Yep, UFOs Are Going Mainstream

Let's begin with the story we haven't seen and likely never will:

DAYTON, OH A team of physicists and metallurgists from the University of Chicago and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has concluded that metallic material collected from a Roswell, NM ranch in July 1947 is "conclusively not of terrestrial origin". "It has clearly been worked by intelligent beings not from our planet," said Edwin P Albright, Director of MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics, "and the metallic material contains isotopes that haven't been found up to now on Earth". The material was brought to the Roswell Air Force base on July 8, 1947 and immediately flown in a B-29 to Fort Woreth, TX. It was later transported to Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton, where it had been held under tight security until the Department of Defense allowed the team of investigators to conduct detailed tests earlier this year. . .

So let's put that non-event into the context of a story at yesterday's Hot Air:

Ever since Congress got the ball rolling on the investigation of UFOs and established the new horribly-named AOIMSG office, other government agencies have slowly but surely moved toward cooperating in these efforts. The latest to join the party is NASA, arguably one of the best-suited agencies in terms of possessing the technology to see what might be “out there.” On Thursday, NASA announced that they will soon be launching a program wherein they will comb through their mountains of telescopic and sensor data to find out if they may have recorded anything anomalous that should be brought to the attention of the new UFO investigatory office. The initial program will run for nine months, with extensions being possible if the results are promising. So will traditional scientists scoff at using NASA’s vast scientific resources in such a pursuit? Perhaps. But the agency’s science mission chief isn’t worrying about any “reputational risk.”

As far as I can see from this account, NASA is bringing nothing new to the party, it's simply opening up existing "telescopic and sensor data" to allow a new bunch of civil servants to pull up the usual blurry images and do the usual wild speculation. NASA even goes so far as to acknowledge "reputational risk" in this course of action, but they're plunging ahead.

Something's hinky here. We're coming off the tail of the COVID panic, but I'm wondering if a substantial part of the population hasn't calmed down. The fact is that there's nothing new on the UFO front, and there hasn't been anything new -- just the same old first-person accounts and blurry images -- since the original UFO panic in the 1940s and 50s. I remember as a kid finding books by George Adamski in the town library, and it's worth revisiting that guy's career. The Wikipedia entry is entertaining:

George Adamski (17 April 1891 – 23 April 1965) was a Polish-American author who became widely known in ufology circles, and to some degree in popular culture, after he displayed numerous photographs in the 1940s and 1950s that he said were of alien spacecraft, claimed to have met with friendly Nordic alien Space Brothers, and claimed to have taken flights with them to the Moon and other planets.

Adamski was the first, and most famous, of several so-called UFO contactees who came to prominence during the 1950s. Adamski called himself a "philosopher, teacher, student and saucer researcher", although most investigators concluded his claims were an elaborate hoax, and that Adamski himself was a charlatan and a con artist.

Adamski authored three books describing his meetings with Nordic aliens and his travels with them aboard their spaceships: Flying Saucers Have Landed (co-written with Desmond Leslie) in 1953, Inside the Space Ships in 1955, and Flying Saucers Farewell in 1961. The first two books were both bestsellers; by 1960 they had sold a combined 200,000 copies.

. . . In the early 1930s, while living in Southern California, Adamski founded the "Royal Order of Tibet" in Laguna Beach, which held its meetings in the "Temple of Scientific Philosophy". Adamski served as a "philosopher" and teacher at the temple. The "Royal Order of Tibet" was given a government license to make wine for "religious purposes" during Prohibition; Adamski was quoted as saying "I made enough wine for all of Southern California ... I was making a fortune!" However, the end of Prohibition in 1933 also marked the decline of his profitable wine-making business, and Adamski later told two friends that's when he "had to get into this [flying] saucer crap."

In 1940 Adamski, his wife, and some close friends moved to a ranch near California's Palomar Mountain, where they dedicated their time to studying religion, philosophy, and farming. In 1944, with funding from Alice K. Wells, a student of Adamski, they purchased 20 acres (8.1 ha) of land at the base of Palomar Mountain, along highway S6, where they built a new home, a campground called Palomar Gardens, and a small diner called Palomar Gardens Cafe.

