ALIENS and FLYING SAUCERS

Day 190 of the Lower Puna Eruption, and nothing to report.

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On Saturday I began a two-part series on life:  how it began and whether we are the only intelligence in the whole Universe.  That was the science.  On Sunday, I provided a religious point of view.  Then on Monday, by accident, came another regression into the possibility that we could well be the only hope for the future of humanity...or life in in some form, which might not necessarily be organic.

I thought that was enough of this subject matter for along time to come.  However, in the mail came SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, and the feature was on UFOS and ALIENS.

I lightly touched on this subject in those above-mentioned postings, but I thought I'd spend an entire article on this subject.  If you ever work for NASA on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, it's okay to mention aliens, but don't, don't ever give any credence to flying saucers.  

You will lose your credibility, for any serious astrobiologist can't comprehend how anyone with any kind of intelligence would bother with this fanciful subject.  And about aliens, the kind NASA is officially searching for today is microscopic.  A former colleague, David Morrison, has a short contribution in this issue on that subject.  You might find interest in another statement of his from nearly a decade ago:  UFOs and Aliens in Space.

Mind you, there remains a sense of humor, for earlier this week, NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day was titled:  Flying Saucer Crash Lands in Utah Desert:

If you read further, you would have learned that this was just the return module from the Genesis mission.  The object was sort of saucer shape, and it did crash in a Utah desert.

So back to SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, here are the articles:

• UFO Identification Process, by Joe Nickell and James McGaha
• UFO's:  Why Humanoid Aliens?  Why So Varied? by Eric Wojciechowski
• Those Supposed Aliens Might be Worms, by David Zeigler

You can find those articles if you wish to read the details, but I thought I'd at least summarize the editorial by Kendrick Frazier--Aliens and UFOs:  What They Tell Us about Ourselves:

• Topic is perennially fascinating.
• But it's one of those subjects where hope, wishful thinking, and unfetterred speculation seems to overwhelm reason, facts and evidence.
• Frazier did not say this, but to many, much of this might sound like religion.

Let me end this posting on something where, perhaps, Donald Trump might actually be right.  Joe Nickell and James McGaha, in this same Scientific American issue, their New York Times Again Hypes Saucers laments some clearly fake news.  The 3August 2018 edition of TNYT had reporter Laura Holson revisiting the July 1952 "invasion of Washington" flap to sell newspapers.  She ignored science-based UFO investigators and only talked to fringe organizations.  At least, that is what they intimated.  In short:

• On July 19-20 Washington National Airport observers saw seven radar targets, verified by Andrews Air Force Base, confirmed by two airline pilots.
• A second set of sightings occurred on July 26-27.
• Reporter Holson happily concludes, "And so the mystery continues," engaging in the logical fallacy known as an argument from ignorance.
• The reality, from the subsequent investigation, was a combination of turbulent air, temperature inversions and something to do with meteor and star reflections.
• Wikipedia has a full account of what happened.

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