A map from the home world

One of the most persistent -- dare I say, canonical -- stories of alien abduction is the tale of Betty and Barney Hill.

The gist of the story is that the Hills, a couple from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, were driving home from their vacation in September of 1961, and near Franconia Notch, New Hampshire they saw a UFO that seemed to be following them.  After observing it for a while, including through binoculars, they experienced a "time-slip," and found themselves back home without any memory of how they'd gotten there.  The following day, they noticed some oddities -- Barney's new dress shoes were scuffed, the leather strap on his binoculars was broken, neither of their watches worked, and there were several shiny concentric marks on the hood of their car.

They were puzzled, but no explanation seemed forthcoming, so they forgot about it, until Betty started to have dreams about being aboard a spacecraft.  This eventually led to some hypnosis sessions in which both of them claimed to have suppressed memories of being abducted and examined (our lore about aliens doing, shall we say, rather intimate examination of abducted humans comes largely from Barney's claims under hypnosis).

All of this would be nothing more than your usual Close Encounter story -- lots of wild claims, nothing in the way of hard evidence -- if it weren't for one thing that Betty revealed.  While she was on the spaceship, she said, she was shown a star map that had the aliens' home world and various other star systems with lines between them showing "trade routes."  She attempted to reconstruct a two-dimensional drawing (she said the map she'd been shown was three-dimensional), and here's what she drew:

Now, potentially, this could be interesting.  One of the more eye-opening things I learned when I was a teenager watching the original Cosmos series was that the constellations in our night sky only seem 2-D from our perspective, but there's actually a third dimension -- depth -- that we can't see from Earth.  If you add that third dimension, it becomes obvious that what we call "constellations" are actually random assemblages of stars that only seem near each other from our perspective, but are actually at greatly varying distances from us.  This means that if they were observed from a different vantage point, the constellations would look nothing like they do here at home -- and in fact, many of the stars that appear to be close together would be widely separated in the sky. 

One of the coolest animations from the series was looking at the stars of the Big Dipper, first as we see it from the Earth, then making a huge circle around it.  It doesn't take much of a difference in angle to make it look nothing at all like the Big Dipper.  Here's the constellation as it's seen from Earth, and the same stars as viewed after a ninety-degree revolution around the star in the lower left corner:

So if Betty Hill's recollection of the alien star map was real, then it'd be pretty convincing -- because the aliens presumably would have drawn the stars from the perspective of their home star system, not ours.  This would be mighty hard to fake now, much less 58 years ago.  So the race was on to try and figure out whether the map Betty Hill drew conformed to any known configuration of stars as viewed from somewhere else in the galaxy.

The person whose answer is the most commonly accepted by UFO enthusiasts is Marjorie Fish, who identified the home world of the aliens as Zeta Reticuli (thus kicking off all of the claims that the Annunaki, the "Greys," and various other superintelligent species have come here from that star system).  Starting from that star, Fish said, there are nearby stars that could represent the ones on the Hill map.

Which brings up the problems with the claim.

Recall that the map is the only hard evidence -- if you can call it that -- to come out of the Hill story.  Brian Dunning, of the brilliant blog Skeptoid, is critical of the claim right from the get-go:

Several years [after the alleged abduction], a schoolteacher named Marjorie Fish read a book about the Hills.  She then took beads and strings and converted her living room into a three dimensional version of the galaxy based on the 1969 Gliese Star Catalog.  She then spent several years viewing her galaxy from different angles, trying to find a match for Betty's map, and eventually concluded that Zeta Reticuli was the alien homeworld.  Other UFOlogists have proposed innumerable different interpretations.  Carl Sagan and other astronomers have said that it is not even a good match for Zeta Reticuli, and that Betty's drawing is far too random and imprecise to make any kind of useful interpretation.  With its third dimension removed, Betty's map cannot contain any useful positional information.  Even if she had somehow drawn a perfect 3D map that did exactly align with known star positions, it still wouldn't be evidence of anything other than that such reference material is widely available, in sources like the Gliese Star Catalog.

