The boy who cried wolf

I'm all for keeping an open mind, but there comes a point where my attitude is, "Produce some hard evidence or shut the hell up."

I've reached that point with David Grusch, who two years ago made headlines as a whistleblower, saying there was a systematic X Files-style coverup of alien spaceships, technology, and even "biological materials" (i.e. bodies) by the United States military.  Much was made of Grusch's antecedents, with one person he worked with calling him "beyond reproach" and another saying he is "an officer with the strongest possible moral compass."

Well, that may well be, be at this stage of things, my patience (and the patience of many of us with skeptical natures) is wearing a little thin.  In the two years since he launched himself into center stage, he's done whatever he can to remain in the limelight, including claiming he was being persecuted for coming forward, and had even had his life threatened.  Just this week, he proved yet again that he's not ready to let the whole thing rest by appearing on Fox News, followed up by an article in The Daily Mail Fail, thus linking together two of the least reliable media sources on the entire planet.

Grusch is now claiming that Donald Trump has been fully briefed on the alien situation, and that Trump is poised to become "the most consequential leader in Earth's history" by doing a full disclosure of everything we know about extraterrestrial species and their visits to our planet.  "Members of this current administration are very well aware of this reality," Grusch said.  "Certainly, the current president is very knowledgeable on this subject."

If that weren't enough, we're also told that Trump and his senior advisors have been briefed on the "alien-human hybrids" walking amongst us.  These are apparently the product of a level of human/ET spicy encounters that Captain James T. Kirk could only dream of, and has produced the "Nordics" -- fair-haired, light-skinned, dazzlingly handsome hybrids that now have infiltrated human society.  

Kind of Alexander Skarsgård in space, is how I think of them.

Of course, even Grusch admits that if the hybrids look just like humans, there'd be no way to tell them apart.  So barring skewering their heads with one of those spring-loaded stiletto things and seeing if they dissolve into a puddle of goo, it seems like there's not much we can do with this allegation.

Then there's the piece in The Liberation Times saying that we're "headed toward massive disclosure," but that Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been coy about pinning down when that'll happen or what exactly will be revealed.  The whistleblowers, Rubio said, "are either lying, crazy, or telling the truth," which certainly seem like the only options I can think of.  They also suggest that Rubio may be shying away from dealing with this right now because he's got other things on his plate, and making a big statement about UFOs would diminish his credibility.

Once again, can't argue with that.  Of course, Rubio's credibility is already so low that maybe he should just throw caution to the wind and go for it.

If I'm sounding a little snippy about this whole thing, well... I think I'm justified.  How many times have we heard from people like Grusch and Luis Elizondo that we're on the threshold of having hard evidence made public?  And every damn time, it's the same old grainy photos, blurred video, and first-hand "but I really saw it!" accounts.  As astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, "Bring me something of alien manufacture that I can analyze in my lab, and then we can talk...  What I've seen thus far doesn't meet the minimum standard for what we consider reliable evidence in science."

Oh, but the government is covering it up, for security reasons!  Really?  If so, they're doing a piss-poor job of it, with leaks and whistleblowers being interviewed by Sean Hannity and broadcast worldwide every couple of weeks.  And conveniently, there's still not one single piece of hard evidence.  Nada.

So that's why my attitude now is: until you can show us the goods -- Just.  Stop.  Talking.

Hank Green said, "It's never aliens until it is," which is true -- and entirely appropriate.  Our default should be "it's something explainable using known science," because thus far it always has been.  We shouldn't close ourselves off to the possibility of alien visitation, but -- given the technological hurdles that an alien spacecraft would have to overcome to get here (repeatedly) -- to accept that explanation requires more than just "I saw it."  It requires evidence that leaves no room for alternate interpretations.

At least if you're adhering to the methods of rational, skeptical science.

So anyway, that's my rather ill-tempered take on the current situation.  More talk about how "disclosure is coming soon," that almost certainly will come to absolutely nothing -- until the glow fades, and the main players break back into the news cycle saying "disclosure is coming soon, no really we mean it this time," rinse and repeat.  I'm getting tired of seeing people falling for the Boy Who Cried Wolf over and over, and increasingly that's what Grusch is looking like.

