Skeptophilia (skep-to-fil-i-a) (n.) - the love of logical thought, skepticism, and thinking critically. Being an exploration of the applications of skeptical thinking to the world at large, with periodic excursions into linguistics, music, politics, cryptozoology, and why people keep seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches.
There's a general rule-of-thumb that if you are trying to get people to believe some outlandish idea, you do not increase your chances of success by altering it to make it even more outlandish. If, for example, your particular shtick is that the Earth is a flat disk, you will not sound more plausible by adding that it was put in motion by the god Frisbeus, and during the End Times the Devil will alter its orbit so it gets stuck up on the Celestial Roof.
This goes double if you give your idea a silly name. Frisbeeterianism, for example.
This is a rule-of-thumb that the UFO/UAP crowd seem not to have taken to heart, given an article I've now been sent three times by well-meaning loyal readers of Skeptophilia, to the effect that the rumor now circulating amongst "whistleblowers" is that the aliens are using the Earth as a "misery farm," getting things set up so as to generate maximum despair, because they feed off negative emotional energy.
Called "loosh."
Apparently loosh has been around for a while, originating in 1985 with a dude named Robert Monroe who was seriously into out-of-body experiences. Monroe, however, envisioned loosh as nice stuff; the "essence of universal love." This kind of energy (using the latter term in its non-scientific sense), Monroe said, is nourishing to the soul, and therefore our benevolent alien overlords want us to produce as much as possible, then share the stuff around.
It bears keeping in mind, however, that Monroe also wrote a book about visiting "The Park," which is the Reception Center for heaven, where spirits go immediately after death to recuperate for a while. How Monroe got there without dying first is an open question, so we're kind of in deep water right off the bat.
In any case, loosh got picked up by conspiracy theorist David Icke, and that's where things took a darker turn. Because, after all, you can't have a good conspiracy theory based on a plot to make everyone really nice to each other, whether aliens are involved or not. Icke claimed that Monroe had misinterpreted loosh; it's not the essence of love, it's actually a negative spiritual energy generated when people are miserable. In Icke's view, the Earth is a prison planet, and our alien masters want us to be upset, because then they have more food to eat, or something.
I have to admit that as a model, this works surprisingly well. The last ten years have been not only a non-stop shitshow, but off-the-register weird. It would explain a lot if there are superpowerful aliens who are just fucking with us. I mean, the other option is that Donald Trump and the MAGA movement are some kind of naturally-occurring phenomenon, and I don't know about you, but for me that stretches credibility to the snapping point.
But one thing I'll give the alien overlords: if there really is a plot to make every smart person on Earth extremely depressed, so far it's working brilliantly.
In any case, apparently there are now UFO Truthers out there who not only want the government to 'fess up about alien spacecraft sightings, but also to admit that the government is in league with the aliens to keep us all trapped in the Slough of Despond. In some versions, the elected officials themselves are alien shapeshifters (in the case of Stephen Miller, the shape honestly hasn't shifted much). In other versions, they're just collaborators who are hoping the aliens will keep them in power so the feast can continue.
What's vaguely unsettling about all this -- I mean, besides the fact that there are people who take it seriously -- is that this is strangely close to the plot of my novel, Eyes Like Midnight.
In this novel, the Earth is being invaded by the Black-eyed Children, who are evil aliens that can take the form of human children (although they can't manage the eyes for some reason, which come out a solid, glossy black). The Children kidnap humans because they feed on cognitive energy -- so for them, the eight-billion-odd people on the planet are basically an all-you-can-eat buffet. There's even been infiltration of the government with humans who are under mind control, and who are acting as collaborators to allow the Children to take over (and thwarting the heroic few who are fighting back).
It's a really good story, and you all should buy it right now. But let me just emphasize one thing about Eyes Like Midnight:
It is a work of fiction.
Like, I made the story up from beginning to end. It's based on an urban legend that's been around for a while, but that, too, is fiction.