At the campground and diner Adamski "often gave lectures on Eastern philosophy and religion, sometimes late into the night" to students, admirers, and tourists. He also built a wooden observatory at the campground to house his six-inch telescope, and visitors and tourists to Palomar Mountain often received the false impression that Adamski was an astronomer connected to the famed Palomar Observatory at the top of the mountain. Adamski would correct this inaccurate impression "only when pressed to do so." Though he was usually referred to as "Professor" Adamski by his admirers and followers and he often implied or claimed to possess various academic degrees, Adamski held no graduate or undergraduate degree from any accredited college or university, and in fact had only a third grade education.

The picture I get is of a type of California pioneer who somehow perceived a deep-seated unease in the population and an openness to quackery that reached full bloom in the various moral panics of the late 1940s and 1950s -- McCarthyism and comic books come to mind as well as UFOs. Adamski was a key entrepreneur of the 1950s UFO panic. But we see signs of a renewed UFO panic now, including a new generation of Adamski-style hucksters building on the seminal work of Erich von Däniken, who added the ancient alien wrinkle to the whole story.

So we see renewed congressional investigations and what's shaping up to be Project Bluebook on steroids. We're seeing renewed quasi-academic respectability for the field, but beyond that, a media gold mine. It means government budget, academic careers, hit TV shows, and heaven knows what else is to come.

I think the bottom line is that, as they did in the late 1940s and 1950s, the times they are a-changin.

Let's Dig A Little Deeper Into The Space Aliens

The whole idea of intelligent alien life, especially in the absence of proof, is a belief system that's at least parallel to religion, and among its more radical adherents it simply explains religion. This is particularly true with the ancient astronaut theory. According to Wikipedia,

"Ancient astronauts" (or "ancient aliens") refers to a pseudoscientific hypothesis which holds that intelligent extraterrestrial beings visited Earth and made contact with humans in antiquity and prehistoric times. Proponents suggest that this contact influenced the development of modern cultures, technologies, religions, and human biology. A common position is that deities from most, if not all, religions are extraterrestrial in origin, and that advanced technologies brought to Earth by ancient astronauts were interpreted as evidence of divine status by early humans.

However, I've got to take issue with Wikipedia's next assertion:

The idea that ancient astronauts existed and visited Earth is not taken seriously by academics and archaeologists, who consider it to be pseudoarchaeological and/or unscientific. It has received no credible attention in peer reviewed studies. When proponents of the idea present evidence in favor of their beliefs, it is often distorted or fabricated.

I've already posted here on Diana Pasulka, a full professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of North Carolina -- Wilmington, who publishes and makes frequent appearances essentially arguing that both religion and technology do in fact stem from the terrestrial visits of ancient aliens. This is a tenured full professor at an accredited institution whose publications are in fact taken seriously by her colleagues. I've made highly critical observations about her public statements in the post linked above.

Prometheus Entertainment's shows on the History Channel generally ascribe to the ancient astronaut theory, especially in the eponymous Ancient Aliens, which is up to 164 episodes in 18 seasons. Recent episodes of The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch purport to give evidence of contemporary UFO activity, so much so that the YouTuber Professor Simon Holland has come out and said that although he'd considered the show "more bigfoot than big science", he's now changed his mind:

His conclusion isn't entirely coherent. He seems to feel that the Prometheus Entertainment crew at the ranch is focusing too specifically on what's happening in that part of Utah, when he thinks there are other places on the planet like, say, Stonehenge, Lourdes, or the Dead Sea, where similar encounters take place. That, according to Prof Holland, is the "big picture" they should be looking at. ("Simon Holland" is actually a common name, but this makes if difficult to determine just which Professor Holland he is, and where he is, or was, on the faculty. So far, I've come up empty.)

The same applies to Dr Travis Taylor, who is best known as an "astrophysicist" who's appeared on several Prometheus Entertainment and National Geographic shows. According to Wikipedia,

Travis Shane Taylor (born 24 July 1968 in Decatur, Alabama) is an aerospace engineer, optical scientist, science fiction author, and star of National Geographic Channel's Rocket City Rednecks. Taylor has written more than 25 technical papers, 14 science fiction novels and two textbooks, and has appeared in multiple television documentaries, including NGC's When Aliens Attack.

