "unknown" column.

Perhaps the strangest of all is the event that happened in February of 1803 in the Hitachi Province of the east coast of Japan.  Called Utsuro-bune (虚舟, hollow boat) the story was recorded in at least four separate written accounts.  The story goes that fishermen saw a strange object drifting in the ocean, and upon approaching it, found that it was a peculiar vessel "shaped like an incense burner," about 3.3 meters tall by 5.5 meters wide.  They said that the top half was "the color of lacquered rosewood," with windows made of glass or crystal, and the bottom half made of metal plates.  They towed it to land, and found that inside was a very small (but apparently adult) woman, only about 1.5 meters tall, with pale pink skin and red hair with white tips.  She spoke to them in some strange language, and could neither speak nor understand Japanese.  She clutched a rectangular metal box covered with strange inscriptions, and wouldn't let anyone touch it.

A drawing of the Utsuro-bune by Nagahashi Matajirou, ca. 1844 [Image is in the Public Domain]

Understandably, everyone in the area was pretty freaked out by this.  After numerous unsuccessful attempts to communicate with her, or at least see what was inside the box, they gave up and decided she was too creepy to keep around.  Ultimately, they put her back into her strange vessel, towed it back out to sea, and let it drift away.

UFO aficionados naturally are predisposed to interpret this as a Close Encounter with an alien.  Certainly her odd appearance and tiny size make that explanation jump to mind.  But can we infer anything more solid from it?

The story itself is strangely open-ended -- they never find out anything more about their weird visitor, and ultimately send her back to her dismal fate in the ocean.  It hasn't the tall-tale aspects of the Clonmacnoise Airship story, nor the obvious astronomical explanation of the flaming wine-jars over Nicaea.  Some have suggested that she was simply some poor soul -- possibly Russian or western European -- who had been cast adrift.  Unfortunately, no one thought to copy the odd symbols inscribed on the metal plates of her craft; at least that'd give us information about whether we're talking about an object of terrestrial manufacture, or something more exotic.

Like the Nuremberg incident, this one was widely-enough recorded that it's hard to dismiss it entirely as a myth.  But who the woman was, and where she'd come from, are still a mystery and probably always will be.

So there are four old tales that are widely touted in UFOlogical circles as evidence of visitation.  Predictably, I'm not convinced, although I have to admit they're curious stories.  But my reaction is tempered by the fact that "it's a peculiar tale" isn't enough to append, "... so it must be aliens."  Before we jump to a supernatural or paranormal explanation, it's critical to rule out the natural and normal explanations first -- and, critically, to determine if there's even enough hard evidence to draw a conclusion.

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The train to CrazyTown

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

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

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

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

[Image is in the Public Domain]

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

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

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

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

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

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The wolves of Skinwalker Ranch

One of the problems that crops up in discussions of cryptids is that a lot of people consistently fall back on arguments based upon the number of alleged sightings.  "It's been seen hundreds of times," they'll say.  "It's got to be real.  All those sightings can't be wrong."

This argument is backwards, and the reason why has to do with a misunderstanding of statistics.  Let's consider two species, a common one and an extremely rare one.  It's no stretch to assume that the common one should be sighted more often than the rare one.  But you'd also surmise that if you set out to do so, hard evidence of the common one should be way easier to come by.  If you set out traps, you should catch more of the common one than the rare one.

So far, nothing very surprising.

A cryptid -- or, in fact, any paranormal phenomenon -- with more anecdotal reports should also leave behind more in the way of hard evidence.  If the Omaha Weasel Man has only ever been seen once, okay, maybe it's not so surprising we don't have any proof of his existence.  But if there are hundreds, or even thousands, of sightings, shouldn't there be something in the way of scientifically-admissible evidence?  A bone, a tuft of hair with DNA not from any known species, something?

Zero hard evidence along with lots of anecdotal reports strongly suggests a different answer -- gullibility, misinterpretation of what witnesses have seen or heard, or outright fraud.

