Skepticblog

I have been saying for years that a) most UFOs are simply misidentified mundane phenomena (satellites, meteors, balloons, Venus, weird clouds, even the Moon) and that 2) if they were real, astronomers — who spend a lot more time looking at the sky than your average person — should be reporting most of them.

My musings on this have been twisted and distorted by UFO folks — shocker! — even though I’ve been pretty clear about what I would count as evidence. But now we may have a way to cut through the garbage. A new website has been started for professional and amateur astronomers to report Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. I rather like this new UAP acronym, since it avoids the UFO/flying saucer baggage. Anyway, it was set up as part of IYA 2009 to help astronomers report things in the sky they may not immediately understand. Better yet, it has links to handy guides that will help people who might otherwise misidentify normal things like sundogs and other weather phenomena.
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I’m a big fan of SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intellience) and I think their search program constitutes the best chance we have of making contact. In fact, on a recent Saturday I was rained out of my normal 4-hour bike ride, so I read SETI scientist Seth Shostak’s new book, Confessions of An Alien Hunter (published by National Geographic), a brilliant and fun read. Seth has a fantastic sense of humor and in his book he presents some of great one-liners to use when dealing with UFOlogists, alien abductees, and the saucerites. For example:

Regarding the time it would take to traverse the vast distances between the stars, which would be millions of years (it will take Voyager II 300,000 years to reach a nearby star), Shostak notes: “That’s a long time to be squirming in a coach seat.”

As for the lack of tangible evidence for UFOs Continue reading…

I was visiting my friend Jim (name changed to protect the embarrassed) when he happened to mention that for a few weeks now, his neighborhood had been receiving regular UFO visits.

At first I wasn’t sure if he was pulling my leg or what. I knew Jim to be a reasonable guy, not given over to the supernatural. Moreover, he was the UFOlogists’ favorite type of witness: A pilot. (Because, as we all know, pilots cannot be mistaken about anything seen in the sky.) But I also knew that Jim could be pretty darn stubborn once an idea got into his head. I realized he was quite serious, and from what he said, a lot of people in the neighborhood were equally serious about it. Well, quite obviously, I had to see it.

So he took me outside into the dark, and what a surreal experience that was. He simply said “Let’s go,” and had the mannerism of every expectation that we’d see the UFO. Like it’s always right there for the taking. Continue reading…

Mystery Lights on the Horizon

I live near Dana Point, a cozy little harbor town on the southern California coast, about halfway between San Diego and Los Angeles. It’s a hilly area and my wife and I often take walks at night, which we’ve been doing for at least five years. But it was only this past week that we finally asked the question “What the hell are those weird lights on the horizon, anyway???”

For as long as we’ve been here, looking out to sea, two brightly lit objects have been sitting on the horizon. We have a lot of shipping traffic here — a glance in that direction always reveals some big freighters on the horizon on their way in or out of Long Beach to the north. And we have our share of oil platforms, to say nothing of thousands and thousands of yachts. So a light out at sea is nothing to take much notice of. Continue reading…

The Mysterious Black Mailbox

Back in June of 2001, my friend John and my brother Todd and I thought it might be a swell lark to fly out to Area 51 and have a look around. Not that we expected to see alien spacecraft, but it’s always neat to visit such a pop culture icon, and I thought we had a reasonable expectation of seeing (or hearing) some new aircraft. Todd and John are both pilots so we rented a plane, and flew to Las Vegas.

It was too late the fly that day, so we rented a car and drove north to the site of the famous White Mailbox, which is all over the Internet. It’s white, but for some reason half of the people on the Internet call it the Black Mailbox. If an attraction lacks mystique on its own, give it a confounding name. That’ll draw the tourists.

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I had to laugh when I read fellow Skeptologist Brian Dunning’s article about the UFO True Believer™ Stan Friedman hating him. What an elite club! Friedman is no fan of me, either. A few years ago I wrote an article for Sky and Telescope magazine about UFOs, basically making the same claim I made here last week: if all these UFO sightings we hear about were real, the majority of them would be seen by amateur astronomers.

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It’s the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, I have to pack, write a dozen blog posts to hold over the
crowd that’s just one missed entry away from pitchforks and torches, do laundry (before packing, damn that arrow of time!), and go to my in-laws for dinner.

So please forgive me for this post which is essentially a link to another one I’ve written. But IMNSHO that you’ll like it. I was asked by Dave Mosher over at the Discovery Channel blog collective to write up my opinion on UFOs as part of their effort to support a program they’re airing about said objects. I agreed, partly because this is something I’ve wanted to write up a for a long time, it’s an important topic, and it’s a fun one. But I mostly agreed because I knew I could link to it from Skepticblog, my own blog, and maybe even Swift. Three alien birds with one logical stone! Spendthrift that I am, I couldn’t resist the opportunity.

So here’s the link to the full post about aliens, flying saucers, and which of these things is more likely to be real (hint: aliens). And here’s an excerpt so you don’t feel totally ripped off:

As far as aliens go, I suspect pretty strongly that there’s life in space. We know of over 300 planets orbiting other stars, and we’ve only just started looking. In our Milky Way Galaxy alone there are probably literally billions of planets. Life on Earth got started pretty rapidly, relatively speaking, after the crust cooled and liquid water formed, so we know it’s not tough for life to get its start… and it’s entirely possible there is microbial life inside icy moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn.

So thinking aliens exist has a pretty decent scientific basis. But them coming here is an entirely different beast.

Read the rest to see my devastating blow to believers in UFOs being spaceships carrying aliens coming here to eat our bovine anusi and squish our cereal harvest.

And have a happy Thanksgiving.