Are there really alien spacecraft that have visited the Earth?  Maybe.  Unlikely, I think, but... maybe.  But until someone brings one out into the public view, and allows an independent team of scientists to examine it, I'm kind of done with the hype.

****************************************

Sphere itself

Despite doing my utmost to keep up with news from the World of the Weird, sometimes I miss one.

Apparently, earlier this year, UFO enthusiasts were leaping about making excited little squeaking noises over something called the "Buga Sphere."  This is a metal sphere with strange markings that (allegedly) was first seen flying around in March, and then landed near the village of Buga, in western Colombia.  

The odd claims about this thing are, apparently, legion.  Supposedly a radiocarbon study at the University of Georgia dated it to 12,560 years ago.  This is a little suspect right from the get-go because in general, you can't radiocarbon-date metal; a solid metal object would contain little in the way of carbon, period, much less carbon-14.  (Radiocarbon dating works because living organisms take in radioactive carbon-14, along with the much more common stable isotope carbon-12, while they're alive; at death, the intake stops, and the carbon-14 slowly decays into nitrogen-14.  So the ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-14 goes up steadily after an organism's death, giving us a neat metric for determining how long ago that happened.)

Anyhow, I can buy that some organic traces on the surface -- dirt, for example -- might have given a radiocarbon date of 12,560 years, but how that's relevant to the object's date of manufacture is beyond me.

It doesn't stop there.  People report that the object is always cold to the touch, regardless how hot the ambient temperature is.  Some who have touched it say they experienced vomiting and diarrhea afterward.  Others say they "temporarily lost their fingerprints."  Get your phone near it, and the phone will spontaneously shut off.  Supposedly, it was x-rayed, and was found to be made of three concentric spheres separated by "microspheres."  Another analysis found not only "microspheres," but fiber optics strands connected to a central rectangular object -- which, not coincidentally, matches the pattern etched onto its surface.  (This latter link is to a YouTube video that evidently used auto-generated captioning, and the captions amused me no end by referring to the object throughout as the "booger sphere."  Proving that despite my advanced degree, I still have the sense of humor of a fifth grader.)

The Buga Sphere even generated a "scientific paper."  I put that phrase in quotes because it was posted to SSRN, a non-peer-reviewed paper preprint aggregator that is really little more than public online file storage.  But the paper -- "A Unified Framework for the Buga Sphere: Quantitative Validation of a Negative-Mass Model Governed by Topo-Temporal Physics" -- is a doozy.  Here's just one excerpt:

The Buga Sphere is a physical artifact whose constellation of observed properties-a drastic 8.1 kg apparent mass change, non-ejective propulsion, and a sustained endothermic signature-cannot be reconciled within the framework of standard physics.  This paper presents a unified theoretical model that quantitatively explains all of these anomalies. We demonstrate that the Sphere's behavior is consistent with an internal network of engineered inclusions generating a negative-mass effect of 8.1 kg.  The operation of this network is governed by the principles of the Axiom of Topo-Temporal Reality, a framework in which interactions with a fractal spacetime manifold permit novel physical phenomena.  Our model correctly derives the system's 81% inertial shielding factor, its non-ejective propulsive force of F ≈ 3.2 × 10-11 N, and, crucially, predicts the observed 100 W endothermic cooling as a direct consequence of topological energy dissipation.  The ability of a single, self-consistent theory to account for the Sphere's gravitational, kinematic, and thermal properties provides strong support for the model and suggests the Buga Sphere may be the first physical artifact of a post-standard-model physics.

Needless to say -- well, honestly, apparently I do need to say it -- if even one of these claims were real, the physicists would be trampling each other to death to get to it first.  It's a common layperson's misunderstanding of scientists; that they somehow are so wedded to the current models that they would willfully ignore, or even suppress, evidence to the contrary even if it was right in front of their eyes.  

That science's primary concern is upholding the status quo.  

Nothing could be further from the truth.  Yes, scientists are reluctant to publish groundbreaking results -- until they have sufficient evidence amassed.  They're not hidebound, they're (justifiably) cautious.  But if we really did have an object that could somehow swallow energy, change its inertial mass at will, and create a propulsive force seemingly from nothing?

