Empire of the Odd

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!”

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?

From the Toronto Star

Here is a really good article which comes way of The Red Queen and her disinformation blog UFO blips.

Noted astronomer Dr. Laban Shrewsbury (noted in the Astronomical Journal of Cosmetology no less.) is this months s feature in The Wicked Scholar. He’s touting his latest book “Use Your Head and Stop Being Such a Loser, You Loser.”

Dr. Shewsbury is the head of the SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) project at the Mount Kadath Observatory in Arkham Mass I should point out that this guy really doesn’t head up SETI at Mount Kadath. That’s a complete and utter fabrication! It’s Mount Al-Hazred in the State of Delaware.

I really hate it when people get the details wrong!

Anyway;

“ What I find absolutely amazing, “ says Dr Shewsbury is the number of people who believe totally and completely that intelligent aliens routinely visit the earth and carry out experiments on human subjects. Over the past several decades, I have been contacted by literally hundreds of people who sincerely believe that they have been the victim of an alien abduction”

I truly sympathize with him.

“–Critical thinkers, of course, instantly recognize abduction stories for what they really are; the adolescent fantasies of pathetic, fat, stupid, people with empty, meaningless lives. Many of them live below the poverty level and long to escape from an unbearable existence. They fervently wish they could be a Han Solo, a Captain Kirk, a beautiful and powerful queen on a distant planet.”

Captain Kirk, a beautiful and powerful queen on a distant planet? Oookaay!

Oh, *or a* beautiful and powerful queen on a distant planet.

Gotcha!

“As most people who believe in alien abductions are stupid and poorly educated, explaining the realities of physics, biology, chemistry, and astronomy is like trying to describe a jet engine to a chimpanzee. It’s a futile activity.”

That much is true!

Anyway, the real gem of this article is how offended some people have gotten over it

Billy Boot over at About.com writes.

I was totally shocked when I read an article about a recent lecture given by astronomer Dr. Laban Shrewsbury. Who is this guy? And where does he get off with the stupid, ridiculous things he says? You just have to read the comments he made, and I hope it makes you as mad as it did me. The only way I could have been any more irate was if I was an abductee myself.”

Well he has a point; getting dragged out of bed at 3 AM, taken aboard a silly looking space craft by some freaking freaky looking blokes with large heads who perform strange operations on your genitalia would really make me irate!

Is that what he meant?

Red Queen says.

And yet he thinks it possible there is ET out there. I think his awful, lazy, and rude rejection of the “fat, stupid and pathetic” is simply a defense. By making such a ludicrous statement, he distances himself from the so-called loonies — those who “believe” in alien abductions — which then gives him some bit of credibility about ET among those who otherwise would laugh him off the stage; his colleagues.

The Red Queen has such a way with words.

So what’s the cost of all this?
Couple of hours to write the piece. 40-60 dollars.
A smidgen of bandwidth and a few amps of electricity. >.10 cents.
Getting some woo-woos bent out of shape over absolutely nothing?

Priceless!

Like a banana?

Alien Cow abduction is a big problem,… in places where it’s a

problem I guess.
Or is that cow abduction by aliens? In any case, This page tells it like it is!

Site via Post Human Blues.

Darren McGavin passed away last Saturday (February 25 ,2006)

^{Some of you might know him as Carl Kolchak, from the old Night Stalker series. Night Stalker is one of those fond memories of the 1970s.}

^{Kolchak was a reporter working for the small and disreputable Independent News Service. A Chicago based wire service. Each week he would find himself embroiled in some paranormal adventure, try to write a story about it just to have it cut for being too fantastic. Kolchak would encounter zombies, animated piles of Spanish moss, strange Hindu critters and even aliens. Since they were on a tight budget the aliens turned out to be a squirrel cage, E-type 21 wind machine. The tight dialog and great acting made up for those invisible aliens.}

<sup>One significant thing about Kolchak is the anti-establishment bent of the whole thing. First aired during the end-note of the Vietnam war the program tells a stark tale of one man’s struggle to inform the world of strange and terrifying things lurking about right under our noses. The establishment, police, government officials etc would turn a blind eye or systematically cover up any allusions to supernatural occurrences. Kolchak then became a kind of allegory of the helplessness many people felt when facing a seemingly megalithic and unfeeling government. It resonated with lots of people and even though it was canceled after only a single season it remains a cult favorite even today.

From Wikipedia;</sup>

^{The series has been described as a predecessor of The X-Files, and X-Files creator Chris Carter has acknowledged that the show influenced him greatly in his own work. One character on The X-Files was named Richard Matheson after author Richard Matheson because of his involvement in the TV movies, and Darren McGavin, although unwilling to reprise his Kolchak character, played an FBI agent who was described as the “father of the X-Files”.}

I pulled this off of UFO Updates this morning. Updates has been unusually tranquil of late. A refreshing change from what it was like only a month ago.

This bit struck me as a very good idea for anyone wanting to investigate such high strangeness as UFOs or just about anything else in the paranormal field. Too bad the word “science” is uttered in the code. People not really trying to move the field forward will probably ignore it.

