Harvard University strains to cram its reputation even deeper down the toilet
When it comes to PR, Harvard seems to have gone all-in on UFOs to garner the media's attention — this time with "cryptoterrestrials."
By now it’s well known that Harvard has done some serious self-inflicted damage to its own reputation by tirelessly promoting Avi Loeb, a professor of astrophysics there, who has spent the last decade descending ever farther into crackpottery. He has become one of the media’s go-to interview subjects whenever they want a ridiculous quote about alien visitors to Earth — he is always happy to oblige. Harvard continues standing by him, even after last year’s effort to (apparently) personally enrich himself at the expense of Silicon Valley alien visitation hopefuls, with his voyage into the Pacific Ocean to collect little bits from the ocean bottom that he claimed were relics of alien technology — to universal mocking from the entire geophysics and astronomy professions.
So it was with some surprise that I saw Harvard’s latest promotion of UFO crackpottery did not include Loeb at all, but two new guys — Tim Lomas and Brendan Case from Harvard (plus Michael Paul Masters from Montana Tech). They’ve written a new paper in the weird journal Philosophy and Cosmology entitled “The cryptoterrestrial hypothesis: A case for scientific openness to a concealed earthly explanation for Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena.”
They posit the conjecture that UFOs — although more likely extraterrestrial aliens (yes they actually say that) — might also be cryptoterrestrials. What the hell is that??? They explain:
[UFOs] may reflect activities of intelligent beings concealed in stealth here on Earth (e.g., underground), and/or its near environs (e.g., the moon), and/or even “walking among us” (e.g., passing as humans).
You know, the underground people, the moon people, even the shapeshifters who hide in plain view. Just so you don’t think I’m exaggerating, here is an actual quote from the paper’s lengthy conclusion: