Yikes, It's David Icke!

Guess who has a new book out. Okay, I suppose the title of this post was a giveaway, but world-famous conspiracy crank David Icke has unleashed yet another broadside attack on reality¹. As most of you probably know, Icke is a soccer-player-turned-paranoia-guru who attained an impressive level of international infamy in the late 1990s with the release of his book The Biggest Secret. The book was an absolute magnum opus in the field of groundless conspiracy-mongering, advancing the claim that the human race been manipulated for untold millenia by a cabal of interdimensional lizard-men. It changed the face of internet conspiracy message boards forever.

Lizard-men have 2d8+2 hit points and usually attack with clubs or large darts.
They also control the entire planet with the aid of the Bilderberg Group.

Icke's new book, Human Race Get Off Your Knees - The Lion Sleeps No More, is a 690-page tome in which he reveals, among other things, that the moon is actually a giant spacecraft filled with aliens. See, it turns out that the moon actually beams out a "fake reality" broadcast that serves to pacify us regular folks and turn us into more malleable slaves for our alien overlords. Of course, all of this is in addition to the alien/human hybrids who have already infiltrated the highest levels of society and control the entire banking industry and pretty much every government in the world. That's right, we all live in that Roddy Piper movie They Live and you can read all about it for a mere $35, plus shipping. I don't advise it.

It's hard to decide exactly what to make of David Icke. There's a part of me that almost wants to laud him for his creativity, since he continuously bangs out torturously long conspiracy tomes (16 since 1992, by my count²) that strive painfully hard to connect every conspiracy trope ever conceived into a sort of Grand Unified Theory of Crazy so complicated and implausible that it defies all attempts at concise summary. Everything from alien crossbreeding (with each other and humans), the New World Order, and the Hollow Earth to the Bilderberg Group, HAARP, and the 9/11 Truth Movement have found their way into his narrative. That's no mean feat, and I'm a little surprised that the Sci-Fi Channel isn't pounding on Icke's door to get the movie-of-the-week rights. I guess even that network that brought us Sharktopus has some standards.

On the other hand, there's a sense in which he's not much different from every other quasi-millenarian kook out there. He promises the imminent replacement of a society overrun by the forces of evil by a new, enlightened society brought about by people with access to special knowledge. Specifically, in David Icke's narrative humanity is being empowered by "truth vibrations" to throw off the yoke of a race of malevolent spacemen who control society and ruthlessly oppress the masses...but doesn't that story sound vaguely familiar?

The motif of "we, the righteous few vs. monolithic evil" has been used by nearly every apocalyptic group I can think of. Christianity's internal narrative revolves around a society dominated by supernatural evil that will eventually be redeemed through divine intervention from God and helped along by those on earth who've heard "the good news". The Gnostics (broadly speaking) were concerned with casting off an evil and corrupted world and reaching a truer, more righteous reality through the application of secret wisdom. Hell, even Al Qaeda organizes itself around the idea of holy war against a wicked society waged by virtuous adherents to a revealed "truth". The particulars may be different, but the broad outline is the same every time.

In other words, David is really just regurgitating a tried-and-true apocalyptic narrative that has been around for thousands of years. Furthermore, pretty much every conspiracy Icke evokes, from the sinister machinations of the New World Order to 9/11 being perpetrated by the U.S. government, either pre-dates him or emerged independently before he re-purposed it for his own claims. As far as I can tell, he's never met a conspiracy that he couldn't find a home for in his wacky world. In all seriousness, go to Google and type in "David Icke" plus any conspiracy you've ever heard of. Odds are you'll find a link to his website in which he endorses it as fact.

Hilariously, some of the "evidence" he cites, such as the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was debunked as utter hokum before he was even born.³ If that's not the very definition of "old hat", I don't know what is. Even his famed lizardmen (aka Reptilians, aka Reptoids, aka Annuaki) are derived from a subset of UFO abduction claims dating back to at least the 1950s. (And, it should be noted, are intriguingly similar to the villains in that old sci-fi show V.) His claims only sound original because of the veritable smorgasbord of absurd conspiracy theories he's stitched together in order to assemble a bizarre Frankenstein monster of paranoia.

