Doing The Paracast: Turnabout is Fair Play

by Karl Mamer

I put in a recent appearance on the August 30 episode of a podcast called The Paracast. The Paracast is a UFO-related podcast. Although we skeptics would classify it as a "woo" podcast, the hosts generally have their critical thinking ducks in a row. I reviewed the podcast for my brief Podcasting Without Pity feature here on The Amateur Scientist. In general, while the hosts (Gene Steinberg and David Biedny) tend to approach it from an angle we skeptics don't, they don't eat up everything shoveled at them. They know their guests are generally used to telling well-honed stories for the True Believers, and David and Gene ask some questions skeptics rarely get an opportunity to lob at the UFO "experiencers" ("So you say you were aboard a UFO for 10 hours? Why is it you never mention where went to the bathroom?").

The hosts Gene and David discovered my Podcasting Without Pity (PwP) review and asked me to be on their show. I readily agreed for many reasons. It's a podcast I enjoy, the hosts have good critical thinking skills, they're funny, and they coined one of my all-time favorite neologisms: "saucetard". In my PwP review I took a couple shots at them, and in private correspondence with the hosts I noted since I took a couple shots at them, I encouraged them to give me my lumps. I'm happy to dish it. And I'm happy to take it. The Amateur Scientist site is pretty ribald ("the dick jokes of skepticism") and my own Podcasting Without Pity feature picks up from there. What's important to remember, PwP is not meant to be taken as a voice of serious, sober skeptical debate. (This post, however, should be taken as such.)

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Anyway, I had a lot of fun doing the podcast. When they mentioned we'd go about 1.5 hours I was thinking "what am I going to talk about for 1.5 hours?" I poke in a bit on the UFO debate but it's not my area of expertise. When the hosts mentioned "okay, that was it", I was thinking "so soon?"

Although David and Gene are great critical thinkers, we approach the subject of UFOs from two different angles.

Their position I think can be summed up thusly:

Sure there's a lot of smoke, but it seems reasonable that there is some fire.

Mine is:

We know you can make smoke without fire. So why can't it all be smoke?

I think David and Gene's position is probably best thought of as Fortean. Charles Fort was noted for being skeptical of both sides.

The Debate

The UFO debate basically boils down to two hypotheses. While some large percentage of UFO sightings can be explained, there exist some that can't be explained by known entities and, therefore, a new entity needs to be introduced to science, typically alien visitors. Some hesitate to put their dime down on "alien visitors" and maintain what I consider a wishy-washy position akin to the Intelligent Design crowd's position about who the intelligent designer is. Of course IDers believe it's the god of the Christian Bible but they don't want to say it. For the sake of this post, I'm going with the space alien hypothesis but understand it can well stand for any kind of unknown entity. (David and Gene are certainly not wishy-washy types, and when they claim they're not willing to put their dime down, I honestly believe they're not willing to put their dime down.)

The other hypothesis, the one I tried to articulate on the show, is the Occam's Razor line:

Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.

Before we invent a new entity (space aliens) to explain UFO sightings (even ones that seem to have no ready explanation), we need good evidence that there exists a sighting that can't be explained by the known entities:

1) Lying

2) Fallible human perception

3) Fallible human memory

4) Hoax

Many UFO proponents tend to misuse Occam's Razor by using in its popular (yet improper) definition: the simplest explanation is the best. They will argue that instead of trying to explain the UFO phenomenon with a patchwork of hoaxes, optical illusions, car headlights, and people spewing pure bullshit, a much simpler explanation is at hand: space aliens. Of course they will admit most sightings can be explained by the four known entities, but they think there are some sightings that need to be explained by a fifth unknown entity.

Science is littered with examples of people who rushed to invent a new entity like N Rays, a human energy field, severe autistics who actually have impressive IQ when their communication is facilitated, or psychic horses before more prosaic explanations were offered and then tested by critics.

Let's consider the known entities:

Lying

Many UFO proponents typically argue the straw man that skeptics are saying UFO witnesses are all liars (neither Gene nor David raised this point, I should note). There are, certainly, liars in UFOlogy. I dare say all those early UFO abductees from the 1950s and 1960s who claimed they were flown to Venus/Mars/the Moon and shown a planet inhabited by an advanced civilization might have been fibbing. Just a li'l. Their stories are, of course, preposterous now that we've sent probes to Venus, Mars, the moon, etc.

Many times it is pointed out by UFO proponents that certain witnesses would never lie. They have too much to lose. Hence, a police officer, a pilot, or even an astronaut would never lie. To that I have to point out crypto-zoologists had a lot of egg on their face following a recent Bigfoot hoax perpetrated by a cop. Some crypto-zoologists assumed a cop would never risk his career in a silly and transparent lie. I speak of the recent case of a Georgia police officer who, along with his friend, threw a Bigfoot costume in a chest of ice and claimed they had captured a sasquatch. Many people who invested with Bernie Madoff rejected claims by critics who thought Madoff was running a pyramid scheme. Madoff was the former head of NASDAQ. There was no way such an esteemed financier would be running an age-old and unsophisticated scam.

Lies may not necessarily start out to be lies. Who of us does not take a true story and make it better in the retelling? And more it gets retold, more embellished the story gets. A Skeptoid episode on the Rendlesham Forest UFO makes the case that some of the witnesses have embellished their stories over the years. The Roswell myth is full of embellished stories. As I noted on my Conspiracy Skeptic podcast with guest Brett Spurr, when your community's main industry is the Roswell legend and your neighbor's job depends on it, it behooves you to "recall" certain details that lend credibility to the whole myth.

In religious circles this is called pious fraud. It's not unknown for a priest to fake a crying statue of Mary in an attempt to bring people back to the fold. Or there was the case several years ago of Hindu holy men suddenly in possession of milk-drinking statues of Hindu gods.

Human Perception

I remember once in my school days I was working part time at a self-serve gas station near a busy intersection. I witnessed a car accident. A cop was on scene and asked me what I saw. I reported what I saw. The cop noted that the position of the cars made it impossible for my account to be correct. Was I lying? No. Your brain has a funny way, at times, of reconstructing events, preferring to overlay a familiar narrative. It's akin to how conquering nations tend to paint their history as having brought civilization, medicine, and art to their conquered neighbors. But the conquered people have a rather different interpretation of what they got out of the invasion.

The problem with perception is that before we perceive something, the raw stimulus on our eyes passes through a marvel of brain functions that have evolved over time, sometimes in a very klugey way. We can't possibly take in and process all the data coming into our brain via our eyes and ears (primarily) so our brain has evolved certain short cuts that favor our survival. The classic example is jumping at shadows. If you mistake a shadow for a tiger, you look foolish but live another day. If you mistake a tiger for a shadow, you don't live long.

Wiki has a great list of cognitive biases that come into regular play in the whole panoply of human endeavors and experience. Science recognizes these biases. Science is, in fact, a method to eliminate cognitive bias and achieve a result that is clear to all.

Magicians, of course, have long known and made use of these mental shortcuts to fool us. Scientific American has a great article about Teller (of Penn & Teller fame) working with neuroscientists to establish them in the lab.

UFO proponents also like to claim certain witnesses are more capable witnesses because they are trained observers. Pilots, we are told, are trained observers, and their perception of aerial phenomena can be considered gold plated testimony.

Now, no doubt people trained in some disciplines can see things the untrained can't. When I look at a painting, I see dogs playing poker. When my artist friend looks at a painting, he sees techniques, mistakes, short cuts the artist took, etc.

But outside of a person's specific discipline, are they generally better witnesses? That's an easily testable claim in a lab condition. Richard Wiseman has fooled many "trained observers" with this simple card trick.

James Oberg, an expert on the Soviet space program and a former NASA rocket scientist, has made the point that pilots are not very good UFO witnesses as they are trained to over interpret aerial phenomena to keep a plane safe from collisions. To rephrase, if you mistake Venus for a small plane and take evasive action, you look foolish. If you mistake a small plane for Venus, you're dead.

The Skeptical Inquirer magazine also makes the point that however well trained a pilot is, he'd have to be trained in about a half dozen fields to make him truly an expert observer of aerial phenomena. A pilot would need to have detailed knowledge of the following domains:

Astronomy

Atmospheric science

Aeronautics

Physics

Physiology of Visual Illusions

Human Psychology

Visual Perception

Phil Plait, an astronomer who should know better, includes a story in his book Bad Astronomy of how he was fooled by a flock of ducks. Here is a story of how an astronomer was fooled by the moon. And here is another person thinking the moon was a UFO. If the moon and ducks can play tricks on even astronomers, why not pilots?

The trained observer claim is so central to UFOlogy (that pilots, say, are less likely to be fooled by things in the sky) I wonder why in all these decades no one in UFOlogy has ever tried to empirically demonstrate that claim. It seems common sense to some, but science has often demonstrated common sense is wrong. Relativity and quantum mechanics defy common sense. The Monty Hall Problem defies common sense as applied to probability. You don't, of course, have to write up the grant request like "we're trying to prove pilots can see space aliens!" This would be a study, I think, civil aviation would happy to fund. You want pilots to over interpret some threats, but you might not want them to over over interpret. A study that would help determine where to draw the line would be valuable.

Bottom line when anyone makes any claim about the supposed superior abilities of people in a given field, I say back it up empirically.

Memory

On the show we briefly touched on the idea of "flashbulb memory". Everyone knows where they were during 9/11. I showed my age, I think, by using the example of knowing where you were and what you were doing when John Lennon was shot. I was in my school's computer room, hunched over a Commodore PET computer. My flashbulb memory tells me I was playing a game called Nukewar. I will swear up n' down that I was playing Nukewar. But I could be wrong in that detail. An interesting study of flashbulb memory indicates our recall of details may not be as strong as we believe. As in all things involving human memory, our brain is selective about what it remembers, and we tend to fill in details that seem to comfortably complete the narrative. The researchers found that what distinguishes flashbulb memory from other memories isn't the accuracy but the level of certainty the person has in the accuracy. Of course, one can be certain about something, but wrong. I'm more certain of the details of what I did on 9/11 than two Saturdays ago, but research indicates this may not be the case.

