Hard on the heels of the Majestic document debunking comes a UFO story, courtesy of the Daily Mail, that has the silliest line I’ve seen in a long time:
The strange episode started just after 10.30pm, when the lights were seen hovering slowly over the town before three of them formed a triangular shape with one positioned just to the right.
Now, if three of them formed a square, then call me. That must take a superior intelligence.
Tip o’ the tin foil beanie to Fark. Note: I wrote this before reading the Fark comments, and others pointed out this three-pointed dumbosity as well.
My friend Jim Oberg just sent along something of GREAT interest to the UFO community– according to a new scientific test, the Majestic documents are frauds.
The Majestic documents contain thousands of supposedly classified papers by high government officials, including three presidents, and they appear to confirm the reality of the Roswell UFO crash among other high-visibility UFO cases. They were released about 20 years ago, and caused a huge stir among UFOlogists, as they call themselves.
Most people, me included, were skeptical.
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The Register is a a satirical Onion-like site, with a weird mix of real and fake news — they mix the fake stuff with the real stuff so it’s hard to tell the difference. Just like Fox news! But The Register is funny.
Anyway, they posted a story about a real NASA project involving rovers, and threw in a few jabs at the hoax twinkies, and… well, just go read it yourself.
Hat tip to all the folks who sent me this link. 
Monday, the Boston Globe ran an editorial that I found very irritating. The writer, Jeff Jacoby, points out that perhaps the greatest scientific mind of all time, Isaac Newton, was not only very religious, but was a young-Earth creationist. For Jacoby, this shows that science and religion can work hand in hand:
For Newton, it was axiomatic that religious inquiry and scientific investigation complemented each other. There were truths to be found in both of the “books” authored by God, the Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature — or as Francis Bacon called them, the “book of God’s word” and the “book of God’s works.” To study the world empirically did not mean abandoning religious faith. On the contrary: The more deeply the workings of Creation were understood, the closer one might come to the Creator. In the language of the 19th Psalm, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.”
Jacoby also has some fun with the idea that Newton today would never get a position at a University, let alone Cambridge, and in fact Jacoby spends much of his editorial on that subject:
When Genesis 1:1 says “In the beginning,” [Newton] determined, it means 3988 BC.
Not many modern universities are prepared to employ a science professor who espouses not merely “intelligent design” but out-and-out divine creation.
I call shenanigans.
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So you’re addicted to Galaxy Zoo, and while identifying galaxies hither and yon you found some killer cool galaxy image. Did you discover something new? Could this be the scientific breakthrough of all time?
Probably not. But it’s still wicked nifty, and you want to find out more. What to do?
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From The Space Review, NASA Administrator Mike Griffin talking at the Heinlein Centennial:
Question: I live about 200 miles down southeast of here, at the home of slapstick living and most of the folks down there are convinced that the Moon landing were a hoax, and wrestling’s real. [Laughter] Do you have any ideas on how to speak to these people?
Griffin: I don’t. [Laughter] [Applause] I mean, what can we say? I mean, all the guys who were still alive and a couple of the ones who are not have all become personal friends of mine, and in the intervening decades. I don’t think they’re lying to me. I just don’t. I don’t know what to tell people who say the Moon landings were a hoax.
Heh. Good for him, But if he needs a couple of pithy soundbites, I know someone who has a passing familiarity with the topic…
Tip of the spacesuit visor to Dan Durda for alerting me to the speech.
I think it’s funny that I learned this from Fark today, but an Apollo afficianado and author (and much more) named Robert Godwin, with help from NASA, has digitally remastered the Apollo mission footage.
I don’t know when it will be available, but I’ll ask around at SpaceFest next month. I don’t have a hi-def DVD player, but I expect they’ll be cheap enough soon enough that getting a disk now isn’t such a bad idea. I can’t wait to see what this looks like!
The link above has videos (Part 1, and Part 2), which they unfortunately label as "Never before seen footage", which isn’t strictly true; it’s just rare to see this particular stuff shown. The videos are at web-resolution and don’t look that great, but they certainly look better than other web vids I’ve seen. Of course the newscaster mentions the Hoax, but that’s to be expected, too.