They'd be all over that mofo before you could say "I Want To Believe."  That they haven't leads me to the conclusion that none of those claims has ever been substantiated.

But the real issue here is that "we don't know who made the Buga Sphere or why" is not synonymous with "... so it must be alien technology."  The most parsimonious explanation is that it's a hoax of human manufacture, and -- "Axiom of Topo-Temporal Reality" notwithstanding -- all of the wild stuff it's alleged to do is simply untrue.  But -- hell, I've never studied this thing myself, much less had my fingerprints stolen by it.  As Hank Green says, in a wonderful video on the scientific process called "Why It's Never Aliens" that you definitely need to watch:

Scientists want to discover extraordinary things.  They want to turn everything on its head.  That's how you win a Nobel Prize.  And that can happen.  It does happen.  But when it comes to extraordinary claims, both the bias of wanting to discover something amazing and the lack of skill and experience we have with that discovery means that more scrutiny must be applied to the claim and the evidence.  And if the evidence, wins out, then, amazing...

But in the absence of amazing evidence, ignorance is the default state.  Not knowing what's going on is super common and normal.  Sometimes people will show me a video and say, "How do you explain this?" and my answer will be, "I don't know what's going on there, I don't have an explanation" and that will be seen by many as an admission that it is aliens, or something supernatural.  But unexplained stuff is normal.  For 99.999% of human history, we had no idea what lightning was.  The sky would just explode during storms.  We still don't precisely know how lightning works.  When America was founded, everyone knew that if you held your breath long enough, you would die -- and no one, no one on Earth, had any idea why...  Accepting an explanation for a mystery without any evidence is totally understandable, but it does not usually lead you anywhere even close to the truth.

When you open up any science news story -- just open up any science news -- what you will see is people providing explanations for things that were unknown and unexplained yesterday.  So it's just not surprising that people show around things that, for now, no one has a good explanation for.  

This can be summed up by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson's pithy dictum, "We should not go from an abject state of ignorance to an abject state of certainty in one step."

So what, exactly, is the Buga Sphere?  I don't know.  My default, in the absence of evidence from a reliable source (i.e. from a peer-reviewed journal) is that it's very likely to be an artifact of terrestrial manufacture -- in other words, a hoax.  Could I be wrong?  Sure.  But what I've seen thus far doesn't even inch me toward "it must be an alien probe."

Look, no one would be happier than me if it did turn out to be of extraterrestrial manufacture.  It would mean we weren't the only intelligent, technological species in the universe, which would be tremendously exciting.  It would give me something positive to focus on besides the ongoing train wreck that's currently happening in my country.  I mean, let's face it; I want it to be aliens.

But that very fact means I have to watch out for accepting weak, shoddy, or (worse) manufactured evidence supporting that claim, precisely because I -- with my pro-alien bias -- would be that much more likely to fall for it.

I'll end with a justly-famous quote from physicist Richard Feynman: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool."

****************************************

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?

****************************************

Wheat from chaff

My question today is one that haunts many skeptics -- how would you know if a bizarre claim is actually true, especially in the absence of evidence?

The hardest-nosed of us would probably object to the premises of the question; if there is no evidence, they would say, then there is no basis on which to make a judgment in the first place.  While I agree with that general attitude -- and have applied it myself on numerous occasions -- it always leaves me with the worry that I'll miss something, and just through the weakness of the evidence and my preconceived notions, I won't see the grain of wheat in amongst the chaff.

I riffed on this whole idea in my novel Signal to Noise (and if you'll allow me a moment of shameless self-promotion, it is available at Amazon from the link on the right side of the page).  In the story, a skeptical wildlife biologist, who had decided that all woo-woo claims are utter bullshit, is confronted with something bizarre going on in the mountains of central Oregon -- and has to overcome his preconceived biases even to admit that it might be real.  In the story, it doesn't help that the news is delivered to him with no hard evidence whatsoever, by a total stranger who just "has a feeling that something is wrong."  (I won't tell you any more about it; you'll just have to read it yourself.  And at the risk of appearing immodest, I think it's a pretty damn good story.)