Discover magazine has an excellent review of how, like perception bias, our memories are at times victims to the kludge nature of our brain. For example, there's evidence to indicate we alter our memories of events by recalling them. This would go a long way in explaining why key witnesses or secondary witnesses at Roswell seem to embellish the story over time.

It's easy to demonstrate that people can be made to remember things they never saw. For example, you give some people a list of random words and some a list of words of a similar theme like "bed night dream wake slumber yawn blanket clock rest calm tired". And then you test people if they remember seeing the word "breakfast" on their list. It's no surprise more people think they remember breakfast on the list of sleep related words than the random list. That's a very very simple example, of course. Researcher Elizabeth Loftus and others have done extensive research on how easy it is for humans to form false memories.

Many UFO stories, like Roswell, involve people trying to recollect events from several decades ago. Skeptoid does an excellent job of showing how the compelling testimony of Glenn Dennis about events that supposedly soon followed the alleged saucer crash were largely real events that happened over the space of several years. Dennis flattened out the time line and made real events that happened years after fit the established myth.

Hoaxes

The final known entity to consider is the flat out hoax. Crop circles, for example, are done by tricksters all the time. Floating Chinese lanterns are another favorite way to fool the sky watchers. Recently some hoaxers pulled off one over the town of Morristown, NJ. Some UFO researchers quite firmly declared this could not be a hoax.

Some UFO proponents claim hoaxes like crop circles are far too elaborate to be pulled off by humans. However, as the Museum of Hoaxes shows us, people will go to great lengths to hoax others for no other reason than for shits n' giggles. To wit, never underestimate what 3 clever second-year engineering students stressed out by studying can pull off on a Saturday night.

So, lies, human fallibility inherent in memory and perception, and hoaxes are part of the human experience, and it's silly to think they are not part of the UFO phenomenon. As I said, David and Gene acknowledge that. However, I think they would contend there are some cases that have not been well documented as a hoax, a lie, or a trick of perception/memory. I think they're careful enough that they don't then shout "it's a dine-in invasion by flesh eating reptoids!" but from their POV, it's compelling evidence there's an undiscovered entity out there. Keep watching the skies n' all.

Now, I would argue just because we cannot definitively explain an encounter by one of my known entities doesn't mean that it is not a result of one of my known entities. It can be the case there is simply not enough evidence to make a definitive explanation. Life is like that. There are plenty of plane crashes that never have a definitive explanation. We cannot then go "ah, they crashed into a UFO." A gap in our knowledge is just that. A gap. A gap is usually a good start for a hypothesis, but one doesn't simply plug a gap with a great just-so story and then walk away from the table. That's when the hard work begins in science.

Of course, when I can invoke "maybe the person was fooled by a hoax" it might seem a bit like creationists who can always invoke God to explain any breaches in their logic. The principle difference is the creationist has to invoke an unknown entity. A skeptic is merely asking a person with a UFO claim to reasonably eliminate known entities.

Science Can Resolve This

While it might strike some as ludicrous that a critic can always say "hoax", "lie," "false memory," "misidentification," etc, when you're proposing a new entity, you really do need to eliminate all possible objections. The guys who won a Nobel prize for discovering cosmic background radiation with their radio telescope had to methodically eliminate all possible known causes of an omni-directional signal before they could present a new entity. Someone suggested it could be bird droppings on their telescope. Instead of laughing off this objection or calling them ridiculous, they simply rolled up their sleeves, got some mops, and scrubbed out the bird poop. Every radical idea in science was met by a plethora of objections and objections over the minutest details. Einstein railed against quantum mechanics for a good long time, trying every trick in the book to demonstrate QM was fundamentally flawed. QM won the day and no one accused Einstein of being unreasonable. Good scientists, of course, first try to anticipate all the objections and control for those, but good scientists realize being too close to their own work they might miss something. It's important to get their peers to review their work and suggest alternatives they might have missed.

So in the debate, it would seem like we're at the beginning. If Gene and David present 20 accounts from astronauts and pilots seeing something in the skies or in space that they cannot identify, I'm still not going to accept a new entity. I need them to eliminate hoaxes et al. In science, when you have two camps who look at the same evidence and come away with different conclusions, those camps eventually come up with a definitive experiment that will resolve the issue. And it's not really that complicated in UFOlogy. Zoology has had the definitive experiment for a long, long time.

What UFO proponents are ultimately doing is proposing a new animal. Consider someone proposes there is a dinosaur in the Congo or the ivory billed woodpecker has not gone extinct. The evidence consists of eye witness accounts by very reasonable biologist. In biology, however, eyewitness accounts are not good enough. The only evidence you can offer to get your hypothesized creature into the taxonomy is bringing in a body. Of course with space aliens, it doesn't have to be a body. It could as easily be a hunk of metal from a UFO. A hunk of metal from another planet would be easy to determine based on different isotopes. So, there is no animal in the Great Book of All Knowledge that has got an entry without a person first bringing in a body (living or dead). Some UFO believers don't want to play by the rules, because science is hard. Real hard. They want to be given a pass. Space aliens are too smart for our shotguns. UFOs never drop a nut or bolt. We do have bodies and space ships, but there's a powerful conspiracy that has managed to keep it all out of our hands for five decades. The excuses are never ending and seem to be about insulating a belief from falsification.

Are Skeptics Fundies?

At some point during the debate, David suggested I was being like a fundamental religious person (one of the lumps I asked them to whack me with). The analogy is poor because a skeptic and a fundamentalist Christian (or any other fundamentalist religious believer) approach a claim from two different positions. A Christian might reject evolution because if evolution were true (which it is), it means his religious belief in a literal Genesis account is false. Since everything he believes in morally flows from that, he cannot abide contrary evidence. More importantly, a Christian can never articulate what level of evidence it would take to falsify his belief.

On the other hand, most skeptics I know (including me), would welcome solid evidence of space aliens (like a body or saucer tech). Holy cats, that's an egg on my face I would happily wear. And skeptics can easily articulate our goal post. I would be bouncing off the walls ecstatic if someone published in Nature a paper calling a strange IC found in a person's abdomen of alien manufacture. I personally can't imagine a Christian being particularly happy if it was proven Jesus' mummified corpse was found in the basement of the Vatican.

A better example of a true "skeptic" who actually is a fundamentalist is an HIV "skeptic" I was arguing with. He claimed HIV had never been isolated. He suggested if this claim were true, someone should have won a Nobel prize for it. A few months later Luc Montagnier was awarded a Nobel prize for ... the discovery of HIV. When I pointed out his goal post had been met, he tried to argue the Nobel prize wasn't awarded for HIV isolation. Errr. No. The Nobel prize was. They were awarded the Nobel on the strength of their paper "Isolation of a T-Lymphotropic Retrovirus from a Patient at Risk for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome". You can't get much more goal post-y than that.

Anyway, in each of my podcasts I take care to lay out exactly what would falsify my belief that the conspiracy doesn't exist. Again, that's what any open minded scientist would do, not what a person holding tightly to a religious view would do.

The other lump, which I thought quite clever, was the suggestion that if I were alive in the 19th century, I would be the kind of person denying people are made of atoms. (I think this was posed after I quipped "I'll believe it when I see it.") I didn't quite get to answer, because I first had to back up and establish a point about how science is a long chain of answering the question "how do we know that?" The answer is, of course, yes. Because at that point there was no evidence of atoms. I would have been a person saying "Hmmm an interesting idea, and it would be cool, but you have no evidence that these atoms exist. Come back to me when you do. Until then I will not form a belief." I would also, of course, be the person who didn't believe in a succubus or witches. Skeptics do not reject anything, they simply want a good chain of evidence.

Three Best Cases

Over the course of the show Gene and David presented me with what they felt (or I think they felt) were their three best UFO cases:

1) Astronaut Gordon Cooper's sighting

2) Kelly "Skunkworks" Johnson's UFO sighting

3) The Skylab 3 sighting

I think they were disappointed I didn't have much technical knowledge of these cases and it would have made for a far more interesting show if they had mentioned they would grill me on these cases before we cracked open some mikes. I certainly would have prepared. The show probably took a pretty boring turn at that point when I had to repeat basically for each case name/rank/serial number. If I were investigating these cases, I'd first want to eliminate things like hoax and failures of perception. I did promise I would look into them and get back to them.

Hence after about 9 pages of introduction, that's what I'm doing now. Getting back to them about their three UFO cases.

Let's take them in order.

Cooper's Sighting

The late Gordon Cooper was one of the original Mercury astronauts. He was a pretty firm believer in UFOs and ETs. Let me quote Wiki on the Cooper sighting:

In 1957, when Cooper was 30 and a captain, he was assigned to Fighter Section of the Experimental Flight Test Engineering Division at Edwards Air Force Base in California. He acted as a test pilot and project manager. On May 3 of that year, he had a crew setting up an Askania-camera precision landing system on a dry lake bed. This camera system would take pictures at one frame per second as an aircraft landed. The crew consisted of James Bittick and Jack Gettys who began work at the site just before 0800, using both still and motion picture cameras. According to his accounts, later that morning they returned to report to Cooper that they saw a "strange-looking saucer" like aircraft that did not make a sound either on landing or take off.

According to his accounts, Cooper realized that these men, who on a regular basis have seen experimental aircraft flying and landing around them as part of their job of filming those aircraft, were clearly worked up and unnerved. They explained how the saucer hovered over them, landed 50 yards away from them using three extended landing gears and then took off as they approached for a closer look. Being photographers with cameras in hand, they of course shot images with 35mm and 4-by-5 still cameras as well as motion film.

The Wiki account seems to differ with the account presented to me on the podcast. The hosts claimed Cooper witnessed a craft land in front of him and his crew, extend landing pads, and then zip away. Oddly, the Wiki page makes no mention of Cooper having seen the vehicle, only Cooper reporting something second hand.