However, although he has multiple advanced degrees -- "a doctorate in optical science and engineering, a master's degree in physics, a master's degree in aerospace engineering, a master's degree in astronomy, and a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering" -- he doesn't have a PhD in physics or astrophysics, and he appears never to have held an academic position, so his actual qualifications in the areas in question aren't entirely convincing. His day job, if he has one outside his TV appearances, seems to be something or other at NASA. But Professor Simon Holland takes him seriously.

I think Prometheus does offer a bigger picture than Holland surmises: at various points in the three seasons so far of the Skinwalker show, the crew has referred somewhat vaguely to a large metallic anomaly lying brneath the ranch, which some have suggested may be an ancient alien mother ship buried for safekeeping, or something like that, and emanations from the buried ship are what's disabling the crew's monitors. But as of the latest episode, they think the aliens, possibly in the buried mother ship, are now trying to send them messages.

The most that can be said is that, contrary to the Wikipedia entry, this stuff is moving into the mainstream, and professors of whatever provenance are in fact beginning to sign on. Stay tuned.

The Space Aliens And President Biden Are Both Passive-Aggressive

As I thought about my bill of particulars against the space aliens yesterday, I began to realize that President Biden shares many of the same characteristics. Lest anyone accuse me of making a diagnosis, I would point out that The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) no longer lists passive-aggressive personality disorder as a distinct and separate diagnosis. Thus in calling soomeone "passive-aggressive", I'm not using a professional medical or diagnostic term and am simply using it in a lay capacity as a rough behavioral descriptor.

The same link defines the term as

a type of indirect aggression. It allows a person to express anger and related emotions without directly communicating these feelings. People expressing passive aggression often retain the ability to deny that they intended their behavior aggressively.

Deniability, as I pointed out yesterday, is a key component of the space aliens' behavior at Skinwalker Ranch. "You can't prove it was us who made your electronic monitors malfunction! You're jumping to conclusions, and that's not fair!" But their behavior is pretty clearly deliberate. Who else could it be? That it suggests they're angry and resentful of the Prometheus Entertainment crew with their monitors and amateur rockets is intriguing, and I may take this up in another post.

But let's look at President Biden's strange interview with Jimmy Kimmel Wednesday night.

Jimmy Kimmel: (08:03)
I think a lot of Democrats are frustrated because we got out and voted, we won the House, the Senate, the White House, obviously, and still we have had made very little progress, as far as I’m concerned, when it comes to guns, obviously, reproductive rights, voting rights, climate change, the all these things. And in some ways we’ve moved backwards.

Joe Biden: (08:31)
Well, in climate change, we’ve actually made some real moves. One in seven of all the changes that have taken place in terms of solar, wind, and wind pumps, and I mean pumps and like, have occurred in the last 18 months; we’ve moved.

Joe Biden: (08:49)
And there’s an opportunity with the process we have dealing with energy to be able to gradually move more rapidly than we have been to alternatives.

Joe Biden: (08:58)
For example, electric vehicles, Jimmy, when I got elected… I pushed electric vehicles for the last, I don’t know, God knows how long. Well I had a conversation with the chairman of the board of General Motors, Mary Barra, and she was suing California, remember? Because your standard was too high.

Jimmy Kimmel: (09:18)
Right.

Joe Biden: (09:19)
Well, guess what? We had a conversation, I got a call from her about three days, four days later, she dropped the suit and committed she’s going to go all electric in the entire General Motors by 2035, by 2030 [inaudible 00:09:32].

Joe Biden: (09:32)
Well, but it really is. And then Ford came along and did the same thing. So we’re on a path. And what is the successor to Chrysler is doing the same thing. We’re moving in directions that are being slow.

He and Kimmel then tiptoe around the issue of inflation:

Joe Biden: (11:58)
Second thing is, look, inflation is the bane of our existence. Inflation is mostly in food, and in gasoline, at the pump.

Jimmy Kimmel: (12:11)
That’s what kills you, because it’s a little billboard telling everyone how expensive everything is. If Donald Trump leaves one of those Sharpies over for you, could maybe change the price on that, you know?

Joe Biden: (12:22)
We could. But here’s the deal, you know, my dad used say every, every family has a little bit of breathing room. If you take and look at all the costs that a family has on a monthly basis, it also includes healthcare, prescription drugs, childcare, all those things. When I’m proposing we get, and I think we can get it done, I’m proposing that we in fact reduce the cost of those things.

Kimmel in effect is asking why Biden deliberately increased the price of gas -- can't he do something now to pull back on some of those measures, like bring back the Keystone XL Pipeline that he canceled? His answer is actually pretty clear: every family has a little bit of breathing room. You like to go to the movies? Well, you can cut that out and still buy gas! You've got breathing room! And if you need insulin, well, down the road, we might help you out with that, too! But the key thing is it's important you don't buy gas. By 2035, you'll have to drive an electric car anyhow.

He's saying I know perfectly well you're seeing inflation in food and gasoline. But I'm not gonna do anything about it, because in the context above, climate change. You just have to manage your priorities based on my new policy, which my dad always said you can do. Down the road, if you need insulin, maybe we can help with that.

It actually sounds like he doesn't like the middle and working classes very much; he's just said he's aware he's sticking it to them, and they'll just have to deal with it, for now, anyhow. Why is Joe so angry? Why is he so angry at the people he claims to represent?

And what's with the self-satisfied smirk in the picture at the top of this post? Does he look senile there? I don't think so. He looks like the cat that ate the canary.

There's another factor, which is the stumbling incoherence that's obvious throughout the transcript. The commentary is pretty much unanimous that he's in mental decline. Again, I'm not so sure. I had a grandfather who claimed to be hard of hearing, and that was the family consensus, except my grandmother always said he just heard what he wanted to hear. This is a perfectly rational old guy strategy. Joe stumbles and stutters and misspeaks, except when he doesn't. In the passage just above, he was perfectly clear. From the first link here, the seventh example of passive-aggressive behavior:

7. Weaponized incompetence

Weaponized incompetence is when a person pretends to be incompetent as a way of either avoiding an unpleasant task or punishing another person. For example, a spouse might pretend not to know how to clean the bathroom or do an objectively inferior job styling a child’s hair so that they do not have to keep doing it.

All the garbled blithering is something he forces on all of us as a way of avoiding serious challenge. But when Jimmy Kimmel comes up with a real question, he gives a real answer: all the inflation is part of the plan. It isn't going away. Deal with it.

The space aliens, that is if they exist, are reading from the same script. I guess I'll have to take this up.

Why Do Space Aliens Only Do Retail?

This is a question that's been pestering me in various forms almost ever since I learned about flying saucers. Here we have extraterrestrial beings from an advanced civilization, always in the popular imagination possessing great truths for earthlings, and they're always turning up piecemeal, visible only to individual pilots or people who see their planes' radar, or to individuals wandering alone or with a few associates in rural environments. A question that's come up somewhat more often as camera technology improves is why images purporting to be UFOs continue to be so blurred and sketchy.

Most recently, the question has come up for me in the popular History Channel series The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, a product of Prometheus Entertainment, whose most respectable show is The Curse of Oak Island, but others include Ancient Aliens -- Skinwalker, with its focus on UFOs, cattle mutilations, and so forth, seems much more compatible with aliens. Searching the web for skeptical opinion on Skinwalker, I found this:

His conclusion about the show is "ulltimately, they're making entertainment", and since my wife and I have fun watching it, I tend to agree. But a commenter to the post says,

My concern has always been the issues with all of their electronic devices. They show so many issues with various electronic devices all over the ranch such as cell phones, ground-penetrating radar devices, etc. however, there are never any issues with the television cameras. The last time I checked, TV cameras were also electronic devices. Why don't they experience failures?

Good point. And following up on that, how come the forces they stir up when they dig on the property or shoot rockets into the air are so passive-aggressive? Rather than, say, just smiting down a too-curious earthling for shooting an annoying rocket into a critical zone, they merely cause malfunctions in their telemetry software, the sort of plausibly deniable jab that someone's sister-in-law might do. Or several hours after the rocket shoot, they just send a glowing ball bobbing in the breeze down a forest path that's visible only to the camera the earthlings have set up to track that sort of thing, which, as the commenter points out, for some reason doesn't malfunction the way every other instrument did that evening.

