Revisiting Roswell

A couple of years ago, I went to visit my cousin's family in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and while in the state I insisted on making the drive out to see the International UFO Museum in Roswell.

Yes, it was campy, but it was fun.  My wife spent most of the visit rolling her eyes, but I did get a poster for my classroom, and an opportunity to have my photograph taken having a nice drink in an alien bar that would have only been improved by having a band like the one in Mos Eisley spaceport.

The "Roswell Incident" is one of the most talked about and thoroughly studied UFO stories in history.  In 1947, the museum's website says, "something happened" in the desert plains near Roswell.  The government says it was the crash of a high-altitude weather balloon, but there are alleged whistleblowers (most notably Lieutenant Walter Haut) who claim that it was the wreck of an alien spacecraft.  There are famous photographs of an "alien autopsy," traces of material from the wreckage, and dozens of eyewitness accounts.

What does it all add up to?  Not much, is my opinion.  Could the Roswell debris be the wreckage of an interstellar alien spaceship?  I suppose.  Could it be a hoax, a conglomeration of stories that grew by accretion after a completely natural, terrestrial event?  Yes.  What we have thus far does not meet the minimum standard of evidence that science demands, so for me the jury is still out.

Then of course, there's Neil deGrasse Tyson's comment about the whole thing:  "You're telling me that these aliens flew halfway across the galaxy, and then they couldn't land the damn ship?  If those are the kind of alien visiting the Earth, then they can go home.  I don't want to talk to 'em."

But even given the fact that we have all of the evidence that we're likely to get -- meaning that skeptics like myself will remain unconvinced either way, the believers will continue to believe, and the disbelievers will continue to disbelieve -- the whole thing is still debated endlessly.  People look for new angles, however unlikely those are to lead to anything productive.  And some of those new angles are so odd that they make the original arguments of the UFO crowd seem like peer-reviewed research.

Take, for example the article over at The UFO Iconoclast that says we have only one option for continuing our research into Roswell:

Remote viewing.

Because we all know how much more reliable a study becomes when you compound it with pseudoscience.  Not that that's the way they frame it:

The remote view protocol that we use at Spirit Rescue International is defined as ‘scientific’ and/or ‘coordinate’ remote viewing.  In order to apply it to the Roswell Incident there would need to be more monitor control, protocol modification, use of the correct data type and extended sessions.  The sessions would be conducted by remote viewers who have minimal knowledge of the Roswell Incident. We believe these objectives can be achieved.

Which brings up two rather thorny problems:

1. How do you guarantee "minimal knowledge?"  Anyone who can successfully navigate a Wikipedia page can find out all sorts of facts and speculation about the Roswell Incident.   Given the amount of play this claim has had on television and in movies, and the ubiquity of such information online, "contamination" of the "remote viewers" isn't just likely, it's a near certainty.
2. Since the US government is still denying anything paranormal happened in Roswell in 1947, how would you check the information the remote viewers obtained to determine if it was accurate?

This last issue is the hardest one.  Suppose a remote viewing team determined that the pieces of the Roswell crash -- incontrovertible evidence of a downed spaceship -- were being kept in a warehouse in Topeka.  Can't you just imagine the telephone conversation that might ensue?

UFO investigator:  We know the wreckage of the Roswell spaceship is in Topeka.  Can you let us have a look at it? 

Government official:  It doesn't exist, so no. 

UFO investigator:  Topeka does so exist.  My grandmother lives there.  Ha!  We've caught you in a bald-faced lie. 

Government official:  Not Topeka, the spaceship.  There's no spaceship parts, in Topeka or elsewhere. 

UFO investigator:  Your denial just proves that we're hot on your trail! 

Government official:  *click*

So the whole thing is kind of a non-starter, from a variety of angles.

Understand, though, that no one would be happier than me to have undeniable evidence of alien intelligence.  Even if the aliens in question couldn't successfully land their ship.  Hell, I'm 53 and I still have trouble parallel parking, so I'm not going to judge.  But I'm with Tyson on one thing: the evidence thus far is unconvincing.  And that includes any evidence -- if I can dignify it with that term -- that comes from psychics.

You can't use one unproven thing to prove another unproven thing.  Sorry, but logic just doesn't work that way.

Go Team Woo-Woo!

I love it when woo-woos team up.

It's a twist on the old maxim that two heads are better than one.  You get several wackos in the same room, all throwing around ideas, and what they come up with is a synergistic explosion of weirdness, far more wonderful than anything they could have come up with working independently.

