Aliens visit Bulgaria

It's been a while since we've had any interesting reports of UFO or alien sightings, so I was tickled to find a post yesterday on Paranominal that claims that some hikers near Plovdiv, Bulgaria snapped a photograph of an "alien Grey" while walking through a forest.

The photograph is put into a sort of montage format on a video in the post, but I'll post the photograph itself here:

What I find interesting about this photo is that it shows the alien, who appears to be about five meters tall, clearly visible between two trees maybe ten meters further on in the woods, and yet the hikers are still walking toward it in an apparently unconcerned fashion.  I don't know about you, but if I were hiking through the woods and stumbled upon a scary-looking alien creature who was over twice my height, I would not just stroll right on up to it.  At the point this photograph was taken, I would already be running in a comical, Looney Tunes manner in the opposite direction, with my feet only visible as a circular blur.

If I had not immediately died of a brain aneurysm when I spotted the thing.  Which is probably more likely.  I may be a skeptical scientific type, and all, but I am also a great big old coward.  I believe that it is our duty as rationalists to evaluate claims of the paranormal, but I am much more comfortable evaluating them from a safe distance, which in this case would be about fifty miles.

Be that as it may, I'm a little skeptical of this claim.  For one thing, if you watched the video, you'll notice how the alien face becomes way scarier when they isolate and magnify it.  While this may seem like a "duh" statement, part of the reason that alien and ghost photographs become more convincing in close-ups is because they get grainier when you do that -- the image "pixillates."  (For a creepy example of how the brain imposes meaning on grainy data, take a look at this optical illusion.)  Now, as we've seen many times before, humans are great at imposing meaning on patternless images, and we especially like to turn those images into faces (a phenomenon called pareidolia, about which I have written many times before).  But the fact that we become more convinced as the data gets grainy is a little suspicious, and exactly the opposite of what should happen to a scientist.  We should be convinced by precision, not by imprecision.

The last nail in the coffin, for me, came at the end of the video, when I saw who had put it together.  The creator of the video -- and probably the photograph as well -- was one Stephen Hannard, of England, who is also the one who claimed that the Martian probe Curiosity found a fossilized shoe, human finger, and woodchuck on the surface of Mars, and that the International Space Station had captured footage of a giant space slug.  It's not like this guy has any kind of solid track record for veracity.  So I'm perhaps to be forgiven if I find anything coming from Hannard a little suspect from the get go.

So anyhow, I doubt this is really a photograph of an alien, which is kind of a shame.  I'd love it if there was, during my lifetime, incontrovertible evidence of intelligent alien life.  I realize that's easy for me to say sitting here safely in my office thousands of kilometers from Plovdiv, Bulgaria, but I really do mean it.  If an alien spaceship landed in my back yard, I'd even try to overcome my urge to run away or die of fright in order to be the first human to shake their gray, seven-fingered hands upon their arrival on Earth.

The Mars rover's cleaning crew

A few days ago, I posted about the contention that the NASA rover Curiosity had discovered life on Mars, in the form of a couple of UFOs and a Martian groundhog.  Today, we have the contention that the Mars lander was actually a (covertly) manned spacecraft.

What is the proof, you might ask?  It's a photograph, to wit:

What we are looking at, claims an article over at UFO Blogger entitled, "Who is Cleaning the NASA Mars Rover Curiosity?", is a man in a space suit leaning over and applying Windex to the camera lens.

Amongst the many problems with this conjecture is that if NASA was smart enough to be able to send a human crew along with Curiosity, lo under our very noses, then presumably they would be smart enough not to post photographs publicly showing the shadow of one of said crew.  Especially given that supposedly they're doing this with evil intent.  Notwithstanding that argument, the poster over at UFO Blogger says if we don't buy the manned-mission hypothesis, we can only come to one other possible reasonable conclusion -- that the Mars landing was a fake, and the rover is currently sending back photographs from the Atacama Desert (and the article conveniently has some photographs of the Atacama Desert for comparison).  Way at the end the writer admits that it could be a "shadow illusion," but you get the impression that (s)he doesn't think that's likely at all. 

And neither do the people who posted the comments section.  A couple of samples will suffice:

"Why would they pull such a scam? This government truly sucks. Not even surprised by anything anymore."

"You know guys... its becoming clear to me that NASA is doing this purposely for the 'conspiracy crowd'. they know we're not buying it yet they still have us distracted, our attention diverted, from whats really important as we waste our time and mental energy on their BS. we need to totally ignore NASA at this point."


Yup.  Those doggone attention hogs down at NASA are never satisfied unless we're watching them.

Of course, the other problem with this whole idiotic contention is that it's remarkably difficult to determine what an object looks like from its shadow.  If you think I'm exaggerating, take a look at this amazing shadow art by Sue Webster and Tim Noble, in which mounds of trash illuminated with light from a particular angle create shadows that look like people, a pair of rats having sex, two severed heads on spikes, and a variety of other things.  Add a bit of pareidolia into the mix -- the tendency of people to see human forms in random shapes -- and you've got an explanation for the shadow in the Mars photograph that doesn't require you to believe that NASA is either duping us all by sending the rover to Chile, or else sneakily including a human crew on the mission for their own nefarious purposes.

