HONG KONG The survival of the human race depends on its ability to find new homes elsewhere in the universe because there’s an increasing risk that a disaster will destroy the Earth, world-renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking said Tuesday
Humans could have a permanent base on the moon in 20 years and a colony on Mars in the next 40 years, the British scientist told a news conference.
“We won’t find anywhere as nice as Earth unless we go to another star system,”
Remember UFO Theater? They were bee-bopping around the silly circut for a while, with “STUNNING videos that depict the TRUE alien presence among us”. Or if you are more like the Odd Emperor they were selling very pretty vids of lights in the sky, extremely professional looking and well done but, probably hoaxes.
I wasn’t really following it very much. Whoring myself out to the UFObiz is not very high on my list of fascinating things to look at.
But, other people were.
In 2003 Stephen Wagner wrote in About.com
Daylight orb
Ufo Theatre – Daily Updated Ufo Videos Media Reports & Research. This site shows a pretty interesting video of what looks like a red orb floating in front of some trees. Near the end of the video, another one seems to swoop down under it. What is it? One possibility is that it’s simply a helium-filled mylar balloon. It’s fairly bright and looks like it might be generating it’s own illumination. Could it be ball lightning? What do you think?
People didn’t think very much according to his level of commentary.
But a quick search on this Brian Bessent person reveals a couple of interesting things
UFO Digest http://www.ufodigest.com/burleson3.html
Received this video and email from Brian Bessent. He has a website at ufotheater.com. This is Brian’s story, “Well basically, I had left the videotape running for a while..trying to tape rods. It was just taped yesterday.. at about 2:30 p.m. in central Texas. I live in San Saba Texas. I have videotaped rods here since 2001 but never anything like this!”
Here’s a puffy bit by someone marketing his videos.
The Book of Thoth page had some interesting things to say including;
Anyone who posts thoughts about anything done by Brian Bessent or ufotheatre.com as being not legitimate will be banned immediately from this forum, no matter how sincere and courteous and professional the questions or statements are, we found this out quickly.
The webpage was pulled abruptly, after a lengthy ‘“ahhh haaa! I fooled you shmucks diatribe which was only up for a few days. Part of it is reproduced here.
Its a no-brainer, this was some blokes out to have a good time at the woo-woos (or Owlists? Belivers? How about suckers?) expense. And making a little cotter on the side, I can’t really fault them I guess. One the one hand, conning people is one of the oldest ways of making money. (GM and Ford do it all the time!) On the other hand, fooling people for money seems a bit unethical. Its OK if all parties are in agreement about the thing (like in a magic show) but making fake videos and selling them as the real McCoy (whatever that means) seems unsavory somhow.
Someone out there agrees with me! Just yesterday the bejeweled Odd Empire transom banged open with this’
A new show coming to TLC this month out-hoaxes the hoaxters. It’s called X-TESTERS. In it, my friend Patrick Denver and I travel around re-creating paranormal events – UFO’s, ghosts, strange creatures, etc. – in an attempt to figure out what really happened. Kind of a “Mythbusters” meets “X-Files”. We go to the real places and meet the real people. And we do it with style. It will begin airing on The Learning Channel (TLC) Thursdays June 15, 22, & 29 at 7pm (et/pt). Check out our website at http://www.xtesters.com for schedules and other stuff. Feel free to contact me if you want more information. Meanwhile, enjoy the show. Regards, Clark
Oh really?
I also got this in my comments hopper for http://oddempire.org/weblog/?p=138
http://www.xtesters.com/Plane%20UFO.html
It’s all part of a new TV show coming to TLC this month called X-TESTERS. It follows Clark and Patrick as they travel around re-creating paranormal events in an attempt to figure out what really happened. Ghosts, UFO’s, strange creatures and more are all put to the test as they go to the real places and meet the real people. Catch it if you can.
Get scheduling and other info at: http://www.xtesters.com
May the farce be with you,
X-Tester
Well being of a skeptical bent I peeked over at the Learning Channel webpage and found
The X-Testers
Paranormal Peculiarity
The X-testers take on a demonic creature, play with fire, and are hot on the trail of a ghost in an Oklahoma City wrecking yard.
tv :: pg
cc :: unavailable
Facinating Mr. Spock!
I really don’t know what to make of all this. An admitted bunch of hoaxers with their own TV show? Kind of like Jackass meets Coast to Coast? Fortian burlesk anyone? (Now there’s a thought.)
Is this the future of UFOology?
Should we worry or just toss another bag of popcorn into the Imperial Microwave and enjoy the show?
And I probably will enjoy the show.
BTW, Brian–dude! I just gave you a plug! Can I get a coffee mug or something?
If Eric Julien is correct a truck-sized chunk of Comet Schwassmann-Wachmann. will smash into the Atlantic Ocean at somewhere between 15 and 40 kilometers a second. This will cause (according to Eric Julien and his psychic friends) a huge volcano to erupt (or something) which in a Rub Goldberg kind of way will cause 200 meter tsunamis radiate from the epicenter, washing over major cities this will be a MAJOR DISASTOR which Hollywood (not being directly affected) will make movies about for the next decade or two (probably not with Tom Cruse though.)
We here at the Odd Empire are waiting with abated breath (or mostly ignoring it as the case may be.) As we are located in the unfashionable west side of the American East Coast the Odd Empire will surely be washed away, never to bother all the true believers again. More likely will be the chuckle watching Eric Julien backpedal on this when the alien-caused event does’t happen. We’ll be standing by to see how all of this goes.
Stanton Friedman is certainly a heavy in the UFO biz. Hes a trend setter, where Freidman goes, much of the UFO biz follows. He’s written a couple of well received books, Crash At Corona: The U.S. Military Retrieval And Cover-Up Of A Ufo for one (Not The Day After Roswell as Paul points out, my bad!) He’s a true professional UFOlogest who makes his living giving lectures on the subject. And Friedman defends his turf too, like when Harvard Psychologist Susan Clancy published her popular book on alien abductions? He weighed in with this review.
I reviewed this book in the Odd Empire some months ago. When I glanced at his take I had the strangest feeling that I’d reviewed another book altogether. He claimed the book had “gross inaccuracy s” It was biased and prejudicial? I honestly don’t remember that.
There were some errors in the book and the author was quite up front about having some preconceived notions on the subject (much like Friedman admitting he had a few preconceived notions about the book in his review.) But one blogger stated that he thought the book was fiction.
What? I didn’t get that at all!
It is true that Clancy, like the rest of the psychological community does not look too well on alien abduction as more than an adult manifestation of night terrors. They are biased in that regard truly.
Friedman writes;
“She (Clancy) goes on, “Even better, alien abductees were people who had developed memories of a traumatic event that I could be fairly certain had never occurred. A major problem with my research on false memory creation by victims of alleged sexual abuse was that it was almost impossible to determine whether they had in fact, been abused. I needed to repeat the study with a population that I could be sure had “recovered” false memories.” Alien abduction seemed to fit the bill.” (italics OE) She notes how she would use the same techniques with the abductees as with the sexual abuse people, and addressed the corroboration issue since it was certain the event hadn’t happened.It is hard to imagine so-called research starting out with such strong bias. Is this what passes for research at Harvard University?”
Certainly if we are talking about research aimed at validating one or more cornerstones in UFOlogy, in that case most of the time it’s assumed that abduction accounts are accurate descriptions of real events despite their complete lack of physical traces or corroborating testimony. (this last is something that Friedman asserts has happened however I can honestly say that, according to my rather limited findings, not a single corroborative account has passed muster against tainting or “story corruption.”
I’m just saying people, don’t kill the messenger!
Friedman writes;
“She does admit her preconceptions that people thinking they had been abducted played Dungeons and Dragons as a kid, were computer programmers or sci-fi buffs and had attended Star Trek conventions. What is really crazy here, to me as a scientist, is that normally one expects somebody beginning research in a new area to do a literature search first.”
Here’s what Clancy actually wrote:
Robert (an abductee) shattered my preconceptions about what abductees would be like. He didn’t fit into any of my stereotypes. He had’nt played Dungeons and Dragons as a kid. He wasn’ a computer programmer (hey!) or a sci-fi buff and he’d never attended a Star Trek convention. He had a beautiful wife and drove a Volkswagen station wagon. He liked to ski, watch French movies and cook Thai food.
Friedman’s right, it is inexcusable!
But wait! What’s this on the very next paragraph?
Not only did Robert teach me to keep an open mind; he jump-started my research by introducing me to his network of fellow abductees.”
Hmmm, bias transformed into a rather humble statement acknowledging this very human failing. Clancy is saying in effect. I’m sorry, yes I have some bias, some prejudices, some presuppositions on this subject, and I’m wrong to have those!
Mr Friedman’s opinion regarding the intent of the statement was clearly out of context, Disappointing because you see, I have some respect for Freidman’s work.
I have very little respect for this kind of argument.
I wonder how much more stuff like that is in his review?
Friedman writes;
Here is a typical example of her gross inaccuracy. Speaking of a meeting with a number of abductees she says, “Highlight of Saturday evening was a conversation with two brothers from Manchester, New Hampshire. These men were relatively well known abductees who had written a book about their experiences. One night in the late 1960s they had been canoeing on a lake in Maine and had seen some weird lights across the water. A few years later one had fallen down an elevator shaft at work; he’d suffered brain damage, developed epilepsy and became severely depressed. The simple fact of the matter is that there were four people involved, not two; the event took place in August, 1976, not in the 1960s. The book The Allagash Abductions was written by an experienced investigator, engineer Raymond Fowler, not by the brothers. It was based on data obtained independently from each of the four. The book is, of course, not referenced though she has 14 pages of noted references including 146 items. Her own “research” papers were each cited several times.
Well, once again this is taken so far out of context that the Odd Emperor thinks he’s simply stating of the obvious, or perhaps I don’t have a grasp of the English language (and the obvious, as many people accuse me.) However, it seems to me that Clancy really said “I met with two brothers who were well known abductees.” This is true, along with two others they were the subject of a book written by Raymond E. Fowler (who also wrote among other things “The Andreasson Affair.” (a book I found extraordinarily biased but that’s the subject of another column or two.) She did get the book author wrong and she doesn’t actually mention how many people were involved in the abduction, Friedman’s correct, it was four.
