Thursday, March 14, 2024

Finally, a constitutional crisis we can have some fun with

This was originally part of our Tuesday tweets post, but I decided the ETs deserved a spot of their own.

UFO believers have been having a bad couple of weeks. 

For starters, once highly respected astrophysicist Avi Loeb watched still more of his reputation go into the wood chipper. The NYT had a snarky article on the details. I'd normally be the last to criticize this sort of thing, but mockery would go down easier if the reporter would acknowledge the credulous reporting we've gotten recently from his paper. Fortunately, there's a better write-up by Joel Achenbach in a paper that hasn't been screwing up this story for years.

Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb scoured the Pacific seafloor last summer in search for debris from a meteor that had exploded in a fireball on Jan. 8, 2014. Loeb organized the two-week expedition because he thought the meteor might be something other than a random rock from space. Based on its astonishing speed, he suspected the object came from beyond our solar system — and might even be evidence of alien technology.

Loeb reported hitting pay dirt, retrieving hundreds of tiny blobs of molten material called “spherules” in the ocean off Papua New Guinea. Some of them, he later wrote, had such unfamiliar chemistry that they “may reflect an extraterrestrial technological origin.”

But reanalysis of seismic data now suggests Loeb may have been looking for the meteor remnants in the wrong place.

The analysis, led by seismologist Benjamin Fernando of Johns Hopkins University, contends that sound waves purportedly from the meteor exploding in the atmosphere, and cited by Loeb as helping to locate the meteor’s debris field, were most likely from a truck driving on a road near the seismometer.

“There are hundreds of signals that look just like this on that seismometer in Papua New Guinea in the days before and the days after,” Fernando said. Moreover, the pattern was more common during the daytime.

“That’s a smoking gun for a noise that’s produced by humans,” he said. “Meteors, earthquakes, waves, none of them care what time of day it is.”


Then came this.

"no verifiable evidence that any UAP setting represented extraterrestrial activity that the U. S. government or private industry has ever had access to extraterrestrial technology, or that any information was illegally or inappropriately withheld from Congress, and alleged hidden UAP reverse engineering programs either do not exist or were misidentified authentic National Security Programs unrelated to extraterrestrial activity or technology exploitation. So what we found is that claims of hidden programs are largely the result of circular reporting by a small group, repeating what they heard from others, and that many people have sincerely misinterpreted real events or mistaken sensitive U. S. programs as UAP or being extraterrestrial exploitation."

 

And the faithful are freaking out.

 

Pay close attention to that part about "circular reporting by a small group, repeating what they heard from others." This is a point that serious journalists on this beat have been making for a long time.


One thing you have to remember about the aliens are among us crowd. If their stories don't sound entirely crazy, it's only because they are holding back the really crazy parts. Dig into what the don't try to sell to the NYT and it's ghosts, demon, Navajo were-creatures and cryptids.


Posted by at

1 comment:

  1. AnonymousMarch 14, 2024 at 12:36 PM

    Not to worry, the true believers won't quit: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/03/the-new-uaps-report.html

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)