Spam, spam, spam, spam, eggs, and spam

Yesterday I got a spam reply on one of my old Skeptophilia posts.

It happens pretty often, and I usually just ignore them, being that (1) I'm not stupid enough to reply, and (2) I have no particular interest in black-market anabolic steroids, penis growth pills, or helping out exiled Nigerian princes.  But this one was so funny that I read it aloud to a student of mine who happened to be hanging around, and we both had a good enough laugh that I thought I should share it here.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Cypher789, Spam 2, CC BY-SA 3.0]

So here it is, along with some interspersed editorial comments from yours truly.

ATTENTION TO THE WHOLE WORLD:

Not just me, eh? You want the whole world's attention?  That's pretty ambitious.

Hello and blessed are you who found me.

Well, you found me, technically.  But hello back atcha.

My name is DR SHAKES SPEAR, and am here to help you change and transform your life in the most positive way possible.

Is that William Shakes Spear?  Huh.  I thought you had Shuffled Off This Mortal Coil four centuries ago.  Shows you what I know.

I use the power of white, black craft and Wicca and voodoo spell casting to help people just like you they get the love they want and the money they deserve.

Did you even read my blog, bro?  You are seriously barking up the wrong tree.

My love spell offer amazing and quick results.  Do you want to find your soulmate?

Already have, thanks.

Do you want to reunite with a past lover and make him or her love you again?

Merciful heavens above, no.  My past lovers are past for a reason.

Do you need to bind a troublemaker from causing problems in your relationship?

Unless you count the fact that my dog takes up way more than his fair share of the bed, I think I'm fine in that regard.

With my spell casting service, I can cast a love spell on your behalf that will help all of your wishes and dreams come true.  I also do other custom spells, such as money spells, job spells, friendship spells, and good luck spells.

Versatile, that's you!  But you have to wonder why, if you can just cast money spells, you are trying to bilk cash from a poor struggling writer.

You may have already tried the power of spells and prayers to get what you want.

No, "hard work" and "a reasonable supply of brainpower" have always worked for me.

Although it is true that everyone has the ability to cast spells and perform magic, spell casting is like a muscle.  Everyone have this 'muscle' but the more you use it, the stronger it gets, and the more things you are able to do with it.

Well, that's a mighty fine sales pitch.  However, the muscle it mostly made me think of was the gluteus maximus, because you seem to be talking out of your ass.

If you are not an experienced spell caster, your spell may not be as strong, and the results not as quick as you may desire.  GET YOUR PROBLEMS SOLVE HERE AND BE FREE!!

Ooh, I can't wait for my problems to be solve!

Hello to people that want to be Great,

Hi there.

Note: This Spell casting do not have any effect on any one, But just to get your problem solve ok.

Ok.  But if it do not have any effect on any one, how the hell do it get my problem solve?

Get your problem solve in master... You can get the bellow problems solve here.

Yes, those bellow problems can be a bitch, it's true.

1. Bring back lost lover, even if lost for a long time

Cf. my previous comment about lost lovers.  They can stay lost, thanks.

2. Remove bad spells from homes, business & customer attraction etc.

Now you're talking.  If you could cast a spell that would make 9th graders less annoying, I'd be much obliged.

3. Get promotion you have desired for a long time at work or in your career.

Promotion?  To what, administrator?  That'd be a big "nope."  If I had to choose between becoming an administrator and receiving a colonoscopy from Edward Scissorhands, I'd have to think about it.

4. Remove the black pot that keeps on taking your money away

So that's where it's going!

5. Find out why you are not progressing in life and the solution

If you could progress one of my novels to "bestseller" status, I'd take back everything I said about you.

6. Ensure excellent school grades even for children with mental disabilities

Who needs the Common Core, when you have Dr. Shakes Spear?

7. I destroy and can send back the Nikolos if request

I'm not going to request, because I have no idea what the fuck that even means.

8. We heal barrenness in women and bad issue and disturbing menstruation

I'm disturbed just thinking about this one.

9. Get you marriage to the lover of your choice

Too late, because I got me marriage to her all by myself.  But it's a nice offer.

10. Guarantee you win the troubling court cases & divorce no matter how what stage

Shouldn't #10 come before #9?  Just saying, you know, as a pitch.  As is it seems like getting the cart before the horse.

