So, first on the hit list, is the UFO Mystery that I posted last week. I gave enough facts that I thought you’d probably be able to figure it out, and figure it out you did. (If you haven’t read it yet, check it out now, and then come back here for the spoiler.)

A number of you guessed it pretty much right on the nose. There are some power lines above those carports, pretty high up. They’re black rubber (or whatever they make power lines out of) so you wouldn’t think they’d look like a light in the dark. But somehow, car headlights on the road outside the complex are hitting something and reflecting 90 degrees into the condo complex in a thin vertical stripe. This vertical stripe of light hits the powerlines, and makes two or three (one cable was thinner) grayish lights appear in the sky. If the car turned into the complex, the lights would shoot off to the left.

And that security guard driving up? I mentioned him for a reason. Note that the appearance and movement of the lights correlated with his car coming up the road and turning into the complex.

We couldn’t find exactly what the headlights were reflecting from. There are a lot of buildings and stores and signs and stuff across the street from the entrance, and I think you’d probably need to climb up onto the powerlines to see exactly where the reflection is coming from. But a reflection it is, as even the most modest patient investigation clearly reveals. It happens whenever a car turns in, and doesn’t happen whenever a car doesn’t turn in. The condo complex is very quiet and isolated from the shops, and there’s no sense at all that you’re seeing an intrusion from that direction.

Of course, in the light of day, when you know what it is, it seems stupid and really obvious, and you wouldn’t think anyone would be fooled by it. But I was there and had the privilege of seeing the lights when I didn’t know what they were; and I assure you, it was a wild scene. It’s not often that you get to enjoy that sense of “Whoa, I’m witnessing something I actually can’t explain!”

When we figured it out, Jim and I had distinctly different reactions. I was excited, like I’d just won Final Jeopardy. Jim was reserved, quiet; he smiled and nodded. There was probably a mixture of disappointment that it wasn’t aliens, and embarrassment that he hadn’t figured out such a simple puzzle. But he’s a smart guy and he certainly didn’t argue or try to twist the explanation. I certainly know UFOlogists who would claim that the reflections are actually aliens trying to tell us something.

Seriously.

I’m certainly not the first, or even the most articulate, to challenge his mission of promoting belief in alien visitation. Writing about Roswell last year, I referred to him as an obsessed UFO wacko, but he’s been called worse by others. Anyway he called me petty, ignorant, cavalier, lazy, biased, and an anti-UFO fanatic, so I guess we’re…even?

In his piece titled “Brian Dunning Running for Top UFO Debunker” this week, he called me “a skilled liar…. He deserves “Debunker of the Year” award.” (Why are conspiracy and paranormal web sites ALWAYS white text on a black background? I guess they don’t want them to be easily read by people whose eyes are older than 40 years.) Like Friedman, I do have a mission, but UFOs are hardly an interest of mine. Debunking, as I often say, has little value when done for its own sake. Frankly I don’t much care if someone prefers to think that every light in the sky is an alien spaceship. Debunking is only important, and valuable, when a belief is harmful or stands in the way of real scientific, technological, or humanitarian progress.

Believing that UFOs are aliens is not a particularly harmful belief. Indeed, it may even stimulate interest in aerospace development. But it can be part of a pattern of inability to distinguish useful evidence from poor evidence, and when that spreads to other aspects of believers’ lives, harm can be widespread as they start making important decisions based on bad information.

Everyone lies somewhere along the spectrum of what quality of evidence they’ll accept. Friedman and I seem to be pretty far apart on that spectrum. If I think he is too quick to accept ambiguous or anecdotal evidence as indisputable proof of something as extraordinary as alien visitation, I’ll admit I’m probably extraordinarily hard to be moved from the null hypothesis.

Interestingly, both ends of the spectrum accuse each other of similar irrationality. True believers accuse skeptics of ignoring evidence. Skeptics accuse true believers of believing anything they hear. If I have to be in one crazy end of the spectrum or another, I’ll happily stay in the “null hypothesis” camp. I’m open to any evidence you want to present, but if it’s ambiguous, explainable by known or natural phenomena, anecdotal or otherwise of poor quality, don’t expect me to adopt your beliefs. Even if you have lots of such evidence, mountains of such evidence: As I often say, you can stack cowpies as high as you want, they won’t turn into a bar of gold. Good evidence is composed of good evidence, not lots of bad evidence.