Given all that, I'm inclined to think that "Earth as misery-producing prison planet" is as well.
Or, who knows? Maybe I'm one of the collaborators myself, and by writing this I'm just trying to sow doubt in your mind. Maybe the whole fifteen-year history of this blog has, all along, been one elaborate exercise in misdirection. Each time I post here, I cackle maniacally and wiggle my fingertips in a menacing fashion, just delighted at how many people I'm bamboozling with all this nonsense about "science" and "skepticism" and "rationality."
When the reality is that the Earth is actually shaped like a donut. With sprinkles.
Now, y'all'll have to excuse me, because I think I need to go lie down for a while. You can only exude so much loosh before you start feeling a little light-headed.
I'll start today with a quote (often misquoted) from William Shakespeare -- more specifically, Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5:
Horatio:
O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!
Hamlet:
And therefore as a stranger give it welcome. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Horatio and Hamlet, of course, are talking about ghosts and the supernatural, but it could equally well be applied to science. It's tempting sometimes, when reading about new scientific discoveries, for the layperson to say, "This can't possibly be true, it's too weird." But there are far too many truly bizarre theories that have been rigorously verified over and over -- quantum mechanics and the General Theory of Relativity jump to mind immediately -- to rule anything out based upon our common-sense ideas about how the universe works.
That was my reaction while watching a YouTube video about an astronomical object I'd never heard of -- Przybylski's Star, named after its discoverer, Polish-born Australian astronomer Antoni Przybylski. The video comes from astronomer David Kipping's channel Cool Worlds Lab, which looks at cutting-edge science -- and tantalizing new data about the universe we live in. (You should subscribe to it -- you won't be sorry.) Przybylski's Star is 355 light years from Earth, in the constellation of Centaurus, and is weird in so many ways that it kind of boggles the mind.
It's classified as a Type Ap star. Type A stars are young, compact, luminous, and very hot; the brightest star in the night sky, Sirius, is in this class.
Przybylski's Star rotates slowly. I mean, really slowly. Compared to the Sun, which rotates about once every 27 days, Przybylski's Star rotates once every two hundred years. Most type A stars rotate even faster than the Sun; in fact, a lot of them rotate so quickly that the light from their receding hemisphere and that from their approaching hemisphere experience enough red-shift and blue-shift (respectively) to smear out their spectral lines, making it impossible for us to tell exactly what they're made of.
You probably know that most ordinary stars are primarily composed of hydrogen, and of the bit that's not hydrogen, most of it is helium. Hydrogen is the fuel for the fusion in the core of the star, and helium is the product formed by that fusion. Late in their life, many stars undergo core collapse, in which the temperatures heat up enough to fuse helium into heavier elements like carbon and oxygen. Most of the rest of the elements on the periodic table are generated in supernovas and in neutron stars, a topic I dealt with in detail in a post I did about six years ago.
My point here is that if you look at the emission spectra of your average star, the spectral lines you see should mostly be the familiar ones from hydrogen and helium, with minuscule traces of the spectra of other elements. The heaviest element that should be reasonably abundant, even in the burned-out cores of stars, is iron -- it represents the turnaround point on the curve of binding energy, the point where fusion into heavier elements starts consuming more energy than it releases.
So elements that are low in abundance pretty much everywhere, such as the aptly-named rare earth elements (known to chemists as the lanthanides), should be so uncommon as to be effectively undetectable. Short-lived radioactive elements like thorium and radium shouldn't be there at all, because they don't form in the core of your ordinary star, and therefore any traces present had to have formed prior to the star in question's formation -- almost always, enough time that they should have long since decayed away.