Pretty sloppy research I must say.
But then, when I look at the context of the statement, I find this was a casual meeting at some sort of abductee’s weekend retreat in which she relates bumping into a number of people including “Vivian,” a channeler who thought Clancy herself had been abducted, a fellow who painted elaborate alien-sex porn, a Shaman from South America who insisted the Mayans were too advanced for their time bemuse they built elaborate temples (just like the Inca, Aztec, the Cahokia, Montauk, and the Olmecs to name a few.) She met a computer engineer who thought the resemblance of PC chip architecture and Mayan bas-reliefs is a little more than a coincidence.
(Those darn Mayans!)
She also met a fellow by the name of Bud Hopkins.
But, once again there is that pesky context thing. Her accounts are related in the first-hand point of view as casual encounters with people and snippets of conversation. Not as Friedman suggests, accounts of a factual nature. The passages (making up around two pages in a 170+ page book) are in a chapter entitled “How Do You Wind up Studying Aliens?“They are merely anecdotal accounts of her early experiences with the UFO community.
Friedman Writes;
Clancy not only seems to consider herself a truly knowledgeable abductionist, but also an expert on UFOs in general. “So far as we know there is no evidence that aliens exist.” “You can”t disprove alien abductions. All you can do is argue that they’re improbable. Obviously she didn’t intend this next comment to be referring to herself: “The Confirmatory bias° the tendency to seek or interpret evidence favorable to existing belief or reinterpret unfavorable evidence is ubiquitous, even among scientists. Amen, and she provides many examples of her own tendency. “We don t accept the alien abduction explanation because there is no external evidence to support it. Isn’t it amazing that she never discusses physical trace cases, at least 16% of which involve reports of strange beings? She doesn’t mention the many cases in which abductees separately indicate that missing time was confirmed. She never mentions Marjorie Fish’s star map work connected with the Betty and Barney Hill case, though she does mention the case
First off, Clancy makes no claims to be much of anything other than a Psychologist. In fact she made many statements to the effect that she really didn’t know too much about abductees.
Second? Fish’s so called star-map while interesting is not physical evidence. It’s ancillary evidence at the very best (Fish managed to find a close match to Betty Hills line drawing of a star map from an alien aircraft by making a 3D string model of nearby stars.)
Third, I’m a little confused of this 16% statement from Friedman, 16% of what kind of cases involve reports of strange beings? I’d say that just about 100% of UFO abduction cases involve strange beings but Friedman’s the expert and I’m just the Odd Emperor!
Friedman goes on in this vein for quite a while, taking Clancy’s statements out of context here and there. He’s outraged that her handling of the history of UFOlogy is so slipshod that she would think Kenneth Arnold was flying a jet aircraft when he was flying a prop plane. He’s got a point; any historian will tell you that there were probably no more than a few dozen military jets in 1947 let alone private civilian planes.
Writes Friedman;
Clancy says that The Roswell Incident claimed that “Pieces of aliens had been among the debris. This was attested to by more than seventy witnesses who had some knowledge of the event. This is totally false; no such claim is made in the book, to which I was a major contributor. She really blasts off: “The evidence for a crashed spaceship and dead extraterrestrials was entirely anecdotal consisting of firsthand reports from people who wished to remain anonymous and even more tenuous second and third hand reports (so-and-so told what’s-his-name who told me that such-and-such really happened thirty years ago). This nonsense comes from a woman claiming to have read everything about UFOs and aliens. I am a physicist who has written more than eighty UFO articles and two books relating to Roswell and was a major contributor to The Roswell Incident. No, I am not referenced at all. There are lots of real people named by me and Don Berliner and Kevin Randle and Don Schmitt °none referenced and other serious researchers as opposed to Clancy’s pseudoscientific claims. The video “Recollections of Roswell has firsthand testimony from twenty-seven witnesses all named.
He’s correct, the statements are dismissive. But, are they inaccurate? Are they really nonsense? She actually cites the book as the source and I seem to remember something to that effect in the story myself. To this assertion by Friedman I honestly don’t know (but will probably find out.) I do know that, if we were to use “Friedman logic, judging from past experiences we can safely conclude that most of his statement in this review and in much of his writing may be accurate but are very likely taken out of their proper context.
Good thing I don’t use that kind of logic!
This is the problem I have with Friedman’s review (and to a lesser extent the sheep-like approval of it by the UFO community at large.) He was not reading the same book I was. To Freidman, Abducted is a popular book about the history of UFOlogy, detailing the massive contributions by luminaries such as Bud Hopkins, Stanton Friedman and so many others. Covering in great detail the stupendous accounts of abductee heroes like Travis Walton or Betty and Barney Hill and reveling new and spine-tingling secrets of the horrific and frightening alien abduction events that unfold nightly to unwitting US citizens as they innocently watch David Lettermen.