The problem runs deeper than that, though.  Long-time readers of Skeptophilia may recall a piece I did a while back on ley lines -- the idea that there are towns and sacred sites that are aligned because there are "energy currents" beneath the ground that flow in straight lines, and were why the ancients chose to build on those specific sites.  The trouble is (as my post describes), in any arrangement of random dots, you can find strings of dots that are close to falling in a straight line, just by random chance.  No "energy currents" required.

Here, the difficulty is magnified by the fact that we don't just have a couple of hundred dots (or, in this case, stars) to choose from, but tens of thousands, and that's just counting the relatively nearby ones.  Also, they're not on a flat surface, as with the ley lines; they're in a three-dimensional grid, which you're allowed to look at from any perspective you want to.

If those were Marjorie Fish's constraints, it's actually astonishing that she took years to find a group of stars that matched Betty Hill's map.

We're pattern-finding animals, we humans.  As with pareidolia -- our capacity for seeing faces in inanimate objects like clouds, walls, and grilled-cheese sandwiches -- if there's no pattern there, our brains will often invent one.  Add to that confirmation bias and just plain wishful thinking, and it's not hard to see that the Hill map -- still considered the best evidence for the Hills' story -- is actually not much in the way of evidence at all.

Allow me to emphasize that I'm not saying Betty and Barney Hill weren't abducted.  It's just that -- to end with a quote from Neil DeGrasse Tyson -- "As a scientist, I need more than 'you saw it...'  If you have an actual object taken from a spacecraft, though, you'll have something of alien manufacture, and anything that has crossed interstellar space to get to Earth is going to be interesting.  So show me an object you've taken from the spaceship, and then we can talk."

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A map from the home world

One of the most persistent -- dare I say, canonical -- stories of alien abduction is the tale of Betty and Barney Hill.

The gist of the story is that the Hills, a couple from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, were driving home from their vacation in September of 1961, and near Franconia Notch, New Hampshire they saw a UFO that seemed to be following them.  After observing it for a while, including through binoculars, they experienced a time-slip -- they found themselves back home without any memory of how they'd gotten there.  The following day, they noticed some oddities -- Barney's new dress shoes were scuffed, the leather strap on his binoculars was broken, neither of their watches worked, and there were several shiny concentric marks on the hood of their car.

They were puzzled, but no explanation seemed forthcoming, so they forgot about it -- until Betty started to have dreams about being aboard a spacecraft.  This eventually led to some hypnosis sessions in which both of them claimed to have suppressed memories of being abducted and examined (our lore about aliens doing, shall we say, rather intimate examination of abducted humans comes largely from Barney's claims under hypnosis).

All of this would be nothing more than your usual Close Encounter story -- lots of wild claims, nothing in the way of hard evidence -- if it weren't for one thing that Betty revealed.  While she was on the spaceship, she said, she was shown a star map that had the aliens' home world and various other star systems with lines between them showing "trade routes."  She attempted to reconstruct a two-dimensional drawing (she said the map she'd been shown was three-dimensional), and here's what she drew:

Now, potentially, this could be interesting.  One of the more eye-opening things I learned when I was a teenager watching the original Cosmos series was that the constellations in our night sky only seem 2-D from our perspective, but there's actually a third dimension -- depth -- that we can't see from Earth.  If you add that third dimension, it becomes obvious that what we call "constellations" are actually random assemblages of stars that only seem near each other from our perspective, but are actually at greatly varying distances from us.  This means that if they were observed from a different vantage point the constellations would look nothing like they do here at home, and in fact, many of the stars that appear to be close together would be widely separated in the sky.  (One of the coolest animations from the series was looking at the stars of the Big Dipper, first from the Earth, then making a huge circle around it -- it doesn't take much of a difference in angle to make it look nothing at all like the Big Dipper.)

So if Betty Hill's recollection of the alien star map was real, then it'd be pretty convincing -- because the aliens presumably would have drawn the stars from the perspective of their home star system, not ours.  This would be mighty hard to fake now, much less 58 years ago.  So the race was on to try and figure out whether the map Betty Hill drew conformed to any known configuration of stars as viewed from somewhere else in the galaxy.