Code Of Ethics

The following Code Of Ethics contains standards of conduct which define the basic essentials of honorable behavior for the
investigator:

1. An investigator will always regard responsibility to the truth as paramount.
2. An investigator will conduct all investigations and allied matters with integrity; be honest in all professional
3. interactions; and strive to report those deficient in character or competence, or engaging in fraud or deception, to appropriate entities.
4. An investigator will respect the wishes of witnesses, colleagues, and professionals; and shall safeguard confidences and privacy.
5. An investigator will continue to study, apply and advance scientific knowledge; to observe the precepts of truth, accuracy
6. and prudence; and to make relevant information available to colleagues and the public.
7. An investigator will always respect the law and legal authority.

(from WEIRD HAPPENS – Investigator Handbook)

Yours in research,

Robert A. Goerman
Unconventional Investigator
of Unconventional Phenomena

It’s really gratifying to find people who actually want to investigate, rather than validate one or more strange belief systems. That method has been around for thousands of year and reached a pinnacle around the time people thought divining the future was best done with a pile of sheep entrails.

People learn, but it takes time.

Last year one of the big stories over at Rense was this amazing video from this most reliable sounding source, UFO Theater  Now on their web page? A supposed confession although some UFO believers are saying the site was hacked.

As of this writing the page seems to have been taken down and my tecknoflunky tells me that he’s been hosting this bogus crap since September of 2002. Here’s a Web Archive feed from April 1^st of 2005.

Here s some of the chatter on Rense.

No, I think this is the real deal….. I pulled this off of UFO Theater just before it vanished.

“Well, that began my experiments to say the least…. I had did research on all the best ufo hoaxers around and learned that people believed just about anything they were told… or shown… I branched out after that…. Knowing that i could do just about anything and people would but it… I began my experiments in consumer idiocy… I began by making the most absurd sh(%$) i could think of and putting up advertisements on rense.com to see if the sh(%$) would sell… SURE enough the sh(%$) sold at least 5 to 10 times my initial advertising investments… My first silly ass experiment was a book i had published called “The secret of immortality”… This was a total wreak of stoner insanity… for an entire week i got stoned and wrote up this insane crazy shit about how you can be reincarnated… i made a very pretty sweet website and paid rense.com and the advertisement was good! I only had 200 copies printed at the press and within a week 150 were sold… i knew that the book sucked ass and that whenever the people got them they would complain to rense.com and sure enough they did…. the ad was taken down and i was refunded half the money… however i sold 150 copies all for $29.95 a piece.. the advertisement was about $500 back then for a showcase and i was refunded $250 so i made a phat weeks pay of about… $4000… So yea no love lost…”

**

The entire ufo scene is full of whacked out cracker jacks…. All hell bent on making a buck! There are NO exceptions! So here is the story you have all been dying to tell…..right from the horses ass – Peace out (to) my wormy internet stalking weirdos (sic) with no lives!

Hes not exactly right, most people in the UFO biz are not inclined or smart enough to make money in the field. There are SO many possibilities but almost all of them involve some form of hucksterism. Most people that I encounter in the UFO field are well meaning types who just, lie to themselves.

I must say though that hoaxing people for money is pretty low. Its Right down there with starting a religion to make money. I much prefer the magician paradine, “first we agree that it is a hoax, now, prepare to be amazed!”s doing the same thing but its much more ethical.

This fellow is behaving like a cat caught doing something foolish“Oh you got me! I MEANT to do that..bwaa ha-ha!”

Ya sure-sure bub! You only admitted it when there was no way to wriggle your way out.

Share and enjoy!

Its quite common to run into this problem. You try to have an open minded conversation about UFOs when suddenly you realize that the person you’re talking to is not open minded at all. they are one of the faithful, a believer in one or more strange ideas and nothing you can say will have the slightest impact.

If you persist you find that these people will lie to you, systematically distort information, mix fact with faith and ruthlessly cherry-pick data to reach whatever conclusion happens to be on their agenda. that’s if they don’t just go on the attack. Like believers in one religion or another they will defend their faith with a fervor that’s spectacular to behold.

Funny that two things fact and faith, so basic, so powerful are so completely misunderstood . In the UFO community, faith and fact are close to becoming synonyms. Even though one describes human thought and the other literally describes the Cosmos.

Here’s what I mean. What exactly is fact? What exactly is faith?

The dictionary defines fact as “Knowledge or information based on real occurrences:

How do we define faith?

Confident belief in the truth–loyalty to a person or thing; allegiance.

They are indeed two diametrically different terms. They might seem similar but, the enabling word in faith is belief. The two enabling words in fact are Knowledge and real. This is a profound difference because fact does not require belief.

In the UFO field the distinction of what is factual or not falls on the so called Ufologist. Luminaries who because of a lack proper peer review (cloistering according to some) can proclaim whatever they want without impeachment. And they do exacly that, to the amusement of people on the outside of the UFO biz. Hence the sharp screeds by engineering types like Aaron Sakulich of Drexel University. He’s been roundly panned by the UFO community even though many of his columns are taken right out of the same cannon believers use.

