"An official announcement by the Obama administration disclosing the reality of extraterrestrial life is imminent", indeed. What does imminent mean? A year? 10? I’m guessing never. But as long as the antiscience advocates can use words like soon, imminent, and impending, they can keep their believers on the hook.
And why am I not surprised to see Richard Hoagland’s name in that article?
Every now and again I have to do that comical rapid-shaking-of-the-head accompanied by that wugga wugga wugga sound when I think that people actually buy into this, um, stuff. Wow.
Houdini was a hero to James Randi, and he famously said that if there were an afterlife, he would do whatever he could after he died to contact his wife. She held a seance, and… nothing happened. However, when you have people like Randi and magician Andrew Mayne involved, why, anything can happen!
OK, maybe not anything. Like, say, actually contacting a dead spirit. But I bet this will be a very fun event, and I encourage all skeptics and believers — especially believers — young and old to drop in. For more info, stay tuned to Randi.org and WeirdThings.com.
I have been getting email from people talking about a possible meteorite impact in northern Latvia yesterday. I had a blog post all ready to go saying this whole thing sounded extremely fishy to me, and before I could post it I found out this story has been confirmed as a fake. Here’s the scoop:
Some reports indicated that there were eyewitnesses to a fireball around 17:30 local time yesterday (for example, here and here).
That’s fine, but what had me very suspicious was the report of a crater about 20 meters or so across. In general, small impact don’t leave craters; or atmosphere slows meteoroids down, so anything in the meter or smaller size wouldn’t be moving quickly enough to dig a big crater. Pictures were posted to a blog; while there was nothing initially I could point to that screams "FAKE!" to me, my spidey sense was all a-tingle. Here’s one picture:
It shows the center of the crater, and again, it just didn’t look real to me. The crater is too deep for its width (most impact craters are shallower). Also, the rim is too piled up, and there’s no ejected rock or dirt sprayed out as you’d expect from an impact. Then, better pictures were posted and I could see immediately I was right; the crater simply doesn’t look real. It looks more like what someone thinks a crater should look like than what one actually does look like.
I didn’t believe this video at all. Look at the crater: the rim just looks like it was dug; the grass just outside it isn’t disturbed at all. Wouldn’t a flaming meteor at least singe the ground? And if I didn’t buy the crater, I really super duper didn’t buy the flaming rock sitting in the center. Meteorites tend not to be hot on impact! They decelerate violently as they come in, compressing the air in front of them. That’s why they get hot. But that happens in a few seconds, and stops while the rock is still a hundred kilometers up. It falls at terminal velocity the rest of the way for several minutes before impacting the ground.
So the meteoroid (the name for the solid part of the meteor) is falling through ice-cold air for a while before it hits. That’s why smallish meteorites are not hot. In fact, many are found to be cold right after impact!
So I was almost completely positive the video was a fake right after seeing it, and I’m glad to see my instincts were correct.
There was more reason to be suspicious, too. A rock a half meter for more across would make a fireball so intense that there would be thousands of witnesses especially given that it was late afternoon when it happened. The media reports don’t indicate it was seen by many people. No pictures of the actual fireball came out, either.
And now all of this makes sense because it’s a confirmed fake. So the only questions remaining are: why was this done? To promote tourism, as a joke, to sell tickets? And, of course, was Richard Heene involved?
Tip o’ the Whipple Shield to Mihkel Kama and Anna from StarSpace who was the first to tip me off to the story in the first place, as well as let me know it was fake.
I should say that I have to give a kudo to the author for trying to set up a scientific experiment to see what would happen, but the experiment itself is so hopelessly flawed!
In fact it’s so wrong it’s hard to know where to start. The lack of double blinding. The single blinding still being able to influence the testers. The fact that all the testers were believers, and able to influence each other. The starting supposition that a) homeopathy works, and 2) astrology works (when neitherdoes). A lack of clear results predicted so that conclusions (either negative or positive) could be drawn. The very subjective observations. And so on.