But let's assume Cooper did claim to have seen something. So, Cooper sees something unusual in the skies at an experimental flight test airbase? You don't say. On the podcast I suggested it might be a VTOL type craft. The hosts pointed out Cooper said the craft made no sound. A Harrier jump jet, of course, would make a lot of sound.

James Oberg (the former space historian noted previously) has researched the Cooper UFO sighting quite a bit. You'll find his extensive report here.

While Cooper claims to have seen the craft touch down, his co-witness Gettys has a different take:

"I am amazed that Gordon Cooper said the object landed -- as far as I know, he never even saw it.... His story sounds kind of funny to me."

Hmmm. Who to believe? Why should we believe Cooper's account anymore so than Gettys'?

There appear to be even more problems and inconsistencies with Cooper's account and Gettys'.

[Cooper's] claim to have been the boss of the cameramen (Bittick and Gettys) was disputed by Gettys and by the man who was Cooper's boss at the time, as well as by the young AF officer who documented the case for Blue Book. The UFO drifted slowly past the cameramen's position, never extended legs, never landed, never soared out of sight. A thoroughly documented prosaic explanation for the sighting (in May 1957, not '1955') was found and published soon after the event. The report (Case #4715) and all the film wound up in the Blue Book files where any competent and honest researcher could have accessed them.

In one interview (with Omni magazine) Cooper disavows seeing the thing in the first place:

"I'd just as soon not get into the Edwards incident. I didn't get to see anything personally, it was all second hand evidence really."

This page seems to indicate Cooper didn't witness the UFO itself but supposedly saw a film of it.

Well, who knows what he saw and how he was able to judge size, speed, etc. in potentially grainy footage filmed from who knows what perspective. Like, you know the actor who played Frodo wasn't actually 3' tall. He only appeared smaller than Gandalf by using forced perspective. And were movie cameras used to film landings rigged to record sound? I would imagine it would be an unnecessary expense to buy and process sound recording film. Assuming silent film footage, I have no clue why the claim that the vehicle made no sound is an extraordinary claim.

The sighting was filed with Project Blue book and investigated. It was thought to be a weather balloon known to be passing Cooper's position at the time. Weather balloons have fooled many experienced pilots and military men. And they're quite silent. Against a sky that doesn't let you judge scale, it can appear to be doing any kind of odd maneuver your brain sees fit to interpret.

So it would appear there is a known entity, there are two conflicting versions of events, and Cooper's account isn't backed up by a co-witness. His only role in being an eye witness is a claim to have seen film footage that's rather conveniently disappeared.

On the podcast, David wondered what Cooper's motivation would be. The implication is an astronaut has a lot to lose. However, it's quite reasonable that Cooper, a firm believer in UFOs, is years after the fact recalling a story told to him. As Oberg points out, he's embellished his story over the years and he seems to have a big motivation for telling tall UFO tails.

A couple select quotes from the two Oberg PDFs I've linked to above:

Quote 1:

A plausible hypothesis might be that he enjoyed visiting UFO conventions and talk shows, and liked the reception his stories got. He didn't have many other people who wanted to see him, by then -- he'd burned all his bridges to NASA and to the space community after naively campaigning on behalf of a number of aviation industry scams that cost people more than two million dollars. He lost his own money, too -- he wasn't one of the fakers, just their tool -- and victim, too.

Quote 2:

By some lucky breaks, I was able to locate the cameramen, the officer who did the interviews for Project Blue Book, and the base historian, who confirmed that the landing of the object was a wide rumor at the time. But the films -- which are still in the Blue Book files and can be found by any investigator -- only show the object drifting slowly, right along with the wind, and leading directly away from the site where it had been inflated and released by a weather station a few minutes earlier. And the cameramen, still believing it was unexplainable, were astonished to hear from me that Gordon Cooper had even been on the base at the time -- they hadn't known it, and they were sure he hadn't been their boss.

Sorry, given all that, the null hypothesis should not be thrown out quite yet on the Cooper case.

Kelly Johnson's UFO sighting

I've read quite a bit about Kelly Johnson. He's the legendary genius behind the Skunk Works, the U2 spy plane, and the SR-71 "Blackbird" spy plane. Again another "trained observer" who should have no reason to lie and with some supposed expertise in watching the skies. As David and Gene explained it on the podcast, Johnson and another group of witnesses some distance away saw a large object doing the typical amazing aerial maneuvers (hovering and then zipping away at what appears to be high speed). The two groups were able to triangulate the position of the UFO. I was told by the hosts that Kelly Johnson himself calculated the UFO zipped away at hundreds of Gs of acceleration.

Based on my research I can find no official claim from Johnson about the G calculation other than a UFO documentary that aired on Canada's Space channel. The documentary offers no expert witness who can vouch for that figure. Sounds cool but someone could have just as likely pulled it out of their ass for a nice TV sound bite.

Take a look at a cloud in the sky. Do you have any idea how far away that cloud is? How big it is? And think about how hard it is to judge speed. I used to work in an office across from a runway at Toronto's airport. Once one of those huge huge huge ass Russian cargo planes was taxiing to take off. The 737 before it just tore up that runway and blazed away into the sky. When the Russian cargo plane was cleared for take off, it looked like I could have outpaced it in a quick jog. You swore the thing was moving at 10 mph. At the last second it appeared to just leap into the air.

What was going on? Well, when you don't have good visual cues and you're comparing smaller objects moving to large objects moving, the smaller object always seems to be going faster. You might have seen this at an airshow. A little jet just zips through the air while a B52 seems to lumber. Both are likely flying at the same airspeed but your eye has only one clue to determine speed: how quickly does the object cover its own length in distance. An F16 going at the same speed as a B52 covers its own smaller length a lot quicker. Hence it appears to be going faster.

The sighting was filed with Project Bluebook and it was concluded the sighting was most likely a lenticular cloud. David suggest since they reported a black object and lenticular clouds cannot be black, the cloud hypothesis is incorrect. This lenticular cloud is identified as "black". So it would appear it's possible. Here are a couple more. Blue Book ruled thusly "First appeared as a black stationary cloud, then rapid movement in long shallow climb."

This site has a good write up although it claims the weather conditions for that day do not support the cloud hypothesis. Beyond merely stating this as true, the site provides no back up for that claim.

Sklyab 3

I believe Gene and David explained this one to me as Skylab 3's astronaut Owen Garriott (if that last name sounds familiar it's because he's the father of Lord British aka Richard Garriott) saw a massive UFO in orbit, which he calculated to be something like 1,000 feet long. No space agency puts up craft 1,000 feet long (at least not in one piece) so therefore what could it be? *wink* *wink*

I wondered at the time if Garriott had seen (and apparently photographed) such a huge object in orbit, as a scientist, why he didn't write it up and submit it to an appropriate scientific journal. Garriott is, after all, a legit scientist who specialized in the ionosphere. Finding something big in the ionosphere is kind right up his alley. He understands things like publishing and peer review. David and Gene suggested he didn't publish because he wanted to keep on being an astronaut. Well, as the two cases above show, Cooper was able to report a UFO and got to be one of America's first astronauts. Johnson reported a UFO and went on record early in his career as believing in UFOs and he got put in charge of some of America's most secret aircraft. Heck, Jimmy Carter reported a UFO and he got to be president. It doesn't strike me as being a career limiting move necessarily.

I noted too on the show that you don't have to go running around screaming the Mayan sky gods have returned. Scientists are extremely careful in what they claim. For example, Einstein published relativity (one of the most paradigm busting concepts ever) under the relatively (ha) staid title "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies".

A man who straps himself onto a Saturn rocket I can't believe is then so pussy as not to write up something he found rather amazing in space for an appropriate scientific journal.

Researching the Skylab 3 UFO, despite David's claim Garriott claimed to have seen/calculated an 800-1000' object I can find no claims by Garriott about the size of the object. When he photographed it he thought he was looking at a large reddish satellite. Others have, however, interpreted Garriott's photographic anomaly as being a giant object in space, notably UFO researcher Bruce Maccabee. He published his own analysis here. He publishes it along with co-author Brad Sparks.

Based on Maccabee's assumptions, he calculates the object to be over 336 feet ("or more"). That's not quite 1,000 feet mentioned to me in the podcast but still no one launches mere satellites of that size. (It could be I'm not reading his analysis correctly, however.) The only mention I can find about its size using the 1000' figure is by co-author Sparks who claims it to be 800-1000 feet for the Space channel "documentary".

James Oberg (that guy again) is not impressed by Maccabee's calculations. If one assumes the bulk of the image is camera fault, then it's well within a conventional satellite dimensions. If you examine the photos, the first three are a small point of light. The last is this weird Y-chromosome shaped thing. I don't know why the last can't be a point of light stretched by camera motion on the final photo. The NASA photo index (see link below) of the mission photos itself lists two blurred photos before the "UFO" photos and one blurred photo after. The Skylab crew basically shot with a hand held camera using a telephoto lens pointed at a porthole window. They were shooting in a low light situation. Garriott took several shots and might have been using a technique called "bracketing". You shoot at least one shot at a slower shutter speed than the camera might recommend in case the recommended shutter speed is incorrect. A slower shutter speed, of course, means it's more likely to be subject to motion blur. Note as well the Y-chromosome shot is brighter than the others, well in keeping with a shot using a longer exposure time.

Garriot's initial assessment of the object was it was a satellite. NASA as well identifies the images of being a satellite in its own index of photos from the mission (see page 41 images 2138-2141). This isn't even a UFO, as it's been identified by NASA as a satellite. Of course Maccabee's page argues it couldn't be a satellite. But then I've seen nothing that indicates Garriott has changed his mind or even believes it is now unidentified. I'm sure Garriott has been made aware of Maccabee's claims. I find it hard to believe an atmospheric scientist like Garriott, someone who should be able to understand when something very big and very out of place is zipping above the atmosphere he's dedicated his career to studying, would still stick to his satellite assessment if Maccabee's findings were so compelling.