11. Mental illness & bewitched

What about them?

12. Extreme protection for those doing dangerous jobs like security guards, Bank manager, cash transporters, etc

Not teachers, eh?  No "extreme protection" for us?  Just your ordinary, garden-variety protection?

I can help you, and I want to help you.  Read through my words and CONTACT ME VIA:shakesspear23@yahoo.com OR shakesspear23@gmail.com AS MY POWERS ARE SO STRONG AND VERY EFFECTIVE AND HAS NO BAD EFFECT INSTEAD IT HAVE A VERY GOOD RESULT AFTER CASTING THE SPELL.

Maybe you should work on a spell for getting your caps lock unstuck.

So, there you have it.  A tasty meal of spam, courtesy of Dr. Shakes Spear.  I strongly recommend against sending anything to the email addresses, because of course that only would alert Dr. Spear that (s)he has a fish on the line, and pretty likely result in your being inundated by further offers.  So unless you have a particular need for steroids or penis growth pills, or are feeling a sudden desire to help down-on-their-luck Nigerian princes, it's probably best just to press "delete" and forget about it.

*************************************

I grew up going once a summer with my dad to southern New Mexico and southern Arizona, with the goal of... finding rocks.  It's an odd hobby for a kid to have, but I'd been fascinated by rocks and minerals since I was very young, and it was helped along by the fact that my dad did beautiful lapidary work.  So while he was poking around looking for turquoise and agates and gem-quality jade, I was using my little rock hammer to hack out chunks of sandstone and feldspar and quartzite and wondering how, why, and when they'd gotten there.

Turns out that part of the country has some seriously complicated geology, and I didn't really appreciate just how complicated until I read John McPhee's four-part series called Annals of the Former World.  Composed of Basin and Range, In Suspect Terrain, Rising from the Plains, and Assembling California, it describes a cross-country trip McPhee took on Interstate 80, accompanied along the way with various geologists, with whom he stops at every roadcut and outcrop along the way.  As usual with McPhee's books they concentrate on the personalities of the people he's with as much as the science.  But you'll come away with a good appreciation for Deep Time -- and how drastically our continent has changed during the past billion years.

[Note:  If you order this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds will go to support Skeptophilia!]

An exercise in futility

I'm going to ask a question, not because I'm trying to lead my readers toward a particular answer, but because I honestly don't know the answer myself.

To what extent are we ethically obligated to confront strangers on social media who post immoral or offensive claims?

I ask this because this morning I saw a post by a friend of a distant relative on Facebook stating that "the origin of homosexuality is in pedophilia."  First of all, this is factually wrong; there probably are some homosexuals who are pedophiles, but they're no more common among the LGBTQ population than they are among the cis-heterosexuals.  But worse, this is vile homophobia, implying that there is an equivalence between a loving, committed relationship between two adults of the same sex, and a person of either sex harming or abusing a child.

So I wrote, "this is bullshit."

The response came back almost immediately: "Typical libtard excuses for the immorality that is destroying America."

I answered, "You want research showing that there's no connection between homosexuality and pedophilia?  I can provide it."

The response: "Why would I be convinced by pro-gay atheistic scientists?  They are hand-in-glove with the queers anyhow."

At that point, I gave up.

This is troubling from a plethora of angles.  Not only does this person espouse ugly bigotry, she has decided that anything contrary to her views must be a "libtard" opinion motivated by a desire to destroy America's moral fiber.  She's successfully insulated herself from ever discovering she's wrong.  About anything.  Further, this enables her to write off anyone who disagrees with her as a dupe at best and actively evil at worst.

So the argument I got into was an exercise in futility, which I knew it would be from the outset.  Someone who would post what she did isn't going to have their views changed by a nasty exchange with a total stranger.  All it did was raise both of our blood pressures and leave us more firmly entrenched in what we already believed.

But does that mean we shouldn't try?

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons David Shankbone creator QS:P170,Q12899557, Anger during a protest by David Shankbone, CC BY-SA 3.0]

That doesn't set well with me, either.  If you don't challenge evil when you see it, what good are your moral convictions?  It also bears consideration that my antagonist is not the only person who saw the back-and-forth.  Presumably a lot of people read what we wrote -- and interestingly, not a single person, including my (very conservative and religious) cousin, decided to weigh in.  It may be that one of them was on the fence, and seeing his or her unexamined views expressed in such a blatantly vicious fashion caused some level of reconsideration.

