Return of the Gootans

Some days, I wave the banner of critical thinking proudly and boldly, confident that we humans are capable of rational thought and decision-making, of recognizing fallacious arguments, of sorting fact from fiction.

Some days I wonder why I bothered to get out of bed.

That I'm falling into the latter category today is the fault of a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia.  Not because of any deficiencies in his own intellectual capacity -- he's a really bright guy -- but because of what he stumbled across, and then felt duty-bound to tell me about.  The whole thing springboarded off Friday's post, about self-styled alien coverup whistleblower David Grusch, and my increasingly irritated demand that people like Grusch fish or cut bait.

"I don't know about Grusch," my friend said, in an email.  "But I think you have to admit this guy has some serious credibility."

What This Guy was claiming goes back to a story that appeared all the way back in 2012 in The Korea Times.  The article said that people at NASA and SETI and HAARP and various other acronyms had detected an alien spaceship on its way into the Solar System, and it was going to attack the Earth in November.  It quoted one "John Malley of SETI" as saying, "Three giant spaceships are heading toward Earth.  The largest one of them is two hundred miles wide.  Two others are slightly smaller.  At present, the objects are just moving past Jupiter.  Judging by their speed, they should be on Earth by the fall of 2012."

The spaceships, they said, were "from the planet Gootan."

Well, if you'll cast your mind back to 2012, what will probably stand out most in your memory is not being attacked by aliens.  In fact, January 1, 2013 dawned without either alien attacks or Mayan apocalypses, which as you may recall was also on the menu at the time.  What had happened, apparently, was that someone at The Korea Times had made a mistake that anyone might make, provided that the person in question has the IQ of a bowl of Spaghetti-Os; (s)he had found a story in another news source, thought it was factual, and reprinted it without looking into its accuracy.

That other news source, unfortunately, turned out to be The Weekly World News.

This caused a flurry of backpedaling over at The Korea Times, and a retraction saying that nothing in the claim had been real.  And, it's to be hoped, the reporter who committed the flub being demoted to cleaning toilets.

Since that time, though, the Gootans have been frequent flyers over at the WWN.  Almost as frequent as Bat Boy, who (according to a time traveler from the future) will win the 2032 U.S. presidential election.  (My favorite part is they refer to him throughout the article as "President Boy.")  My feeling about that is: Bring On Bat Boy.  He couldn't be any worse than Don Snoreleone and his evil sidekick, Cabbage Patch Satan.  In fact, why wait till 2032?  If Bat Boy runs in 2028, he's got my vote.

Make America Scream Again, amirite?

But I digress.

In any case, the Gootans have made regular appearances in the thirteen years since their debut, such as the following:

Honestly, I'm more worried about all the motorists having sex while driving.  I mean, wouldn't that be kind of distracting?  Myself, I prefer to give my full attention to whichever of those I'm engaging in at the time.  I'd think telling your partner "Hang on a moment until I get through this roundabout" might be a bit of a buzzkill.

On the other hand, if they really did make a ballet based on Plan Nine from Outer Space, I am so there.  And I don't even like ballet.

But back to the Gootans.  Apparently the whole thing was settling back down into the side alleys of lunacy until someone found a Wikipedia article on a (real) group of people called the "Gutians."  The Gutians were a tribe that gave the Sumerians some trouble in the third millennium B.C.E., and in fact swept in from somewhere and ruled the place for over a hundred years.  So far, nothing too unusual, considering the fact that in ancient times conquering and oppressing and overthrowing were their version of team sports.  But then, someone found that there's a Sumerian document called "The Curse of Akkad" that describes the Gutians thusly:

The god Enlil brought out of the mountains those who do not resemble other people, who are not reckoned as part of the Land, the Gutians, an unbridled people, with human intelligence but canine instincts and monkeys' features.  Like small birds they swooped on the ground in great flocks.  Because of Enlil, they stretched their arms out across the plain like a net for animals.  Nothing escaped their clutches, no one left their grasp.  Messengers no longer traveled the highways, the courier's boat no longer passed along the rivers.  The Gutians drove the trusty (?) goats of Enlil out of their folds and compelled their herdsmen to follow them, they drove the cows out of their pens and compelled their cowherds to follow them.  Prisoners manned the watch.  Brigands occupied the highways.  The doors of the city gates of the Land lay dislodged in mud, and all the foreign lands uttered bitter cries from the walls of their cities.  They established gardens for themselves within the cities, and not as usual on the wide plain outside.  As if it had been before the time when cities were built and founded, the large arable tracts yielded no grain, the inundated tracts yielded no fish, the irrigated orchards yielded no syrup or wine, the thick clouds (?) did not rain, the macgurum plant did not grow.

First of all, I think we can all agree that disturbing the trusty goats and preventing the macgurum plant from growing is pretty nasty business.