We're back to the peculiar retail-only level of paranormal phenomena. There's no paranormal equivalent to, say, the laws of thermodynamics. Why did the water in the vase evaporate? Well, there's a clear, universal explanation. Nature is operating at the wholesale level. Why did the pilot spot a tic tac UFO? We don't really know, but the whole episode is operating at the retail level. The explanation is a point solution, as the techies would put it.

The other thing that strikes me is a remark that Bp Barron made in his recent address at the US Air Force Academy: life is exuberant. Where it exists, it's everwhere. It swarms. It can't help but be visible. Why is alien life, if there is such a thing, so esoteric, so hidden, so deniable, so passive-aggressive?

My object isn't to pooh-pooh this stuff; the TV shows are fun up to a point, but doesn't the fact that the paranormal always seems to require a personal revelation, not a public manifestation, present a puzzle about human (not alien) nature worth working through?

The CDC, Monkeypox, And Masks

As of last January, the word was this:

The CDC has struggled with clear messaging and COVID-19 guidance during the pandemic, and the agency will aim to do better, Rochelle Walensky, MD, director of the CDC, told The Wall Street Journal.

. . . TWalensky said she is committed to communicating CDC policy more clearly. She is being coached by a media consultant and plans to hold more media briefings in coming months that are separate from the briefings with the White House COVID-19 Response Team.

How goes the effort, six months later? Well, they've been pivoting to monkeypox, right? Here's what moneypox amounts to, according to the WHO, which treats the delicate subject of transmission most gingerly:

Human-to-human transmission can result from close contact with respiratory secretions, skin lesions of an infected person or recently contaminated objects. Transmission via droplet respiratory particles usually requires prolonged face-to-face contact . . . . While close physical contact is a well-known risk factor for transmission, it is unclear at this time if monkeypox can be transmitted specifically through sexual transmission routes. Studies are needed to better understand this risk.

More specifically, according to Newsweek,

As cases of monkeypox rise across the nation, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported the disease is primarily affecting "men who have sex with men."

An update by the CDC showed 31 confirmed cases in the U.S. as of Monday. "It's not clear how the people were exposed to monkeypox, but early data suggest that gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men make up a high number of cases," the CDC said regarding monkeypox in the U.S.

So what did the CDC recommend as of Monday morning?

The CDC says travelers should avoid close contact with sick people, including those with skin lesions or genital lesions, and steer clear of dead or live wild animals including rats, squirrels and monkeys.

'Avoid eating or preparing meat from wild game (bushmeat) or using products derived from wild animals from Africa (creams, lotions, powders),' the CDC says, recommending travelers also avoid contaminated material such as clothing or bedding.

'Wear a mask,' they state.

'Wearing a mask can help protect you from many diseases, including monkeypox.'

No mention that if you're a guy who has promiscuous sex with other guys, that's the chief risk. Avoid bushmeat, and don't mess with road kill. And of course, wear a mask. There can be little better indication how politically driven CDC's messaging is. But as of Monday evening,

The CDC last week had added mask-wearing as a precautionary measure for people traveling to countries where monkeypox has been detected. The CDC removed that advice from its website late Monday following social-media posts criticizing the agency for what they called mixed messages over the risk posed by the virus.

A CDC spokeswoman said the agency removed the advice because it caused confusion, but didn’t respond immediately to a request for a more detailed explanation.

I suppose it's a positive sign that when someone says, "You blithering idiot, take that down," someone at the CDC had the good sense to do it, and right away. On the other hand, what Ivy League degrees and postgraduate credentials did the person have who put that up in the first place? Wouldn't it have been smarter simply to hire competent people to start with?

Amber, Elon, And 21st Century Relationships

I started my morning yesterday asking Google what I thought was an easy question: Is Elon Musk the father of Amber Heard's baby? As an answer, I got this: Elon Musk Alleged To Be The Father Of Amber Heard’s Baby Amid Claims They Created Embryos Together. While this is all "alleged"-level stuff, I can only hope and pray that when he took his mother as his date to the Met gala, it was a sign that he'd straightened up.

