Her evidence for this bizarre story? It came allegedly a “retired unnamed engineer” from the government contractor EG&G (now part of URS Corporation). No one asked the obvious question about what a retired aerospace engineer would be doing examining bodies, or how he would know they were genetically and surgically altered. In fact, we didn’t even know the structure of DNA until 1953, so there is no way someone could do “genetic engineering” in the 1940s. And if the “teenagers” were genetically engineered by the Soviets using Mengele, they would have to have grown up remarkably fast in the two years from 1945 when Soviets occupied Berlin until 1947, when the Roswell incident took place. In addition, this supposedly all took place over 64 years ago, and this alleged “engineer” would have to be at least in his 30s to have the training and experience to hold such a job. If you do the math, he’s in his 90s or older. Doesn’t that strike anyone as suspicious? Doesn’t that fail the “smell test” of credibility for most people? When Jacobsen was questioned skeptically by interviewer Terry Gross of the radio program Fresh Air on NPR about the problems with the “engineer” story, all she could say is “I don’t think he is lying to me.”

Apparently, no one bothered to look into her credentials, but Jacobsen has a history of “crying wolf” before in order to get publicity. For example, there was the incident in 2004 where she mistook 14 Syrian musicians on a Northwest Airlines flight from Dallas to Los Angeles for terrorists, then she caused hysteria with her 3000-word piece on the web that demonstrate the worst aspects of xenophobia and bigotry and paranoia. The entire piece is about these Middle Eastern men talking in Arabic, with Arabic writing on their clothes, who have odd-shaped packages, and have to go to the bathroom once in a while. From this, her paranoid thinking generated a story that was published without fact-checking, and wasted a lot of taxpayer dollars while the TSA had to check their manifests, and announce that the mysterious “terrorists” were just Syrian musicians on the way to another gig. Shouldn’t that information have made the people interviewing her about her new book  a bit suspicious that she had an overactive imagination and tendency to exaggerate and write about her paranoid fantasies without fact checking?

The entire mainstream media gave it saturation coverage and uncritical repetition of its claims, and even the normally sarcastic Jon Stewart listens to her outrageous assertions without mocking her, and endorses the book. Even sadder is that a book with such bizarre ideas was promoted for its sensationalism, and almost no one gave her a real challenge on the implausibility of the whole story. The New York Times ran a book review which mostly recounted the book’s detailed research into the legitimate military uses of Area 51 (mostly nuclear testing and spy planes), then recited her outrageous claims about the Soviet aliens without much analysis. It’s sad enough that the formerly scientific cable channels like Discovery Channel and TLC (which once meant “The Learning Channel”) now run mostly pseudoscientific garbage documentaries about UFOs, aliens, Bigfoot, Atlantis, psychics, and the paranormal. It no longer surprises me when the major figures of the media, especially Oprah Winfrey, promote woo on their shows. But I looked and looked and found only a few truly skeptical reviews, including one by Dr. Athena Andreadis on her website and also on the Huffington Post (a site that, unfortunately, posts a fair amount of woo itself, especially in religion and medicine). About the only oasis of critical reasoning was the harshly negative reviews on the book’s Amazon.com site, which list a host of factual errors starting in the first chapter.

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. Survey after survey show that a high percentage of Americans believe in the paranormal, including UFOs, aliens, Bigfoot, and psychics. The Baylor Religion Survey found that about 23% of Americans actively read the UFO literature, and 17% believed they had actually seen a UFO. Other polls have claimed that as many as 80% of Americans believe the government is hiding information about UFOs, 64% think that aliens have contacted humans, and 50% think that aliens have abducted humans. II don’t know whether Americans are truly this deluded, but it’s tough to dispute it with the consistency of most polls, or the sales of hundreds of book titles on UFOs and aliens, or the huge web presence of alien conspiracy buffs.

What can be done about it? Do we need better science education, or just basic training in critical thinking? I leave this to you, the readers, to weigh in on your thoughts.

Asimov once penned a novelization of the sci-fi flick Fantastic Voyage (the story of a submarine miniaturized for a mission inside a human body). He recalled his daughter’s reaction to the film’s ending, in which the crew members escape from the patient’s body and return to their normal sizes, leaving their vehicle behind.

“Won’t the ship now expand and kill the man, Daddy?”

“Yes, Robyn,” I explained, “but you see that because you’re smarter than the average Hollywood producer. After all, you’re eleven.”¹

Funny how kids sometimes see straight to the heart of things. I notice this often when talking with my five-year-old son.