But more to the point, this passage made people go "Aha!"  Surely this peculiar description -- monkeys' features, swooping around like birds, etc. -- was an indication that the Gutians were, in fact, aliens.  And were, in fact, the same as the Gootans, who famously failed to mount a savage and bloodthirsty attack on humanity in 2012.  This was coupled with a few paragraphs that I can summarize as "something something something Annunaki something something Babylonians and ancient astronauts something something."

 It's a pretty airtight argument, I have to admit.

I mean, c'mon, people.  You're making David Grusch look like the pinnacle of scientific plausibility, here.

Can I start with the fact that in linguistics, you can't just take a passing similarity between two names, and say, "Hey, they sound kinda alike!  Must be the same!"  And this goes double if one of the names came from the fucking Weekly World News.

Because, if you'll recall from the beginning of this post, it was people over at The Weekly World News who made up the Gootans in the first place.

Anyhow, if anyone needs me, I'll be over here weeping softly and banging my forehead on my desk.  Maybe the Gutians and/or Gootans will take pity on me and sweep on down and pick me up in their two-hundred-mile-wide flying saucer.  At this point, I'd consider it a rescue mission.

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Comet redux

Okay, can we all please please puhleeeeeez stop posting stuff without checking to see if it's true?

I know it's a pain in the ass, but this needs to become a habit.  For all of us.  Unless you make a practice of never reposting anything anywhere -- which eliminates most people -- it's got to become an automatic reflex when you're using social media.  Stop before you hit "forward" or "share" or whatnot and take five minutes to verify that it's accurate.

The reason this comes up is something about comet 3I-ATLAS that I've now seen posted four times.  I wrote about 3I-ATLAS here only a couple of weeks ago, and to cut to the chase: the considered opinions of the astronomers who have studied it -- i.e., the people who actually know what the hell they're talking about -- are that the object is an interstellar comet made mostly of frozen carbon dioxide.  Despite the claims of people like Avi Loeb, the alien-happy Harvard astronomer, it shows no sign of being an extraterrestrial spacecraft.

That, of course, isn't sufficient for a lot of people.  Without further ado, here's the image I've seen repeatedly posted:

There is nothing in this image that is accurate, unless you're counting "3I-ATLAS is an interstellar object" and "Japan has a space agency" as being in the "correct" column.  Japan's space agency has released no such "footage."  There are no "precise pulsating lights."  No scientist -- again, with the exception of Loeb and his pals -- are "questioning if it's artificial."

And the object in the image?  That's not 3I-ATLAS.  Jack Gilbert, of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, has identified it as a microorganism.  "That is a paramecium," Gilbert writes.  "Freshwater I believe -- although better phase contrast, and where it was found, would be ideal for better identification."

Another image that is making the rounds is from NASA, but it's being used to claim that the 3I-ATLAS has changed direction and speed in a fashion that "indicates some kind of propulsion system."  This shift in trajectory, they say, made the telescope at NOIRLab (National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory) image alter its aim to keep up with it, resulting in the background stars showing rainbow-colored streaks:

This isn't correct, either.  If you go to NOIRLab's website, you find a perfectly reasonable explanation of the streaks right there, without any reference to propulsion systems and alien spacecraft.  I quote:

Comet 3I/ATLAS streaks across a dense star field in this image captured by the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS) on Gemini South at Cerro Pachón in Chile, one half of the International Gemini Observatory, partly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and operated by NSF NOIRLab.  This image is composed of exposures taken through four filters -- red, green, blue and ultraviolet.  As exposures are taken, the comet remains fixed in the center of the telescope's field of view.  However, the positions of the background stars change relative to the comet, causing them to appear as colorful streaks in the final image.

Once again, the upshot: 3I-ATLAS is a comet.  That's all.  Of great interest to planetary astronomers, but likely to be forgotten by just about everyone else after March of next year, at which point it will be zooming past Jupiter and heading back out into the depths of space, never to be seen again.  There is no credible evidence it's a spaceship.  If there was, believe me, you would not be able to get the astronomers to shut up about it.  The concept some people have of scientists keeping stuff hidden because they're just that secretive, and don't want anyone to know about their big discoveries, only indicates to me that these people know exactly zero scientists.  Trust me on this.  I know some actual scientists, and every single one of them loves nothing better than telling you at length about what they're working on, even if it's something that would interest 0.00000001% of the humans who have ever lived, such as the mating habits of trench-dwelling tube worms.  If there was strong (or, honestly, any) observation that supported this thing being the ship from Rendezvous With Rama, we'd all know about it.

And after all, if there was evidence out there, the hoaxers wouldn't have to use a photograph of a paramecium to support their bogus claims.

So for fuck's sake, please be careful about what you post.  It took me (literally) thirty seconds to find a site debunking the "Japan space agency" thing.  What I'm asking you to do is usually not in any way onerous.

I mean, really; wouldn't you rather be posting things that are cool, and also true?  There is so much real science to be fascinated and astonished by, you don't need these crazy claims.

And believe me, neither does the internet as a whole.

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The first step

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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