But I don't know.  I detest conflict, and am the last person who would seek out a battle just for the hell of it.  Also, I can say that when I've engaged in this kind of thing with a stranger, it has resulted in an exactly zero percent success rate of moving the person who posted the initial comment.  So was it worth the unpleasantness?

I honestly don't know.  It felt a great deal like tilting at windmills to me.  But like I said, with some things staying silent really isn't an option.

If anyone has any better perspective on this, I'd love to hear it, either privately or in the comments section.  Because right now, I'm feeling pretty despondent about ever convincing anyone of anything -- even when their views are immoral, unfair, bigoted, or demonstrably false.

**********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is for any of my readers who, like me, grew up on Star Trek in any of its iterations -- The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence Krauss.  In this delightful book, Krauss, a physicist at Arizona State University, looks into the feasibility of the canonical Star Trek technology, from the possible (the holodeck, phasers, cloaking devices) to the much less feasible (photon torpedoes, tricorders) to the probably impossible (transporters, replicators, and -- sadly -- warp drive).

Along the way you'll learn some physics, and have a lot of fun revisiting some of your favorite tropes from one of the most successful science fiction franchises ever invented, one that went far beyond the dreams of its creator, Gene Roddenberry -- one that truly went places where no one had gone before.

Missives from the sixth dimension

Generally speaking, there are two things that rapidly identify a claim as the work of a crank: (1) saying that it explains everything; and (2) saying that it overturns all previous theories and models in one fell swoop.

Now, that's not to say there haven't been ideas that have blown away previous theories.  The heliocentric model of the Solar System, the germ theory of disease, Darwinian natural selection, genes and the role of DNA in heredity, Newtonian physics, quantum mechanics, James Clerk Maxwell's theories on electricity and magnetism, plate tectonics, relativity -- all of them were earthshattering, and caused a complete revision of what we thought we knew.

But you know what stands out about them?  How rare they are.  There might be a handful of others I've missed, but if you just count the ones I've named, from the earliest (the Copernican heliocentric model) in about 1520 to today, that's nine honest-to-goodness scientific revolutions in five hundred years.

Also, given the precision of our instruments and the rigor with which science is approached -- itself a relatively new thing -- the likelihood of our having missed something major that will "rewrite the textbooks" is pretty low.  (There may be one exception -- incorporating "dark matter" and "dark energy" into our model for physics.  There's a fair chance that when they're figured out -- or, as I speculated in a recent post, are the impetus for a revision of our current model -- we might see a revolution of no less magnitude than Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.  Of course, it's also possible that we'll account for them by physics we already know about.  Which it'll be, only time will tell.)

My point is, if there is an overturning of current scientific models, it's likely the anomalous data and its explanation will come from within the realm of science, not from a layperson waving his or her hands around.  And it will be a rare, headline-making event.

So the fact that there are hundreds of websites that claim to outline some major flaw in a current scientific model, and propose a solution to it, means that most likely all of them are wrong.  (As a commenter put on one of them I saw a while back, "Here are your next steps: (1) Write this up as a formal academic paper.  (2) Submit to peer review.  (3) Collect Nobel Prize.  After you've done all that, come back and we'll talk.")

Most of these sites, therefore, are ringing the changes on the same crazy claims.  But every once in a while there'll be one that is so out there, so bizarre, that it has merit simply on the basis of how creative it is and how earnest its creator seems to be.  Which is why today I'm going to tell you about:  Mosheh's Unifying Field Theory.  Which, as he points out right in the title, is not only a Unifying Field Theory, it's a God Theory.

Whatever that means.

I encourage you to visit the website, because there's no way I can excerpt enough here to give you the full experience, but here's one sentence so you can get the flavor:

There is the suggestion given by evidence, and if energy was removed from a 3D space, then rather than just shrinking, it could be reduced into a 2D plane, and if energy was removed from a 2D plane, then "it" would become 1 dimensional, and if more energy was removed, it would become a zero dimensional object, not being zero, as in not existing, but zero as in having no potential energy, a zero energy state.

