This is what you're going to keep hearing about all year
The flare that burns twice as long is twice as annoying
Before I get into today’s post, I want to throw a bit of an explainer out there. I have no interest in being a UFO guy. UFOs are not especially interesting to me. My thing — and it’s our mission statement at Skeptoid Media — is separating fact from fiction, real science from pseudoscience, information from misinformation. If we can all learn to better tell what’s real from what’s not, we’ll make better decisions is every aspect of our lives. That’s something that truly benefits everyone. And yet, here I am today with another Substack on UFOs. Why? It’s because the media won’t let them go, and it’s influencing many people in the wrong direction. Despite a complete dearth of evidence that anything unusual is in the skies, certain personalities (James Fox, Jeremy Corbell, George Knapp, and of course the whole Rogues Gallery cast of characters) continue bombarding the media with press releases claiming the opposite, and the media loves anything sensational. And so I will continue to count myself among those providing a rational counter-perspective, of which my soon-to-be released UFO movie is a huge part. If you would rather spend our energy on things that are more immediately relevant, well, I apologize that that effort is more diluted these days.
OK so here’s the latest. Remember back in 1997, the so-called “Phoenix Lights” episode, where may people thought a giant triangular UFO the size of a city was flying over Phoenix? You probably heard that it was very quickly determined to have been a flight of A-10 attack aircraft jettisoning leftover illumination flares at the Barry M. Goldwater Range some 70 or so miles away. The Air Force gave a repeat demonstration for the benefit of the media, and we all got to see exactly what had happened and to see the illusion repeated. Mystery solved.
However, as you can imagine, to this day there is a subset of UFOlogists whose minds are absolutely closed to any explanation except alien visitation. The firmer the proof of what actually happened, it seems, the tighter they circle their wagons to shut it out. To many, the Phoenix Lights were aliens, end of story.
The same thing has happened again. This time it was in California. On their podcast, Corbell and Knapp promoted a video taken in April 2021 at Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms, near Palm Springs, CA. It showed a line of flares in the sky in a certain configuration — flares which they insist are actually the lights of a triangular alien spacecraft.
Turns out the DoD had released a whole bunch of photos and videos of the exercise they were conducting at the time. It was the Weapons and Tactics Instructor Course 2-21. It included a night drop of flares, and their photos and videos showed they were in the exact configuration as those in Corbell and Knapp’s video. All of this was dug up by investigator John Greenewald, Jr., Filer Extraordinaire of Freedom of Information Act requests. He didn’t even have to go to the trouble this time, because the DoD had already publicly released all that information. (For the full story, see Greenewald’s Twitter thread here: https://twitter.com/blackvaultcom/status/1660979348860715009?s=61&t=5TfCeHDBDJ1Aq-L47ZLzMQ)
I can’t know what’s in the minds of UFOlogists like Corbell and Knapp. Since the information was already out there, you have to conclude they’re either astonishingly incompetent as journalists, or just out to promote yet another UFO story without regard to its authenticity. Promoting UFOs is, after all, how they both make their living (to the best of my knowledge).
Predictably, they’re sticking to their guns, and are fighting tooth and nail against the evidence, and their followers are praising them for it.
And it’s this, my friends, that illustrates why UFOs — or any pop pseudoscience of the week making headlines — are important for skeptics to keep talking about. In human society, celebrating misinformation has become mainstream. Rejecting evidence has become a badge of honor. It’s politically correct to embrace the fringe perspective, to scorn expertise and data. It’s a fashion statement. It’s virtue signaling that you are among the Few, not the Many. You have the courage to stand up for what you know to be true, despite all that Ivory Tower evidence showing that it’s not.
Misinformation will always be in style, and choices based on it will continue to be a force for harm.
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