Take, for example, this article, entitled "Brown Dwarf Star Flyby: Estimated Maximal Earth Impact June-July 2013," written by none other than Skeptophilia frequent flyer Alfred Lambremont Webre.  Webre, you may recall, is the one who said the Earth would be bombarded by "4th dimensional energy" on November 11, 2011.  This would cause the Earth's axis to shift by 90 degrees, meaning that we'd all evolve.  Apparently it would also mean that we'd have to get used to having "4th dimensional sex."

For the record, I'm not making any of this up.

Well, now Webre has teamed up with a variety of other contenders for the Nobel Prize in Wingnuttery, including:

• Andrew Basiago, who claims that he ran into President Obama on Mars
• Courtney Brown, an expert in remote viewing
• Marshall Masters, an "expert on Nibiru"

All we need is Diane Tessman there to add some Cosmic Quantum Vibrational Energy Frequencies, and we'd be all set.

But the foursome of Webre, Basiago, Brown, and Masters did pretty well without her, I have to admit.  Here are a few gems from the article I linked above:

• A brown dwarf star will make a close pass to Earth in summer of 2013, causing great distress to those few of us who survive the Mayan apocalypse.
• This brown dwarf star is also the Planet Nibiru, or, as the scientists refer to it in their scholarly papers, "The Lost Star of Time and Myth."
• Actual astronomers can't see this object coming, because the government has hidden it from sight using chemtrails.
• When the dwarf star passes by, it could be a hazard to Earth because of "electrical discharges between our Sun and the brown dwarf star."
• We have some idea of how bad this event is going to be because Basiago, Brown, and other remote viewers, using a device called a "chronovisor," looked into the future and saw that the Supreme Court building is going to be under 100 feet of water.
• However, other remote viewers said that we have only a 39% chance of our future timeline being "catastrophic."  A full 29% said it would be "non-catastrophic."  Presumably the other 32% just said, "Meh."
• The Global Seed Vault on the island of Svalbard is not a research facility devoted to preserving plant biodiversity; it's actually a huge underground shelter that will host two million Norwegians when Nibiru comes, leaving the rest of us to die horrible deaths.  Of course, given that then the two million survivors will then be stuck on a godforsaken island above the Arctic Circle, I kind of think I'd rather just let Nibiru take its best shot at me.
• Basiago, however, did say that these predictions might not come to pass.  The chronovisor, which was "developed by two Vatican scientists in conjunction with Enrico Fermi," might be showing "an alternate time line that does not show up on our timeline" coming from "somewhere else in the multiverse."  Which makes me think he's been spending too much time watching reruns of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
• Webre, on the other hand, says that we can make sure we have a safe flyby if all of us work together to create an "intention vortex" to create "proactive consciousness" and keep the brown dwarf star from doing bad stuff.  Because of course we all know how much our thoughts and prayers alter the laws of physics.

 See?  Wasn't that amazing?  I told you it would be awesome.  Teamwork is so important.

But I think there are still some unexplored avenues, here.  Me, I think we should have the whole gang collaborate.  Dirk vander Ploeg and Nick Redfern could throw in some stuff about Bigfoot.  James van Praagh could get in touch with Great Aunt Mildred and find out if she can give us any advice from the afterlife.  Alex Collier and Paul Hellyer could call in some UFOs to pick up the survivors.  David Icke could wind it all up with a two-hour-long talk about how the government is covering the whole thing up.

It'd be a party!

Remotely possible

Everyone has biases.  I beat that point unto death in my Critical Thinking classes; there is no such thing as a completely objective viewpoint.  We all have our implicit assumptions, preconceived notions, and unquestioned attitudes about how the world works -- or how it should work.  The best thing, and perhaps the only thing if you want to think as clearly as possible, is to be aware of those biases and to try not to let them lead you by the nose.

Still, it's hard, sometimes.  Witness my reaction to the article I just read, entitled "Remote Viewers Help Police Solve Murder."

I had hardly clicked on the link before I was already thinking, "Pfft.  Bunch o' malarkey."  That reaction only intensified as I read -- beginning with their definition of "remote viewing:"  "Remote viewing calls for people to look at random numbers and letters and then let their mind wander, during which they will be able to conjure mental images of people, events and places."  My thought was, "Oh, hey, I can do that!  I just call it 'daydreaming.'"