Right!  Sure!  What?

And I just have to include one of the illustrations, which are amazing:

My favorite part is in the lower right corner, wherein we learn that dinosaurs evidently evolved not only into birds but into "Grey Aliens."

There are so many other delightful features of this website that I don't want to spoil them, so you'll just have to go there and take a look.  I think my favorite part is under the "General Theory Outline" page, wherein he draws four-, five-, and six-dimensional objects.  If only the mathematicians had realized years ago that it was this easy!

So Mosheh's "dimensional field theory" is so wacky as to be kind of charming.  He's a crank, yes; he's wrong, almost certainly; but you have to admire his creativity and chutzpah.  As for me, I'm going to go back and poke around some more, and see if I can figure out what he means by saying that "an object's four-dimensional spin is made up of time and something."

**********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is for any of my readers who, like me, grew up on Star Trek in any of its iterations -- The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence Krauss.  In this delightful book, Krauss, a physicist at Arizona State University, looks into the feasibility of the canonical Star Trek technology, from the possible (the holodeck, phasers, cloaking devices) to the much less feasible (photon torpedoes, tricorders) to the probably impossible (transporters, replicators, and -- sadly -- warp drive).

Along the way you'll learn some physics, and have a lot of fun revisiting some of your favorite tropes from one of the most successful science fiction franchises ever invented, one that went far beyond the dreams of its creator, Gene Roddenberry -- one that truly went places where no one had gone before.

Jerk analysis

Sometimes there are news stories that I have to feature here simply because they're cool.

This one came from some data collected by a mission called Swarm, consisting of three satellites which were launched in 2013 to study the Earth's magnetic field.  The mission is pretty important -- besides being critical to navigation, the magnetic field of our planet protects us from most of the cosmic particles that strike the upper atmosphere.  And -- somewhat alarmingly -- it appears we may be at the beginning of a geomagnetic pole reversal, when the magnetic field of the Earth flips for reasons still poorly understood.  (We know about 183 such pole reversals in the last 83 million years, which is about as long as we have good data for.  The oddest part is that they are anything but regular.  The shortest duration of a particular polarity was around 400 years -- and we've been in the current one for 780,000 years.)

What the current study looked at is a much more transitory phenomenon called a geomagnetic jerk, which sounds like a derogatory name for a geologist, but isn't.  Actually, it's a sort of hiccup in the magnetic field.  They were first discovered in 1978, when there was a sudden increase in the magnetic field intensity followed by an equally rapid decrease, only lasting a few days.  They can be localized geographically, too; there have been jerks that are measurable in North America and invisible in the magnetic field measured everywhere else.

The new study, released last week in Nature: Geoscience in a paper by Julien Aubert (Université de Paris) and Christopher Finlay (Technical University of Denmark) is called "Geomagnetic Jerks and Rapid Hydromagnetic Waves Focusing at Earth’s Core Surface."  It suggests that what's happening is twofold -- there's a slow convection within our metallic core that, combined with the Earth's rotation, gives rise to the magnetic field on the larger scale; but there are much more rapid, turbulent fluid motions, caused by rising blobs of hot liquid metal.  When those blobs impact the boundary between the outer core and the mantle, it results in shock waves that register on the surface as a jittering of the magnetic flux.

Simulation of the magnetic field within the Earth's core

The weirdest part is that the rising of the blobs (which would make a great title for a horror movie, wouldn't it?) begins a good twenty-five years before it registers on the surface as a jerk.  What process creates the blobs is still not understood, but this is at least a step forward.

"Swarm has made a real contribution to our research, allowing us to make detailed comparisons, in both space and time, with physical theories on the origin of these magnetic jerks," said Christopher Finlay, who co-authored the paper.  "While our findings make fascinating science, there are some real-world benefits of understanding how our magnetic field changes.  Many modern electronic devices such as smart phones, rely on our knowledge of the magnetic field for orientation information.  Being able to better forecast field changes will help with such systems."

All of which makes me wonder, however, how we're going to handle it when the overall magnetic field does its headstand, because the theory is that the field first collapses (or becomes highly erratic) before reforming with the opposite polarity.  I have this strangely hilarious mental image of people with their noses glued to the GPS on their cellphones all heading very efficiently to their destinations, and then suddenly they all start wandering off in random directions, never to be seen again.