In most other fields, distinguishing between what is factual and an article of faith is easy. Think of an aerospace engineer, an airframe designer for example. He or she cannot design something based on faith or belief, engineering must be based on verifiable–factual information. An airframe based on faith alone is not going to fly very well. The same goes for a civil engineer, a medical doctor, electricians, or even an artist! You must have a recipe of facts or your project will not succeed. Experience helps but experience can be defined as based on fact. Even if the experience is so ingrained that its intuitive, the intuition itself is coming from experience which (hopefully) is based on facts pertaining to one’s success or failures.

But this is different in other fields. Take religion! Religion substitutes fact with faith. Faith becomes fact, its kind of the engineering of religion. In so the faith/facts becomes belief in the intangible, what life after death is like, what are the personalities the likes and dislikes of the gods. That sort of thing. And so a web of legend and mythology is created to substitute for factual information. Thus belief and faith becomes the “fact” of religion.

The same concept is very much a tradition for some so-called UFOlogests. When one looks at the field of UFOlogy one can see why. Let’s face it, there are, very few facts here, most of the cannon in UFOlogy must be taken as articles of faith. Take for example (more or less selected at random,) the famous Mexican UFO wave of the 1990s There are hundreds of eye witness reports, repeat encounters involving hundreds of people. There were alien encounters of various sorts, even a Roswell type crash and retrieval tale. But facts? There are almost no facts from this ten year period in Mexico. A number of very good but virtually unverifiable photos, lots of testimony and a certain amount of video footage. Footage that has little or no pedagree and is not reproducable. (There is one major exception to this, the so-called Gulf FLIR footage but that’s a whole column in itself.)

Some people argue that the abundance of data adds up to factual information. If one person sees a flying object, believes it’s an aircraft built by an alien race, that’s a data point. It has some significance–to that person certainly.

If a hundred people see the same thing and most believe it’s an alien aircraft? That’s a more reliable data point to many in the UFO field.

If a thousand or ten thousand people see and believe the same thing? That must lend weight to the belief that this in fact was an alien aircraft. Many UFOlogest will ague that there is a preponderance of evidence proving that Earth is being visited by extra terrestrials. The sheer weight of testimony and anecdotal data somehow adds up to factual information .

In the gritty real world of facts, it doesn’t matter how many people believe something. Remember all the people in my example are seeing exactly the same object. Their belief does not change the physical aspects of the thing, their beliefs do not make it an alien aircraft. We don’¢t really know what they saw. Any other conclusion is sheer speculation.

In many parts of UFOolgy where facts are based on such data, this (so the belivers say) proves the existence of aliens, beyond a shadow of a doubt. To many (even to a few prominent Ufologists) a mountain of poor data is significantly better than a single poor data point.

When one compares UFOlogy with almost any other field, one is struck by how backward this method seems. Most of the time, proof is the proof of reproducible evidence. There is no such thing in UFOology. In other feilds, fact comes from a direct result of experimentation or experience. For example; each point on a scuba dive table is a result of a diver’s experience. Think about how useless that tool would be, how deadly if someone’s opinion replaced the gritty facts. But replacement of fact by opinion and belief is done in almost every aspect of UFOlogy.

This is why the field is a circus, fodder for tabloid journalism and a haven for nutcases. What do they expect?

Look at how little progress has been made in not just the last few dozen years but the last several hundred. We do not know ay more about those lights in the sky than our ancestors did. Sure we have lots of information! I can show you people who know intimate details about aliens, their likes and dislikes. What planet they come from, how their spacecraft work or what they eat for breakfast.

But, all of this information must be taken as an article of faith. None of it is factual. And this is not the fault of some giant conspiracy of the US government. The US does not have influence everywhere and I’m not aware of significantly better research going in Europe or the Eastern Europian countries.

It’s a conspiracy all right but it begins by with the face UFOlogy shows the world.

Until and unless UFOlogests stop thinking about what they want to see in UFOs and take a good hard look at what they are actually seeing, the study of UFOs will remain as it is today. A carnival of ideas and conflicting information. A clash of competing faiths and beliefs with very few facts. Useless from a knowledge standpoint. Useful for entertainment but not very good in the quest for knowledge.

In short the study of UFOs will be exactly the same today as it was yesterday and it will be tomorrow unless the UFOlogests stop trying to defend their petty beliefs. Unless they start gathering and cherishing facts.

Since facts seem to be in such short supply, this shouldn’t take them very long. The hard part is going to be, dumping the carnival of beliefs and faith-based material.

That”s going to be difficult indeed, maybe impossible.

I pulled this off one of Antigray’s yahoo SIGs. It’s a real-time map of world crisis’s.– http://visz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/woalert.php

Just what you need for that little paranoid-guy in each of us!

This has got to be the most humorous disclaimer I’ve ever seen!

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