No wonder he was disappointed, that’s not what the book was about at all! I glanced at the flyleaf of my copy and found this;
“Clancy argues that abductutees are sane and intelligent people who have unwittingly created vivid false memories from a toxic mix of nightmares, culturally available texts and a powerful drive for meaning that science is unable to satisfy.This book is not only a subtle exploration of the workings of memory, but a sensitive inquiry into the nature of belief.”
It seemed to me that this was the book I read. It was not some Berliz or John Keel-like sensational account of strange alien encounters. It was an account of a physiologist embarking into a five year inquiry of alien abductee claimants and some of her experiences thereof. I didn’t agree with everything Clancy said, I agree that her history of UFOlogy was glossed over and was not 100% accurate in some spots. However, I’m not sure skewing an author for making mistakes in a few brief passages is really fair. I thought that material was there to be illustrative, not as the main meat of the book. It seems to me that Friedman (et-al) is not doing himself (themselves) any favors by panning Clancy based on cherry-picking a few errors while missing the point of the book in full. It seems to me that the message here is,“we as UFOlogests reject any opinion which does not put forward the fact that aliens abduct people.
Being opened minded thrusts both ways and I find that most UFOlogests seem to have problems with that skill. Being opened minded is not about believing in UFOs, it’s about not believing. It’s about dispassionately looking at the data, trying to fit some together to get a better grasp of things and allowing the information to drive your conclusions.
I honestly don’t; know if Clancy does this. There is nothing in her book suggesting that she does not and I’m not upset that she admits to being bias. We are all biased about something.
Friedman on the other hand is using an age-old technique called the”straw-man” argument. It is almost as old and silly as the fallacy-ad hominem.) Straw-man attempts to discredit a point by taking some (usually irrelevant) fact and using it to discredit the main argument. What this really says is, “hey! I actually agree with Clancy’s main points (or I’m unable to argue against them.) This is a terrible way to make a point and Friedman should know better! I think this is a very unbecoming of one of the luminaries in UFOlogy to use such transparent debate forms. What I think is really unfortunate is how many so-called researchers just march along in lockstep with this kind of thing.
And this is a mild form of “valid” argument in UFOlogy. An acceptable form, It truly makes me sick
Too bad really.
As much as I disagree with Phill Klass (at times.) I think Friedman’s screed against Clancy illustrates his UFO Curse in the worst possible way;
“No matter how long you live, you will never know any more about UFOs than you know today. You will never know any more about what UFOs really are, or where they come from. You will never know any more about what the U.S. Government really knows about UFOs that you know today. As you lie on your own death-bed you will be as mystified about UFOs as you are today. And you will remember this curse.”
I hate to say it but, for this reason among many others, the words of Klass ring true.
I’m not saying you have to like Clancy’s take on the abduction thing. Heck I don’t like it very much (although admittedly I think her ideas are far more probable than Friedman’s.)
She’s done what very few UFOlogests have done. She’s studied the UFO abductee, profiled them and found some interesting congruencies. What she found doesn’t sit well with UFO researchers, not because it’s wrong. She could be right, only more research of this type will tell. But it’s not going to come from UFO researchers.
It’s going to come from people like Clancy, and that’s what they are really upset about.
Shair and Enjoy!
Strange pockets of the Internet are abuzz today. A MAJOR DISASTER is about to occur! (BTW, the term MAJOR DISASTER must always be in all caps.)
Eric Julien writes
What will occur on May 25, 2006? Perhaps a planetary catastrophe originating from the Atlantic Ocean due to a medium size impact event. On this assumption, a series of giant waves, including one méga tsunami almost two hundred meters in height, will be born from a succession of underwater eruptions. These watery giants, decreasing with distance, will touch the majority of the Atlantic coasts; in particular, those most at risk lie between the equator and the tropic of Cancer. The victims of May 25 2006 will be tens of millions. The devastated survivors will be more numerous still. The economic losses will be enormous, well beyond the scales of destruction hitherto tested by our civilization. North America and Europe will not be saved, but will be affected in less dramatic proportions. By extension, other remote countries will be also affected.
(Translated from the French)
By dint of supra-human psychic powers (and some space buddies,) Someone by the name of Eric Julien has concluded that the East Coast of the US will be struck by a giant tsunami on MAY 28 OF THIS YEAR!!!!! Is this a realistic look into our very near future? Eric Julien (aka Jean Ederman) seems to think so. He’s a French ex pilot who’s written a few bits for the Exopolitics Journal, notably a piece entitled Are we a Security Threat to Extraterrestrial Civilizations.
But, even the good folks over at Exopolitics think this idea is more than a little too strange. Writes exopolitics’s guru Michael E. Salla, PhD,
In conclusion, despite Eric’s clear sincerity, I believe he has misinterpreted the available public data and overemphasized his own personal data gained through extraterrestrial experiences. I conclude that a devastating impact by a fragment of comet 73P Schwassman-Wachman is in fact unlikely. There are profound foreign policy and exopolitical implications raised by the Bush administration’s drive to sanction a preemptive nuclear war against Iran as originally reported by Seymour Hersh. The exopolitical implications deserve balanced scholarly analysis so the public can be properly informed of the consequences of such a war, the link with extraterrestrials, and how extraterrestrials may respond; and not be distracted by unconfirmed predictions of a devastating comet strike.
