Concentrated Daftness...

I've been laying it on pretty thick with the political posts on here lately, so I thought it'd be a nice change of pace to throw some more peculiar conspiracy silliness your way. Embedded below is a video from the Youtube user PlanetXNews that's sure to be worth a giggle. For the first minute or so this video could be any old creatard yarn: "No transitional fossils, no such thing as macroevolution*, scientists lie". By this point one might be expecting to hear some quotes from Ken Ham or Kent Hovind, but then we get a swerve - Religious creationists, she says, are also wrong. Humankind is all the work of freakin' aliens!



You see, this lady claims that aliens came to earth long ago and genetically engineered humans as slaves. (Like in that H.P. Lovecraft story At the Mountains of Madness.) It's just the usual "ancient astronauts" sort of stuff, and in this case it all comes from the "work" of a fellow named Zecharia Sitchin. Sitchin claims that ancient Sumerian artifacts record the story of how mankind was created by super-beings from Nibiru, a planet with such a long elliptical orbit that it rarely mingles with the rest of the planets in the solar system. (How an advanced alien civilization could have arisen on a planet that spends thousands of years at a time so far away from the sun that it would be frozen solid is never really addressed.) According to Sitchin, the Old Testament is just a wholesale corruption/simplification of these Sumerian stories and the Biblical creation myth incorrectly refers to our mighty alien taskmasters as angels. Sithcin also apparently supposes that his degree in economic history somehow allows him to translate ancient Sumerian better than, I dunno, every other Sumerian-reading scholar of antiquities out there who says that he's either mistranslating things or making them up from whole cloth.

Interestingly, Sitchin himself has fallen out of vogue with some ancient astronaut buffs, but some of his ideas have been adapted into the occasionally popular conspiracy theories about rogue planets propagated by folks like Nancy Lieder, a lady who runs a website in which she also details her exploits psychically channeling the voices of space aliens. For those of you lucky enough to have missed out on the rogue planet craze, it's an end-of-the-world scare about a gigantic planet with an extremely elliptical orbit that is, conveniently, soon to come crashing pell-mell through the solar system and kill us all. (Actually it was supposed to do that back in 2000 or so, but when that didn't happen the True Believers™ "recalculated" the date, as they always do, to 2012.) Different individuals tend to use the terms "Planet X" and "Nibiru" interchangeably, but at this point it seems that "Nibiru" is more popular.

A thorough discussion of rogue planet theory is a better left to people with actual backgrounds in astronomy, for they are better equipped than I to explain why it's asinine. For an in-depth discussion of the Lieder's role in the Planet X craze, as well as a breakdown of the physical impossibilities of such an arrangement, check out Phil Plait's enormously informative dissection of the matter here. For a look at the more current "Nibiru" incarnation of the whole mess, I recommend David Morrison's article in the current (September/October) issue of Skeptical Inquirer.

Rogue planet, schmogue planet - Everyone knows the real danger from Planet X is King Ghidorah.

Back to our Youtube friend's evolutionary claims, I'm a bit confused as to why, if the aliens specifically made humans as slaves, there would also be no transitional forms (as she claims) between other, non-human, species. According to this lady's logic, it would make sense if there were no transitional forms leading from ancestral primates to modern humans (There are plenty, of course, but just for the sake of argument...), but why would the aliens bother to engineer things like giraffes or sloths? Her argument is further boggled by her apparent lack of understanding of what a species is. When she's talking about how horses "change and develop their shape and form" (Isn't that evolution?), she's displaying as evidence a chart of different species of horses even as she saying that there aren't different species of horses! I think she's trying to make a sort of "kinds" argument, like a regular creatard, but that she doesn't quite know how to express it.

I've long been curious as to why "Intelligent Design" groups don't welcome folks of this particular bent with open arms. After all, this lady really isn't saying anything about human origins that Bill Dembski doesn't also prattle on about. Since ID is supposed to be non-religious, you'd expect to see more of these Erich Von Däniken-types hanging out at the Discovery Institute. Curiously though, it turns out that all of the Discovery Institute's henchmen happen to be religious Christians, with nary a Nibiru-descended, genetically engineered space slave among them. Regardless of the reluctance of regular creatards to accept space creatards into their ranks, life is made convenient for skeptics because both groups remain wrong for essentially the same reasons.

For one, fossil evidence of transitional forms is much, much stronger than either group will admit. See for example this video that discusses transitional forms from the evolution of whales. Secondly, in either the case of a supernatural god or super-advanced aliens, we have an issue as to where they came from. Anything on that order of complexity would have to have either evolved through natural selection or, for the sake of argument, had an equally (or more) complex designer of its own. If we go with the second option we, of course, run into a problem of infinite regress.

Now, a canny space creatard might make the argument that they aren't saying that no evolution occurs, only that humans didn't evolve naturally. Perhaps our alien overlords did evolve by natural selection, they might say, but humans themselves did not. Unfortunately for our current friend, her argument is is rooted in the premise that progressive evolution does not occur, so she has effectively disallowed herself from making this argument. Even if she did make the claim that aliens evolved but humans did not, acknowledging the possibility of complexity arising from natural selection cuts out the need for alien interference in the rise of man. Since the only evidence she appeals to are the "ancient stories" that Sitchin concocted about Nibiru, she must find some way to back up the claim that this particular set of "ancient stories" is the correct one. There are lots of ancient creation myths. Even if the Nibiru thing wasn't just made up by Sitchin - That is to say, if the ancient Sumerians really did think that aliens made them - how does one reach the conclusion that the Sumerians were actually right? What really makes it more believable than say the Norse myth of the frost giant and the cosmic cow?

Finally, a clever space creatard might try to argue that the chromosome fusion demonstrated by human chromosome 2 is evidence for artificial modification of the human genome by those clever spacemen. (See here for details on human chromosome 2 and why it's devastating to the creationists' case.) In some bizarre way "aliens did it to cause us to evolve from other primates" almost sounds like it makes it a little more sense than "God did it so it would look like we evolved from other primates". Indeed, if humans were the only creatures to display chromosome fusion maybe that argument would at least carry a little rhetorical weight. Now, our friend doesn't make this argument (Though I've seen other space creatards make it.), but if she did, one would only have to point out that the phenomenon of chromosomal fusion in other species is well-documented. There's no need to resort to alien intervention to explain something that is known to happen through natural processes. To make a claim that "well, maybe it happens naturally in crickets but in humans it was caused by aliens" is pure special pleading.

In any event, all our friend has really succeeded in doing is packing an enormous amount of silliness into four short minutes. In a way it's almost impressive - she's managed to create an extraordinarily tangled web of utter wrongness.

*Macroevolution and microevolution are false creatard distinctions designed, I contend, to allow creationists to admit the most undeniable examples of evolution while trying to claim that true speciation doesn't occur. Sorry, but it's all evolution, baby.

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.

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.

Is a Space Pope next...?

Word from the Vatican is that it's cool to believe in aliens. Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, who's the director of the Vatican Observatory, recently noted that believe in his wacky sky deity is does not preclude the existence of life on other planets and that Catholics can believe in aliens without the threat of everlasting torment in hell. He said that aliens would all be "God's creatures" too. Funes said that ruling out the existence of aliens would be equivalent to "putting limits" on God.

And on the eight day, God created Spacemen.

Now, it's fair enough to say that their might be aliens out there. Heck, I'm no UFO True Believer™, but as far as some form of life existing somewhere in the universe, the statistics seem to favor it. That being said, it's just hilarious to me watching the Church flail around reaching for some sort of modern context for itself. I'm waiting for a papal pronouncement about Sasquatch next.

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.

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.