Contrary to his own delusions, David Icke is certainly no visionary genius on a fast track to saving the universe. He's not even an especially creative weirdo. He is, I fear, just another oddball who's taken a heaping handful of pop-culture conspiracy cliches and arranged them into the generic millenarian outline like some kind of tinfoil hat Mad Lib. It would almost be funny if so many people didn't take him seriously.

_____________
1.) "Icke" is pronounced like "Ike", although "ick" is more intuitive...and fitting.

2.) He also wrote a book about professional soccer in 1983 that, so far as I can tell, includes no references to space lizards.

3.) Before he settled on lizard aliens from another dimension as the shadowy secret masters of the world, Icke pointed the finger at a rather more down to earth target: Jews.

Another UFO Up In Smoke...

I always get a weird feeling when the first thing I encounter on a visit to CNN.com is a headline about a UFO sighting. That was the case this morning when I was the checking news on my break at work and stumbled upon this video article. Apparently a lady named Deanna Smith and her family were visiting the King's Dominion amusement park in Virginia when they saw a large ring floating in the sky above them, which they then photographed. That's pretty par for the course as far as UFO sightings go, but then the story got...peculiar.

See, CNN interviewed two folks for this story: The lady who took the photo and a UFO investigator named Cameron Pack. Pack points to a similar UFO that was photographed near Fort Belvoir (also in Virginia) back in 1957 as evidence that this new photo might be something spooky. More on that later. Mrs. Smith, for her part, disagrees with Mr. Pack and thinks instead that maybe this smoke ring was a sign from God Almighty. It's not immediately clear what that sign is meant to indicate, but I think this lady may get extra credulity points for immediately jumping to divine intervention as her first explanation for a weird-looking cloud.

One thing that is immediately clear, however, is this:


The towering monstrosity pictured above is Volcano, a roller coaster at King's Dominion that, among other things, is in the business of periodically launching gigantic rings of smoke into the air. I'm going to take a wild stab in the dark and posit that perhaps, just perhaps, the huge smoke ring in Mrs. Smith's photo might not have been produced by a vengeful deity but instead by the 155-foot tall smoke ring machine located nearby.

As for the 1957 Fort Belvoir photos, the incident was investigated by famous Condon Committee 50 years ago and was found to almost certainly be the result of an A-bomb simulation conducted at the Fort Belvoir military base. This simulation and others like it conducted at the base, according to a report from the Condon Committee, consisted of "[f]ive 55-gal. drums of gasoline, diesel fuel, TNT, and white phosphorus" that were arranged in a circle and then detonated. That certainly does seem like it could create a bit of a smoke ring. The report also noted signs that at least one of the photographs may have been retouched to make the smoke ring "appear more regular and more puzzling." The full report on the incident (as well as the full text of the entire Condon Report) can be viewed at the excellent website of the National Capital Area Skeptics.

So there you have it - Two "UFOs", fifty years apart, that looked mysteriously like huge, floating rings of smoke have been revealed to be...huge, floating rings of smoke.

Poof.

Ed Mitchell and UFOS: From Any Other Source...

Edgar Mitchell was a decorated pilot and astronaut back in the 1960s and, among other things, he holds the record for the longest moonwalk ever.* He holds a doctorate in aeronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has several honorary doctorates from other institutions. Sounds pretty impressive, eh? Well, frankly, all of that is pretty impressive. Unfortunately, he's fast becoming the poster boy for UFO conspiracy theorists.

Ed Mitchell walking on the moon.

Mitchell made headlines about a week ago when he went to the British press with a story about UFOs being covered up by the U.S. government. It really wasn't anything that he hasn't said before, but a lot of the conspiracy sites out there have been treating this like some kind of sea change in world attitudes about UFO visitation. Basically all of the excitement hinges on a pair of statements that he made last week on a British radio program, which we'll examine in turn. Here's the first:

There’s not much question at all that there is life throughout the universe. I’m totally sure we are not alone.