OK, I have to agree with him on this point. Eric Julien is very sincere!
But, acording to Julien/ Ederman (whatever he calls himself,) the aliens are VERY pissed off at our current political situation. So much that, instead of just calling up the US President’s office and explaining their concerns like any US citizen might do, they elected to demonstrate in an alien way. By knocking a chunk from comet SW-3 which is coincidentally making a close pass this year. This fact, Julien’s recent dreams of huge waves crashing into the US and CROP CIRCLES showing–well we are not sure what they are really showing but its got to be important!
He writes;
Chance? This luminous start will reach a magnitude thousand times higher than the normal in October 1995, after having passed by its perihelion and to have sailed in parallel during several million kilometers to the terrestrial orbit. For a comet to break apart at the time of its closest passage to the Earth an explicit symbol? Wouldn’t this be an exopolitical message of a great clarity?
Or it could be a natural progression caused by well known gravitational effects but that’s just scientific malarkey, we all know it doesn’t stand up well against French psychic evidence and crop circles made by aliens.
The good news (If you happen to be Regan Lee or Alfred Lehmberg.) The Odd Empire is located on the unfashionable west side of the East Coast! That means there is a very good chance that the Odd Empire itself will be washed away, never to trouble a poor woo again!
What’s really funny about this? (outside of the obvious), The Odd Emperor thinks that the whole exopolitical thing is a bunch of malarkey in the first place. That makes the people’ over at exopolitics.org who are distancing themselves from Julien/ Ederman recursively well….you know! The nerve of them! Proclaiming that his ideas are nuttier than theirs! (not to mention that the term Exopolitics is not in the Microsoft spell checker which means it’s not a real word!) That ALONE should show how deranged I am! > )
his thing dropped into the bejeweled Odd Empire Imperial transom. it’s from James Gilliland’s Self Mastery Earth Institute newsletter, published several times a day by James and some helpful aliens (we can only assume.)
[ECETI News] Response to Donald Ware who supports chemtrails;
Dear Donald. Please fill out the following questionnaire
Is the murder of innocent people okay?
Is poisoning the air, water and land okay?
Is killing justifiable of men women and children as a direct result
of chemtrails without their knowing okay?
What is the effect of ethylene dibromide a banned pesticide due to
its extreme carcinogenic nature and aluminum oxide creating memory
loss and Alzheimer’s increased exponentially by fluoride?
What happens when the immune system is compromised?
What opens the door to opportunistic diseases lying dormant in the
body? Who decides who and how many of the population die, what are the
guidelines?
The answer to your previous statement if I was enlightened I would
know why this is necessary. My answer is if you truly believe the
masses need to be culled you first. If you are an enlightened man
teach by example. Even a third grader understands KARMA which in
arrogance we often think we are above. We come up with all kinds of
noble reasons to murder, kill, poison, control and dominate yet are
they really noble or enlightened? It is such a noble gesture to say
it is good for the planet and the people, all done in service yet
service to who? Which people does it serve? The elite keep missing
the reality that no one is above Karma or action reaction. Killing,
poisoning, controlling are all methods of a very unevolved, ignorant
and arrogant consciousness. Gandhi said,”The only thing that brings
me solace in the face of tyranny is the immutable law of karma”. Now
that is enlightenment. PS who does the military serve? Certainly not
the people anymore. Who do you serve? Be brutally honest with
yourself your souls future depends on it and no, the Angels and
benevolent Ets are not behind these works that bring death, disease
and suffering. I would check in again I think the ones you might be
talking too are quite a bit lower in the evolutionary scale in fact
they probably have scales. Time to wake up and smell the coffee.
Also Dr Teller, the father of chemtrails was an idiot that loved to
set of nuclear bombs yet you hold him in high regard as to what is
good for the planet? Why not just quote Hitler he had some great
ideas too, also had a d’plan as to who lived and who died. His plan
did not work out to well either.
James Gilliland www.eceti.org
James seems to be referring to this fellow He’s got some fascinating takes on stuff, some wacky ideas but, saying that he wants to cull the masses? Seems a bit extreme to me!
A paragraph and misunderstandings, The Condon Report.
Let me preface this by saying, I wasn’t always interested in UFOs and such things. Once I liked cartoons, and teddy-bears!
But, when the 1960s were waning and I was in the 5th grade, I came upon a very disappointing book. You see, sometime over that long summer I had a very good UFO sighting, a silent, glowing crescent-shaped object which slid past my point of view as I looked at the night sky. I became obsessed with the idea that aliens were here on Earth with us and began reading everything I could get my hands on. One early book was The Condon Report. I was disappointed you see because I expected lurid tales of strange alien beings and fantastic flying saucers. What I got instead was a dry analysis that concluded UFOs were a batch of bloated swap gas and imagination.
Well come-on! I was about nine or something! And I read far too much, (I still do!)