Of course, it probably won't be nearly that much fun.

Um, I mean, "catastrophic."  "Catastrophic" is what I meant.

Anyhow, it's nice that we now have another piece of the puzzle as far as what's happening in the core of our planet, which -- as always -- turns out to be far more complex than we realized.  As far as jerks and pole reversals, we'll just have to wait to see what happens and find out if the models hold up under scrutiny.

As always.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is for any of my readers who, like me, grew up on Star Trek in any of its iterations -- The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence Krauss.  In this delightful book, Krauss, a physicist at Arizona State University, looks into the feasibility of the canonical Star Trek technology, from the possible (the holodeck, phasers, cloaking devices) to the much less feasible (photon torpedoes, tricorders) to the probably impossible (transporters, replicators, and -- sadly -- warp drive).

Along the way you'll learn some physics, and have a lot of fun revisiting some of your favorite tropes from one of the most successful science fiction franchises ever invented, one that went far beyond the dreams of its creator, Gene Roddenberry -- one that truly went places where no one had gone before.

Spins, jets, and wobbles

In the last couple of weeks, I've written about the discovery of colliding neutron stars six billion light years away, the incredible achievement of generating the first-ever photograph of a black hole, and a team that found a white dwarf star which amazingly still had a planet orbiting around it, even though you'd think the process of becoming a white dwarf would obliterate anything nearby.

So the achievements of the astrophysicists have been coming hard and fast lately.  But this week, a team led by James Miller-Jones of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research at Curtin University (Perth, Australia) has found something that might be the weirdest yet: a spinning black hole that is precessing like a top, wobbling so quickly that it actually drags spacetime along with it.

The object is called V404 Cygni, and was first sighted in 2015 when it suddenly began to emit a jet of plasma.  The explanation was thought to be that it had encountered a cloud of matter (or possibly had captured another star) which was slowing being devoured.  It's been known for some times that as matter spirals toward a black hole, it spins faster and faster -- rather like water going down a drain -- and in the process emits particles that are funneled along the magnetic field lines of the black hole and emerge as jets from each pole -- in the case of V404 Cygni, traveling at 60% of the speed of light.

So far, this is impressive, but still very much in line with the predictions of the current model.  But  Miller-Jones and his team found out that V404 Cygni had another feature; the jets of plasma it was emitting were exhibiting such rapid precession that they were flailing around with a period of only a few minutes.

"This is one of the most extraordinary black hole systems I've ever come across," Miller-Jones said, in an interview with Science Alert.  "We think the disc of material and the black hole are misaligned.  This appears to be causing the inner part of the disc to wobble like a spinning top and fire jets out in different directions as it changes orientation."

Here's an image that Miller-Jones's team generated of what this might look like from closer up:

(The Science Alert page I linked above has a very cool animation of what this system in motion -- you should all check it out.)

The strangest part is that the mass and rapid spin of the black hole have generated an effect called frame dragging, wherein spacetime near a massive rotating object becomes distorted, with nearer regions experiencing a drag analogous to what happens if you rapidly stir a glass full of honey.  (It's not truly fluid drag -- it's a relativistic effect that wouldn't be observed at slow rotational speeds -- but has a similar effect.)

"We were gobsmacked by what we saw in this system - it was completely unexpected," said astrophysicist Greg Sivakoff of the University of Alberta, a member of the team who discovered the phenomenon.

So once again, what's out there in deep space has shown itself to be wonderfully weird.  It seems fitting to end with the quote from biologist J. B. S. Haldane -- "The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine."

**********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is for any of my readers who, like me, grew up on Star Trek in any of its iterations -- The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence Krauss.  In this delightful book, Krauss, a physicist at Arizona State University, looks into the feasibility of the canonical Star Trek technology, from the possible (the holodeck, phasers, cloaking devices) to the much less feasible (photon torpedoes, tricorders) to the probably impossible (transporters, replicators, and -- sadly -- warp drive).

Along the way you'll learn some physics, and have a lot of fun revisiting some of your favorite tropes from one of the most successful science fiction franchises ever invented, one that went far beyond the dreams of its creator, Gene Roddenberry -- one that truly went places where no one had gone before.