Well, that's pretty fair, and in fact I think he's probably right. I'd stand by him on this statement - somewhere in the universe there is almost certainly other life in some form or another. There's honestly not a lot of controversy about this statement, so I'm unclear as to why it's causing so much excitement. I guess hearing it come from a former astronaut makes a difference to some people, but if some of the True Believers™ out there would read some books by actual astronomers (Which I have a sneaking suspicion they won't - I rarely read much scholarly work when I was a True Believer™ myself.) they'd realize that the idea of alien life somewhere in the universe isn't particularly controversial. This particular statement is something that most of us evil skeptics probably wouldn't have a problem with. That being said, I think the real excitement is about the second statement he made:

...We have been visited on this planet and the UFO phenomenon is real - though it’s been covered up by governments for the last 60 years or so.

Now here we get into conspiracy gobbledy-gook. Again, alien life is not only possible elsewhere in the universe but, I'd argue, fairly likely. On the other hand, claims of alien visitations to the earth are totally unsubstantiated. Note that Mitchell himself offers no elaboration or evidence here, he just knows. He later goes on to specifically mention that the Roswell incident really involved a crashed UFO and the corpses of aliens were recovered from the scene. Unfortunately, Mitchell himself has never actually seen the bodies, but he heard about them from a source he won't name except to say that he's dead now.

Are we honestly meant to believe a fantastical story about a government cover-up of the most important scientific discovery of all time based on a yarn someone heard from an anonymous source who's now claimed to be deceased? If I posted an entry claiming that some super-secret anonymous source told me that they were keeping a live dragon in a special enclosure underneath the Pentagon, but that I'd never seen the monster and the source was dead now and thus not available for questioning, would you believe me? Probably not, unless your name is Philip O'Donnell. Nope, if I made a claim like that, I would be deluged with e-mail calling me a loon! What makes an equally weak story more believable when it's coming from Mitchell? Keep in mind that he's not even saying that he himself has any specific experience with the alien corpses himself, he's just repeating what someone else told him. As long as the primary source remains anonymous and no actual evidence is forthcoming, Mitchell's UFO claims are no weightier than the old cliché about how "a friend of a friend" heard that there are alligators in the sewers.

Looking at these assertions, I have to note that Mitchell isn't really making any claims or giving any more actual evidence that countless conspiracy-minded forum posters all over the internet. The only reason he gets any press at all for these statements is that he's a former astronaut. The members of the media (as well as some conspiracy buffs) are also downplaying the fact that Mitchell is a proponent of ESP, distance healing, and, specifically, is a supporter of the Canadian huckster who goes by the emo-sounding pseudonym "Adam Dreamhealer". Mitchell claims that this miracle man cured him of cancer simply by thinking good thoughts about him, but is somewhat slower to mention that it was never confirmed by doctors that he even had cancer. (As a little background information, Adam Dreamhealer claims that his supernatural healing abilities came to him when a giant bird "downloaded all the information in the universe into [his] mind". ) I'm not so sure the media would be quite as interesting in Mitchell's UFO claims if they were aware of the breadth and scope of some of his other odd claims.

Mitchell supports "distance healer" Adam Dreamhealer.
Dreamhealer claims a big bird gave him the secrets of the universe.

Ed Mitchell's not some kind of lunatic or idiot, and there's no reason to try to denigrate all the real scientific work he did as an astronaut, but his current UFO (and other) claims just don't come close to reaching the levels of credibility that they would need to warrant the amount of attention they're getting. Keep in mind also that I'm not calling Mitchell a liar, either. For the most part, Mitchell is not claiming that he's had firsthand experience with aliens - he's just retelling stories that other people have told him. That makes him gullible rather than malevolent. The same his true for his claims about Adam Dreamhealer - Mitchell is no more a liar in this matter than is any other "satisfied" victim of a faith healer.

All of this leads me to suspect that while Mitchell is a smart man with an open mind, he may have kept his mind so open that his brains are starting to slosh out.

*Technically he is the co-holder of this record, alongside Alan Shepard.

Jeff Peckman's Crazy is Hanging Out...