But, of course, that's not what the article meant.  The author goes on to tell the story of Robert Knight, a Las Vegas photographer, who alerted police to the disappearance of his friend, Stephen B. Williams, in 2006.  Knight was unhappy with the progress made by the police in the case, so he enlisted a teacher of remote viewing, Angela Thompson Smith, for help:

He knew Smith as a teacher of remote viewing, and she apparently knew her stuff. From the late 1980s through 1992, she worked with Princeton University’s Engineering Anomalies Research team. She then moved to Boulder City and became research coordinator for the Bigelow Foundation, which engaged in paranormal research for its founder, Robert T. Bigelow, owner of the Budget Suites of America chain and founder of Bigelow Aerospace...  When Knight came to her in 2006, Smith and six remote viewers she had trained went to work. They included a retired airline captain from Henderson; a retired U.S. Air Force nurse from Dayton, Ohio; a civilian Air Force contractor from Texas; a civil engineer from Virginia; a photographer from Baltimore, Md.; and a university librarian from Provo, Utah. Each was given a coordinate — a random series of letters and numbers — on which to focus.

The viewers each did from one to three remote viewing sessions of about an hour each. They were seeking information unknown at the time, working blind with only the random numbers and letters provided by Smith to focus on. Smith began the work with an initial viewing of the missing man, a follow-up viewing of the suspect’s location, then a profile of the suspect. The other viewers helped seek possible accomplices and the location of the suspect after he fled.

The images they gleaned painted a picture of a body in water, perhaps in criss-crossed netting, near Catalina Island off the Southern California coast.

The punchline: that night in his hotel room, Knight saw a news broadcast in which the newscaster mentioned that an unidentified body had been pulled from the Pacific Ocean off Catalina Island.  Knight "knew who it was," and called the morgue the next morning, saying he could identify the body.  Sure enough, it was Williams.  Then Knight said he had more:

Knight’s information went beyond the body identification. He told police about a man named Harvey Morrow, a supposed investment adviser, who had befriended Williams and was investing Williams’ money — a few million dollars — on his behalf.

Investigators looked into it and found that Morrow was stealing Williams’ money. By now, after Williams’ death, Morrow wasn’t to be found.

Knight told detectives that remote viewers believed Morrow had fled to the British Virgin Islands. One of the viewers even sketched a boat with Morrow on board.

Both observations turned out to be accurate.

Clark said Morrow appeared to have no clue he was a suspect. He left the Caribbean for a job as a used car salesman in Montana — for a boss who was a former cop. He Googled Morrow and discovered he was sought for questioning in the Williams homicide.

Morrow was arrested and convicted in November and is now serving a life sentence without possibility of parole.

The article ends with a quote from a scientist:

Physicist Hal Puthoff, one of the founders of the government’s Stargate remote viewing program, isn’t taken aback by skeptics.

“People seem to fall into two categories: those who have been intimately involved with the phenomenon and know it works, and those who haven’t and know it can’t,” he said.

Well.  He sure told us, didn't he?

Okay, here's my problem, and I will readily admit that my reaction to all this is based upon my biases that the world works a particular way.  First, I am strongly disinclined to believe in remote viewing, and also telepathy, telekinesis, psychometry, and a variety of other kinds of ESP and action-at-a-distance, because I see no possible mechanism by which they could work.  Despite the undoubtedly excellent credentials of Physicist Hal Puthoff, the mechanisms of energy storage and transfer, the behavior of fields, and so on, are exceedingly well understood by physicists, and if remote viewing et al. are real, they must involve some method of energy transfer that is not only outside of the realm of what we currently understand, but is undetectable by any of the instruments physicists use.  And it's not for want of trying; people have been for years trying to develop some kind of "psi-meter," if for no other reason to win James Randi's Million Dollar Challenge, but without success.

Second, I just can think of too many other plausible explanations for what happened in the Williams case, without any appeal to woo-woo.  I won't go into details, because several of them cast Knight in a pretty unpleasant light, and I've no wish to do that as I have no proof of those, either; my point is not that any particular explanation is correct, but simply that there are a great many other possibilities in this situation that could adequately explain what we know without espousing the view that the remote viewers saved the day.

All of which, I realize, is because of my biases.  I know little about the case except what was presented in the article.  Because of my pre-existing condition -- that I tend to assume that the world operates by the known laws of science unless I'm shown convincing hard evidence otherwise -- I read the entirety of this article with, shall we say, a fairly jaundiced eye, and ended by saying, "Yeah, right.  Still not doing it for me."  It does raise the question of what it would take to convince me... and on that count, perhaps Hal Puthoff is right.  It would take my being "intimately involved in the phenomenon."  In other words, direct evidence.  And for that, I'm still waiting.