Hybrids to the rescue

Well, I've got good news and I've got bad news, courtesy of a professor at Oxford University.

The good news is that climate change is being taken care of.  All of the worries about ice sheets melting, sea level rise, and stronger storms can be set aside.

The bad news is that in order for all this to happen, humans have to be willing to have sex with aliens.

I wish I was making this up.  Young-hae Chi, a professor of Korean at Oxford, has published a book called Alien Visitations and the End of Humanity, in which he tells us that there are already some human/alien hybrids walking around.  There are four categories: small, tall and bold, insect-like, and scaly with cold, reptilian eyes.

What I'm wondering is, if there are all these hybrids walking around, why haven't I seen any?  Although I have to admit the first two categories are kind of vague, and Stephen Miller could easily fit into the last one.  But at least there aren't any insect people around, which is a good thing, because that'd be fucking creepy.

Still from "The Web Planet," from season two of Dr. Who.  Okay, these weren't so much creepy as ridiculous, especially considering the really annoying chirping sound they made.

"[T]hey come not for the sake of us, but for the sake of them," Chi says.  "[For] their survival, but their survival is actually our survival as well — the survival of the entire biosphere."

How exactly this works, or the specifics of how making lots of human/alien hybrid babies is going to stop climate change, Chi never says, and it sounds like he may not be clear on this himself.  "I'm looking for more evidence to support my view," he said.

I'll just bet he is.

Of course, even if there are intelligent aliens visiting the Earth, there's a serious problem with the hybridization claim, and it goes beyond supposing that humans and the aliens have the right combination of orifices and pokey-outy-bits to make it work from a mechanical standpoint.  While it's possible that extraterrestrial life would be DNA-based -- DNA and RNA nucleotides seem to be relatively easy to make abiotically, and are likely to be common in the universe -- it is extraordinarily unlikely that they would read it the same way we do.  The "translation chart," from which you can use the sequence of a messenger RNA molecule to determine the amino acid sequence of the protein it makes, is thought to be arbitrary, and there's no reason why even if there is some RNA-to-protein correspondence on the Planet G'zork, it'd be the same one we use.  (I emphasize the word thought in the previous sentence.  How the translation chart evolved, and whether it actually is arbitrary, is one of the unsolved problems of biological evolution.  If the translation chart was constrained to evolve the way it did, it might be that the decoding process is fairly uniform throughout the universe...  but I doubt it.)

So while I like Mr. Spock and Deanna Troi and B'Elanna Torres as much as the next Trek geek, that sort of thing is pretty certainly impossible.

Anyhow, I'm thinking that Dr. Chi is just making shit up, and should focus on his Korean classes and leave the astrobiology to the astrobiologists.

Still, it'd be nice to do something about climate change.  I mean, our current "leaders" are doing bugger-all, so maybe we should all welcome our alien overlords.  Although I draw the line at having sex with them.  I'm open-minded and all, but I do have my limits.

**********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is for any of my readers who, like me, grew up on Star Trek in any of its iterations -- The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence Krauss.  In this delightful book, Krauss, a physicist at Arizona State University, looks into the feasibility of the canonical Star Trek technology, from the possible (the holodeck, phasers, cloaking devices) to the much less feasible (photon torpedoes, tricorders) to the probably impossible (transporters, replicators, and -- sadly -- warp drive).

Along the way you'll learn some physics, and have a lot of fun revisiting some of your favorite tropes from one of the most successful science fiction franchises ever invented, one that went far beyond the dreams of its creator, Gene Roddenberry -- one that truly went places where no one had gone before.

UFO report overhaul

New from the "Well, At Least They're Going About It The Right Way" department, we have: the US Navy's new guidelines for reporting UFOs.

Apparently, this rewrite was spurred by an uptick in reports of strange sightings, although the powers-that-be state in no uncertain terms that they're not saying any of these are alien spacecraft.   "There have been a number of reports of unauthorized and/or unidentified aircraft entering various military-controlled ranges and designated air space in recent years," the Navy said in a statement in response to questions from POLITICO.  "For safety and security concerns, the Navy and the [U.S. Air Force] takes these reports very seriously and investigates each and every report.  As part of this effort, the Navy is updating and formalizing the process by which reports of any such suspected incursions can be made to the cognizant authorities.  A new message to the fleet that will detail the steps for reporting is in draft."