It’s clear from the article that the homeopath/astrologer means well, and is actually curious about all this. I wonder if there is any reliable way to take that curiosity, that well-meaning intention, and redirect it toward science? If there is — besides slowly and methodically banging the drum of reason — I’d love to know. A lot of people who believe in things like homeopathy and astrology and all that really are naturally curious, intelligent people, but somewhere down the line they strayed off the narrow path that winds its way through reality, and it would be nice to find a good way to nudge them back in the right direction.
Tip o’ the precessed vial of distilled water to Krelnik.
I am of two minds about Facebook. It has its uses and can be fun, and I know a lot of people use it as their primary means of keeping track of friends, but I find the interface and messaging system clunky, and the constant barrage of app invites makes me stabby.
But the sponsored ads are über irritating (and I don’t mean just the blatantly sexist ones). I saw a Facebook ad today for the upcoming movie "The Fourth Kind", about aliens coming to Earth to um, probe humans (and I mean, seriously? If we finally develop warp drive and travel to other planets, will we get all hot and bothered by the indigenous six-legged slimy malodorous gelatin bags that live there?*). Here’s the ad:
See the poll? It asks, "Do you believe in alien encounters?", and the answer choices are "Yes, I believe", "I have seen one", and "Not sure".
Um, Facebook/Universal Pictures, how about a more realistic choice, like one that says: After years of seeing UFOlogists collecting nothing but anecdotal evidence without a single shred of actual y’know, tangible evidence, there is no reason to think this is anything but a psychological phenomenon and not a physical one, and should be treated that way.
Or better yet, how about simply:
No.
I usually enjoy movies about aliens, monsters, flying saucers, and the like, but this kind of advertising leaves me cold, and plays into the public’s misconceptions about the UFO phenomenon. So I’ll probably skip this movie and take a nap instead. Someone please wake me up when we have real evidence.
* I suppose the aliens could be coming here for medical testing and such, but really, estimates are that given the number of "sightings", they’d have to be abducting upwards of a million people per year. A million. Maybe it’s just me, but I’m thinking that if that many people were being whisked away, we’d get more evidence then hazy dreams that seem to change over the years to follow media trends in what aliens look like and how they behave.
Skeptic Michael Shermer wrote an open letter to antivaxxer Bill Maher, and to be frank, Shermer hit it out of the park. There’s nothing I need to or can add to what he wrote. Go read it.
I don’t expect a lot out of the daytime TV show The View. After all, if one of your four hosts isn’t sure the Earth is round, and you don’t immediately replace her with someone who’s views are more up-to-date (like more recent than Eratosthenes), then maybe your standards are too lax.
So when my friend Al Janulaw sent me a note saying they had a psychic on the show, I wasn’t too shocked. When I watched a bit of the show, I was surprised that Joy Behar, one of the hosts, expressed not just skepticism, but actually employed targeted skepticism. She made fun of the fact that psychics will ask leading questions and use things that are almost certain to get a hit ("I sense you know someone who’s name starts with M").
Still, the actual segment with the psychic, Laurie Levin, was amazingly credulous. I don’t know if Ms. Levin actually believes what she says or not, but here we have a woman claiming to be a psychic who a) told a man his murdered son chose his death to shock him into caring about someone, b) told this man he was in an unhappy marriage, and then c) married him.
Um. Again, I don’t know this woman, or the man, or their circumstances, but every skeptic alarm bell in my head is ringing pretty loudly.
I don’t think psychics are real, obviously. I am not saying psychic powers are impossible — though that’s the way to bet — but I am saying that every single time they’ve been tested under controlled circumstances, they come up short (and are indistinguishable from random guessing). And if they do exist, I know where there’s a million bucks left as-yet unclaimed.
If psychic powers are really true, I have severe doubts that the possessor will be using them to wow daytime TV talk show hosts. My real problem here is that as long as things like this are treated unskeptically and swallowed whole by TV shows, as well as in other media, then they will never go away, and the public remains that much more gullible.
If you went to BadAstronomy.com and found yourself here, never fear: the BA Blog has moved to its new home at Discover Blogs. The original BA site (with the Moon Hoax debunking and all that) is still online, too.
Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.
Contact me: The Bad Astronomer "at" gmail "dot" com
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