Finally back in the time of Skylab 3, no one knew about "sprites" and "elves", which are not what they sound like. They describe large scale red-colored electrical discharges. These high atmosphere electrical blobs were not discovered until 1989. Check out the picture on Wiki. If you didn't know about sprites and elves you might think you had photographed a classic mothership. I don't think the Skylab 3 photo is an elf or sprite. I think the Skylab photographs represent several seconds of time and electrical discharges of this type appear to last less than a second. The point I'm making, however, is as lay people, you might be mighty impressed by a photo of a sprite and think you're looking at something solid, real, and unexplainable.

But, I dunno, maybe Maccabee's assumptions are correct. This is why peer review is so important. Instead of publishing his findings on a web site in an oddly unreadable font, why doesn't he submit it to a journal? Maccabee has a Ph.D. in physics. He must be familiar with how science is done. Maccabee makes no UFO claim or even a claim it's a solid object. Maybe he's discovered a new atmospheric phenomenon like a sprite or elf. If his assumptions are correct, he robs real science of scientific thought where they look for it the most: in the published literature.

As I've noted before in my Conspiracy Skeptic podcast on the "Big Science" conspiracy, science does provide scientists venues to present controversial research. Real scientists do this all the time. When a real scientist suddenly sidesteps the peer review process and takes his research straight to the public, to me that's a huge red flag. It's a bit like Steven E. Jones, a former legit physics professor who keeps taking his thermite claims about 9/11 to the public instead of submitting to a legit journal or presenting before a scientific conference of his peers. At scientific conferences, notably, anyone who is a member of the society is generally allowed to present any research without peer review. Scientific conferences are generally places where scientist present their ideas and get other scientists to pick them apart before they attempt to write up a formal paper for submission. Jones, however, has not even done that but instead either takes his thermite claims directly to 9/11 "truthers" or publishes in low grade "pay for play" vanity journals that claim "peer review" but will pretty much publish anything as long as you pay the fee. (The journal publisher who accepted Jones' thermite paper recently accepted a nonsense paper created by a computer script.)

Conclusion

We've got three "best cases" (or three "good cases") but even a cursory investigation shows plausible alternatives. Whatever is behind these cases, the onus is always on the person making the claim that there exists a new entity to provide compelling evidence the new entity exists and empirically eliminate other explanations. Simply not having a ready explanation does not allow one to logically invoke a new entity. I would welcome hard evidence of space aliens visiting earth. Until such time, space aliens are not on my list of things that exist. I don't believe in them but I don't disbelieve.

Dr. Steve Novella of the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe podcast once commented that parapsychologists and skeptical scientists both look at the same data for ESP but come away with very different conclusions. Parapsychologists find the results compelling evidence for ESP. Skeptical scientists don't. Parapsychologists rarely ask themselves why skeptics don't find the data compelling, preferring to believe skeptics are afraid of the implications, have a religious devotion to the ruling paradigm etc. (all the while ignoring skeptics saying quite openly they would LOVE compelling evidence for ESP). Skeptical scientists will say with complete honesty they just don't see particularly significant results: small effect sizes over thousands of trials, difficultly in replicating other's positive results, when you tighten up the controls the effect goes away or approaches chance. They're not being closed minded. They're just trying to keep people from wasting time on the equivalent of N Rays.

The same goes for the UFO debate. UFO believers see cases like Skylab or Cooper's "sighting" as compelling evidence for the existence of UFOs. Skeptics such as myself see anecdotal evidence. As the maxim goes, the plural of anecdote is anecdotes, not data.

All in all, I'm grateful to Gene and David for a chance to express my views and have my views challenged by two podcasters with great critical thinking chops. I hope they'll have me on again so we can debate the merits of these cases further.

Karl Mamer is host of The Conspiracy Skeptic podcast, a 12 part look at conspiracies of today and the not too distant past. Karl is also the world's greatest living proponent of Franglais. He also likes to bait Nigerian Bank Scammers and hosted his own podcast about teaching English in Seoul, South Korea. Karl lives in Toronto, Canada and works as a senior technical writer to pay the bills.

The Michael Jackson Resurrection Index

by Karl Mamer

On a recent installment of The Amateur Scientist Podcast, Brian and Bob "raised" the "specter" that we should not grieve over Michael Jackson's passing as he was possibly going to rise from the dead Real Soon Now. Like many people expecting the Prince of Pop to return from the dead, I'd like it to happen sooner than later. And I would like some advanced warning so I can prepare an appropriate garden party and get attendance confirmation from A-list friends before my A-list friends accept other invites to Michael Jackson resurrection garden parties.

To this end, I've created the Michael Jackson Resurrection Index, a scientifically valid metric for determining how close Michael is to returning to us from beyond the grave.

Positive Indicators

Positive Indicators increase the likelihood of Michael's return. Positive indicators include things like sightings of Michael (corporeal or non-corporeal versions of him), miracles or healings attributed to Michael's intersession, events in Michael's life (pre- and post-death) that mirror the life of Christ, and events that generally create an atmosphere conducive to Michael's return (e.g., The Wiz has been released on Blu-Ray).

Below are the Positive Indicator categories:

Ghost Sightings

Flesh Sightings (including sightings of Michael in drive-thrus or working in a German Walmart)

Jackson-Christ Parallels

It's Not Pareidolia (Michael's image inexplicably appears on the side of buildings or bread products)

Miscellaneous Occult Occurrences (includes lycanthropy)

Healings

Other Miracles (lost wedding rings are found, Diana Ross makes a career comeback)

Advances in Plastic Surgery

Jackson-related UFOs

Profit (anything that might make Jackson richer if he returned from the dead)

Negative Indicators

Negative Indicators decrease the likelihood of Michael's return. Negative indicators include things like burial plans that make it difficult for Michael to resurrect via occult means (spells, yogic flying) or events that create an atmosphere that impedes Michael's return (Bubbles the chimp attacks and grossly disfigures his trainer).

Below are the Negative Indicator categories:

Man/Boy Love Vilification (plus other indicators that ruin the magic of childhood)

Joe Jackson (includes his attempts to thwart Michael's funeral plans)

Deaths (deaths of Michael Jackson friends, supporters, and known sympathizers)

Negative Market Forces (anything that might impact a living Michael Jackson's bottom line)

When Animals Attack (stories of some of Michael's favorite animal pals attacking adults and children)

Bad Times for Disney (The death of Captain Eo and other Michael-negative Disney stories)

CURRENT MICHAEL JACKSON RESURRECTION INDEX

Positive Indicators

Since we can assume The Tholian Web episode of ST:TOS is a true depiction of metaphysical reality, we can then assume reports of Michael Jackson's ghost at Neverland are his attempts to cross back over. He is risen, real soon now.

The Bigfoot-Michael Jackson link.
And there's an Uri Geller connection.

Michael Jackson cures a boy of some unnamed medical condition that some unnamed doctors said he would only have a 50/50 chance of recovering from.

I would like to point out this lyrics site offers Michael Jackson's #1 Billie Jean song as a "related" tune to the lyrics page for Alphaville's Miracle Healing. I believe most lyrics from the 1980s were secretly written to warn this generation that the evolution of a new enlightened cosmic consciousness could be sidetracked unless .... unless ... unless something or another. Stay tuned.

The UFO-Michael Jackson link.

Michael Jackson memorial ratings: 31 million watch.

I have this as a positive indicator. Some closed-minded skeptics have commented that ratings were lower than expected. Obama (who has never had even a single number one song) got higher ratings for his inauguration, for example. However, that nearly 31 million people gave up time in their day to watch the cold corpse of Michael just lying there in his coffin and the coffin not even moving rhythmically to the musical stylings of Stevie Wonder, I think that bodes well for Michael's eventual Resurrection Day celebration, where he will not only be dancing and singing but likely flying and shooting rainbows from his eye sockets.

Total Positive: 7

Negative Indicators

Yahoo News brings us this headline (to no one's surprise): "Michael Jackson gets more bizarre after death".

"Bizarre in life, Michael Jackson's complex personal affairs are taking even stranger twists in death, with sketchy reports on Tuesday of plans for an elaborate public memorial and questions over the parentage of his children.

Celebrity website TMZ.com, which broke the news of Jackson's death, reported the entertainer was not the biological father of his three children and that his ex-wife, Debbie Rowe, was not the genetic mother of the eldest two."

"'Endless' supply of music in Jackson's vaults".

Given whoever controls the Jackson estate can be living high off the hog for decades, if not centuries, releasing endless "best of" CDs that include a single new track from this vault, it might be in their best interest to place a silver stake through Jackson's heart, dump him in a edelweiss lined coffin, cut his head off, stuff his mouth with belladonna, and bury him where two rivers meet to ensure any occult form of resurrection does not take place.

Total Negative: 2

MJRI (positive - negative): 5

Endtime Youth Corps Podcasts

by Karl Mamer

Next up fans of Podcasting Without Pity (are there any fans?) we have the Endtime Youth Corps Podcast. EYCP for short, which makes it sound like they're a Korean all boy hip hop band ("an nyong yo yo ma chingus, EYCP in da house. Word to yo halmoni!"). And sure enough their theme music sounds a lot like what Asians think American hip hop sounds like. Christian gangster hip hop banged out on a Radio Shack keyboard. Oh man. Nothing is more pathetic than when religion types try to take on the trappings of the youth culture to appear all hip 'n' cool and, like, testifying about the Lord is no big thang, yo. It's just another thing the cool kids are doing these days like under age drinking and sex on the hood of your dad's Volvo after a high school football game with a cheerleader you got drunk on half a bottle of Boone's Strawberry Hill.

I remember back in university the local head of the Campus Crusade for Christ (I'll call him "Ted") tried to convert our campus paper's outspoken atheist editor (I'll call him "Larry"). Ted had his little "playbook". Ted's playbook told him to find something the "mark" really likes and then claim Jesus was into that as well. Ted decided our editor liked to party. Par-tay. So he decided that would be the thin edge of the wedge to drive Jesus into our editor's heart.

Ted sidled up to Larry and asked "So, Larry, I hear you like to par-tay."