Kenneth Arnold displays drawn reconstruction of his unidentified objects.

Recently, on a long evening walk, I told my boy the whole story of flying saucers in the 20th Century, starting with the case that started it all: pilot Kenneth Arnold’s 1947 sighting of a “chain, which looked to me like the tail of a Chinese kite,” of objects that “looked something like a pie plate that was cut in half.”² (Hear Arnold tell his story in this radio interview recorded the day after his sighting.)

“These objects more or less fluttered,” Arnold said, in another interview. He added,

When I described how they flew, I said they flew like if you take a saucer and throw it across the water. Most of the newspapers misunderstood and misquoted that too. They said that I said they were saucer-like. I said they flew with a saucer-like fashion.”³

As I described what happened next, my son hung on every word. He eagerly followed the dominoes, as the Arnold sighting made national headlines, and gave rise to the media concept of “flying discs,” or “flying saucers.” He followed as I described how those headlines ignited the public imagination — creating the flying saucer hysteria of the summer of ’47, with its hundreds of flying saucer sightings across the USA (including a forgettable flash in the pan in Roswell, New Mexico). I explained how this led to an ecology of UFO subcultures, from cult leaders to skeptics, Contactees to Abductees, investigators to hoaxers. I told him about cases solved. I told him the unlikely tale of Roswell’s eventual resurrection as a pop culture phenomenon.

We even covered Mothman.

At the end of this long, long story, my son walked on in thoughtful silence. Then he stopped, and turned to me, and asked, “But Dad… what were those boomerang things the first pilot saw?”

Bingo! That is the exact right question — not only for flying saucers, but for all weird mysteries: “How did this legend get started in the first place?” Never mind the edifice of later embellishments. Never mind the decades of escalating yarns and rhetoric. The place to look first and hardest is always the origin of the story. If the foundation is rotten, it doesn’t matter how imposing the structure built upon it may appear.

Surprised into laughter, I smiled down at my son and ruffled his hair. “Exactly!” I said. “That’s the question! And do you know what? I don’t know the answer. I’m not sure that anyone does. Some people think that pilot really saw balloons, or secret airplanes, or even birds.”

We walked on, hand in hand. “It’s a mystery,” I said, as we took in the sunset and the evening breeze. “Maybe one day, you could be the one to solve it.”

Their presentation purports that there are only three possibilities to explain the UFO sighting: Hoax or hysteria; experimental aircraft; or an object of extraterrestrial origin. Actually, that’s four possibilities, since a hoax and mass hysteria are two completely different things.

After we eliminate hoaxing, hysteria, and experimental aircraft, the only remaining possibility is that this was an extraterrestrial object. Let’s hope Australian television audiences are outraged by that insult to intelligence.

I’m going to help out the show’s producers. They left out the two overwhelmingly most likely possibilities: mistaken identification, and unknown. Their list should have read like this:

1. Hoax – Not very likely in this case, but always a possibility.
2. Hysteria – Highly unlikely. Mass hysteria does not create shared visual hallucinations.
3. Mistaken identification – Most likely. The witnesses did see something, they were simply unable to identify it. Maybe it was seen from an odd angle, maybe it was something weird looking they weren’t familiar with. This doesn’t mean nobody would have known what it was.
4. Unknown – We do not have an explanation for what the witnesses reported.
5. Extraterrestrial object – I’ve struck this one out because it’s not a supportable conclusion. In order to positively identify the Westall object, we’d have to be able to reliably test it against a known sample. We don’t have a known sample of an “extraterrestrial object” to compare it against, so there’s really no way to get past #4 on this list and make a positive identification of “alien spaceship”.

Before this “documentary” came out, I was able to scoop it on my Skeptoid podcast by a few days, thanks to a heads-up from Maynard in Australia, who also provided this screen capture (many thanks, sir). On that show, I found that there are indeed some good possibilities for what the witnesses saw. The first half of the sighting coincided with a weather balloon, known to be in the area at the time, and sounding quite a lot like what some of the witnesses reported. The second half of the sighting is harder to pin down, so I’m completely comfortable with calling it unidentified. I’m reasonably comfortable saying it was probably a misidentification, and there’s a good explanation of that if you want to check out my episode.