The reason I bring all of this up is a website called Little Sticky Legs: Alien Abductee Portraits, owned by Steven Hirsch.  On this website, which you should definitely take a look at, there are photographs of a number of people who claim that they were abducted by, or at least contacted by, aliens, and their first-hand accounts (and in some cases drawings) of their experiences.  I thought this was an unusually good example of the phenomenon I've described above, for a variety of reasons.

First, the accounts are weird, rambling, and disjointed, and many of them seem to have only a loose attachment to reality.  Second, the photos don't help; whether Hirsch deliberately set out to make his subjects look sketchy is a matter of conjecture, but my sense is that he was playing fair and this is the way these people actually look.  Some of them, not to put too fine a point on it, are a little scary.  And third, of course, the content of the accounts is fairly contrary to what most scientists think is realistic.  All of these things combined seem to put their stories squarely into the category of bizarre, possibly delusional, nonsense.

But reading the earnest narratives of these supposed contactees left me feeling a little uneasy.  Part of it was a sense that if their stories aren't true, then these people are either lying or else are the victims of hallucinations that could qualify as psychotic breaks.  And although I am rather free about poking fun at folks who generate strange ideas, I draw the line at including as targets people who have genuine mental illnesses.

My unease, however, had another source, and one that haunts me every time I see something like this; what if one of these stories is actually true?

A person who had been abducted, but was left with no physical trace of the experience, might well describe it in just these terms.  If the victim was someone who wasn't highly educated, there's no reason to expect that (s)he would remember the details, or explain them afterwards, in the way a trained scientist would.  The general vagueness and lack of clarity is, in fact, exactly what you'd expect if an ordinary person experienced something shockingly outside their worldview.

Now, please don't misunderstand me.  I'm not, in any sense, committing to a belief in alien abductions in general, much less to any specific one of the stories on Hirsch's website.  My hunch is that none of these stories is true, and that whatever these individuals are describing has another source than actual experience.  But it is only a hunch, and an honest skeptic would have to admit that there is no more evidence that these claims are false than there is that they are true.  My only point here is that if one of them was telling the truth, this is much the form I would expect it to take... which means that it behooves all of us, and especially the skeptics, not to discount odd claims without further inquiry.  Skeptics tend to rail against the superstitious for jumping to supernatural explanations for completely natural phenomena; we should be equally careful not to jump to prosaic explanations when an odd one might be correct.

Carl Sagan famously said, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."  Which is an excellent rule of thumb, with one addition.  Accepting an extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence.  Investigating an extraordinary claim requires only that you keep your mind open -- and see if there's anything there which might allow you to make a rational evaluation of its truth or falsity.

The best thing, of course, is to withhold judgment completely until the facts are in, but that is pretty solidly counter to human nature, and is probably unrealistic as a general approach.  And given the ephemeral nature of some of these claims, the facts may never come in at all.  All we can do is keep thinking, keep watching and listening and investigating... and not be afraid to push the envelope of our own understanding when the time comes.

****************************************

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."

****************************************

What Listen heard

Regular readers of Skeptophilia -- and, heaven knows, my friends and family -- are well aware that one of my obsessions is the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and perhaps even extraterrestrial intelligence.

I grew up watching Lost in Space and The Invaders and the original Star Trek, and later The X Files and Star Trek: The Next Generation and Doctor Who.  But while those classic shows piqued my budding interest in exobiology, my training in actual biology taught me that whatever the aliens look like, they will almost certainly not be humans with odd facial protuberances and strange accents.  How evolution plays out on other planets is impossible to say, but it's likely to be vastly different from the pathways taken by life on Earth.  I still remember reading Stephen Jay Gould's essay "Replaying the Tape" from his excellent book on the Cambrian-age Burgess Shale fauna, Wonderful Life, and being blown away by the following passage:

You press the rewind button and, making sure you thoroughly erase everything that actually happened, go back to any time and place in the past -– say, to the seas of the Burgess Shale.  Then let the tape run again and see if the repetition looks at all like the original.  If each replay strongly resembles life’s actual pathway, then we must conclude that what really happened pretty much had to occur.  But suppose that the experimental versions all yield sensible results strikingly different from the actual history of life?  What could we then say about the predictability of self-conscious intelligence? or of mammals?