"Errr, sure, Ted."

"You know, Larry, Jesus liked to par-tay too."

"I was not aware."

"Sure thing. After all Jesus turned water into wine at a wedding to keep the par-tay going."

"Ted, if Jesus really liked to party he would have turned the water in to Jägermeister."

In my day (the 1970s), religion was out to convert the hippies. And nothing will turn you off organized religion quicker than hearing a priest say "hey, man, come by my pad sometime and we'll rap about Christ Jesus."


As a young boy, scenes like this were repeated daily outside my window

Right. So after about a mercifully short 30 seconds of their Christian hip hop signature tune (which seems to end on a very short sampling of the guitar in Scientologist Beck's "Loser"), the hosts Jessie and Vince intro themselves. Jessie, who uses "dude" a lot, announces it's raining and he's sad. So, a bit of funk music to get the hip hop crowd, now some emo funk to get the shoe gazers. I can't wait to hear what their hook is for the metal crowd. Lee Aaron has become born again?

CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST...




Jessie's next hook is talking about this great new thing called MySpace and how he's got to get himself an account. I'll note here the show I downloaded was from September 9, 2008. Tune back in 2012 when he discovers Facebook and SuperPoke.

Jessie then introduces the show's topic: Protestants who believe in Calvinist-type predestination are wrong. There is a rich irony about a man complaining about the error of believing in predestination when he hosts a podcast about the predestined end times. Goodness.

Jessie gets Vince, who has done about dick all so far, to read a wiki page or something on predestination. Jessie could not have gotten a worse person to do it as Vince reveals he has a hard time reading even simple words in the English language. Ah, another triumph of home schooling. Vince's jumbled, stoner-like reading prompts Jessie to rephrase by throwing out a rhetorical question about one sect's belief that an all-loving god is picking and choosing from the outset who is going to heaven and who is going to hell ("and there's nothing you can do about it!"). Jessie never bothers to question his own brand, where an-all loving god from the outset has picked which generation is going to see 1/3 of the earth's population horribly killed during the end times (and there's nothing you can do about that either!).

After about only four minutes into this podcast we go to a "commercial". I love podcasts that have commercials which are just promos for themselves. The funky theme music from the top of the show (plus the Beck guitar riff) plays us out. We then hear a promo for their magazine, which opens with the "One small step for *static* man" quote from Neil Armstrong. It's really disturbing that all this science, all this engineering, just amounts to a sound bite for a bunch of end times creationist podcasters who think the world is only 6,000 years old.

Anyway the promo is for their magazine. The hosts are doubled over with excitement about the cover for their latest End Times Magazine. The cover features, get this, a real live photo of two real live homosexualists getting married by a liberal pro-homosexualist priest! Nothing heralds the final days when two humans want to publicly declare their commitment to a monogamous loving relationship. The End Times boys are so excited about this cover photo you'd swear they thought they had a clear, well-lit photo of Bigfoot stepping off of JHVH-1's UFO. In the promo segment Jessie asks someone named Jason how a person might go about sending out copies of this issue with their exciting landmark homoerotic cover to their pastor or their church (Yeah, throw those in the pews and start a great Sunday morning convo like "Mommy, why are two bare-assed men in white leather chaps kissing in front of a priest?"). Jason breaks it down real simple like. Send us money. More money, more copies they'll send you. Jason suggests you buy them by the truckload and then, for some reason I'll never figure out, we hear a cow mooing before Jason can answer. But not one of those placid "moo, food is in my feed bucket" moos but more like one of those "moo, something fist-sized has been inserted into my rectum" moos. You know the kind of moo.

After the promo we're treated to a reprise of the Christian hip hop intro tune. Oh joy. The hosts remind us of the topic: why another Christian sect's ideas about predestination are all wrong 'n' shit. Jessie gets all logical, asking Vince what kind of god would condemn you to hell despite a lifetime of good works? Yeah. And what kind of god lets 10-year olds get bone cancer? Vince manages a "not really" before Jessie cuts him off. I'm noticing a trend in these woo podcasts. With the exception so far of the Paracast, there's always a dom and a sub. One guy does most of the talking and the other guy just says "pie" a lot.

Anyway, Jessie rambles on about the illogic of predestination, still oblivious to the theme of his own podcast. Jessie notes that god wants all men to be saved. He doesn't actually want to send people to hell. Now you would think what god wants, god can get. I want the cute short-haired redhead working behind the counter at the Starbucks where I'm currently banging this Podcasting Without Pity into my laptop. But I lack the power and ability. Guys who spend Saturday nights alone in Starbucks with a laptop oddly lack the magical power of getting any mega cute short-haired redhead of their choosing. However, I want a sip of the Gold Coast tall drip I ordered and I have the amazing, awesome power to make that happen. I can take firm, decisive hold of the pansy sleeve wrapping my Starbucks paper cup with some pithy "The Way I See It" saying and raise it to my lips and drink. But I mean god, the omnipotent ruler of heaven and earth, could have any Starbucks barista of his choosing. If true, then it's not an unreasonable jump in logic to believe god could certainly make it so even men with free will could make it to heaven. While I'm sure there are ways a mere mortal couldn't even contemplate, I can think of one easy way: just let humans live to be nearly immortal. Once they accept god and Jesus as their personal savior there's the quickening, Christopher Lambert appears out of the clouds, and cuts their head off. But those that don't manage this just keep on plugging along until they figure it out. You know?

Jessie calls upon Calvinists to call in and explain their stupid ideas to him. He notes Calvinist predestination and evangelizing are logically incompatible. Why preach to people who might be destined to go to hell? Seems to me the simple answer to Jessie's question is this: that's why you don't get a lot of Calvinists banging on your door 9am on a Sunday. I'll take those assholes over an asshole that can't leave you in peace on your day off.

Jessie calls on Vince to read something about St. Augustine and John Calvin. Vince again blows his lines. Jessie then goes on a long diatribe about the biblical passages Calvinists use to support their whacked idea of predestination. Jessie smugly notes Calvinist are really just a cult, doing what cults do best, cherry picking biblical passages and then twisting them to say whatever the hell you want them to say. Again, rich irony from a guy who cherry picks the Book of Revelation to determine they're living in the end times.

Hmmm. Oddly, no Calvinist has called in yet.

Jessie notes if you're a Calvinist you could just walk away from god, being you're already one of the elect. He seems to have missed the fact Calvinists don't know who is elect until they die. I believe that's why they work so hard and follow such a strict moral code: it's the only way they can get a hint whether or not they're elect. If they're elect they'll be financially successful and lead a moral life. If they're not elect they'll fuck up sometime before they kick the bucket.

Vince then helpfully notes this whole thing is just like the terrorists who flew airplanes into the World Trade Center. Does Vince think Calvinists were at the sticks of those planes?

Jessie then pulls the "some of my best friends are black" routine. Don't get him wrong, eh. He says he knows a lot of Calvinists and they're a very kind people. A very musical people.

Jessie sums up that he just doesn't think god operates in the way Calvinists think god operates. After all, he argues, Hitler could get into heaven under a Calvinist system. Errr. But couldn't Hitler also get into heaven if he accepted Jesus as his personal savior two seconds before the end? Couldn't Hilter get into heaven if he confessed the sin of genocide to his local Catholic priest? Geez. At least a Calvinist would argue there's no way in hell Hitler was one of the elect based on his track record of death and destruction. I'll take a religion that says Hitler is doomed no matter how much he tries to make up for it after the fact over a religion that's going to give him a get out jail free card if he just intones some magic words.

Jessie closes out by reading a passage from Ezekiel. He's the guy who saw the UFO, eh? The relevance of the passage to the episode's topic escapes me.

Update on my prediction of an impending Nov 1, 2008 attack on New York by a giant lobster

If you will recall, in my September 3, 2008 installment of Podcasting Without Pity I made this
bold prediction:

People, unless you change your ways [in some nebulous, ill-defined fashion], New York is oing to be devastated by a giant marauding lobster on November 1, 2008! Mark my words! Act now!

I'm quite happy to say I predicted accurately people were going to change their ways and head off (for now) a merciless attack by a giant lobster on the good and fair people of New York.

Clearly the death of Studs Terkel on October 31, 2008 and the many, many warm
tributes from all across America convinced the giant lobster to suspend his rampage through the streets of New York.

But I warn you, the giant lobster has only suspended his plan to smite New York. To find out how to delay future retribution, consider buying my soon-to-be-released book How to Avoid the Total Devastation of Your City by Giant Lobster Attack and Related Calamities. Makes a great Christmas or Festivus gift.

Karl Mamer is host of The Conspiracy Skeptic podcast, a 12 part look at conspiracies of today and the not too distant past. Karl is also the world's greatest living proponent of Franglais. He also likes to bait Nigerian Bank Scammers and hosted his own podcast about teaching English in Seoul, South Korea. Karl lives in Toronto, Canada and works as a senior technical writer to pay the bills.

I Am a Course in Miracles

by Karl Mamer

Alright, I'm back with another Podcasting Without Pity, wherein your intrepid skeptical podcast listener finds a True Believer podcast and reviews a representative (i.e., the easiest to make fun of) episode and reviews it without pity.

This week we have the I Am A Course in Miracles podcast. It's based on some book from the 1970s called A Course In Miracles. Let me take you back, for a moment, to the 1970s. The Arabs and Israelis were conducting open warfare, America lost a war to Buddhists carrying AK-47s, Nixon went to China. Christians were basically getting their asses kicked by followers of Eastern religions. The time was ripe to take a long, hard squint at that dusty old Bible and recast it in a more eastern mystical light, and maybe add some Chinese gongs. A Course in Miracles was cooked up by Helen Schucman, a professor of psychology. She started hearing voices. Instead of getting medicated she decided Jesus was talking to her and began writing it all down.


Why wouldn't God talk to her?

Eventually she published a book based on the voices in her head called A Course In Miracles. And anytime someone has written a book they claim is a transcript of voices they hear in their head, you just know it's going to be, cover to cover, clear, succinct prose. No?

No.