Remember: “I don’t know” does NOT mean “I do know, and it was an alien spaceship.” To those who say this is the only possible explanation, I invite them to show us exactly how they were able to match up the Westall story to what’s known of alien spaceships. If they can’t, I invite them to revise their conclusion to admit that maybe the explanation is unknown.

So, first on the hit list, is the UFO Mystery that I posted last week. I gave enough facts that I thought you’d probably be able to figure it out, and figure it out you did. (If you haven’t read it yet, check it out now, and then come back here for the spoiler.)

A number of you guessed it pretty much right on the nose. There are some power lines above those carports, pretty high up. They’re black rubber (or whatever they make power lines out of) so you wouldn’t think they’d look like a light in the dark. But somehow, car headlights on the road outside the complex are hitting something and reflecting 90 degrees into the condo complex in a thin vertical stripe. This vertical stripe of light hits the powerlines, and makes two or three (one cable was thinner) grayish lights appear in the sky. If the car turned into the complex, the lights would shoot off to the left.

And that security guard driving up? I mentioned him for a reason. Note that the appearance and movement of the lights correlated with his car coming up the road and turning into the complex.

We couldn’t find exactly what the headlights were reflecting from. There are a lot of buildings and stores and signs and stuff across the street from the entrance, and I think you’d probably need to climb up onto the powerlines to see exactly where the reflection is coming from. But a reflection it is, as even the most modest patient investigation clearly reveals. It happens whenever a car turns in, and doesn’t happen whenever a car doesn’t turn in. The condo complex is very quiet and isolated from the shops, and there’s no sense at all that you’re seeing an intrusion from that direction.

Of course, in the light of day, when you know what it is, it seems stupid and really obvious, and you wouldn’t think anyone would be fooled by it. But I was there and had the privilege of seeing the lights when I didn’t know what they were; and I assure you, it was a wild scene. It’s not often that you get to enjoy that sense of “Whoa, I’m witnessing something I actually can’t explain!”

When we figured it out, Jim and I had distinctly different reactions. I was excited, like I’d just won Final Jeopardy. Jim was reserved, quiet; he smiled and nodded. There was probably a mixture of disappointment that it wasn’t aliens, and embarrassment that he hadn’t figured out such a simple puzzle. But he’s a smart guy and he certainly didn’t argue or try to twist the explanation. I certainly know UFOlogists who would claim that the reflections are actually aliens trying to tell us something.

Seriously.

I’m certainly not the first, or even the most articulate, to challenge his mission of promoting belief in alien visitation. Writing about Roswell last year, I referred to him as an obsessed UFO wacko, but he’s been called worse by others. Anyway he called me petty, ignorant, cavalier, lazy, biased, and an anti-UFO fanatic, so I guess we’re…even?

In his piece titled “Brian Dunning Running for Top UFO Debunker” this week, he called me “a skilled liar…. He deserves “Debunker of the Year” award.” (Why are conspiracy and paranormal web sites ALWAYS white text on a black background? I guess they don’t want them to be easily read by people whose eyes are older than 40 years.) Like Friedman, I do have a mission, but UFOs are hardly an interest of mine. Debunking, as I often say, has little value when done for its own sake. Frankly I don’t much care if someone prefers to think that every light in the sky is an alien spaceship. Debunking is only important, and valuable, when a belief is harmful or stands in the way of real scientific, technological, or humanitarian progress.

Believing that UFOs are aliens is not a particularly harmful belief. Indeed, it may even stimulate interest in aerospace development. But it can be part of a pattern of inability to distinguish useful evidence from poor evidence, and when that spreads to other aspects of believers’ lives, harm can be widespread as they start making important decisions based on bad information.

Everyone lies somewhere along the spectrum of what quality of evidence they’ll accept. Friedman and I seem to be pretty far apart on that spectrum. If I think he is too quick to accept ambiguous or anecdotal evidence as indisputable proof of something as extraordinary as alien visitation, I’ll admit I’m probably extraordinarily hard to be moved from the null hypothesis.

Interestingly, both ends of the spectrum accuse each other of similar irrationality. True believers accuse skeptics of ignoring evidence. Skeptics accuse true believers of believing anything they hear. If I have to be in one crazy end of the spectrum or another, I’ll happily stay in the “null hypothesis” camp. I’m open to any evidence you want to present, but if it’s ambiguous, explainable by known or natural phenomena, anecdotal or otherwise of poor quality, don’t expect me to adopt your beliefs. Even if you have lots of such evidence, mountains of such evidence: As I often say, you can stack cowpies as high as you want, they won’t turn into a bar of gold. Good evidence is composed of good evidence, not lots of bad evidence.