Well, the whole Stan Romanek alien video seems to have kind of fizzled out throughout most of the media, but that didn't stop Romanek's ally Jeff Peckman from making an appearance on David Letterman's show earlier in the week. Peckman, a transcendental meditation enthusiast, appeared with Romanek on Larry King Live a couple of weeks ago but didn't really have an enormous amount to say. Letterman, on the other hand, plays his interview with Peckman perfectly straight and lets him espouse his views on aliens with few interruptions. Check out the embedded video below to see Peckman explain how the U.S. government is conspiring to hide visitation of Earth by 57 different species of aliens in order to...wait for it...protect the evil interests of Big Oil.

Enjoy.

Back among the faithful...

Ugh...I was lucky enough to have gone through my UFO True Believer™ phase during a period of my youth in which I didn't have access to an internet enabled computer. I only had my beloved but very woo-woo neighbors and The X-Files to reinforce the silly UFO "research" I was filling my head with at the time, but modern True Believers™ have dozens of internet forums to supply them with all the insular reinforcements they need to get inextricably bound up in their fantasies. As I alluded to yesterday, I've been spending a large bit of my free time trolling the internet UFO pages for reactions to the Romanek "case" that recently began attracting so much attention, and I have to tell you that the world of the True Believer™ can get pretty bizarre.

The one-stop shop for conspiracy theories of all stripes is without a doubt AboveTopSecret.com, a collection of forums that plumb the depths of silliness and seriously discuss such things as the reality of vampires, text messages from the future, and (endlessly) the New World Order.* Many of these folks see signs of global intrigue everywhere. For example, I'm reading a post right now about how one of the songs on the soundtrack of the new "Grand Theft Auto" game is a "New World Order" song meant to brainwash the unwary. (The song is actually "One Vision" by Queen. It was released years ago on the CD "It's a Kind of Magic" and later on a greatest hits album.) Oh, and if you decide to poke around on there, it would pay to get used to the word "sheeple", as it pops up constantly as a pejorative term for anyone who subscribes to commonly held views on...well...anything.

Forums like Above Top Secret provide powerful reinforcement for people inclined to believe in these sorts of things. Unlike the old days, when you actually had to find people in your area that shared your beliefs on certain topics, nowadays you can hook up with hundreds of people on the internet that have ideas similar to your own. Combined with the fact that these forums tend to be insular and have a high turnaround time for skeptics (As another example of the insular quality of certain websites, I might note how quickly skeptics get bored with and leave Ray's blog.), this can create impression that a vast majority of people, or at least a majority of knowledgeable people, support the views being espoused there. Since most of the people on conspiracy forums already believe in at least some of the conspiracies being discussed, it can seem to believers like almost anyone who's ever heard about or discussed conspiracy X or conspiracy Y has come to accept it as real. After all, almost everyone who comes to the forum to discuss it already "knows" it's true!

There are powerful "out-group" forces at work as well. Conspiracy theorists, are, after all, "in the know". They feel that they possess insight that the public at large does not. Thus, any skeptic that appears to challenge them are part of a sinister out-group that is ill-informed at best or a malevolent agent of the conspiracy at worst. Meanwhile these malign attacks on the in-group serve to strengthen the bonds between "the good guys" as they circle the wagons against their foes.

As far as alien abductions and their ilk go, an entire modern mythology has grown up around them in the last few decades that works quite a bit like a feedback loop. There is a culturally accepted "script" for an abduction: paralysis, gray aliens with big black eyes, operating tables and fertility experiments, etc. Encounter stories that sync up with this scenario are reinforced within the UFO community because they "fit the mold", to the point that most modern alien abduction tales are indistinguishable from one another. There's another factor at play too. Most people who come to believe that aliens have been probing them in their sleep don't just wake up one morning secure in that knowledge. Instead, they have some sort of strange experience and, while looking for answers, encounter a psychologist or UFO researcher or some other authority figure who already knows the abduction script and is inclined to believe it. This authority figure will help the victim "recall" memories that fit the abduction script by asking leading questions and, essentially, molding a new set of experiences and memories for the victim that fits with the authority's preconceived idea of what happened.

For an interesting look at this phenomenon, I recommend this book by Susan Clancy. Carl Sagan also discusses this subject in Demon Haunted World, in which he interestingly compares the abduction myth with its sister modern myth, Satanic Ritual Abuse. Sagan wryly notes that alien abduction "specialists" rarely uncover instances of SRA, whereas SRA "specialists" almost never "discover" that their patients were abducted by aliens.

