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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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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