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.

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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."

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