If you’ve been impressed by any of the seemingly weird or inexplicable phenomena showcased on TV’s Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, I have just one thing to say: TV shows are entertainment, not science journals.
But it seems no matter how many times I (and many others) repeat this, core audiences insist that nothing on these programs could be fake or even exaggerated. They believe everything with full credulity, as do — apparently — the personalities on the show. A friend has spoken personally with Brandon Fugal, the owner of Skinwalker Ranch and the guy behind the show, and reported back to me that he is absolutely serious and is a true believer. Fugal has tweeted the same to me. So that’s why I just can’t get past this one thing — and if I watched more of the show, I’m sure there would be a hundred others.
Mick West recently tweeted a bit from the show (below), how they’re flying along in their helicopter when cameras on the ground capture some kind of tiny, hypersonic UFO flying back & forth just beneath the helicopter. The TV personalities all go wild in amazement. Clearly, however, it’s just a fly or other insect crossing in front of the camera:
Something close & slow looks just the same as something far & fast; a single observer has no triangulating information to tell which it is. It’s not an ability you can acquire through training; it’s a limitation imposed by geometry.
This is not rocket science, and it’s something that even the most amateur UFO investigators are intimately familiar with, because it’s one of the most common ways that people can be fooled by things in the sky. Here it is explained by an air traffic controller and a flight instructor in my UFO movie:
So this is why it’s hard for me to believe that the people making the Skinwalker Ranch show are true believers. They had to know it was an insect; it is simply not credible that all of them on site are that incompetent as investigators.
Yes, it’s possible that cognitive dissonance is the true culprit here. They are so invested in their belief (in Fugal’s case, deeply invested monetarily too) that their brain skips over alternate explanations for anything they choose to perceive as an inexplicable phenomenon.
But come on, the real explanation is that it’s a television program. It’s entertainment. It is there to amaze you and to get you to watch and to make money for HISTORY. My personal bet is that the personalities on the show did sooner or later realize they were looking at insects, but the show’s producers elected to keep their stunned reactions anyway, to amaze the viewers.
So, despite the claims of the on-air personalities that they believe the show to be a serious scientific exploration, they know that it’s not. I say, just come straight out and be proud producers of a successful entertainment program; there’s no shame in that.
I’m just not a fan of de-educating and dumbing down the public with misinformation dishonestly presented as fact or as science.