In any event, for an interesting immersion course on in-group reinforcement I dare you to spend a week or two hanging around at Above Top Secret or a similar forum. Life among the faithful is a strange thing indeed.


*The sinister Illuminati conspiracy, not the pro wrestling faction.

UFO Lunacy in Colorado!

Denver, Colorado man Stan Romanek is working hard to become the next Whitley Strieber. Romanek has been taking UFO pictures and videos since 2000, but he's recently hit the big time with a video that he claims shows a real, live alien (That, of course, happens to look exactly like every single gray, bug-eye alien you've ever seen.) peeking in through his window. The video itself is hard to comment on, but only because it hasn't been shown to the public yet. Though it was taken several years ago, Romanek won't allow more than a single frame of the video to be shown because "the scientists" who are studying it have asked him not to. (The apparent situation is actually that the video is going to be part of a "documentary" show later this year and they don't want to give up the goods.) Embedded below is a video of Romanek's recent appearance on Larry King Live. Of particular chagrin to me is that while Romanek's "real" video appears only in the form of a single still, there are several "reenactment videos" shown during the story that have already been circulated on the internet as genuine footage of aliens.



Romanek's other evidence consists of the regular contactee bollocks - pictures of "mysterious" cuts and scratches, a few lame UFO pictures, etc. His website makes much ado about his "automatic writing" of such things as Drake's Equation, which is an equation that was generated by Dr. Frank Drake in 1960 to estimate a plausible number of alien civilizations in the galaxy. Romanek disingenuously claims to have "never heard of" this equation at the time the aliens magically commanded him to write it in 2002. I mean, after all, how would a guy who thinks aliens have been contacting him for 2 years (at the time) have ever heard of one of the most oft-quoted bits of esoterica among the UFO True Believers™? Come the hell on, man. Oh, I almost forgot, the aliens made him write "X 100" at the conclusion of the equation. Spooky.

The man is a walking museum of alien encounter clichés - drawing "star maps" a la Betty Hill, telling stories about encounters with alien hybrids a la Whitley Strieber, or making pronouncements about historical UFOs a la Erich Von Däniken - Romanek does it all! One of his feature automatic drawings is a tesseract (with mysteriously straight lines, he notes) with a tunnel leading out of it to a place beyond the 4th dimension. Double-spooky. Please. Not only is this guy hokey, he's not even creative. He's just pillaging all the old UFO lore and rehashing it wholesale.

Romanek's chief backer in all this is a guy named Jeff Peckman, who has a degree from the Maharishi University of Management. Yeah, that's right, that Maharishi. Peckman is a former Senate candidate (for the Maharishi's own Natural Law party) and is now using Romanek's video to push the city of Denver to create a special organization in the city government to investigate extraterrestrials. He previously headed up an unsuccessful ballot initiative to mandate "peacefulness" in the city. These guys deserve each other.

I'll be watching all the major UFO websites (as much as I can stomach anyway) so I can give you guys a taste of the reaction to this pair of loons amongst the other True Believers™. I have a feeling it's going to be a long week.

Skippy Sees a UFO...

I'm kind of a military nerd. It comes from taking so many classes on international conflict during school and from having two brothers who have spent time working as civilian contractors for the Navy. I especially love airplanes, as some of you might have guessed from the pool of slobber under my post about the A-10. On the other hand, rotary craft aren't quite my thing - for one, I have a heck of a time identifying them by sight. I tend to assume that any winged helicopter that isn't obviously a Hind is an Apache, and as far I'm concerned every twin-rotor chopper is a Chinook. On the other hand, I like to think I'm halfway decent at identifying modern military planes from the ground. (Though for some weird reason I get F-15s and F-18s mixed up.)

In any event, I didn't end up going to the big air show that was in town yesterday because, well, it was 45 and raining. I did, however, end up making a mall run. The mall happens to be in the flight path of the aircraft en route to and from the air show, so I got to see a couple of F-18s (I think...) fly overhead and all was right with the world. Then, while sitting at a red light, I glanced up and saw a blazing bright light far away and high up in the sky. At first I thought it was one of the jets I'd just seen laying on their afterburners, but the light was sustained for far longer than you'd have expected for something like that. Weird...