Here’s what I found…
“As indicated by its title, the emphasis of this study has been on attempting to learn from UFO reports anything that could be considered as adding to scientific knowledge. Our general conclusion is that nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge. Careful consideration of the record as it is available to us leads us to conclude that further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified in the expectation that science will be advanced thereby.”
Condon Report
Section I
Conclusions and Recommendations
This is thought to be one of the most damming statements against the existence of UFOs. Hailed by skeptics and believers alike, this one paragraph, often quoted is also one of the most misunderstood passages of the Condon report and by extension, UFOlofgy itself.
Believers roundly condemn it, using it to disregard scientific principals.“We know UFOs are alien spacecraft “they scream, “Condon was a scientist, HE says UFOs are bunk so ALL SCIENCE IS STUPID!!!!.”
Skeptics use it to prove that scientific principles are sound. “We know UFOs are just misidentified things, see! Condon proved it!”
Is it possible that both ideas are incorrect? Could it be that both the skeptic and the believer have it wrong? You see, in my ravings I feel that any extreme viewpoint has a high probability of being incorrect however, it’s helpful to understand the extreme views because somewhere in the middle resides-
– the truth.
The paragraph really does not validate or invalidate any theory or idea of UFOs. It neither proves nor disproves the existence of unidentified flying objects. It does not prove that little gray aliens from Epsilon behooties (Beta Reticule or wherever) rudely used an anal probe without even a how-are-ya sailor! It also does not say that such things didn’t happen. It actually can’t because (now get this.)
Proving the existence of aliens was right outside the scope of the Condon report. Hell proving UFOs were anything was right outside the scope of the Condon Report.
Let me step out on a real limb here.
The Condon report is not about UFOs.
It never was.
Let me say that again;
The Condon report is not about UFOs.
The Condon Report is about UFO reports. It’s a report on reports. It’s never been about UFOs, space brothers, aliens, mothmen or chupa-whatevers. It was from the very beginning a scientific examination of reports on UFOs period. Not UFOs themselves.
It’s like someone wanting to figure out how an automobile works by collecting testimony of car wreck witnesses! Sure you could figure out that automobiles are physical objects, they tend to slam into other automobiles and people get hurt as a result. But you could never really understand where they come from, what they are made of or even what they are for just from crash witness testimony. And guess what?
We have far FAR less to go on from UFO reports.
Dr. Condon was simply telling the truth.
The Condon report was a scientific study to determine whether or not further scientific inquiry should be conducted on Unidentified Flying Objects. I.E. the emphasis of this study has been on attempting to learn from UFO reports anything that could be considered as adding to scientific knowledge (Condon Report section I) Its here in black and white. When you create a program its always a good idea to create a set of goals. A mission statement and here we have one, we want to learn if UFO reports can add anything to scientific knowledge. In so many words the Condon committee was not looking at the validity of UFOs, they wanted to see if there was any good information that could be gleaned from UFO reports!
And what did they find?
Nada. Not a damn thing. Most reports could be explained as mundane stuff. Sundogs, misidentified aircraft, reflections, even the planet Venus. Some, around 30% (a very high percentage BTW) were true unknowns.
So, what sort of scientific benefits can we get from misidentifying Venus? Nothing! Perhaps someone can write a learned paper on optical illusions, not that there aren’t lots of those already.
What kind of benefits can we get from the unknown reports? While interesting as reports of genuine unknowns, there is little scientific benefit we can get from those either. They all describe different objects, different events from different points of view. Frankly they are just data points and poor ones for the most part. The best you can do is shrug your shoulders and say “I don’t know what that was!”
Kind of like our car-crash witnesses. What if 30% saw what they think were large gorillas smashing into each other? Could that possibly further the study of automobiles? Remember that 70% were sure they saw automobiles, and 30% thought they saw something else. this is exactly opposite of the situation in the Condon Report.
The bottom line here is, the Condon report did a very good job of analyzing UFO reports to determine if there is any scientific methodology to study UFOs. The concluded (quite correctly) that there is no scientific bases to study UFOs according to the data they had been given. In other words“This data sucks! What do you want us to do with it? Prove Santa exists?
But, that’s about all they can do with it. Not that the data itself is bad, its s very good data of a bunch of unknown events. It just doesn’t go anywhere. There is no way to verify or falsify any hypotheses based on that data. Ergo, it’s not scientific!
And that’s why Dr. Condon and his report gets such a bad rap from the UFO community. I can’t blame most of them really. Some people in the UFO community are not scientists and do not think objectively about them (or much else for that matter.) Too intent on proving this crackpot idea or another they seldom sit back and take in the broad concepts, let alone details like the Condon Report.
So what can we learn from all this? Well the first thing I recommend is read the report again and try to understand where they were coming from. Just because someone did not come up with a conclusion you like doesn’t necessarily invalidate the work. There are other factors here and get this.
The objectives of the Condon Report were flawed from the very beginning! I might add that the objectivity of many key players in the Condon report may also be ..questionable.
More on that in another edition of,
ALIEN HISTORY!!!!! (or whatever I end up calling this if it becomes a series.)
Share and enjoy!