Which brings us to the infamous Skinwalker Ranch.

The Skinwalker Ranch is a 512-acre plot of land in a remote region of Uintah County, Utah.  It gets its name from the Navajo legend of the yee naaldlooshii (which translates to "it goes on all fours"), which is an evil magician who can take the shape of a non-human animal at will.

Skinwalker Ranch has been the site of literally hundreds of bizarre claims, including:

• UFOs (lots of these)
• vanished or mutilated cattle
• glowing orbs hovering over the ground/"ball lightning"
• invisible objects emitting sparks and powerful magnetic fields
• large animals with glowing red eyes that are alleged to be unharmed by gunfire

The last one is what gave the place its name, and comes along with a legend of uncertain provenance -- that the Navajo who lived there were attacked and enslaved by Ute warriors, and the Navajo cursed the place, saying whoever settled there afterward would be plagued by an evil spirit who could take the form of a wolf.  Several successions of modern owners of the property have claimed to have seen this thing, most notably Gwen and Terry Sherman and their family, who owned it from 1994 to 1996, and Robert Bigelow, who bought it from the Shermans in 1996 and owned it until 2016.  The Shermans are the first ones who made a big deal about bizarre happenings on the place, including seeing strange, wolf-like animals, and a sighting of an "orb filled with a glowing blue fluid" that supposedly killed three of their dogs.  Bigelow, a prominent businessman, is deeply interested in UFOs and other sketchy phenomena, and bought the ranch because of the Shermans' stories; he can be credited with bringing the site to national attention.

So, naturally, people have tried to figure out what's going on there, with some of the more scientifically-minded saying that the strange animal sightings, at least, have a natural explanation -- they're a surviving population of dire wolves (Aenocyon dirus).  There are two problems with this, of increasing difficulty: first, that the most recent dated remains of dire wolves is from almost ten thousand years ago, and second, if there is an extant population somewhere in the Uintah Basin, they've left exactly zero evidence.

Artist's reconstruction of a dire wolf [Image is in the Public Domain]

In fact, that last bit is the sticking point about Skinwalker Ranch in general.  Robert Bigelow founded a group he called the National Institute for Discovery Science, whose sole raison d'être was to find evidence for claims of the paranormal, and after a long investigation of the claims from Skinwalker Ranch, they concluded -- and this is a direct quote -- they had "difficulty obtaining evidence consistent with scientific publication."

Which is a euphemism for "we found fuck-all in the way of proof."

So the problem here is, we have a place that -- to listen to the hype -- has UFOs out the wazoo, strange meteorological phenomena, and wild animal sightings that are (depending on who you believe) something like a werewolf, or a ten-thousand-year prehistoric holdover.  And despite all that, there has not been a single piece, not the tiniest shred, of hard evidence.  To me that argues strongly that the whole thing is a publicity stunt.  It may well have started out with some odd observations that were misinterpreted -- the Shermans certainly seem to have been earnest enough -- but after Bigelow got involved, it's become one tactic after another to keep people's attention on the place.  UFOlogist Barry Greenwood, who investigated the ranch earlier this year and also came up empty-handed, said Bigelow was "always in the business of selling belief and hope."

Belief and hope aren't the only things he's selling.  It's telling that in 2020, Bigelow, filed for -- and was approved for -- a trademark on the Skinwalker Ranch name, for the purpose of "providing recreation facilities; entertainment services, namely, creation, development, production, and distribution of multimedia content, internet content, motion pictures, and television shows...  cups and mugs, shirts and short-sleeved shirts, sports caps and hats."

Gullibility is, as always, big business.

So once again, we're faced with the difficulty that just the sheer quantity of anecdotal reports doesn't mean there's anything real behind it; in fact, without hard evidence, it can actually argue for the opposite.  The wolves of Skinwalker Ranch are very likely to be nonexistent.  As much as I, like Fox Mulder, "want to believe," this one appears to be a non-starter as anything but a way to make money.

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The aliens of Mexico

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The first step

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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