The podcast itself doesn't appear to be associated with the publishers of the book, just some devotee cranking it out. And I mean cranking it out. He's got 160 episodes (as of this writing). Actually, it's more like 320 episodes. The podcast is kind of split into two. There's one mp3 that's just the weekly reading from the book and, in case you listen to that and come out going "what the fuck?" there's also an mp3 that repeats the weekly reading along with the host's comments. That one appears more fun. So I'm going to review that one. I grabbed episode 159.

The episode starts with a new age version of the Star Trek: Voyager theme. The host welcomes his listeners in a voice that sounds like, after 159 episodes, he's still quite terrified of this broadcasting stuff. And maybe I'm not quite understanding what the podcast host and the author of the book mean by "miracles" but shouldn't the host have, by maybe episode 114, transformed into a shaft of pure white light that can bend space/time to his will? What sort of miracles are we talking about? The miracle of being able to defy the laws of the universe or the miracle I can bend over and tie my shoes? And why does he still sound like he's terrified of the outdoors and probably wears Kleenex boxes on his feet? What single course takes you 160 (and counting) lessons to learn? Most competent universities can turn out someone with a highly useful bachelor's degree in accounting or education after about 160 lessons.

The first minute and a half of the show is basic boiler plate, giving the show's web site and inviting fellow "energy healers" to visit the web site and give lessons. We then get into the lesson with a greeting by the host that sounds a lot like Reverend Schuller's line from Hour of Power about this being a perfect day but delivered by a guy who sounds like a terrified Doug Henning.

Soon enough we get into the, umm, course, which I might add is backed with this low, humming music mixed in with the sound of croaking frogs. I suppose it is meant to put us at ease. Our host Frightened Doug Henning plays back the start of the lesson, this one titled "I give back the miracles I have received". The lesson starts from first principles. "No one can give what he has not received." Sun goes up. Sun goes down. What part of the brain needs that special mutation that allows some of us to think selling the blindingly obvious is ethical?

Keep reading...

Frightened Doug Henning fears his listeners might have missed the obvious and tries to illustrate with several examples.

"You can't give heaven unless you receive heaven." I dunno about that. I've been with a few women who sure seem to like getting a bit of the ol' heaven and I'm always coming up short in the gettin' some heaven department.

"You have to be able to know something to teach something." Has this guy ever taught English in Korea? He wouldn't say that if he met some of the people flopping around Asia claiming to be qualified English teachers.

The lesson's voice over (which sounds a lot like the voice of God from Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments) then tells us humans always mess up on this giving what you receive bit. We always want to keep what we get. Is that so wrong? This is the very message I keep trying to impart to my mutual fund broker. I just want a fund where I can keep what I get. Quit selling me those guaranteed wealth reduction plans.

The voice-of-God-over then lays on some wisdom our podcast host Frightened Doug Henning has some trouble justifying. The-voice-of-God-over tells us giving away what we have is proof we have it and it's ours. And I got the tenses right. See if you get something and then turn around and give it away, then that's great proof you have it. Not had it. Not watched it drive off in your ex-girlfriend's Prius. Frightened Doug Henning tries to underscore this point by giving the example you can't give your body away because it's not actually yours. But then for a guy who sounds like he's sold a bit too much of his own plasma this month, it's no surprise that it quickly dawns on him you can actually give away your body. If not in whole then you can give it away in part or you can at least rent it out for $200 for a full, unhurried hour session or $150 for a half hour.

We get about another two minutes of psychobabble about giving away miracles although not one mention of an actual miracle we can give away. Water into wine? Walking on water? Raising the dead? What exactly?

Frightened Doug Henning then goes into his marital problems and surmises they're because he's not viewing his wife as sinless. Yeah, nothing about spending hours a day working on some stupid podcast while she's working ten hours a day at Walmart trying to make rent. The real problem is he's not viewing her as God. Assuming this guy has completed the course in miracles (after all, he is teaching it and by lesson 159's logic he must have it to give it away) should he still be fighting with the wife over whose turn it is to take out the trash? If my accountant freely admitted he couldn't add, despite the diploma on the wall of his office that says he's completed a B.Comm, should I even be listening to that guy? Wouldn't I take my business elsewhere? Frightened Doug Henning then suggests we should try and view our co-workers as the people they really are. Ah, you mean as incompetent assholes who keep asking me how to set tabs in Microsoft Word? I'll go with that.

The voice-of-God-over then intones that earth is a reflection of the innocence found in heaven. Frightened Doug Henning suggests we should view people as mirrors of heaven. In fact, we should view ourselves as such mirrors of heaven. Should you doubt it, Frightened Doug Henning proposes a sure-fire exercise. Sit in front of a mirror. Look at yourself. And talk to yourself. This will reveal that the mirror, amazingly, reflects you, reflects what's really going on, namely you're there talking to yourself in your underwear. I'm so glad Frightened Doug Henning is here to help clear this all up.

The voice-of-God-over chirps up that Christ beholds no sin in anyone. Wow, even Hitler? Frightened Doug Henning tells us sin is actually not all that killing and gassing of Jews stuff. No no. Sin is viewing other people as not you. Ummm. Sin is viewing other people as dangerous or evil. Sin is viewing that punk kid as a threat simply because he's threatening to beat you to death with his skateboard unless you hand over your iPod. That's sin.

After that stunning revelation, that people who lock their doors at night are actually committing a sin, the voice-of-God-over intones about Christ's vision. His vision is the bridge between the worlds. In the power of this vision you can safely trust that you'll be able to make it from this world to the next. Frightened Doug Henning breathes a sigh of relief. "I'm glad we're getting into the discussion of what is Christ's vision because we were trying to learn it yesterday. In almost every paragraph he talks about Christ's vision this, Christ's vision that." Perceptive one here has finally noticed after 159 lessons his course has yet to even define basic terminology? Isn't that like your accounting student noticing after three years of education none of his textbooks have yet to actually define "debit" and "credit"?

Turns out, according to the voice-over of God, that Christ's vision means we can't see his vision. Everything in this world is just shadows. Wow, that cleared it up.

Karl Mamer is host of The Conspiracy Skeptic podcast, a 12 part look at conspiracies of today and the not too distant past. Karl is also the world's greatest living proponent of Franglais. He also likes to bait Nigerian Bank Scammers and hosted his own podcast about teaching English in Seoul, South Korea. Karl lives in Toronto, Canada and works as a senior technical writer to pay the bills.

The Paracast

by Karl Mamer

Welcome back to Podcasting Without Pity. Every other week I listen to a different True Believer podcast and give you my sceptical summary, a summary lacking in pity and sometimes even good taste.

This week we have The Paracast. Guess what that's about? Woo. In the unlikely event you think it's a podcast for British paratroopers, the show's logo features some Kirlian photography hand shit.



Hosts Gene Steinberg and David Biedny have been cranking out the woo weekly since 2006. There are over 130 shows there. What to choose, what to choose? Three jump out at me.

1. We've got an interview with Bud Hopkins. This one jumps out at me because I thought Bud Hopkins was dead. But it turns out I was thinking of John Mack. I guess there were two old dudes convincing stressed out housewives that all their unexpressed angst was not being caused by an emotionally detached husband who is stopping each night on the way home from work and meeting other married men for emotionless man-on-man sex in public washrooms. No. Their problems are being caused by nightly space alien abductions. Hey, anything not to have to confront your husband about the weird semen stains you keep finding on his shirt collar.

2. We've got an interview the Lloyd Pye. Pye has been toting a 900-year-old hydrocephalic skull from trekkie convention to trekkie convention trying to convince anyone who will listen that a skull most competent doctors immediately recognize as a birth defect is in fact evidence of an alien/human hybrid.

3. We've got a two-fer: an interview with some guy named Eric Julien who wrote a book called The Science of Extraterrestrials: UFOs Explained at Last and comic book artist Neal Adams. Fans of the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe will remember Neal Adams as an, ummm, interesting guest on that show.

I decided to listen to all three. Even though each show is about 2 hours long and this took about 6 hours of my not so valuable time, I'm sort of glad I did. While I've stated clearly this is Podcasting Without Pity, after listening to three shows, I did find I appreciated the actual hosts of this show. As one reviewer on iTunes notes, these two guys are not your typical Saucer-Tards. They seem pretty sceptical of most claims and don't mind ruffling feathers. An examination of all the one star ratings by the saucer-tards and their vindictive reviews indicates they're not exactly being cheered on by the tinfoil-haired set. One woman in her iTunes review raged that The Paracast is hosted by a third-rate writer and a, gasp, computer FX guy. Googling, it turns out one of them has published several computer guides (you try writing 300 page manuals, lady, and tell me if third rate writers are up to that) and the other host worked for ILM.

Keep reading...

As the hosts themselves noted in one episode, most of their saucer-tard guests are pretty much used to telling their tales before like minded saucer-tards, who just lap up their prepared, rehearsed spiel. Gene and David ask them questions even sceptics sometimes don't think to ask. Like one guy was relating his harrowing tale, told in his book of course, about being on a saucer for 10 hours. The Paracast crew asked him why nowhere in this ten hour ordeal did he ever mention where he went to the bathroom. How many times do you have to take a piss during 10 hours? I know I'd have to see a man about a mule at least twice. The guest was gob smacked and only managed a rather implausible "I didn't pee. I'm just good at holding it in." I'm sorry, I can't mock two guys who can so effectively coldcock a saucer-tard on a popular woo podcast.



In another episode, a guest was spewing the old chestnut that all our technological advances since the 1950s have come from reverse engineered crashed saucer technology, and not, as we've been led to believe, hard work by hundreds and thousands of smart engineers and research scientists giving up any hope of ever being seen as attractive to the opposite sex. The hosts pointed out that claim is ridiculous on the face of it. Space aliens clearly are centuries, if not millennia, ahead in technology. Imagine if an F15 crashed in the middle of the Civil War and the Union recovered it. What exactly could they learn from it? The ability of a more primitive civilization to reverse engineer technology that is indistinguishable from magic is patently unbelievable.

