All the weekend's new UFO news, explained in one post
Or, What Happens When I Step Away From My Computer for 48 Hours
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My daughter is starting her graduate work and teaching astrophysics this term, so I took a few days to drive there with her, along with her car stuffed with belongings. We had a very nice weekend drive, hitting several of our favorite destinations along the way. Anyway, what that means for today’s purposes is that I never once looked at Twitter or the regular junk news sources that play such a big part (for better or worse) in what I do for a living. A welcome respite.
So I turn it on, and what’s been consuming Those Who Believe In Anything As Long As It’s Unevidenced? You guessed it: new (to me) UFO stories. Two basic ones:
In Peru, it’s just come out that for many years, tribes in the Peruvian Amazon have been getting attacked by 7-foot-tall aliens, and it’s just never managed to make the news before. Dramatic video shows aliens walking through the jungle at night. (If you feel overburdened with a problematic surplus of brain cells and would like to remedy it, here is one tweet with such a video.) UFOlogists are up in arms because some prosecutor has released a cover story saying the tales of flying bulletproof alien attackers are actually just illegal miners flying around in jetpacks and wearing body armor — apparently the reason the UFOlogists are upset is that this is clearly an implausible alternative to what they KNOW to be true. Also, prosecutors are apparently now tasked with covering up alien stories. In a related story, apparently these tall aliens also excise the faces of beachgoers — which also never made the news before.
The other incredible new UFO story is that Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370, which disappeared in 2014, has now been determined to have been pursued by a fleet of UFOs which made it suddenly vanish. How do we know this? Why, because it’s all captured on video, of course — from several different angles. Apparently someone kept this covered up from all the world’s authorities for nine years. The video has all been shared on Twitter by random UFOlogists, which is, you know, how government spooks always make their findings public. Here’s one, here’s another, and you can find more. Seriously, cameras from like three angles watched the entire thing. Like they watch all flights. And, amazingly, judging by what the video looks like rather than what’s anonymously tweeted alongside it, the video appears to be neither thermal nor optical, but something new, almost like animation.
Perhaps the more astute among you may detect a slightly cynical tone in my writing today. Why might that be? Are not these new claims deserving of full attention and investigation?
No, they are not. Neither of these is news — and it’s not simply because both are unevidenced anecdotes, which they are. These, and the other stories like them that pop up from dubious sources on social media, are symptoms of having a small portion of the population having gone manic with a UFO obsession. This draws hoaxers having themselves a hilarious good time trolling these folks; it draws hoaxers from within their own ranks doing what they see as the right thing by calling attention to an issue they believe is being criminally ignored by the mainstream media; and it draws the lowest levels of mainstream media (The Drive, The Intercept, News Nation, et. al.) who are hoping to capitalize on some buzz to get their own rankings up.
The stories share what so many others do. They are wildly implausible. Wherever possible they contradict facts that are not in meaningful question. They come from sources that would not be the real ones if these things actually happened. They come with claims that the real names or places or dates are withheld, and are otherwise shielded from verification. From a journalistic perspective, they are insults to the intelligence.
And from a scientific perspective, they are nonexistent. Science is, at its most basic, the process we follow to develop an explanation for an observation. You might be inclined to say, “Hey, here’s this video, that’s an observation; explain it!” But no, an anecdote on Twitter does not constitute an observation by any scientific standard. An observation is repeatable. An observation is thoroughly documented, and all the data comes along with it, making it verifiable. An observation is not ambiguous, and we eliminate all the usual possible explanations for it before we declare that this is something truly new that doesn’t fit into other explanations (like a hoax CGI made by a chortling Hot Pockets gobbler in a basement).
So I will not be diving in to “explain” these “explosive new stories” and I expect that very few of my colleagues will either.
There is a real story to be told here — it is not one of goofy UFO stories from Earth, not one of which has ever turned out to be an alien. The story is one of astrophysics and exobiology and of the cosmos. It’s a story that spans decades of study and millennia of data. It is not one of overnight Twitter sensations, and that’s what makes it — to me — far more fascinating. Oh, and actually real.