If the evidence is good, I’m easy to convince. Over the decades, I’ve absolutely changed my mind and accepted phenomena that I was certain were baloney. I didn’t believe in diamagnetism until I saw water suspended in a magnetic field at the Lawrence Berkeley labs. I didn’t believe the Judica-Cordiglia brothers could have made some of the space recordings they claimed until I learned about the controls that were in place during their recordings, and learned of some plausible explanations for the recordings. I spent 10 years fighting time dilation, claiming that there was no such thing, simply because I didn’t understand it, until I was finally illuminated. I’m not even ashamed to admit that NORAD’s Santa Claus radar reports had me reconsidering into my early teens.

But so far, I haven’t heard anything from Stan Friedman or any other true believer to encourage me to reconsider the null hypothesis on the Betty and Barney Hill story, or any other alien visitation claim. When something is real, it has properties that can be measured and detected. Even today, we can prove that the 1876 Battle of Little Big Horn took place, because we have the testable archeological proof; there is no reliance on anecdotal stories or hypnotic regression needed. I still await the first such testable shred of evidence of any alien visitation.

Stanton Friedman

A reader wrote me on Facebook that he was listening to the “Paranormal Podcast”, another of the usual promoters of nonsense inexplicably allowed to remain in the Science & Medicine section of iTunes. The guest was Stanton Friedman, the principal author of the Roswell, Travis Walton, and Betty & Barney Hill UFO mythologies. Anyway, at 25 minutes into the episode (#56, but don’t bother listening as it’s only a 15 second blurb), Stanton mentioned that he “came across a piece on the Internet” the other day that got “40 flat-out false claims” about the Betty and Barney Hill story, and added with a condescending chortle that he “couldn’t believe it.” It was the online transcript of my Skeptoid episode on that story.

The Paranormal Podcast host, Jim Harold, acknowledged that he had heard of Skeptoid. Of course you have Jim, because it’s kicking your ass in iTunes, probably much to your dismay.

Stanton was probably predisposed to have a problem with me. I’ve called him “an obsessed UFO wacko”, which I think is accurate. I grew up watching Stanton Friedman; he’s on just about every TV documentary about UFOs, and of course he wrote the most significant books inventing the most popular UFO stories. I used to listen to him in awe: The TV always said “nuclear physicist” under his name, so of course, anything he said had to be true. (I didn’t know that his real career, in fact his only career since 1970, was writing UFO books. I guess the TV producers feel that calling him a nuclear physicist gives him more credibility than calling a spade a spade and saying “Obsessed UFO Wacko”.)

I browsed through the transcript looking for 40 factual errors. This is a daunting task, because there aren’t more than 20 or 25 points made that you could call factual claims. Most of them either came from or are corroborated by Stanton Friedman’s own books. The facts of the case aren’t really in question, it’s the interpretation of the facts that are. Betty Hill spent two years writing a UFO story and sharing it with her husband, and then when asked about that story under hypnosis, Barney Hill was able to rattle it off pretty much as she wrote it. I say “Duh,” Stanton Friedman cries “Proof that aliens abducted them!”

If I thought he might care (which I don’t presume to), I would love to challenge Stanton to list even just 25 of the “40 flat-out false claims” I made, keeping in mind that virtually all the statements of fact I made are corroborated by his books. Not interpretations or innuendos, but statements of facts. Not that it’s a 40 minute drive from Ashland to Portsmouth, not a 45 minute drive, but substantive errors. He argues that I distorted the facts (my “false claims”) in order to discredit his fiction. This is an easy argument to make when you have an unchallenged platform on a podcast. An intelligent opponent would point out that the significant facts are not disputed, and that it’s the interpretation of the facts that makes all the difference.

He won’t accept this challenge, of course, mainly because he’s a successful author busy with book tours and UFO conventions, and I’m just one of many farts in the breeze of reason. Reason doesn’t pay, and since he’s more concerned with his bank account than with reason, he’s right to ignore piss-ant blogs like this. But it won’t be long before The Skeptologists are on his ass, and he’ll find that condescending chortles only take him so far.

Anyone can take a mundane newspaper headline and expand it into a dramatic fictional UFO abduction tale. If it’s done well, it will be gobbled up by an uncritical public. It’s those of us who caution against the folly of pseudoscience and faith in the supernatural who have the hard job.