His point was that a great deal of evolution is contingent -- dependent on events and occurrences that would be unlikely to repeat in exactly the same way.  And while there's no way to re-run the tape on the Earth, this has profound implications regarding what we're likely to find elsewhere in the universe.

If we do find intelligent aliens, chances are they won't be Klingons or Romulans or Andorians.  To be fair, the aforementioned shows did make some attempts to represent what truly different life might be like; the Horta from the original Star Trek and the Vashta Nerada and the Midnight Entity from Doctor Who come to mind.  Most likely, though, whatever we find out there will be -- to pilfer a phrase from J. B. S. Haldane -- "queerer than we can imagine."

All of this is just a preface to my telling you about an article I read today, that should have had me excited, but ended up leaving me looking like this:

The link I'm referring to was sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, and I've now seen the story in a number of different news sources.  This particular iteration has the title, "Huge Alien Announcement 'Could Happen Within Weeks' as Professor Says 'We've Found It'."  "It," in this case, is apparently definitive proof of extraterrestrial intelligence.  The guy claiming this is one Simon Holland; two different scientific teams, he says, are "in a race to publish the first confirmed evidence."

And not just evidence, but actual transmissions of some kind, bringing to mind the movie Contact and the breathtaking moment astronomer Ellie Arroway finds a radio signal from another planet.  Like the one in Contact, the signal Holland tells us about is some kind of narrow-band radio message, and was apparently discovered by Yuri Milner's Breakthrough Listen program.

"It’s a single point source, not just noise," he said.  "The signal, instead of being the giant buzz of everything in the universe that we hear through all radio telescopes, was a narrow electromagnetic spectrum."

Which sounds awesome, right?

But.

First, Simon Holland isn't a professor, he's a YouTuber and filmmaker.  He says he "taught at a major UK university" -- no name given -- and his nickname is "Prof."  And here are a few of his recent YouTube videos:

• "Cattle Mutilation -- a Horrible 'Big Picture'"
• "Nuclear Explosions Over the Atlantic"
• "The Science Film YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO SEE"
• "Antigravity Machine Finished"
• "Faster Than Light: CIA and the UFO"

Not exactly a testimony to scientific rigor, right there.  So how would this guy know about some find at Breakthrough Listen, especially one that is being kept hush-hush so the scientific teams themselves don't get scooped?

The other thing, though, is that we've been down this road before.  Last year, we had all the hoopla over military whistleblower David Grusch, alleging that the United States had hard evidence not only of alien technology but of "biological material not of earthly origin" -- there were even extensive hearings in Congress over the matter.  And the whole thing came to nothing.  The upshot was, "Okay, yeah, if there are actual UFOs from another world zipping around on Earth, it would be a matter of national security," but when asked to present the actual evidence itself, all we got was a shoulder shrug.  

So forgive me for being dubious about Simon Holland's claims.  I'll say what I've said before; if there is proof of alien intelligence, stop acting coy and show us the goods.  Until then, I'm perhaps to be forgiven for being dubious.

I'll end, however, by saying that this is one case where I devoutly hope I'm wrong.  If in "a few weeks" we have publication of a paper in a peer-reviewed science journal about a radio transmission from an intelligent civilization on another planet, I will be beyond thrilled to eat my words.

But I'm not holding my breath.

****************************************

Bugging out

Because the universe has an odd sense of humor sometimes, I suppose it wasn't surprising that after writing a post about how there's no evidence we've been visited by aliens and a post about how giant insects are impossible, I would run into a webpage claiming that we're being visited by giant alien insects.

The webpage calls 'em mantids, which for me really ups the creepiness factor.  Even real praying mantises are scary little beasts, with their bulgy unblinking eyes and flexible necks (allowing for rotation of the head -- something close to unique in insects) and serrated steak knives for arms.  A giant one would definitely fall into the category of "nightmare."

My reaction to this claim was also amplified by having recently rewatched the episode of The X Files called "Folie à Deux," in which a giant bug, which can also manipulate your mind to think it looks human, is biting people and turning them into zombies.  Okay, stated like that, I have to admit the plot sounds pretty fucking stupid, but let me tell you, that episode is terrifying.

