A rare fail for The Conversation
Normally good science; this time, not so much.
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If you’re not already a subscriber to The Conversation, you should be. It’s a news magazine website that lives up well to its subtitle: “Academic rigor, journalistic flair.” Their articles are almost always written by legit scientists representing the consensus view in their field, and well written for the general public; so reading any given article, you’re likely to come away with the best info. A regular Conversation reader is a well-informed person.
Well… generally. There are exceptions to every rule. And on December 6, 2023, they made a big exception. Since it’s me writing about it, you can probably guess the topic: It’s yet another article by a UFOlogist on the far-out fringes of her field, promoting the reality of alien visitation as a given: “UFOs: How astronomers are searching the sky for alien probes near Earth” by Beatriz Villarroel. (Spoiler alert: astronomers aren’t. She is.)
Before we talk about the article, let’s look at the red flags. The Conversation always dutifully lists any important disclosures by the author, and Villarroel’s is a big one: “Beatriz Villarroel receives funding from a private donor for the ExoProbe project.” What’s the ExoProbe project, you ask? She wrote about it here for The Debrief, a conspiracy website that has framed itself as UFO News Central for the Internet:
This new network of telescopes utilizes carefully designed instruments with high-speed cameras that give a time resolution, a spatial resolution, and a spectral resolution of any discovery. Each object is localized in three dimensions so that we can extract where exactly an alien probe is.
There is not even a suggestion that our skies might be free of alien probes. They’re up there. ExoProbe, alongside her other project VASCO with the same goal, will find them. Governments move too slow. Only private ventures like this are agile enough to grab the alien probes and learn their advanced technology.
The development of a tool called EXOPROBE that can detect and analyze non-human objects in real time could revolutionize the search for extraterrestrial artifacts and expand human knowledge beyond our current boundaries.
Sounds impressive. I assume they’ve done sufficient testing to support declaring the speed at which they analyze non-human objects?
Pay special attention to how she closes her article for The Conversation:
Some 60 years of searches for extraterrestrial civilisations in the radio frequencies have yielded no candidates whatsoever. We find ourselves at a moment in time when new paths must be explored. That means we can finally focus our attention closer to home.
To paraphrase: “We haven’t found anything yet in the nanosecond of time we’ve spent looking at the most probable form of interstellar contact, so it’s now time to focus our attention on the least probable.”
Let us take a moment to refresh ourselves on the consensus among astronomers, astrobiologists, and astrophysicists: There is probably a lot of life out there, but it can’t ever get here any more than we can ever get there. The view that there are probably alien probes in Earth’s immediate vicinity is simply not held by anyone in that field (well, except Avi Loeb, who best exemplifies how every field has its lunatic fringe — a point The Conversation has also made). There is an absence of evidence for alien visitors, and rock solid theory explaining why we don’t ever expect them. Villarroel does not represent the consensus view in her field.
A perfect record is an aspiration to which no publication can ever reasonably be held, so I don’t criticize The Conversation. I’m just helping out a little bit. When a topic like UFOs gets as red-hot as it is, and is as wildly controversial as it is, being debated in Congress and all, it warrants a bit of extra editorial attention. Persuading readers that alien probes are certainly in our skies and we’re in the process of detecting them is (a) a false claim, and (b) a public disservice.
Brian Dunning is the producer of The UFO Movie THEY Don’t Want You to See, streaming now, which teaches actual, real astronomy using the public interest in UFOs as a springboard.
Good analysis of a questionable article. Ironically, it reminds me of what the physicist Donald Menzel mistakenly said over 50 years ago: "scientists of the twenty-first century will look back on UFO's as the greatest nonsense of the twentieth century."
I agree with your assessment of this article, but I can’t agree with your sentiment on “the others”. I really, really, wish I could and didn’t know what I know or have seen what I have seen, but I can’t. (Yet anyway.)
Please be a good skeptic on all this information as it becomes publicly available but not a debunker. True Skeptics are worth their weight in gold, debunkers are a dime a dozen. Trust no one, particularly those with vested interests and believe no one without credible evidence, and always look for possible misidentifications, explanations.
Trust the government at your own peril.
That said always remember that one that claims to be a wiseman clearly doesn’t know, and dogma is neither scientific or helpful. It’s completely ok to say sometimes it’s unidentified or I don’t know what the hell it is. When the explanations are less credible than the observer you have gone a bridge too far.
Doesn’t make it an alien ship from a distance planet, it just means we don’t know. And not only do we not know a lot, a lot of what we think we know simply isn’t so.