The person whose answer is the most commonly accepted by UFO enthusiasts is Marjorie Fish, who identified the home world of the aliens as Zeta Reticuli (thus kicking off all of the claims that the Annunaki, the "Greys," and various other superintelligent species have come here from that star system).  Starting from that star, Fish said, there are nearby stars that could represent the ones on the Hill map.

Which brings up the problems with the claim.

Recall that the map is the only hard evidence -- if you can call it that -- to come out of the Hill story.  Brian Dunning, of the brilliant blog Skeptoid, is critical of the claim right from the get-go:

Several years [after the alleged abduction], a schoolteacher named Marjorie Fish read a book about the Hills.  She then took beads and strings and converted her living room into a three dimensional version of the galaxy based on the 1969 Gliese Star Catalog.  She then spent several years viewing her galaxy from different angles, trying to find a match for Betty's map, and eventually concluded that Zeta Reticuli was the alien homeworld.  Other UFOlogists have proposed innumerable different interpretations.  Carl Sagan and other astronomers have said that it is not even a good match for Zeta Reticuli, and that Betty's drawing is far too random and imprecise to make any kind of useful interpretation.  With its third dimension removed, Betty's map cannot contain any useful positional information.  Even if she had somehow drawn a perfect 3D map that did exactly align with known star positions, it still wouldn't be evidence of anything other than that such reference material is widely available, in sources like the Gliese Star Catalog.

The problem runs deeper than that, though.  Long-time readers of Skeptophilia may recall a piece I did a while back on ley lines -- the idea that there are towns and sacred sites that are aligned because there are "energy currents" beneath the ground that flow in straight lines, and were the why the ancients chose to build on those specific sites.  The trouble is (as my post describes), in any arrangement of random dots, you can find strings of dots that are close to falling in a straight line, just by random chance.  No "energy currents" required.

Here, the difficulty is magnified by the fact that we don't just have a couple of hundred dots (or, in this case, stars), but tens of thousands, and that's just counting the relatively nearby ones.  Also, they're not on a flat surface, as with the ley lines; they're in a three-dimensional grid, which you're allowed to look at from any perspective you want to.

If those are were Marjorie Fish's constraints, it's actually astonishing that she took years to find a group of stars that matched Betty Hill's map.

We're pattern-finding animals, we humans.  As with pareidolia -- our capacity for seeing faces in inanimate objects like clouds, walls, and grilled-cheese sandwiches -- if there's no pattern there, our brains will often invent one.  Add to that confirmation bias and just plain wishful thinking, and it's not hard to see that the Hill map -- still considered the best evidence for the Hills' story -- is actually not much in the way of evidence at all.

Allow me to emphasize that I'm not saying Betty and Barney Hill weren't abducted.  It's just that -- to end with quote Neil DeGrasse Tyson -- "As a scientist, I need more than 'you saw it...'  If you have an actual object taken from a spacecraft, though, you'll have something of alien manufacture, and anything that has crossed interstellar space to get to Earth is going to be interesting.  So show me an object you've taken from the spaceship, and then we can talk."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic, and is pure fun: Man Meets Dog by the eminent Austrian zoologist and ethologist Konrad Lorenz.  In it, he looks at every facet of the human/canine relationship, and -- if you're like me -- you'll more than once burst out laughing and say, "Yeah, my dog does that all the time!"

It must be said that (as the book was originally written in 1949) some of what he says about the origins of dogs has been superseded by better information from genetic analysis that was unavailable in Lorenz's time, but most of the rest of his Doggy Psychological Treatise still stands.  And in any case, you'll learn something about how and why your pooches behave the way they do -- and along the way, a bit about human behavior, too.

[Note: If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

A Comprehensive Field Guide to Aliens

(One of a series of reposts, for your enjoyment while I'm on vacation.  First posted in May 2011.)

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That people believe all sorts of weird things without any hard evidence is so obvious as to barely merit saying.  What never fails to astound me, however, is how complex some of these beliefs are.