Or maybe I'm just suggestible, I dunno.  Because like I said, giant bugs are impossible for several different reasons having to do with well-established laws of physics, chemistry, and biology.  The largest insect known was the Carboniferous dragonfly Meganeura, with a 75-centimeter wingspan -- but this was a time when the Earth's atmosphere had much higher oxygen content (by some estimates, as high as thirty percent), allowing insects' inherently inefficient respiratory systems to be less of a hindrance to growth.  

This argument apparently doesn't have any impact on the people who believe in alien mantids, because according to the webpage, these things are kind of everywhere.  Here's a typical example from the hundreds of encounters you will find described therein:

It started when I was a teenager and went on until my early thirties.  I would wake up in the middle of the night and not be able to move.  It was terrifying and I would try to scream but nothing would come out.  Sometimes I would see a bright round light across the room and I always felt like it was trying to drain the energy/life out of me.  Sometimes I felt a heavy pressure on me and a couple of times I even thought I could feel someone next to me on the bed.  Once I saw a figure in black who I just felt was evil, standing next to my bed and it also felt like he was trying to drain the energy/life out of me...  And one time I woke up to see a large praying mantis type creature sitting in a chair looking at me and there was a small hooded/cloaked figure next to him.  I can't tell you much about the smaller figure because I didn't pay that much attention to it.  I was more terrified of the larger creature and It had my full attention.  And one thing I do have memory of is noticing a large gold medallion on its chest area.  I know also that it was very tall even though it was sitting on a chair.  I think it was wearing some kind of cape around its shoulders.  I do remember also feeling like it was studying me with indifference, if that makes any sense.  Like it didn't seem to care that I was looking back at it, or that I was terrified.  More like I was just an object in front of it that it was looking at.  I have never gone into this much detail about it before, but these are the main things that stand out in my memory.

You're probably already predicting where I'm going to go with this; this sounds like a classic example of a hallucination experienced during sleep paralysis, a well-studied phenomenon that is undoubtedly terrifying to the people who experience it, but the intensity of their fear doesn't mean what they're seeing is real.  The trouble is, sleep paralysis hallucinations are extraordinarily convincing, because (unlike ordinary nightmares) you're aware of your actual surroundings and the position of your body, so it feels like you're immersed in a partly-real, partly-surreal world, where you can't tell which is which.

Sleep paralysis accounts for maybe half the stories of mantid encounters, from the sound of it.

It's also telling that the other half of the accounts begin with, "After taking a dose of DMT/psilocybin/high-strength THC..."

So I wouldn't worry about being visited by giant mantises.  If you do experience frequent sleep paralysis, though, you might want to see a doctor.  And if you're seeing huge insects after doing drugs, the obvious solution to your problem is "stop doing drugs."

But you have to wonder what mashup of previous posts the universe will find for me next.  Maybe "Bigfoot x ghosts."  Sasquatch sightings are actually people seeing the ghosts of prehistoric proto-hominids.  That claim's gotta be out there somewhere, right?

****************************************

Facepalms of the gods

While snooping around looking for topics for Skeptophilia, I stumbled upon a page over on Quora that made me utter a string of really bad words and then say, "that nonsense again?"

It will come as no surprise to regular readers that the aforementioned nonsense was the contention that mythological accounts of powerful deities living in the skies are evidence of visitations by aliens with advanced technology.  The original poster on Quora called it "the Ancient Alien Theory," which made me grind my teeth even harder, because the use of the word theory to mean "this crazy idea I just now pulled out of my ass" makes me absolutely livid.

But I shouldn't be surprised that they use it this way, because (1) they also misinterpret just about every piece of archaeological or anthropological evidence in existence, and (2) calling it a "theory" gives an undeserved sheen of seriousness to their claim.  What gets me, though, is that this stuff has been around for decades, has been debunked every which way from Sunday, and it's still got traction.

The whole goofy story starts with the book Chariots of the Gods, written by Erich von Däniken in 1968, but more's the pity, it doesn't end there.  Chariots of the Gods is the Creature That Won't Die.  Like the Hydra, it just keeps regrowing heads and coming back at you again.  In fact, Chariots of the Gods was only the first of a series of books by von Däniken, each ringing the changes on the Ancient Astronauts theme.  When Chariots of the Gods hit the bestseller list, he followed it up with: Gods from Outer Space; The Gold of the Gods; In Search of Ancient Gods; Miracles of the Gods; Signs of the Gods; Pathways to the Gods; and Enough About The Gods, Already, Let's Talk About Something Else.