While I do tend to agree with Neil DeGrasse Tyson's view that the eyewitness testimony of pilots, policemen, ships' captains, and other people wearing uniforms isn't inherently better than that of the rest of us -- "it's all bad," he says -- I do have some niggling doubts about including pilots on that list.  After all, Tyson goes on to say that the frequency of reports of UFOs from astronomers is lower than that of the rest of the population because -- another direct quote -- "We know what the hell we're looking at!", ignoring the fact that pilots spend a lot of time looking up, too.  My guess is that a seasoned pilot wouldn't be taken in by such uncommon but perfectly natural phenomena as noctilucent clouds, lenticular clouds, sun dogs, sprites, STEVE (strong thermal emission velocity enhancement), and fallstreak holes.

And honestly, much of what pilots have reported don't admit of easy explanation.  According to Chris Mellon, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, a large percentage of the sightings were of objects "flying in formation" and "exceeding the speed of the airplane."

I'm in agreement that those sightings deserve investigation, and there needs to be a lessening of the stigma of even making the report.  Mellon says that a lot of pilots who've seen UFOs have chosen not to report them because of fear of ridicule or of actually hurting their careers.

So far, so good.  But then Luis Elizondo, who runs the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, got involved, and took the new recommendations and leapt right into hyperspace.  "If I came to you and said, ‘There are these things that can fly over our country with impunity, defying the laws of physics, and within moments could deploy a nuclear device at will,’ that would be a matter of national security," Elizondo said.  "This type of activity is very alarming, and people are recognizing there are things in our aerospace that lie beyond our understanding."

Now just hang on a moment.

There's about a light year's distance between "I saw an unexplained light in the sky" and "this is a spacecraft that defies the laws of physics and is just waiting to deploy a nuclear device against us."  I mean, on the one hand, I think what Elizondo is saying is that by the time an alien spaceship did deploy a nuclear weapon, it'd be too late to do anything about it, which is true as far as it goes; but don't you think the first step would be to establish that what people have seen are alien spaceships before we go into collective freak-out mode?

And I am absolutely sick unto death of people claiming that these alleged aliens can "defy the laws of physics" and "are beyond our understanding."  Maybe I'm being a little cocky and defensive, here, but the laws of physics are pretty damn well established, and I'd be willing to bet cold hard cash that if there are aliens out there, they obey the same laws of physics we do.  I'd also be willing to wager that even if there is some hitherto-unknown bit of physics that is allowing the aliens to do their aerial gymnastics, it's not "beyond our understanding."  Physicists are by and large pretty smart women and men, and my guess is they would be perfectly capable of understanding it, if the aliens would just land their spaceships and sit down and discuss it with them.

So simultaneously mythologizing and catastrophizing these sightings isn't very productive, or even very realistic.  Yes, they should be investigated.  I'm also with Michio Kaku that if even one in a hundred credible UFO sightings are unexplainable as natural terrestrial phenomena, that 1% is worth looking into.  But we need to keep our heads on our shoulders and not assume that everything we haven't explained will turn out to be something we can't explain.

I think the US Navy has the right idea, though, in making it part of their policy to take UFO sightings by pilots seriously.  And hell, maybe one of the reports will turn out to be evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence.  Believe me, no one would be more thrilled than I am if this turned out to be the case.  But it's important to keep looking at these things skeptically, always questioning and looking for alternate (natural) explanations, especially if the more out-there explanation is something we'd very much like to be true.

Because everyone -- even pilots, astronomers, and people in the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program -- are subject to confirmation bias.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is for any of my readers who, like me, grew up on Star Trek in any of its iterations -- The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence Krauss.  In this delightful book, Krauss, a physicist at Arizona State University, looks into the feasibility of the canonical Star Trek technology, from the possible (the holodeck, phasers, cloaking devices) to the much less feasible (photon torpedoes, tricorders) to the probably impossible (transporters, replicators, and -- sadly -- warp drive).

Along the way you'll learn some physics, and have a lot of fun revisiting some of your favorite tropes from one of the most successful science fiction franchises ever invented, one that went far beyond the dreams of its creator, Gene Roddenberry -- one that truly went places where no one had gone before.