So anyhow, that's pretty much that, as far as I can see.  The rover will have to manage without any space-suited humans cleaning the camera lens, and the woo-woos will have to find another ridiculous conjecture to blather on about.  The latter might actually be a forlorn hope, because as we've seen before, once woo-woos catch hold of an idea, they hold on like grim death despite the most cogent argument to the contrary.  But at least the rest of us can go back to enjoying the photographs from Curiosity for what they are -- amazing images of our strange and uninhabited neighbor world.

Faces in the woods

One of the first things I ever wrote about in this blog was the phenomenon of pareidolia -- because the human brain is wired to recognize faces, we sometimes see faces where there are only random patterns of lights and shadows that resemble a face.  This is why, as children, we all saw faces in clouds and on the Moon; and it also explains the Face on Mars, most "ghost photographs," and the countless instances of seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches, tortillas, and concrete walls.

When I first mentioned pareidolia, four years ago, it seemed like most people hadn't heard of it.  Recently, however, the idea has gained wider currency, and now when some facelike thing is spotted, and makes it into the mainstream press, the word seems to come up with fair regularity.  Which is all to the good.

But it does leave the woo-woos in a bit of a quandary, doesn't it?  If all of their ghost photographs and Faces on Mars and grilled cheese Jesuses (Jesi?) are just random patterns, perceived as faces because that's how the human brain works, what's a woo-woo to do?

Well, a recent post at OccultView gives us the answer.

Entitled "Photographing Spirits, Faeries, and Trolls," the writer admits that pareidolia does occur:

Photographing nature spirits is tricky business.  Nature spirits, fairies and trolls don’t exactly resemble human beings.  Any image of such an entity could simply be pareidolia, which is imagining meaningful shapes in random patterns.  Then again, there is always a chance what appears to be a fairy is actually a fairy.

Okay, so far so good.   So how do we tell the difference?  We can't, the writer says, because even if it is pareidolia, the spirits are still there:

There is also a third possibility…intentionally created pareidolia.  Even if non-physical beings can’t necessarily be photographed, perhaps they can manipulate their surroundings to give themselves shape.  Might they use branches and leaves to give substance to their formlessness?  What appears as pareidolia may not always be the result of purely random patterns but the result of serendipity and synchronicity. 

So, in other words -- if I'm understanding him correctly -- even if analysis of the photograph showed that the image we thought was a Forest Troll turned out to be a happenstance arrangement of leaves and branches, it's still a troll -- it's just that the troll used the leaves and branches to create his face?  (At this point, you should go back and click the guy's link, if you haven't already done so -- he includes some photographs of "Woodland Spirits" that he took, and that are at least mildly entertaining.)

Well, to a skeptic's ear, all of this sounds mighty convenient.  "No -- the ghostly image wasn't just a smudge on the camera lens; the ghost created a smudge on your camera lens in order to leave his image on the photograph."  What this does, of course, is to remove photographic evidence from the realm of the even potentially falsifiable -- any alternate explanations simply show that the denizens of the Spirit World can manipulate their surroundings, your mind, and the camera or recording equipment.

The whole thing puts me in mind of China Miéville's amazing (and terrifying) short story "Details," in which a woman admits that cracks in sidewalks and stains on walls and patterns in carpet that happen to resemble faces are just random and meaningless -- but at the same time, they are monsters.  "For most people, it's just chance, isn't it?" the main character, Mrs. Miller, says.  "What shapes they see in a tangle of wire.  There's a thousand pictures there, and when you look, some of them just appear.  But now... the thing in the lines chooses the pictures for me.  It can thrust itself forward.  It makes me see it.  It's found its way through."

It does bear keeping in mind, though, that however wonderful Miéville's story is, you will find it on the "Fiction" aisle in the bookstore.  For a reason.

Of course, it's not like any hardcore skeptic considers photographic evidence all that reliable in the first place.  Besides pareidolia and simple camera malfunctions, programs like Photoshop have made convincing fakes too easy to produce.  This is why scientists demand hard evidence when people make outlandish claims -- show me, in a controlled setting, that what you are saying is true.  If you think there's a troll in the woods, let's see him show up in front of reliable witnesses.  Let's have a sample of troll hair on which to perform DNA analysis, or a troll bone to study in the lab.  If you say a house is haunted by a "spirit," design me a Spirit-o-Meter that can detect the "energy field" that you people always blather on about -- don't just tell me that you sensed a Great Disturbance in the Force, and if I didn't, it's just too bad that I don't have your level of psychic sensitivity.  Also, for cryin' in the sink, don't tell me that my "disbelief is getting in the way," which is another accusation I've had leveled at me.  Honestly, you'd think that, far from being discouraged by my disbelief, a ghost would want to appear in front of skeptics like myself, just for the fun of watching us piss our pants in abject terror.  ("I do believe in spooks, I do believe in spooks, I do believe, I do believe...")

In any case, the article on OccultView gives us yet another example of how the worlds of science and woo-woo define the word "evidence" rather differently.  The two views, I think, are probably irreconcilable.  So I'll end here, on that rather pessimistic note, not only because I've reached the end of my post for the day,  but also because I just spilled a little bit of coffee on my desk, and I want to wipe it up before the Coffee Fairy fashions it into a scary-looking face.