Witness the website that a student of mine was kind enough to send me, which gives information about all of the different alien races that are currently visiting Earth.  Me, I thought there were only a couple -- the bug-eyed gray guys featured on various historical documentaries (for example, The X Files and Close Encounters of the Third Kind), and the shapeshifting reptilian dudes called the Annunaki that are the favorites of conspiracy theorists.  These last have supposedly infiltrated world governments, and many prominent human leaders have been replaced by heartless, cold-blooded scaly extraterrestrials, bent on world domination.  Apparently the trained eye can still recognize which are the real humans, and which are the Annunaki replacements.  Personally, I'm suspicious about Dick Cheney.  Doesn't he look a little like someone who has only recently learned the rule, "when you smile, raise your lips and expose your teeth," and still can't quite manage to make it look authentic?

In any case, imagine my surprise when I learned that the bug-eyed gray aliens and the Annunaki are only two of a whole petting zoo's worth of different alien species.  And I'm not talking about your typical Star Trek type alien, who looks like a guy speaking in a fake Russian accent while wearing a rubber alien nose.  I'm talking some serious non-humans here.

For example, consider the Arcturians.  These guys are only three feet tall, but are super-powerful, telekinetic aliens with turquoise skin, enormous almond-shaped eyes that are entirely glossy black, and only three fingers per hand.  Visiting Earth is rough for the Arcturians because "Earth's vibrational energy is harmful to their fifth-dimensional frequency."  Whatever that means.  But that's apparently why you see so few of them around.

Then, there are the Dracos, who hail from, amazingly enough, the constellation Draco.  Even more coincidentally, they look kind of like dragons.  While I was reading this, I started talking to my computer.  "You... you can't be... from a CONSTELLATION!" I yelled, alarming my neurotic border collie, Doolin, who began to pace around and look for something to feel guilty about.  "A constellation is a random assemblage of stars!  And Draco only looks vaguely like a dragon if you see it from this vantage point!  From somewhere else in space, it would look ENTIRELY DIFFERENT!"  Then I had to go get a cup of coffee and calm down for a while.  So perhaps we should just move on.

Then there are the Els, or Anakim, which is a race of giant red-haired humanoids, who "ran the Garden of Eden" and built the pyramids.  And when I say "giant," I do mean seriously height-enhanced.  Some of them, this website claims, were 250 feet tall.  The description of the history of the Els on this website runs to several pages, and I won't even attempt to summarize it, except to mention that it involves Scotland, the Jews, the Templars, the Merovingians, L. Ron Hubbard, the Masons, J. R. R. Tolkien, the Three Wise Men, and clams.  It's worth reading.  I recommend doing it while drinking single-malt scotch.

Then we have the Ikels, which are like little hairy humans with cloven feet.  The Ciakars, or Mothmen, one of whom was featured in the historical documentary Godzilla vs. Mothra.  The Pleaidians.  The Hyadeans.  The Cetians.  The Orions.  The Lyrans.  The Weasel-People of Wahoonie-3.

Okay, I made the last one up.  But really... it's no weirder than their actual claims.  The people who wrote this website obviously believe it all; it has none of the hallmarks of a spoof.  It's full of links to pages describing how various malevolent aliens are plotting to take over Earth, with intricate details of which alien races are in league with which, who might tentatively be on our side, which ones have already established bases on Earth, and so on.  You  have to wonder if the people responsible for this are simply paranoid and delusional -- which, as a mental illness, I can have some sympathy for -- or if they are making the whole thing up to see how many people they can bamboozle.  (Speaking of L. Ron Hubbard...)

Sad to say, I've known people who actually believed in alien conspiracies, so the idea of someone falling for this nonsense is not as outlandish as it may seem.  And as I've commented before, once you've accepted that there's a Big Scary Evil Conspiracy, everything afterwards is seen through that lens.  My attempts to convince the alien believers that what they were claiming was complete horse waste were met with very little success.  In fact, afterwards, I sort of sensed that they acted a little suspicious of me -- as if my arguing with them just proved that I was in alliance with the aliens.

Or maybe... that I AM an alien!!!

I wonder which kind I am?  I don't want to be a little turquoise guy, and the reptilians are becoming a little passé, frankly.  Maybe I could be a Horlock, which are sort of like the Men in Black.  I look good in black.  Besides, they can disappear at will, and alter people's memories, which seem like pretty damn cool superpowers to have.