I then though that maybe it was a plane doing a flare drop for the crowd at the air show, but no, the light wasn't falling from a craft - it was the craft. Ah ha, I thought, it's an aircraft reflecting light from the sun! But what kind? By now the traffic signal has changed and I'm granny-driving down to the next light trying to keep an eye on the aircraft - I'm foaming at the mouth to know just what it is. It had a weird outline for a jet, with what looked like a large bulge jutting up in front of the tail. It was at a funny angle to me, and even after it flew out of the sun glare the outline seemed unfamiliar to me. What the heck kind of fighter jet was this?

Finally it got a little closer to my position and turned its profile to me - It wasn't a fighter jet at all, it was an E-3 Sentry (aka AWACS), a jet-liner sized command and control plane whose back-mounted radar array gives it one of the most distinct profiles in aviation! Having just seen some F-18s at relatively close range, my brain was trying to jam this new craft into a "fighter jets, up close" category rather than looking for larger planes at a greater distance. With no reference points in the sky, I had no sense of scale to show me that I was looking at much large craft than I expected to see. It wasn't that I was seeing something unfamiliar - it was that I was actively trying to see something other than what I was looking at.

I can only wonder how many UFO sightings come from folks under similar conditions. Had I been a UFO true believer confronted with a mysterious craft that not only had a weird body outline but seemed to be ablaze with light I can imagine the conclusions I would have jumped to. (I should know. Once upon a time I was a UFO true believer.) What's most illustrative about the incident is that I absolutely love reading about, looking at, and studying military aircraft. If someone had told me yesterday morning that I'd run into an AWACS and not be able to immediately identify it, I'd have laughed them off. Nonetheless, put into a situation I wasn't expecting, with my mind striving to jam a square peg in a round hole, I had trouble seeing something obvious for what it really was.

Just what, I wonder, would I have been posting today if I were a UFOlogist who had set out yesterday evening to look for intruding spacecraft?

Space Sasquatch!

A four year-old image from the Mars Spirit rover is making the rounds on the internet as showing a humanoid figure, possibly Space Bigfoot. It's garnering coverage on CNN TV and Fox's website, as well as Phil Plait's blog. Phil's of the opinion, which I share, that it's just a simulacrum or an optical illusion. Most of the major news outlets are getting a giggle out of it, but a quick google search indicates that some bloggers out there are missing the joke. In any event, this can't be a Space Sasquatch, because they have horns and carry axes.

(An FYI for the four people who aren't familiar with the term, a simulacrum, for our purposes, is a natural formation that resembles something else, such as the famous Old Man of the Mountain.)

The Arrogance of the 'Saved' Part 2

Ray's post from earlier has been jangling around in my brain all day like a handful of nickels in a washing machine. Declaring something a miracle simply because you don't understand it is so arrogant that it's almost awe-inspiring, and it has stuck in my craw much more so than I would have imagined. Likewise the arrogance of those who fancy that the all-powerful creator of the universe is taking an interest in their day-to-day affairs, helping them find parking spaces, arranging lovely vistas, and, once supposes, causing cows to lactate solely for the benefit of the faithful. It must be fun to live in such a self-centered world.

Christianity in particular and the monotheistic religions in general play hosts to a strange dichotomy. First, believers are taught that they are lowly, sinful, useless creatures who couldn't sit the right way on a toilet seat, much less conduct their lives in this big scary world, without their deity to protect them. Meanwhile, they are simultaneously taught that the all-mighty, all-knowing creator of the universe is at their beckon call, ready to answer their prayers and bend to their will. Alternating delusions of worthlessness and abject grandeur constitute symptoms of schizophrenia.

Honestly, think about it for a few minutes. Here are folks who, for example, are content to call the process of lactation a miracle rather than look at the underlying science because their god tells them they have all the answers, yet they're also afraid to make decisions in their own life without begging the same god for answers about the most piddling stuff. (For example, check out this page of Christian dating tips, courtesy of P.Z. Myers' awesome blog. I never expected anyone to seriously ask if their erection was honoring god.)