Alright, so I decided to give the Neal Adams episode (the April 22, 2007 ep) my full-on treatment, because after Neal's appearance on SGU and his widely read follow-up correspondence with Dr. Novella^{2 3 4}, there are people out there that simply can't get enough of Neal. But, alas, before we get to Neal we have to listen to this Eric Julien character.

So the show opens with their theme music, which sounds a lot like every single new age CD that's been released since Tubular Bells. You can just picture people sitting cross-legged in their loft apartments, gluten-free organic pasta boiling on the stove top in a copper pot bought from the fair trade store, surrounded by patchouli scented candles, chanting mantras to themselves, while this music plays in the background. Some voice run through a vocoder introduces the hosts.

Gene starts the show about the angry all caps emails they were getting following the Lloyd Pye interview. After showing Pye the door they proceeded to trash his theory. It was quite delicious. But I guess Pye didn't see it that way. They wonder what Pye is whining about. They let Pye promote his limited edition Starchild pop-up book, signed by the woo-ist himself. They even let Pye make some clearly actionable statements that his book was pretty much guaranteed to appreciate in value. Now, if I recall from that time I worked for a publicly traded dot.com (JustDayOlds.com, a B2C portal that sold day-old products like bread, newspapers, and sushi), we couldn't legally make statements like "our stock is going to just take off and will never lose value!" Anything that sounded even the least bit positive like "someone actually PayPal'ed us 50 cents!" we had to footnote with a disclaimer that it was a foreword looking statement and not a promise of future performance. But hey when you've been carrying around a hydrocephalic's skull for half a decade, you're probably not thinking too clearly.

Gene and Dave spend the top of the show outlining why they think Pye is a pseudoscientist. He tries to fit evidence to his theory. He takes his skull to expert after expert who tell him "nope, just a birth defect" and then eventually stops when he finds the one medical guy who will tell him what he wants to hear. ("Finally I found a doctor who will tell me these polyester threads under my fingernails are a biological disease, and not just from me scratching my stretch pants!")

After their little bitch fest about Pye, they break for a promo. I guess the show is sponsored by some saucer-tard (god I love this term, can you tell?) magazine.

After the promo we're kind of dumped into the interview with the science of saucers guy, Eric Julien. The hosts ask him another one of those great questions you might not get from the tinfoil wearers: what do you mean exactly by the "science" of extraterrestrials? Now if you listen to the Science Watch podcast, the hosts endeavour each podcast to supply a short, concise definition of science. Each week the hosts always manage to sum up all of science in about 3 or 4 short sentences. Julien, on the other hand, rambles for about 10 minutes. Other than something about there being a contradiction between quantum mechanics and Relativity, the rest seems to be just word salad. He has a bit of a strange accent and that also makes it hard to figure out what the fuck he's saying. From the way he keeps putting H's in front of every word he speaks, I'm guessing he's French.

Julien is a) reminding me why Marcel Marceau was such a popular French entertainer to North American audiences b) the perfect example why, if you can't fit your scientific theory on a tshirt, it's probably total and complete bullshit.

Evolution: Survival of the fittest, common descent with modification.

Relativity: E=MC²

Germ Theory: Microorganisms are the cause of disease.

Plate tectonics: The continents are drifting on a viscose asthenosphere.

Julien's Science of ETs: The hscience hof hETs his ha hscience hwhere hscientific hideas hknown hand hunknown hto hscience hare hunderstood hthrough hscientific hprinciples hestablished husing hscience. hIt's hclear hto hscience hthat hnot hall hof hwhat his hknown hto hscience hhas hbeen hdiscovered hwith hscience hand hmy hbook hreveals hET hscience hthat hI hscientifically hestablish husing hscience.

One of these things does not go with the other. N'est-ce pas?

After a good ramble, the hosts cut him off and try to establish some basic principles. Julien, it turns out, has been contacted by UFOs. He's an abductee. Sure, why not. David (I think it's David) wonders where these aliens have come from. A guy that's ostensibly figured out their science probably knows which star they're coming from. Julien doesn't disappoint and pins it down: "they're from a galaxy and the universe. They come from Sirius. They come from the Orion belt. They come from everywhere. It's very difficult to say they come from here or there."
This guy rambles like a first year student bullshitting on a Sociology 101 mid term essay. Do the saucer-tards really buy this shit? Co-host David doesn't. Gene tries to hold his feet to the fire. "Don't they say to you 'we're from such 'n' such a place…'?"

Julien informs the Paracast boys that the blue aliens he's been in contact with are from a planet called something like "Eh moon ya". Blue aliens? Ehmoonya? Ah, it's like this guy watched Yellow Submarine and Adult Swim after a nice repast of hallucinogenic crème brûlée and merged the Blue Meanies with the Mooninites.

Gene and David got a live one here. They ask another question the saucer-tards never stop to ask. Why the fuck did they pick you? If you were going to pick one human to communicate complex science, hell, communicate English, why would you pick some guy that puts H's in front of every word? Wouldn't they, I dunno, snap up Neil deGrasse Tyson?

Here's another common thread that joins all these abductions. Utterly insignificant people get taken away in saucers, are told the secret to life the universe and everything, are charged with a sacred mission to tell the world about the secret as this message is paramount to human survival. So naturally they pick hayseeds as their spokesmen. And their message is never "here's the complex formula for the cure to cancer or cold fusion". It's always touchy feely stuff that would have the Hands Across America organizers go "oh man, that's just pandering to your audience."

Anyway, I guess Slices, Dices and Julien French Fry was scooped up by the Mooninites to tell the world, for one thing, Ehmoonya has one third less gravity than our Earth and their vertical leap is beyond all measurement.

I dunno. When the hosts ask him how does he know they're actually ETs, he goes off on another ramble about time being recursive. When I think of my work day, this actually makes sense. We're nearly 20 minutes into this podcast and he's finally said one thing that makes sense. He goes for another five minutes rambling about the recursive nature of time. It's like a fractal, man.

After this we have my favourite part of the show, their little sounder that they're going to a commercial break. We hear two loud bangs. It sounds like the hosts put two bullets in their guest. But I guess it's not the sound of bullets being pumped into the head of a sauce-tard. It's supposed to be, I dunno, docking clamps releasing from a UFO or something.

The podcast spends a bit of time hawking Fate magazine. Read all about UFOs and angels. Sure. Whatever.

Anyway, the hosts try to start this segment from square one with this guy and ask him if what he's saying is the ETs have tried to pass on some information to share with the rest of the world. Julien takes this as another opportunity to ignore the question at hand and goes into a long ramble about his past. I guess Julien was a pilot for Air France. This goes a long way in explaining why Air France planes keep sliding off the end of runways. They're hiring abject idiots.

He also claims he was an air traffic controller. I'm not sure the world of aviation was any safer kicking him upstairs. So, what I'm hearing is the guy had a high stress job. He, naturally, goes bonkers and starts thinking elements from Yellow Submarine and Aqua Teen Hunger Force are real.

I guess his whole history stuff is to establish he, and not Stephen Hawking or even Pamela Gay, was the logical choice for bringing the world this super science knowledge that ummm errrr what exactly? It's astounding? Time is fleeting? Madness takes its toll? I try to listen closely, but not for very much longer. I've got to keep control. So I start fast forwarding a bit. He's babbling about dreams he had of UFOs. Fast forward more. He's still talking about his dreams. Fast forward even more.

Gene jumps into the middle of his psycho babble and reminds him he's not actually answered the question of how does he know these are extraterrestrials? Oh well, simple, Julien answers. They're not extraterrestrials per se. You big sillies. They're actually extratemporals.

Aw Jesus.

Gene tries a different approach. "Eric, if you're saying they're extra temporals, not of this time, how do you know they're time travelling space aliens and not just Earth people from the future?"
I would have asked "how do you know this isn't just some wild delusion?". And Gene's question strikes me initially as him just trying to layer on more woo, but after listening to several of these podcasts, I'm thinking he's more just trying to ask "you claim it's this one bullshit idea, but why that bullshit idea and not this bullshit idea over here? Why limit yourself?"

The hosts give up and try to get Julien to talk about some science. Since the guy, you know, wrote the book on the science of ETs, he should have the corner on what the blue ETs are using to power their TARDIS.



Julien's answer again sounds like Sociology 101 essay padding. "What is the energy? This is the question itself." Arg. He goes into more psycho babble about the energy is the difference between two time flows.

After another ten minutes of Julien's rambling psycho babble, the hosts then pose a question which I think firmly puts them in the woo camp, although it's at least internally sceptical. They note so many alien stories ultimately involve deception, how does Julien know he's not being hoodwinked by the Mooninites? The logic seems to go like this. All these abductees, contactees, experiencers, channelers, alien consciousness hosts, hybrid caring space baby surrogates, and semen donors are given predictions by the saucer people like in 1997 there will be a major landing, the Earth's magnetic poles will shift in 2001, Tom Cruise will stun the world that he's renouncing show business and entering the Catholic priesthood. And none of these predictions ever, ever, ever come true. Ergo, the aliens are deceiving us.

So how do you think Julien is going to answer that question? How do you know you're not simply being deceived by these space aliens? Right. He just lays on more psycho babble. We're now 40 minutes into this podcast and he hasn't said a single thing about his science of ETs that can be tested by science.

Gene mercifully announces they don't have a lot of time left and poses Julien one last question: Why should we take your pile of steaming psycho dung seriously?

Julien answers with the typical True Believer response to that kind of question: "I don't ask anyone to believe me." Sure. You just wrote a whole book trying to convince people about the science of ETs. I guess Darwin wasn't asking anyone to believe him about evolution when he wrote Origin of Species. But then he goes into a long, back-patting list of all the (unnamed) scientist who have been stunned by his science. Since all these unnamed PhDs in physics totally grok his schlock, you should too.