Blond aliens, etheric bodies, and sentient spaceships

In the past few posts, we've dealt with issues like Siri predicting the Apocalypse, Noah's Ark has been found but the government is hiding it from us, elves are blocking a highway project in Iceland, and Catholic leaders determining that angels don't have wings.  Today, we look at an even more pressing issue:

Are tall blond aliens invading Australia?

The question comes up because of a post on the amazingly wacky site Pararational called, and I am not making this title up, "Albino Extraterrestrials in Australia."  In it, we hear about an encounter between a man in an undisclosed location in Australia and some aliens who were, to say the least, peculiar:

A few nights ago I was standing on my balcony at around 2:30 to 3 in the morning.  I usually go out there around that time each night just to look at the stars for a few minutes before going to bed.  That night however, out over the neighbourhood on a foresty mountain just a couple blocks away, I saw this light in the trees.  It was a very bright white sort of pulsing glow, not bright in that it was blinding but bright in that it seemed to light the trees like daylight but pulsing really slowly...  after a couple of minutes or so a glowing white ball looking thing started to slowly rise above the trees. it was very bright but not blinding like the sun or anything...

I got in my car and drove around the block down to where the forest starts and I got out and walked into the forest.  I couldn’t hear anything but I could see the general direction which the light was coming from.

I followed it until another of those balls came into view. I was probably about 30m away when I could suddenly see silhouettes walking around past the ball up ahead. I tried to get closer but I couldn’t will myself to move. A really kind sounding voice from behind me said “do not be afraid” and then suddenly I was able to move again which caused me to fall face first into the ground.

I rolled over and standing over me was a very tall man with long white blond hair and very pale skin wearing what looked like a white onesey, all fluffy looking...  He leaned over and helped me up and that’s when I noticed something really freaky. on either side of his neck was a small but long slit that moved when he breathed.  It kinda looked like gills on a fish but it was just one slit on each side. this man helped me up off the ground and lead me over to where this floating ball was.

So, let's see... thus far, we've got a tall albino alien, with gills, wearing what amounts to fluffy footed pajamas.  It couldn't get any weirder, right?

…around this ball were several smallish people wearing black hooded robes and holding long metal rods, sort of like a staff or walking stick. They sort of reminded me of grim reapers with a walking stick instead of a scythe.

The man was calming yet he looked really freaky, especially the gill things he had. The hooded people never showed their faces which was pretty scary looking. Made me think it was some sort of satanic cult or something but the tall man was able to paralyze me without touching me at all and I don’t know how he did that.

And the tall albino in pajamas was surrounded by midgets dressed up like the Grim Reaper.  Got it.

After receiving this report, the people over at Pararational decided to do what any sane individual would do, on reading a story like this; they immediately tried to figure out which race of aliens these assorted weirdos represent:

So the question now is what exactly what race of extraterrestrials did this man encounter in Australia?  What race was this alien, and what is up with the shorter minions?   Sounds reminiscent of the Grey Aliens and their taller and shorter members...  (A) “Very tall man with long white blond hair and very pale skin.”  This sounds very much like some descriptions of the Annunaki.  Are they back to check up on us?

If you're curious, the dude on the right is what the Mesopotamians meant by "Annunaki."  No gills, no long blond hair, and no (thank heaven) footed pajamas.  [image courtesy of George Lazenby and the Wikimedia Commons]

Which leads us to another story, this time from UFO Digest, called "Zeta Craft and Their Propulsion System," which tells us about contact with aliens called the "Zeta Race" that has resulted in a guy named Paul Hamden finding out all about their super-advanced technology.  We are told, in the opening paragraphs, that the authors are going to give us details about Zeta science and technology, but when you read further, you find out that the details aren't very... detailed:

The Zetas are physical beings who live in physical environments, but they also have the ability to extend their activities to a non-physical, energetic environment where different laws of nature apply.  The energetic realm holds templates, also known as etheric bodies, that define the properties of associated forms in the physical universe.  In these non-physical realms, consciousness has the ability to create with thoughts...

