I am getting a gazillion emails about a guy in Denver who claims to have the "the final visual confirmation" of aliens visiting Earth. It’s a video of a four foot tall alien looking out a window, and you can see it blinking! And it’s in infrared!

Color me convinced.

The article says:

Jeff Peckman, who is pushing a ballot initiative to create an Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission in Denver to prepare the city for close encounters of the alien kind, said the video is authentic and convinced him that aliens exist.

The video will be released Friday, and of course lots of local news stations and websites are talking about it. That’s very irritating, because they tend to produce those news items seriously, but deliver them (at least on air) somewhat snarkily, giving them plausible deniability when the story (inevitably) turns out to be more blurry footage that was either faked or misinterpreted.

Here’s my prediction: the article says it’s an IR video (it doesn’t say if it’s thermal IR or enhanced near-IR), which means we’ll see a blurry false-color of something that looks like a blobby head. We’ll see it blink, and that’s it. In IR things look pretty funky, so this will either be something else entirely from a head, or maybe a kid.

I may be wrong, of course. I’ll wait and see the video tomorrow before stating anything more solid than this. But we have seen so many of these claims come and go, with just as much hoopla. But where are the aliens? The White House lawn is conspicuously absent of them.

It’s Thursday, so it must be festival! I mean, Carnival of Space! It’s up at the Lifeboat Foundation Blog. As you might expect, it’s Phoenix-heavy, but there’s lots of other spacenalia to keep you occupied, too.

Some antiscientists never learn.

Of course, if they did, they wouldn’t still be antiscientists.

I present to you one Ted Twietmeyer. He is a contributor to Rense.com, a webby bastion of poor thinking, bad evidence, breathless speculation, and out-and-out nonsense. Twietmeyer, you may recall, made some incredibly ridiculous claims about an Apollo picture, and back in January I wrote how I was able to shut down his goofy NASA conspiracy theory in about 30 seconds of using teh googles.

Surprise! He’s at it again. And surprise! 30 seconds of Googling shows he’s wrong again.

This time — of course — he’s frothing about Phoenix and claiming NASA is covering up the real images. Take a moment to shut down some brain cells and read what he wrote. In a nutshell, his big complaint is that the images are not in color. Yes, that’s the huge NASA conspiracy: they’re sending black and whites, and not color glossies.

But first, let’s dissect the idea that the images are not in color. The first images we saw from Phoenix were greyscale (not "MONOCROME" [sic] as Twietmeyer claims). That means we saw images that were shades of grey, and no color. The image shown here on the left, for example, is one of the earliest Phoenix sent back, showing a part of one of its solar panels and a small patch of Martian surface. It’s indeed lacking color. Why?

Phoenix — and almost all modern space probes — use cameras that are digital detectors called CCDs. These are basically computer chips that are sensitive to light. When a photon hits a part of the chip, it is converted into a charge, and the amount of charge that builds up tells the chip how much light hit it. But all the CCD can do is count photons. It can’t really tell a red photon from a blue one; all it knows is how much light hit it.

The way to produce color is to trick the CCD. You put a red filter in front of it, for example, and that lets only red photons through. You do that again using a green filter, and then a blue one, taking three images in all. Then you can add the three images together, producing a color image (there are a lot of details to this of course, which you can read about here, here, and here).

That’s a lot of picture taking, and then a lot of post-processing to get the colors right! So of course, when we land a probe on a planet for the first time, scientists are perfectly happy to wait for extra images to be sent back, for people to process them, then to make them into color, and finally to display them…

Pbbbbbt. Duh. Of course they don’t do that. They take a bunch of images without a filter (or maybe through just one filter) and send them back immediately so scientists and engineers can assess the status of the probe. Color information is cool, and even in many cases useful, but not right away! It’s more important to just find out what’s going on with the lander.

That’s why the pictures first seen weren’t color. Had Twietmeyer actually done any research at all (or — GASP — talked to someone who actually knows about this stuff) he would have found that out right away. But it’s easier to spin ridiculous conspiracy theories.

About this, he says:

What we saw today is a dramatic replay of the Viking lander more than 30 years ago, complete with another image of the spacecraft’s foot and a view of the horizon. But those images broadcast more than 30 years ago from Mars were in COLOR. But not images in 2008! Who can believe this nonsense?

Well, I couldn’t agree with his last sentence more! But maybe not in the way he means. And irony alert: the first images sent back from Viking were greyscale! It wasn’t until the next day that the first color images were produced. How did I find all this out? By typing "first viking pictures" into Google.

But then, I have a PhD in astronomy. I’m highly trained in the intertubes.

Second irony alert: color images were sent back from Phoenix within a day or two of landing as well.

Twietmeyer goes on and on about this. As a caption to an image from Phoenix, he says:

First black and white May 25, 2008 image of Martian arctic landscape, taken from jpl-nasa NASA website. This is claimed to be a “raw image before processing.” But JPL-NASA doesn’t say just what the processing does.

OOoooooo, JPL doesn’t say what "processing" means! That must mean conspiracy! Puhhhlease. Anyone who has worked in astronomical digital imagery knows exactly what processing means. The images right off the chip aren’t very pretty, or even useful. There are cosmic ray hits, calibration issues, electronic noise from the camera itself, problems with telemetry (dropouts) and so on. These are all known problems, and can be taken care of using some image manipulation techniques. That may sound like the images are being fiddled with, but it’s actually a fairly rigorous technique to turn the raw data into something you can actually analyze. I’ve written about this many, many times. But as Twietmeyer clearly believes, why do any actual research when it’s so much easier to make conspiracy claims?

I expect we’ll be seeing more silly claims like this, not fewer, the more probes we send to space. It’s frustrating to have to deal with this kind of irrationality… especially when these very pictures we see represent the height, the pinnacle, of rationality: our ability to use science to send machines to other worlds and send back data. It took a vast amount of clear thinking to be able to do that, and people like Twietmeyer are trying very hard to tear that down.

And they will, no doubt, always have an audience. But when you hear some claim about conspiracies, ask yourself: does the person talking have any real experience in this field? Have they done any research to back up their claims? Are they telling me the whole story? What are they leaving out?

And in many cases, such as this one, they are leaving out the evidence, the background, the research, the investigation, the science, and above all, the critical thinking and logic to back up what they claim. All they leave in is the hot air and wild speculation, and that’s not how you find the truth.

Tip o’ the tin foil beanie to BABloggee Skyhound for letting me know about this.

To help raise money for people to attend Randi’s skeptic conference, a very beautiful Hubble picture of the Orion Nebula is up for auction on Ebay. It’s printed at 600 DPI and is 30×30 inches (76×76 cm). You can see the original image file here.

The auction ends on June 1, so hurry! Note: they’ll only ship to the US.

Not that there was much danger of me going there in the first place, but I’ll never go to a Dunkin’ Donuts again.

Why not?

Because they pulled this ad.

Honestly. Michelle Malkin couldn’t make a logical conclusion if it were beamed into her brain with a 40 megawatt laser. If you’re going to pull an ad over her ravings, then you don’t deserve my coin. Instead, stick up for your principles, say publicly and loudly that there is a section of the populace that clearly is a razor’s edge from insanity, and then use the publicity to sell more product. I’ll be first in line.

Sheesh. I can’t keep giving advice out like this for free.

Although I had heard that Malkin was frothing over this ad, I didn’t know it had been pulled until I saw it at John Scalzi’s blog, so tip o’ the kiffiyeh to him… and he said it pretty well there too. And for the inevitable commenters who will complain about this post: it’s this type of bad thinking and poor decision making and craven behavior that allow antiscience to flourish, so not only is this perfectly in line with the goals of this blog, it would be wrong of me not to point it out.

I have to give creationists credit for one thing: when they speak, they can fit an incredible amount of absurdity into their words.

An excellent example is televangelist Ray Comfort. He is probably most famous for what can be considered the silliest argument against evolution of all time: the banana. Please, take a moment and soak up the dumbosity of Comfort’s argument there, then come back. I’ll wait.

OK, done? Have you stopped laughing? Good. I have to say that he eventually finally sorta kinda conceded that maybe this isn’t a good argument, but still, we’re not talking about a guy here who has the luxury of logic on his side.

So of course, when he spouts off about Mars and Phoenix, well, the nonsense continues. On his blog, he tries to say that we wasted our money with Phoenix, because all we’ll find is that "God [...] made Mars of dirt". Just like we did on the Moon.

Wow. His ignorance of these missions is surpassed only by his arrogance that we need not do them. Just dirt? Actually, the regolith (not dirt; that’s rock and other substances that has been processed by bacteria) and rocks brought back from the Moon were a scientific goldmine, telling us about the conditions on the Moon, the characteristics of the solar wind, and even providing evidence for the impact origin of the Moon itself^*.

Of course, on Mars, we’re looking for something different. The goal of Phoenix — had Comfort done the unthinkable act of actually looking it up — is to study the history of water on Mars, and search for habitable conditions on Mars and see if it ever was conducive for life. This will help us understand if life might have ever arisen on Mars, and also characterize conditions that will help us sustain a colony there eventually.

Of course, then he complains that NASA spent $400 million on the mission, making the same false dichotomy I have debunked over and over again.

But why stop there? He actually says that instead of wasting money on exploring space, "… we should spend our time and money on cleaning up the dirt in our own backyard. There sure is plenty of it."

Hey, whaddya ya know? A creationist said something that was right. Though I doubt that what he actually meant was that we should spend that money educating people about science and reality so that all Comfort would ever hear after he spouts his nonsense are crickets, but there you go. He was right for the wrong reason, which at least is a change from being wrong for the wrong reasons all the time.

Tip o’ the space helmet to Jason Brunet for sending me the link to Comfort’s blog.

BABloggee Robbert Folmer (some NSFW language there) pointed out to me that Worth1000 has a Photoshop contest to make artificial pareidolia! Cool.

I think we should sit everyone down who sees Mary in an oil stain and Jesus in wood grain and see what they say about these.