Unless you just crawled out from under a rock yesterday (And having corresponded with some of you I have no doubt. ; ) you have probably heard the buzz regarding the Lizard guy Eric Pianka.
Or more specifically, some comments he made to the Texas Academy of Science. In his so-called doomsday speech (if like many non-science types you would like to take him out of context) he stated that Ebola would be an ideal way to deal with the vast overpopulation of the human species and how this would be a good thing for the rest of the Earth’s biomass.
If the professional community has lost its sense of moral outrage when one if their own openly calls for the slow and painful extermination of over 5 billion human beings, then it falls upon the amateur community to be the conscience of science.
If you choose to take his comments in context (I.E. not what it sounds like dim-bulb but what he actually meant,) it would go more like this.
(my words)
From an objective point of view, humanity is in the middle of a crisis. We don’t realize it yet but we as a species will be facing a period of rapid change, beginning with a devastating population crash. This crash (if we are fortunate) will take us down to about 10% of our current population. Our current strategy of unbridled growth and exploitation of resources guarantees that the crash will take place sooner or later. Exactly how the crash will take place is unknown but pathogens like airborne Ebola which kills in as little as two days might be a prime candidate.
How do we know that the crash will take place? Because it always does in any closed-biologic system. Note the terms “allways” and “any.”
“But here’s what’s gonna happen.”And after the human population collapses, there’s going to be a lot fewer of us. Food is going to be diminished. Pollution is going to go down, which will be good. But there’s not going to be much to recover from. Our descendants are going to curse us for the party we took, the party we had, and I really recommend Richard Heinberg’s book the Party is Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies. This man has thought about these things deeply.”
Pianka also thinks that we should get to Mars, as soon as possible. “Send a one way spaceship loaded with people” he says. “Send along a complete Library of Congress on DVD so that when the Earth fizzles out at least some record of what happened will remain. We can only hope” Pianka says“That the pioneers on Mars won’t make the same mistakes.”
There are those who disagree with Dr. Pianka, to the point where someone actually reported him to Homeland Security after his presentation.
WTF?!!
Anyone who doesn’t agree with the tenets of this guys speech is a freaking bat-guano eating mouth-breather in my not-so humble opinion. That’¢s how strongly I feel about this. Overpopulation is bad freaking bad! We have too many kids, we use too much energy. We have big cars and inefficient appliances. We heat our homes in the winter and cool them in the summer. We drive huge gas guzzling behemoths. If you have a kid in the US or some other industrialized country you are automatically committing HUNDREDS of children in underdeveloped countries to a slow death by starvation. Each time you fill up your tank, someone dies.
Those are the facts. THINK!
Pianka’s just stating the obvious as known to anyone who has studied biological systems. And he’s being panned for that? Oh the idiot humanity!
The lion is not going to lie down with the lamb. The Bush family is not going to suddenly realize that they are self serving ignoramuses. Some alien is not going to take you to the land of milk and honey. You already live there! What the hell do you think the rest of the solar system is like?
You believe someone is going to save you? You lazy moronic dim-bulb fecal headed morons! This fellow is telling your real future you ass-hats! No stupid-freaky UFO is going to swoop down and save your stinky booties. No ascended master will change trees into breadfruit. Jesus isn’t going to save you, light being Phatha and Saint Germaine are going to laugh at you.
So is the Odd Emperor.
Jason Rosenhouse has a good rant on the Evolutionblog
The real problem is that if you did a poll in which you asked people whether discussing the second law of thermodynamics versus the theory of evolution indicates that the former is on solid evidential ground whereas the latter is not, I think you would have upwards of 70% of the people answering yes. And that idea is so jaw-droppingly pig-ignorant that it pretty much defies response. How is it that so many people can reach adulthood holding such delusional views about science?
Is hostility towards evolution caused by a few insensitive remarks by people like Dawkins and Dennett? Or is it caused by having a large segment of the population that doesn’t know anything about science? You make the call.
How about both? Ignorant people tend to react defensively when their noses are rubbed into it. Voluntarily ignorant people (like those who take the Bible literally) can be downright nasty.
Where it gets downright strange is in a field (like say – paranormal studies) where you have a large segment of passionate believers who condemn science as being ineffectual or fraudulent. In such cases any claim can be proven by a passionate testimony and becomes cannon when enough people swallow the cool-aid. The moment science caves in to this kind of thinking it becomes faith/religion. The study of the paranormal is stuck exactly because people will not open their minds and truly inquire.
One would think that this would be a time of rejoicing! The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has just completed a complicated and dangerous maneuver, placing it into a high elliptical orbit of the red planet. Over the next few months the probe will be nudged into the upper reaches of Mars atmosphere to slowly modify and circularize it into a stable orange peel-pole to pole obit which can cover the entire planet.
Even now, brilliant high definition photos are being beamed back to Earth from this probe. Soon, a resolution of objects less than three feet across will be sent back, unprecedented quality. Additionally the probe carries the Optical Navigation Camera , a the Mars Climate Sounder and several other instruments.