Our craft are of a nature that are able to support our biological framework.  These craft are living entities...  The craft behaves like a single-celled organism so that it is without doors or windows. 

I'm with you, so far.  I've never seen a cell with windows.  But do go on:

They (the craft) are grown from what was initially a hybrid framework designed by our best technical and scientific beings, so this explains why we have craft who can also "self-heal". The craft are generic, genetically modified structures. Not all craft have individual operators, but as there are certain parts of our DNA replicated, there is one standard craft for beings to use. There are specific craft for specific beings. These beings are utilized to move in different dimensional aspects of the non-physicality of this physical universe. 

Okay, non-physicality of the physical universe means... um... that some things are physical, and then other things aren't?  How can you have a non-physical thing?  I thought the word "thing," by definition, meant "physical."

This statement says that the craft are designed to respond to operators with Zeta DNA. There is a standard craft that can be used by any Zeta because the craft responds to certain segments of DNA shared by all Zetas. There are also specific craft that respond to unique sequences of DNA possessed by particular Zetas. The latter craft and operators are used to move to and from non-physical dimensions of the universe. 

So the spaceship recognizes your DNA, and then just makes the ship go where your DNA tells it to?

The Zeta adds that the craft, like all living things, needs sustenance or a source of energy to survive. He says, “There is a basic life force woven into the fabric of the universe. This energetic form, waveform, feeds and nourishes these cellular craft.” For the Zeta, the basic life force of the universe is the energy of consciousness. Everything that is and can be experienced is constructed from this fundamental substrate.

I... um...  "life force of the fabric of the universe..."  But...

The process of wave shifting involves interaction with the field that 'is and always is'; that is, the energy of source consciousness. So the craft's intention to move invokes the creative process at a particular level of this consciousness field to relocate its etheric body in the matrix. 

DANGER!  DANGER!  Sensors indicate that bullshit readings are reaching maximum allowable limits!  Shield breach imminent!

*Engaging warp drive*

Whew.  That was close.

Anyway.  I'm thinking that what we have, here, is just two cases of rampant hallucinogen use.  There's no reason to believe that there are Zetas, or Annunaki, or midgets in Grim Reaper suits, or tall pajama-clad gilled albino aliens hanging around the Earth.  And I think now I'm going to wrap this up, and then relocate my etheric body to the kitchen, where I can gain some sustenance from the life force of a second cup of coffee.

Elements of style

When scientists this week at Lund University in Sweden confirmed the production of an atom of element 115, I thought it was just a story that would be of interest to physicists, chemists, and assorted science nerds.

The atom, like those of all "superheavy" elements, disintegrated almost instantaneously.  All of the high-atomic-weight atoms -- those on the bottom tiers of the periodic table -- are extremely unstable, and undergo radioactive decay within a fraction of a second after they're created in the lab.  None of them occur naturally.

This confirms a claim made by Russian scientists in 2004, and completes another row of the periodic table, bringing to 118 the number of confirmed elements.  Like its near neighbors with atomic numbers of 113, 117, and 118, it doesn't have an official permanent name yet, so it is called "ununpentium" (a placeholder name that simply means "115").

So far, only a story that would interest people who are fond of esoteric chemistry.  Thus my surprise when stories started popping up all over woo-woo websites with headlines like, "Element 115 proven to be real!  Bob Lazar was right!"

My first reaction was, "Who the hell is Bob Lazar?"  So I looked him up, and found that he's a pretty famous guy, even though I had never heard of him.  He even has a Wikipedia page.  And his story turned out to be quite interesting.

Lazar is (appropriate for our unofficial theme-of-the-week) a conspiracy theorist of the first water.  He claims to be a physicist with degrees from both the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; attempts to confirm this have turned up nothing, although he did once take an electronics course at Pierce Junior College.  Lazar says this is because the government tampered with his academic records to discredit him.

Why would the government do that?  Because Lazar worked at Area 51, of course.  And while at Area 51, he was allegedly the leader of a group of physicists who studied some downed extraterrestrial spaceships.  And guess what he claimed was the fuel that powered said flying saucers?

Got it in one.  Element 115.