If the evidence is good, I’m easy to convince. Over the decades, I’ve absolutely changed my mind and accepted phenomena that I was certain were baloney. I didn’t believe in diamagnetism until I saw water suspended in a magnetic field at the Lawrence Berkeley labs. I didn’t believe the Judica-Cordiglia brothers could have made some of the space recordings they claimed until I learned about the controls that were in place during their recordings, and learned of some plausible explanations for the recordings. I spent 10 years fighting time dilation, claiming that there was no such thing, simply because I didn’t understand it, until I was finally illuminated. I’m not even ashamed to admit that NORAD’s Santa Claus radar reports had me reconsidering into my early teens.

But so far, I haven’t heard anything from Stan Friedman or any other true believer to encourage me to reconsider the null hypothesis on the Betty and Barney Hill story, or any other alien visitation claim. When something is real, it has properties that can be measured and detected. Even today, we can prove that the 1876 Battle of Little Big Horn took place, because we have the testable archeological proof; there is no reliance on anecdotal stories or hypnotic regression needed. I still await the first such testable shred of evidence of any alien visitation.

Stanton Friedman

A reader wrote me on Facebook that he was listening to the “Paranormal Podcast”, another of the usual promoters of nonsense inexplicably allowed to remain in the Science & Medicine section of iTunes. The guest was Stanton Friedman, the principal author of the Roswell, Travis Walton, and Betty & Barney Hill UFO mythologies. Anyway, at 25 minutes into the episode (#56, but don’t bother listening as it’s only a 15 second blurb), Stanton mentioned that he “came across a piece on the Internet” the other day that got “40 flat-out false claims” about the Betty and Barney Hill story, and added with a condescending chortle that he “couldn’t believe it.” It was the online transcript of my Skeptoid episode on that story.

The Paranormal Podcast host, Jim Harold, acknowledged that he had heard of Skeptoid. Of course you have Jim, because it’s kicking your ass in iTunes, probably much to your dismay.

Stanton was probably predisposed to have a problem with me. I’ve called him “an obsessed UFO wacko”, which I think is accurate. I grew up watching Stanton Friedman; he’s on just about every TV documentary about UFOs, and of course he wrote the most significant books inventing the most popular UFO stories. I used to listen to him in awe: The TV always said “nuclear physicist” under his name, so of course, anything he said had to be true. (I didn’t know that his real career, in fact his only career since 1970, was writing UFO books. I guess the TV producers feel that calling him a nuclear physicist gives him more credibility than calling a spade a spade and saying “Obsessed UFO Wacko”.)

I browsed through the transcript looking for 40 factual errors. This is a daunting task, because there aren’t more than 20 or 25 points made that you could call factual claims. Most of them either came from or are corroborated by Stanton Friedman’s own books. The facts of the case aren’t really in question, it’s the interpretation of the facts that are. Betty Hill spent two years writing a UFO story and sharing it with her husband, and then when asked about that story under hypnosis, Barney Hill was able to rattle it off pretty much as she wrote it. I say “Duh,” Stanton Friedman cries “Proof that aliens abducted them!”

If I thought he might care (which I don’t presume to), I would love to challenge Stanton to list even just 25 of the “40 flat-out false claims” I made, keeping in mind that virtually all the statements of fact I made are corroborated by his books. Not interpretations or innuendos, but statements of facts. Not that it’s a 40 minute drive from Ashland to Portsmouth, not a 45 minute drive, but substantive errors. He argues that I distorted the facts (my “false claims”) in order to discredit his fiction. This is an easy argument to make when you have an unchallenged platform on a podcast. An intelligent opponent would point out that the significant facts are not disputed, and that it’s the interpretation of the facts that makes all the difference.

He won’t accept this challenge, of course, mainly because he’s a successful author busy with book tours and UFO conventions, and I’m just one of many farts in the breeze of reason. Reason doesn’t pay, and since he’s more concerned with his bank account than with reason, he’s right to ignore piss-ant blogs like this. But it won’t be long before The Skeptologists are on his ass, and he’ll find that condescending chortles only take him so far.

Anyone can take a mundane newspaper headline and expand it into a dramatic fictional UFO abduction tale. If it’s done well, it will be gobbled up by an uncritical public. It’s those of us who caution against the folly of pseudoscience and faith in the supernatural who have the hard job.