When Heard announced the birth of her daughter, it was reported that the “Aquaman” star was the “sole legal parent” of the baby who was born on April 8, 2021.

. . . Heard made the announcement via a July Instagram post in which she made no mention of Musk — whom she dated on and off between 2016 and 2018.

“Four years ago, I decided I wanted to have a child. I wanted to do it on my own terms,” she wrote.

It was widely assumed the baby had been born via a surrogate as Heard showed no signs of being pregnant in the months prior to the birth.

“I hope we arrive at a point in which it’s normalized to not want a ring in order to have a crib. A part of me wants to uphold that my private life is none of anyone’s business,” she continued in the caption.

. . . In a later post, she referred to herself as both “the mom and the dad” of the little one.

Whether or not Heard used a sperm donor remains the subject of speculation.

Elon Musk and Amber Heard reportedly created embryos together during their relationship.

According to a 2020 report by the Mirror, a friend of Heard’s mother claimed that Musk was suing the actress in an attempt to have the embryos destroyed.

“Paige told me.... she was in a legal battle with him over the rights to embryos they had created together. He wanted to destroy them, and Amber tried to keep them to have a baby,” the family friend allegedly claimed in the libel case Depp has taken against Heard.

Not even Ayn Rand could dream this one up. But if she had, whose side would she be on? Seems like the case would be something like Galt v Taggart, except that Galt strikes me as a MGTOW type.

Trust the science.

Did The Depp-Heard Trial "End #MeToo"?

The Guardian, for instance, raises that question:

When Hollywood star Johnny Depp’s defamation trial against Amber Heard ended in his favor on Wednesday, some observers worried that the verdict might have a chilling effect on the #MeToo movement.

The whole trial enexpectedly turned into a media event with manifold implcations -- Depp was revealed as a master of improv tongue in cheek on the witness stand, for instance. What a loss it's been not to have his talent available for the past half decade. As a personality, he simply outshone Heard, her attorneys, and her witnesses in a way that the worldwide audience found delicious. #MeToo was just an incidental casualty.

The main problem is that it was a Hollywood media event, certainly the equivalent of a blockbuster film, except that the Hollywood machine that might have created such an event in the past -- the Star Wars franchise, for instance -- was AWOL, clueless, not involved. It emerged spontaneous, unscheduled, without spin, without photo ops, without programmed PR in People magazine.

Isn't that the unintentional subtext of this tweet?

Far Left = Amber is a Liar.
Far Right = Amber is a Liar.
Vast Majority of Public = Amber is a Liar.

CNN/MSNBC/ABC/CBS/NBC = Believe Amber because she is a woman. Believe the lies.

This is the real story coming out of the Depp trial.

— Nate The Lawyer (@NatetheLawyer) June 4, 2022

I think the public didn't even know how badly it wanted a Captain Jack Sparrow back, but the character Depp played in the trial is also a cousin to Han Solo, and Amber Heard somehow turned out to be an anti-Prinicess Leia.

If you think about it, Princess Leia in the Star Wars franchise manifested classical virtues, prudence, temperance, justice, fortitude, and indeed even faith in the Force. Our image of Ukraine's President Zelensky in the popular imagination owes something to her implied leadership of the Rebel Alliance -- and let's not forget that Zelensky started out as an actor and comic.

What we saw in the Depp-Heard trial was Hollywood out of control, without producers, writers, flacks, and handlers who normally manipulate the public imagination. Amber Heard's character spontaneously emerged as a woman utterly without virtue, and the public loved it. Official Hollywood would never have allowed this. Woman must always be victim.

The public is generally aware that women tell lies, they cheat, they cover for each other, they're histrionic, vengeful, and vain. It's normally polite not to point this out. On the other hand, a pirate of the lovable sort can get away with this simply because he's a pirate.

When we all stop laughing sometime in coming days, we'll just go back to living out the normal pathology of everyday life, having been helped along by some unintentionally great entertainment.