Ununpentium, Lazar said, created "antigravity effects" when bombarded with protons.  Antimatter was also somehow involved.  Put 'em all together, says Lazar, and the "intense strong nuclear force of element 115's nucleus" would warp space and time, creating a way to cross interstellar space.

Oh, and he knows where these aliens came from.  Zeta Reticuli, the favorite star of conspiracy theorists everywhere, alleged home to both the Reptilians and the Greys.  Which ties in neatly with stories of government collaboration with extraterrestrials, and the replacement of various world figures by shapeshifting evil aliens.  This last allegation might be true, of course.  I myself am suspicious about recently-disgraced San Diego mayor Bob Filner.  Doesn't he look like someone trying to mimic a human, but who can't quite make it look authentic yet?

I think that is exactly the expression you'd see on the face of an alien who had just learned the rule, "When you smile, retract the lips and expose the teeth."

But I digress.  Let's return to our consideration of Bob #1.

Bob Lazar's ideas have achieved considerable buzz in the UFO community, and also in the world of the conspiracy theorists, being that his ideas combine the best from both.  And he was taken at least seriously enough to have an actual physicist, Dr. David L. Morgan, give a close look to his ideas.  And after careful consideration, Morgan has concluded that Lazar is a raving wingnut.

"After reading an account by Bob Lazar of the 'physics' of his Area 51 UFO propulsion system," Morgan stated, "my conclusion is this: Mr. Lazar presents a scenario which, if it is correct, violates a whole handful of currently accepted physical theories...  The presentation of the scenario by Lazar is troubling from a scientific standpoint.  Mr. Lazar on many occasions demonstrates an obvious lack of understanding of current physical theories."

Which is much nicer than I would have put it, but amounts to the same thing.

Any time someone comes up with a "theory" that will "destroy all of physics as we know it," I'm always inclined to give him the raspberry and walk away.  It might be narrow-minded of me, but think about it; what's the chance that the best brains the Earth has produced -- people like Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, Lise Meitner, Murray Gell-Mann, and Peter Higgs -- are all wrong?  That they've missed the boat completely, and some new guy, with no particular access to research facilities or technical equipment, or possibly even a college degree, has figured it all out?  Okay, I guess it's possible, but I need more than just his word for it, especially when that word contains mention of "the Grey aliens from Zeta Reticuli."

The bottom line is: if you think that you've got a revolutionary idea, turn it over to peer review like the rest of the scientific world.  If it stands, I'll be happy to eat my words.

Anyway, this explains why the woo-woos all started jumping up and down and making excited little squeaking noises about element 115, in spite of the fact that the Swedish scientists only succeeded in making one atom of it, which would hardly be enough to power a spacecraft.  And the atom in question (1) decayed in less than a tenth of a second, and (2) showed no signs of generating an "anti-gravity field."

But I guess when you are resting your claims on no evidence, then any evidence is an improvement.

The Black Death, aliens, and the role of chaos in history

Yesterday's post, about the alien origins of humanity, generated a nice round of "you think that's a crazy belief, wait till you see this one!" from my readers.  The best contender in this game of Wingnut One-Upmanship came from another student, who found out that not only did aliens produce our species, they've been trying to kill us ever since.

I guess it's understandable, really.  Our stewardship of the globe hasn't exactly been praiseworthy.  It's no wonder that our superpowerful alien cousins, who still presumably live on our original homeworld (with its clement temperatures, 30-hour rotational period, and "no geomagnetic storms or glaciers"), would have some second thoughts about sending us here.  So it turns out that they've repeatedly tried to get rid of us.

This conclusion comes from a stellar piece of research entitled "Did Aliens Create the 'Black Death' and Other Diseases During the Middle Ages?  (And Are They Still Creating Diseases Today?)," which not only would win an award for the longest article title ever, but is yet another example of a piece of journalism that should say, in its entirety, "NO."  Unfortunately, the author doesn't take that route.  We're told that the 14th century plague has to be extraterrestrial in origin:

A great many people throughout Europe and other plague-stricken regions of the world were reporting that outbreaks of the plague were caused by foul-smelling “mists” and bright lights were reported far more frequently and in many more locations than were rodent infestations. The plague years were, in fact, a period of heavy UFO activity.