The composition of Przybylski's Star, on the other hand, is so skewed toward heavy elements that it elicits more in the way of frustrated shrugs than it does in viable models that could account for it. It's ridiculously high in lanthanides like cerium, dysprosium, europium, and gadolinium -- not elements you hear about on a daily basis. There's more praseodymium in the spectrum of its upper atmosphere than there is iron. Even stranger is the presence of very short-lived radioactive elements such as plutonium -- and actinium, americium, and neptunium, elements for which we don't even know a naturally-occuring nuclide synthesis pathway capable of creating them.
So where did they come from?
"What we’d like to know... is how the heavy elements observed here have come about," said astronomy blogger Paul Gilster. "A neutron star is one solution, a companion object whose outflow of particles could create heavy elements in Przybylski’s Star, and keep them replenished. The solution seems to work theoretically, but no neutron star is found anywhere near the star."
"[T]hat star doesn’t just have weird abundance patterns; it has apparently impossible abundance patterns," said Pennsylvania State University astrophysicist Jason Wright, in his wonderful blog AstroWright. "In 2008 Gopka et al. reported the identification of short-lived actinides in the spectrum. This means radioactive elements with half-lives on the order of thousands of years (or in the case of actinium, decades) are in the atmosphere... The only way that could be true is if these products of nuclear reactions are being replenished on that timescale, which means… what exactly? What sorts of nuclear reactions could be going on near the surface of this star?"
All the explanations I've seen require so many ad-hoc assumptions that they're complete non-starters. One possibility astrophysicists have floated is that the replenishment is because it was massively enriched by a nearby supernova, and not just with familiar heavy elements like gold and uranium, but with superheavy elements that thus far, we've only seen produced in high-energy particle accelerators -- elements like flerovium (atomic number 114) and oganesson (atomic number 118). These elements are so unstable that they have half-lives measured in fractions of a second, but it's theorized that certain isotopes might exist in an island of stability, where they have much longer lives, long enough to build up in a star's atmosphere and then decay into the lighter, but still rare, elements seen in Przybylski's Star.
There are several problems with this idea, the first being that every attempt to find where the island of stability lies hasn't succeeded. Physicists thought that flerovium might have the "magic number" of protons and neutrons to make it more stable, but a paper released not long ago seems to dash that hope.
The second, and worse, problem is that there's no supernova remnant anywhere near Przybylski's Star.
The third, and worst, problem is that it's hard to imagine any natural process, supernova-related or not, that could produce the enormous quantity of superheavy elements required to account for the amount of lanthanides and actinides found in this star's upper atmosphere.
Which brings me to the wildest speculation about the weird abundances of heavy elements. You'll never guess who's responsible.
Go ahead, guess.
There is a serious suggestion out there -- and David Kipping does take it seriously -- that an advanced technological civilization might have struck on the solution for nuclear waste of dumping it into the nearest star. This explanation (called "salting"), bizarre as it sounds, would explain not only why the elements are there, but why they're way more concentrated in the upper atmosphere of the star than in the core.
"Here on Earth... people sometimes propose to dispose of our nuclear waste by throwing it into the Sun,” Wright writes. “Seven years before Superman thought of the idea, Whitmire & Wright (not me, I was only 3 in 1980) proposed that alien civilizations might use their stars as depositories for their fissile waste. They even pointed out that the most likely stars we would find such pollution in would be… [type] A stars! (And not just any A stars, late A stars, which is what Przybylski’s Star is). In fact, back in 1966, Sagan and Shklovskii in their book Intelligent Life in the Universe proposed aliens might 'salt' their stars with obviously artificial elements to attract attention."
A curious side note is that I've met (Daniel) Whitmire, of Whitmire & Wright -- he was a professor in the physics department of the University of Louisiana when I was an undergraduate, and I took a couple of classes with him (including Astronomy). He was known for his outside-of-the-box ideas, including that a Jupiter-sized planet beyond the orbit of Pluto was responsible for disturbing the Oort Cloud as it passed through every hundred million years or so (being so far out, it would have a super-long rate of revolution). This would cause comets, asteroids, and other debris to rain in on the inner Solar System, resulting in a higher rate of impacts with the Earth -- and explaining the odd cyclic nature of mass extinctions.