I have to draw parallels between some subspecies of Christians these days and the weird UFO subcultures such as the Unarius Society that have sprung up over the years. Both are equally hilarious because of the bollocks they spout and the self-contradictory nature of many of their beliefs. I don't dwell on the UFO stuff quite as much because the UFO True Believers don't constitute a major a voting constituency, but sometimes it can be pretty instructive to compare the two.

UFO and/or Antichrist Sighted in Texas...?

CNN's website has picked up an Associated Press story to the the effect of "some folks in Texas saw what they think was a UFO, and furthermore some of them think it may be a sign of the coming apocalypse." It's the typical silent, silver, seamless wonder with no visible riveting apparently free-moving running lights that the aliens have been sporting for years now. (I guess the Zeta Reticulans don't by into the whole "new models every year" paradigm we earthlings use for our vehicles.) The only wrinkle this time is that one of the witness is saying that it's at least a mile long and have a mile across. The same witness, commercial freight pilot Steve Allen, is quoted as saying (and I'm not kidding) "It was positively, absolutely, nothing from these parts."

I think a quote from Philip J. Klass out of his book UFOs: The Public Deceived* might be instructive here: "No human observer, including experienced flight crews, can accurately estimate either the distance/altitude or the size of an unfamiliar object in the sky, unless it is in very close proximity to a familiar object whose size or altitude is known."

For a fun illustration of how hard it is to judge the size of a flying object, here's a clip from that History Channel show "Monster Quest" in which people are asked to guess the size of a large bird-shaped kite being flown away from any good reference points. Check out how wildly their estimates vary.



Well, in any event, I'm interested to see how much play this Texas UFO gets. It's front page news on CNN as I type this, so it may end up attracting a fair bit of attention. I'll be keeping my eye out for it in the coming days.

*I'm pretty sure this was also covered in UFOs Explained, but I don't have my copy handy at the moment so I can't check.

Faking it...

Well, I spent part of the weekend working on a new video regarding UFO photos. I've been inspired to this by "War of the Words - The True but Strange Story of the Gulf Breeze UFO" by Craig R. Myers. It's an interesting book, though it's hindered by the author's too frequent attempts at humor. Myers has a funny story to tell, mind you, but he overplays his hand a little. Still, anyone interested in learning more about one of the most well-known UFO hoaxes in recent memory will find his book worthwhile.

In any event, I've been inspired to fake my very own UFO pics, just to see if I can come up with something that looks halfway plausible. Some of this will be detailed in the upcoming video, but it's getting both harder and easier to fake a decent picture these days. It's easier because of fancy computer editing software that lets you layer multiple pictures together (Works great for ghosts too!). It's getting harder because you can't do a double exposure on a digital camera. It's also hard to take the classic out of focus half-assed shots that are the hallmark of UFO lore. Some of the easiest to do "practical" UFOs (as opposed to ones generated later by computer editing) only look good if the shot is kind of out of focus, and it's getting harder to shoot out of focus with a digital these days. There's one technique that worked like magic when I tried it out a few years ago with a Polaroid, but I had all kinds of trouble doing it over the weekend with a digital camera because the auto-focus was just plain working too well. (What a goofy complaint.)

Anyway, pending how long it takes me to get all the pictures I want and how lazy I feel about shooting the actual video itself, I should have another video up sometime in the next couple of weeks. Should be pretty fun.

I <3 UFOs

I have to say that I regard as the zenith of my former credulity not my Catholic upbringing but my middle- and high school interest in UFOs. I'm gathering up materials for an upcoming video and I thought I'd just mention a good ol' UFO evidence page that may or may not be the foremost depository of non-spiritual silliness on the web. Sweet layout though.

For a better discussion of UFOs, check out Phil Plait's book "Bad Astronomy" (which contains loads other interesting stuff too, or the too often ignored "UFOs Explained" by Phillip Klass.

If you want to test the limits of your UFO-related flummery endurance, be sure to have a peek at ZetaTalk, where an ordinary lady acts as channeling conduit for the voices of super advanced extraterrestrials that apparently only know about as much about science as an ordinary lady. These are, I suppose I should note, meant to be aliens of the same species that "abducted" Betty and Barney Hill.