Well, I hate to be unimaginative, but the foul smells during the Middle Ages don't really require UFOs to explain them.  There was a fairly appalling lack of sanitation, particularly in the big cities.  Apparently just the amount of human waste lying around in heavily populated areas was enough to create a smell that would blow your hair back -- even 19th century London was a frightful-smelling place, according to Steven Johnson's wonderful book The Ghost Map (which chronicles the cholera epidemic of the 1850s, and how it led to the creation of an efficient city-wide sewer system).  And the fact that rodents weren't "reported frequently" is pretty certainly because of their ubiquity, not because they were absent.

But of course, it's not just the stinky mist and bright lights that are brought out as evidence:

A second phenomenon was sometimes reported: the appearance of frightening human-like figures dressed in black. Those figures were often seen on the outskirts of a town or village and their presence would signal the outbreak of an epidemic almost immediately. It appears that the “scythes” may have been long instruments designed to spray poison or germ-laden gas. Strange men dressed in black, “demons’ and other terrifying figures were observed in other European communities. The frightening creatures were often observed carrying long “brooms,” “scythes,” or “swords” that were used to “sweep” or “knock” on the doors of people’s homes. The inhabitants of those homes fell ill with plague afterwards. It is from these reports that people created the popular image of “Death” as a skeleton or demon carrying a scythe. In looking at this haunting image of death, we may, in fact, be staring into the face of the UFO.”

Right.  Because we're not talking about a superstitious, credulous bunch of people here.  They can't possibly have made this up to explain a terrifying event that they didn't have the science to understand.

 Maybe it wasn't rats or aliens.  Maybe it was the "saaaalmon mooouuussse."

But then we find out that it wasn't all aliens who were impersonating Death; it was only the crazy homicidal aliens who were responsible:

This Awareness indicates that what in Medieval times were termed demons, and what many of the Christian faith considered to be demons, are in fact what entities refer today to as extraterrestrial aliens. The Greys from Zeta Reticuli today are not precisely the same invaders as those of the Medieval times. The Medieval aliens were both Reptoid and also of the Grey community that now is underground and known as the Deros. The Deros underground are demented forms of Zeta Greys, which have been here for many thousands of years, living underground to avoid sunlight and to avoid communication with humans except on those occasions where they seek to make contact for one reason or another.

Oh.  Okay.  Because that makes sense.

You know, I think that the problem here is that people are uncomfortable with the chaotic, random nature of much of life, especially the bad parts.  If something bad happens, the immediate impulse is to look for someone, or something, to blame.  This explains so much woo-woo thinking, doesn't it?  Without even trying hard, I found three examples that were linked on Reddit in the last two days -- an article on the website of the Institute for Natural Healing that attributes all cancer to eating meat, a claim that the government is covering up how dangerous vaccines are, and an allegation that WiFi in schools is causing headaches in children. 

Somehow, we just can't accept that people get sick, sometimes for no obvious reason.  It's not enough to celebrate the astonishing advances in medical science over the last hundred years, that have generated new records in the healthy human life span -- because, unfortunately, they haven't eliminated all disease and suffering.  The fact that we still get sick, we still grow old and die, must mean that there is some insidious plan behind it all.

It can't just be that we live in a world that's kind of a rough place, a world where bad things happen sometimes.  Not even in the case of the Black Death, where we (1) have identified the bacterium that causes it, (2) know the vector that transmitted it, (3) have evidence from medical records of the time that the symptoms are consistent with subsequent outbreaks, and even (4) have tissue samples (bones) that show evidence of Yersinia pestis infection.  No, that's not enough.  It has to be the evil demented aliens causing it all.

Anyhow, however understandable it is to want there to be some kind of overarching reason why stuff happens, rationality forces us to concede the role that chaos has in human history.  No extraterrestrial epidemics necessary.

And in case any of you were considering trying to one-up this story, I have to request, with all due respect: if you know of anything loonier than this claim, you probably shouldn't tell me about it.  I've done enough facepalms over this one to last me a while.