On the same topic, here’s Richard Feynman talking briefly about the likelihood that flying saucers are actually alien visitors, and making a good point about scientific reasoning in the process.
(via Open Culture)
Bad Public History
August 3, 2011 By 9 Comments
From Jason Colavito, (and a brief mention by Bill Maher) I learn that New Hampshire has just erected a historical marker commemorating an alien abduction. The marker reads:
On the night of September 19-20, 1961, Portsmouth, NH couple Betty and Barney Hill experienced a close encounter with an unidentified flying object and two hours of “lost” time while driving south on Rte 3 near Lincoln. They filed an official Air Force Project Blue Book report of a brightly-lit cigar-shaped craft the next day, but were not public with their story until it was leaked in the Boston Traveler in 1965. This was the first widely-reported UFO abduction report in the United States.
While the UFO craze is an interesting trend in modern history and worthy of some mention, this is a troubling marker. Despite the careful writing, it’s still an unskeptical presentation of the facts. The brevity of the marker allows them to skirt over issues of timing, which Brian Dunning mentions in his version of events.
There’s also the fact that the abduction story was brought out by a session of “regressive hypnosis,” which is unreliable at best, completely fraudulent at worst. It played a large role in the “satanic panic” of the 80s and 90s, and I’d hoped that people would realize that stories produced by this technique are not acceptable as evidence.
But as Colavito points out, the real problem is that the New Hampshire Division of Historical Resources signed off on this. While they did not draft the text, they were responsible for reviewing it and accepting it. According to the author, the DHR asked for revisions, so they at least read and proofed it.
I really hate to see public historians participate in this kind of thing. It doesn’t make us look good. My personal pet peeve are historic houses that bring in “ghost hunters,” but even this kind of minimal backing for pseudo-history and pseudo-science leaves a mark.
Man hit by six meteorites; blames 'aliens'
July 21, 2010 By 52 Comments
I normally wouldn’t rip a headline (or even a story) straight from the Micro$haft Network, but this one was such a doozie that I thought it would be fun to share anyway:
A Bosnian man insists he is being targeted by extra-terrestrials after his house was hit by meteorites six times in three years.
Radivoje Lajic, 50, who lives in the northern village of Gornji Lajici, believes aliens are responsible for the meteor strikes.
“I am obviously being targeted by extra-terrestrials,” he insists. “I don’t know what I have done to annoy them but there is no other explanation that makes sense. The chance of being hit by a meteorite is so small that getting hit six times has to be deliberate.”
I’m not entirely sure why he’s so pissed about this considering that the selling price of ONE of the meteorites was enough to steel-reinforce his roof!
James Randi on Psychic Fraud
May 12, 2010 By 8 Comments
James Randi exposes psychic fraud at a TED event:
Aliens vs Demons
November 13, 2009 By 31 Comments
by Jesse Galef
Can you tell the difference between Aliens and Demons? If you were visited in the night by an intelligent, non-human entity, could you really distinguish between them? (In a sidenote I’m not addressing right now, how would you know the voice in your head is God and not a tricky demon? How do you know devils can’t impersonate voices?)
Although nobody would know it in an age with laptops and cell phones, I’m in New York City right now. I hopped on a bus to go see my sister Julia Galef give a presentation on rationality – my first post was written while on the BoltBus, actually. The talk was entitled “Aliens, Psychics and Ghosts, Oh My! Or, How Our Brains Fool Us Into Believing Strange Things.” I thoroughly enjoyed it.
John Henry Fuseli’s 1781 painting “The Nightmare” is now seen as a classic account of sleep paralysis accredited to a demonOne interesting point was that while reports of alien abductions are a relatively new phenomenon, the psychological reasons behind such hallucinations are not. However, instead of blaming aliens, people used to blame the bad boys of the supernatural world: Demons.
In “alien abductions”, people tend to report waking up, feeling pinned down and unable to move, seeing visions of visitors, and often experiencing sexual stimulation. These are the familiar symptoms of sleep paralysis and hypnopompic hallucinations.
During sleep, the brain stops controlling the muscles – that’s why we don’t flail around in our sleep as we act out our dreams. Sometimes when woken from a deep sleep, the brain doesn’t immediately retake control, leaving the poor person both awake and unable to move (This has happened to me, and I was lucid enough to recognize what was happening. It was a fascinating experience.) It can be particularly difficult to breathe. When woken up from a deep sleep, a person is also prone to vivid hallucinations. This combination explains the commonly heard reports of alien abductions.
But before aliens, people interpreted those perceptions as demons – same symptoms, different supernatural explanation. Online Etymology says the term “Nightmare” originally meant “an evil female spirit afflicting sleepers with a feeling of suffocation”. Sound familiar?
John Henry Fuseli’s painting “The Nightmare” shows an evil-looking imp sitting on a woman’s chest while she lies in bed. Psychologists now believe it to be an early representation of sleep paralysis. It’s telling that the same evidence can fit seamlessly into countless supernatural theories.
How cool is it that we can look at ancient experiences people thought were supernatural and explain them in scientific ways? Epilepsy, schizophrenia, sleep paralysis, oxygen/sensory/nutritional deprivation… The gaps keep getting smaller and there’s less and less room for God.
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