So I'm not all that surprised about Whitmire's suggestion, although it bears mention that he was talking about the concept in the purely theoretical sense; the weird spectrum of Przybylski's Star was discovered after Whitmire & Wright's paper on the topic.
Curiouser and curiouser.
So we're left with a mystery. The "it's aliens" explanation is hardly going to be accepted by the scientific establishment without a hell of a lot more evidence, and thus far, there is none. The problem is, the peculiar abundance of heavy elements in this very odd star remains unaccounted for by any science we currently understand. The fact that Kipping (and others) are saying "we can't rule out the alien salting hypothesis" is very, very significant.
I'll end with another quote, this one from eminent biologist J. B. S. Haldane: "The universe is not only queerer than we imagine, it is queerer than we can imagine."
Just about everyone has heard about the Roswell Incident, the 1947 discovery of military balloon debris near Roswell, New Mexico that gave rise to a million (and counting) conspiracy theories suggesting that the crash site had actually been pieces of a downed spacecraft, complete with the corpses of the alien crew. But have you heard about the Warminster Thing?
It's a tale that's even weirder than Roswell, because (1) there were multiple witnesses who seem to have had no particular reason to lie, and (2) there's no good rational/non-alien-based explanation that I've ever heard. This event got its start in December of 1964, near the town of Warminster, in Wiltshire, England.
Here are the basics of the claim.
In the wee hours of Christmas morning, a woman named Mildred Head was awakened by a strange noise coming from above. It sounded like something was striking and/or dragging across her roof tiles. "The night came alive with strange sounds lashing at [the] roof," she later reported. "It sounded like twigs brushing against the tiles and got louder and louder until it reverberated like giant hailstones." Alarmed, she got out of bed and went to the window, pulled the curtains, and looked outside. There was no sign of hail (or any other form of precipitation). But as she stood there, she heard another sound -- a "humming sound that grew louder, then faded to a faint whisper -- a low whistling or wheezing."
Her husband, who was deaf, slept through the entire thing.
At six o'clock that same morning, another woman, Marjorie Bye, was walking to the early Christmas service at Christ Church in Warminster when she also heard odd sounds. At first it sounded like crackling, and she thought it might be a truck spreading grit on icy spots on the road. But as she listened, the sound got nearer, passed over her head, and continued in the direction of Ludlow Close. Like Mildred Head, Marjorie Bye heard a humming noise and a sound like "branches being pulled across gravel." The night was clear and starlit, and she saw nothing even when the sounds seemed to be at their nearest.
But the incident wasn't over yet. As she neared the church, she experienced what she later characterized as a "sonic attack." "Sudden vibrations came overhead... Shockwaves pounded at my head, neck and shoulders. I felt I was being pinned down by invisible fingers of sound."
A similar report came from Warminster's postmaster, the unfortunately-named Roger Rump. He heard "a terrific clatter, as though the roof tiles were being pulled off by some tremendous force. Then came a scrambling sound as if they were being loudly slammed back into place. I could hear an odd humming tone. It was most unusual. It lasted no more than a minute."
All told, over thirty people in or near Warminster heard the noises, and the accounts all substantially agreed with each other.
Then, in March of the following year, the events started up again -- and intensified.
There were more reports of noises like rushing wind, something scraping against roof tiles, and loud booming sounds. People reported flocks of birds being found dead. "There was a great bouncing and bumping noise over our heads," one man reported. "As though a load of stones was being tipped against the roof and the back wall of the bungalow. It seemed like a tonne of coal were being emptied from sacks and sent tumbling over all the place."
This time, though, people began seeing things as well.