For some people its not a time for rejoicing, its time to bitch. For example, science writer Richard Hoagland writes on his Enterprise Mission site;
So, what is NASA planning to shoot on the Martian surface with this unprecedented NRO-quality “ at Mars
The usual:
Rocks followed by more rocks then entire fields of rocks
Lets face it — for the last three decades, NASA has effectively stonewalled the American people and the World ¦ on the greatest story in history or, more appropriately, in pre-history.
Here we go again! With utter determination and a pig headedness that the USs esteemed chief pobah would admire, Hoagalnd is going to (yet again) tell us that NASA is covering up huge, mile long artifacts on the planet Mars. That there is a giant conspiracy to hide proof that Mars once or currently harbors intelligent life.
No; NASA is not going to spend precious cotter imaging and re-imaging your damn butte. Its probably a freaking natural hill anyway, the best face pictures are still from the 1976 Viking series and those were manipulated so much I can’t tell what the hell we are looking at. All the subsequent photos of the Cydonia face look progressively more natural, not less like one might expect.
Now admittedly, I’m not an expert on satellite imagery or Planetary Geology. I can’t tell you what kind of land-forms might arise in Mar’s thin, mostly carbon dioxide atmosphere. One where it gets hundreds of degrees below zero and only a few degrees above freezing. A place where planet wide-dust storms are observed every few years and the winds can reach supersonic speeds. I have no idea what kind of natural phenomena could arise from such conditions.
You know what? Neither does Hoagland.
What’s really rich is Hoagland mentions a couple of (admittedly) strange things. Jack Kirby (the comic book artist) penciled a space exploration thriller called“Race for the Moon. This was back in 1958!
One episode was entitled “The Face On Mars” and features a humdinger of the Cydonia face as, get this, ‘ s “as big as a mountain!”
Hoagland;
Now we have found additional, even more remarkable evidence supporting this extraordinary scenario: that “someone” — decades before they went to Cydonia and found it — somehow knew what NASA in 1976 would discover as “the Face on Mars!”
Well no. It seems more reasonable that someone saw that comic as a kid, years ago. The blurry Cydonia photos resonated with Kirby’s image. People saw a similar shape to Kirby’s drawing on Mars and immediately, perhaps subconsciously made the connection. Since there are virtually an unlimited amount of land-form shapes on Mars, it’s not too big a stretch to believe something like that might happen.
Hell I think I’ve run across that series myself, and I’ve probably held the Face on Mars issue in my grubby little hands. I recognized the Cydonia face image immediately, probably because of those half-forgotten images.
The thing about this is, Kirby was admittedly an imaginative fellow. But, it’s very-very unlikely that someone from NASA (which was formed the very same year) met with him in some seedy bar and said “Kirby baby! Why don’t you slip in a story about some giant face on da planet Mars, it’d make the boys upstairs really happy!â€Â
Even if for the sake of argument NASA is a big fake. If we had had photographs of Mars back in 1958 and humans already have freaking cities on Mars, why muck it up with bogus probes and blurry photos when they could just say “sorry, no money for space shots this year.‘Heck, all they need to do is drop a booster on some unoccupied mansion in Coco Beach and the US space program could be closed up forever, by public declaration.
Which brings up my one and only beef with the US government is the US space program. It’s not that they are wasting taxpayer money like Hoagland contends.
It’s that they are wasting far too little taxpayer money.
The United States is the richest, most powerful country on the Earth. As a nation it has more of everything by some factor more than its three closest competitors. We should be “wasting” billions on space! We should have huge rotating hotels in orbit. Cities on the Moon and Mars. We should be sending manned probes to Jupiter and Saturn by now. We could be thinking seriously about sending people to the nearest star systems.
How will this stop terrorism, feed the poor or contribute to world peace? It will but that’s to rich of a subject for this little rant. Sufficient to say that guaranteeing the survival of humanity has many rewards, failing to do so has only one.
What are we doing? Sending web cams to mars on chemical bottle rockets. We have to use the Mar’S atmosphere to slow our spacecraft because we can’t afford to send up enough reaction mass.
All the while people like Hoagland, a very good and engaging writer, sits around and bitches when the cash-strapped American space program has such a magnificent success. That’s the real tragedy here. The goddamn photos that Hoagland basis his conspiracy theories on didn’t come from his camera. They didn’t come from Russia, or China or the Men in Black. They came from the self-same US government. The same one that’s covering up everything!
The thousands of hard working and underappreciated workers at the Cape and JPL were not paid by Hoagland, they work for the US government. These people are not liars or fakers. They are not part of some strange monolithic Capricorn One type conspiracy. They are simply people doing what they love. Sending explorers to another world so that humanity can find out just a little bit more about the place we live, And a lot about ourselves.
It means just looking at rocks. Rocks! Not alien cities, not mile long artifacts, not pie in the sky and not wild flights of fancy. Rocks, and ice and places we might live in a few generations. The other stuff? The ruined shopping malls or strange complexes? The weird boojum trees and mile long artifacts? They will show up, if they exist. If they don’t the people who sent that fantastic object to Mars will be very content. If they just happen to find something else besides rocks?
Why; we will probably have people there checking it out in about ten years.
How exciting would that be?