Obviously, I made the last one up, because von Däniken at age 89 is still blathering on about The Gods.  His books have sold 62 million copies, have been translated into 32 languages, and his ideas formed the basis of a theme park in Switzerland, thus further reinforcing my belief that skepticism will never be the lucrative profession that woo-wooism is.

A statue from the late Jomon period of Japan (1000-400 B.C.E.), which Erich von Däniken thinks can only be explained as a space-suited alien, since humans obviously never include weird imaginary creatures in their mythological art. [Image is in the Public Domain]

You might ask what von Däniken's evidence is, other than the argument from incredulity ("wow! The pyramids are really big!  I can't imagine making a pyramid, myself.  Therefore they must have been designed and constructed by aliens!").  Here are a few pieces of evidence that von Däniken claims support the Ancient Astronaut hypothesis:

• The Antikythera mechanism.  This complex "mechanical computer," found in a shipwreck dated to about 150 BCE, contains a series of nested gears and was used to calculate astronomical positions.  Von Däniken says it's of alien manufacture, despite the fact that similar devices are mentioned in Greek and Roman literature, including Cicero's De Re Publica, in which its invention is credited to Archimedes.  (To be fair to von Däniken, I used Antikythera myself as the central MacGuffin in my novel Gears.  However, unlike von Däniken's work, Gears is clearly labeled "fiction.")
• The Piri Reis map.  This map, dating to 1513, "could only have been drawn using an aerial perspective," von Däniken claims.  In other words, it was drawn looking down from a spacecraft.  Unfortunately for von Däniken, the truth is that human sailors have been quite good at drawing maps for a very long time, because those who weren't quickly became fish bait.  The antecedents of the Piri Reis map have been identified, and include ten maps of Arab origin, four of Portuguese origin, and one map drawn by Christopher Columbus himself.
• The sarcophagus of Mayan ruler K'inich Janaab' Pakal, which allegedly shows him riding in a spacecraft.  The claim has been denounced loudly by every known expert in Mayan culture, language, and history.  The sarcophagus depicts the Mayan religious concept of the "world tree," not a rocket ship with a plume of exhaust, says archaeologist Sarah Kurnick -- von Däniken's claims to the contrary show that he can't be bothered to learn the first thing about Mayan culture before making pronouncements about what their art and inscriptions mean.  An objection which, of course, could be made about every other cultural artifact he mentions.
• The Moai, or Easter Island statues.  These are pretty cool, but in my mind only demonstrate what a lot of single-minded people working together can accomplish.
• A "non-rusting" iron pillar in India, that supposedly didn't rust because it was some kind of alien alloy.  When von Däniken's books became popular, naturally skeptics wanted to go to India to check out this story.  They found the pillar, and you'll never guess what it had on it?  Rust.  If you can imagine.  Being that this was kind of conclusive, von Däniken backed off from this claim, and said in an interview with Playboy, "We can forget about this iron thing."

The truth is, piece after piece of von Däniken's "evidence" falls apart if you analyze it, and try not to be swayed by his hyperdramatic statements that always seem to include phrases like "can only be explained by," "scientists are baffled by," and "a mystery beyond human ken."  Von Däniken's books were written because they make money, and are, simply put, pseudoscientific tripe.  The best debunking of his claims was Ronald Story's 1976 book The Space Gods Revealed, which is a page-by-page refutation of all of von Däniken's claims, and remains to this day one of the best skeptical analyses of pseudoscience ever written.

But the frustrating bottom line is that all of that hasn't made a dent in the popularity of von Däniken and his ideas.  Much of the blame lies with shows like Ancient Aliens, of course; the This Is No Longer Even Remotely Related To History Channel keeps pushing it because it's lucrative (it's now on its twentieth season and showing no signs of flagging).  So despite the rationalists and skeptics giving themselves facepalm-induced concussions, it looks like The Gods are still going to be around for a good long while yet.

****************************************

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.

****************************************