Patricia Philips, the wife of the vicar of Heytesbury, a village near Warminster, saw a "cigar-shaped object" in the sky that was visible long enough for her husband and all three children to watch it through binoculars. Two months later, a woman named Kathleen Penton saw "a shining thing going along sideways in the sky. Porthole-type windows ran the entire length of it. It glided slowly in front of the downs…it was the size of a whole bedroom wall. It was very much like a train carriage, only with rounded ends to it. It did not travel lengthways but was gliding sideways."
By the end of summer, the incidents seemed to taper off, but not before one man -- Gordon Faulkner -- was able to photograph what he claimed was a UFO near Colloway Clump, north of Warminster:
By this time, a journalist named Arthur Shuttlewood had become obsessed with figuring out the answer to the mystery, and interviewed dozens of people who had strange experiences between December 1964 and August 1965. He ended up with eight notebooks filled with accounts -- and no answers.
So, what's going on here?
There are a few possibilities, but I have to admit there's no particularly good reason to subscribe to any of them. The first is that the noises were military equipment tests from the Land Warfare Center, a British Army training and development base near Warminster. The military, of course, denied all knowledge of the source of the noises and (later) sightings, but if they were testing sonic weapons that were classified, there could well be another reason for that.
On the other hand, it's hard to imagine why the military would choose Christmas morning to test a sonic weapon near a town where fifteen thousand people live.
A second possibility is that Arthur Shuttlewood, the journalist who brought the whole story to light -- and who popularized it thereafter, eventually writing a book about the incidents -- exaggerated, or (perhaps) even spun from whole cloth, the lion's share of the "personal accounts." Shuttlewood was never accused outright of falsifying evidence, but his colleagues at The Wiltshire Times said he was not above embellishing reports of local events "for dramatic effect." It bears mention here that even if Shuttlewood started out fairly reliable, he kind of went off the rails later in life. He reported telepathic communications, and even telephone calls, from "natives from the planet Aenstria" who were behind the whole thing. They warned Shuttlewood of various dangers we were facing as a species, but said not to worry, because Christ would return in 1975 and fix everything.
Well, I was fifteen years old in 1975, and what stands out about that particular year is that there was no sign of the Second Coming, and everything is still as unfixed as it ever was.
In any case, Shuttlewood lived until 1996, swearing to the end that what he'd said was nothing less than the unvarnished truth. (If you want to read Shuttlewood's own account of his interactions with the Aenstrians, you can check it out here. I'll warn you, though -- don't expect to come away from it with an improved opinion of his veracity.)
So what we have here is another unfortunate case of a curious unexplained incident getting into the hands of someone who was either an obsessed attention seeker or completely unhinged, or both -- similar to what happened with the famous case of the haunting of Borley Rectory. When this occurs, any evidence we may have had becomes tainted with misrepresentations and dubious additions from people who also want their fifteen minutes of fame, to the point that it becomes difficult to tell what is true, what is due to human suggestibility, and what is an outright fabrication.
Myself, I'm most inclined to credit the first few accounts as being the most credible, and the most in need of an explanation. Mildred Head, Marjorie Bye, and Roger Rump, all of whom made their reports before the furor started, had no particular reason to make their stories up; in fact, Bye initially didn't want her name attached to it, until so many other people came forward that she figured it was safe.
The later accounts, though -- and especially the infamous photograph taken by Gordon Faulkner -- are all too likely to be the result of people eager to jump on the bandwagon of what had by then become a nationally-reported incident. That's not proof, I realize -- "they could be hoaxes" is a long way from "they are hoaxes" -- but at the very least, those later reports should be looked at through a (really) skeptical lens.
The "Warminster Thing" taken as a whole, though -- it's a curious story, but there's honestly not enough hard evidence there to make a certain determination about anything. We have to leave it in the "unknown, and we probably will never know" category. Maybe aliens did visit Wiltshire in 1964 and 1965. Maybe they were even from "the planet Aenstria." But at the moment, I'm much more confident that the incident -- whatever it was -- had some purely rational, and terrestrial, explanation.
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.
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.
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 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."
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?
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.
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