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.
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.
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