After some words by the hosts to Julien that he's not supplied any actual science they show him the door. Oh thank god. After a break, the hosts come back to sum up and share the true skinny on their guests. This Eric Julien is the nut bag who, back in 2006, was claiming a crop circle told him the space aliens were going to pumpkin bomb Earth with comet fragments . Why? Well, because the USA had a secret plan to nuke Iran. The aliens, fans I guess of Farsi soap operas, were preparing this retaliatory strike. Phil Plait, of course, gave Julien a public pants down spanking over this foolishness.

When the comet didn't hit Earth, Julien claimed it was because he warned the world, the USA was secretly forced to secretly cancel their secret plans for a secret attack on Iran. You gotta love claims that are insulated from falsification. Anyway, because the US government listened to Julien and didn't nuke Iran, the aliens moved the comet out of Earth's path and the day was saved. Thanks to Julien. Yeah. Thanks.

Here, let me set myself up to be the future saviour of mankind.

People, unless you change your ways [in some nebulous, ill-defined fashion], New York is going to be devastated by a giant marauding lobster on November 1, 2008! Mark my words! Act now!

Gene and Dave, in their post-game analysis, tear Julien a new one, although they probably should have done this when the cracker was actually on the phone. They decide to wash their hands of Julien and then proclaim they're going to get on to some real stuff. Of course when you define "real stuff" as Neal Adams' expanding hollow Earth "theory", you might be using "real" in a fashion new to the editors of the OED.

Alright, finally, we get to the man of the hour, after a 50 minute warm up show. Ladies, gentlemen, X-Men fanboys, I give you Neal Adams.

Gene announces Neal and gives a teaser type summary of Neal's "theory". Everything we think we know about how planets are formed is wrong. Right, Neal?

Neal says not so fast. First Neal wants to wax philosophically and kind of set up the framework of his special pleading. See. We've been wrong about everything. Since we're wrong about everything, we're wrong about the very foundations of physics and astronomy. Since we're wrong about all of science, the only other theory that can explain it all is Neal's theory and therefore it wins by default. Got it?

Neal notes every century someone comes a long and goes "that stuff that you thought was right is wrong."

First problem, Neal doesn't really define what he means by "wrong". Copernicus wasn't 100% wrong about heliocentricism. He mostly got it right. He just thought orbits were perfect circles. Kepler came along and fine tuned it. Orbits were ellipses, not perfect circles. Newton came along and tweaked Kepler's laws. Einstein then came along and tweaked Newton's laws of universal gravitation. Same deal with germ theory. Germ theory was tweaked by the discovery of viruses. Now germ theory is being tweaked by the discovery of prions. In sum, lots of science isn't wrong. It's mostly right. The science gets fine tuned.

Neal then plays the "they got upset at Galileo" gambit. Since we all laughed at Galileo and Galileo endued up having the last laugh (hundreds of years after he was dead, of course), we shouldn't be so quick to laugh at a goofy comic book artist trying to re-write basic science. As Carl Sagan noted, they did laugh at Galileo, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

Neal then goes on to summarize the standard theory of how planets and solar systems come to be born and gets it wrong, creating a silly straw man version that he'll ably knock down shortly.

First, a brief summary of the correct version:

1) Big bang spewed hydrogen, helium, and trace bits of lithium.

2) Gravity eventually pulled all this together into first generation stars.

3) These stars fused the elements. Smaller stars fused up to iron. Bigger ones fused everything above iron when they exploded as super novas.

4) This material came back together again to form second generation stars and now these heavier elements also formed planets.

Anyway, Neal stresses we believe this based on authority. Those darn scientist tell us X and we have to believe X. You'll remember from my last instalment of Podcasting Without Pity, the creationists also echoed this theme. Science is authority driven. It's thousands of highly competitive, independent, creative thinkers all advancing science using other's findings because those findings actually work. And they work because they're true.

Neal then proceeds to knock his straw man down. Since the solar system was formed by all this stuff coming together and bashing into each other, why has this process magically stopped? Why isn't stuff still bashing into each other and forming new stuff? Why don't we see the planets in our solar system growing rapidly today?

Errr.

Neal doesn't seem to grasp there is limited matter. After about 4.5 billion years, most of the stuff in this region has come together via gravity to form the planets. Stuff, of course, is still bashing into planets. Just ask the dinosaurs. But we're not going to see whole new planets being created, especially before our eyes in a human lifetime.

Further, we see things like stellar nurseries. We do see this stuff coming together in places where older stars have blown apart and now those clouds of elements are coming together again to form new stars.

Neal sums up: the reason we don't see the planets growing is because it's a stupid theory to begin with. You will note Neal bases a lot of his theory not on observation and experiment but on simple personal incredulity. Since it doesn't appeal to a comic book artist, it must not be true. There is a theory out there that tall blond women don't like short, fat bloggers like me. That sounds like a stupid theory to me. But that doesn't mean it's not true.

Neal, not content knocking down his current straw man, stuffs it up a bit more by claiming some scientist say the solar system was formed only out of a cloud of hydrogen, while others claim it was formed out of meteors. Errr. Neal really needs to understand the difference between first generation stars and second generation stars like our sun. "You guys gotta decide if it's hydrogen or meteors before you come at me with your theories."

Neal, I wasn't aware any scientist was seeking your peer review or even gave a flying fuck what you think.

Neal claims if the meteorite theory is true then the only meteorites we find in the solar system that are 4.5 billion years old are chondrite meteors and those, for reasons never given, can't form planets. Neal wraps up by concluding since this theory is so obviously stupid, we need a better theory. And then he chuckles. You'll notice through this interview Neal does this a lot, laughing at his own jokes, which aren't really jokes. Last time I saw someone laughing this much at himself, who wasn't taking a dump in a shopping cart and wearing a winter parka in August, was that Tom Cruise in that Scientology video that kept getting deleted from YouTube.

Neal explains he's had this brilliant insight because he's been able to study this not only logically but as a kind of scientific Renaissance man. Neal proclaims he's studied all the sciences, and the problem with scientists (real scientists) today is they don't get exposed to all the other sciences. Not like Neal. You study astronomy, you don't get exposed to physics, chemistry, math, and probably some biology. Oh wait. You do. Jesus. Could this guy be any more deluded about his mastery of all human knowledge? It seems to me anyone who has a PhD in any science, must first complete a Bachelor of Science, and one generally has to take the basics from all the sciences. Neal somehow presumes because he read a couple Idiot's Guides, he's learned more about the basic sciences than someone who had to take a range of basic science courses as an undergrad?

So the reason we got this mixed up theory of the origins of solar systems is because a theory like this needs the input of so many different experts. Yeah, I guess that's why evolution just never got off the ground, what with needing biologists, geneticists, physicists, and geologists all coming together on the same page. Ain't gonna happen. Right?

After demolishing the theory of stellar/solar system formation, Neal then gives us a summary of plate tectonics. Plate tectonics is the theory that the continents all sit on a viscous layer of semi molten rock and float around. This is why we get earthquakes. The continents float into each other. The continents break apart and float off in other directions. Anyway, Neal isn't buying and spins a little story making it seem like this was all authority driven stuff. In fact, plate tectonics was a pretty hard sell for most of the 20th century. It wasn't until they started mapping and measuring the sea floor did the evidence to support continental drift emerge.

And then, according to Neal, they cooked up this crazy idea about Pangaea, all the continents used to be one land mass. Like they just pulled this out of their butts. Well, no. It emerged from the evidence. We found similar fossils on all the major continents from the same geological time. How do we explain that? Well, similar animals means they had to be able to get from Africa to South America to Australia to Europe. Since they can't build boats, these land masses must have been connected.

The problem Neal has with this is he simply doesn't like the idea that there was, for a time, one big land mass on one side of the planet. I think Neal is under the impression the theory claims the Earth started this way, with just one big land mass, instead of at one point in time all the continents by random chance bashed into each other. If you throw five plates on a table and vibrate the table, and make it so when the plates touch, they stick and it takes forces to unstick them, odds are those five plates, at some point, are going to vibrate into each other, and stick for a time until forces start to work them apart.

To Neal, who can't imagine this happening in the great expanse of time, it makes more logical sense if the world started off much smaller than it is now, with no oceans between the land masses. Instead it was one big crusty Earth and then, here's the money shot, the Earth expanded from the inside out.

Oh dear.

The hosts jump in. "Ummm Neal, what about the oceans?"

Neal says there were no oceans. There were only shallow seas in the continents. We have all this evidence of shallow seas in, say, North America. That we can mine salt up in Michigan is evidence of this. And that's true. And odd we don't see those seas anymore. Neal reasons that's because as the Earth grew and the continents cracked apart, the water then ran into the cracks, making the oceans.

So where did those great inland seas go and why don't we see them today? Neal neglects that ocean levels have changed through history. At one point the world was a lot warmer and we didn't have ice caps. As we all know from talk about global warming, higher oceans means that water is going to run inland. So when there were no ice caps, the oceans spilled inland and we got seas. As the Earth grew colder and water was frozen into ice caps, the oceans were no longer sending water inland and these inland seas dried up (and left us nice salt beds).

Neal believes if his hypothesis is correct, we should not find fossils under the oceans we have today because that's all new stuff. But we do find such fossils. I think Neal has confused "we don't find many" with "none". Neal ignores subduction. The ocean floor plates are bashing into each other. It's a blender down there. Fossils get crunched up by this action.

Neal concludes only an expanding Earth explains all his observations. One problem, he needs a mechanism for the expansion. Oh well, simple. The Earth (all planets actually, including the moon) is hollow and there's this plasma in the middle of the Earth, and it's spontaneously generating new matter, which then causes the Earth (and all other planets and moons in the universe) to blow up like balloons. But wait, don't those astronomers and those pesky laws of thermodynamics tell us the big bang produced all the energy and matter we're ever going to have and you can't create more of it? Neal borrows from quantum mechanics. QM tells us sometimes a particle and antiparticle will spontaneously form out of nowhere. While this seems to violate the conservation of mass and energy laws of thermodynamics, the particle and anti particle quickly destroy each other. So we have a +1 and a -1. 1-1=0. It all balances out.

Just as people who believe in The Secret grasp to a misreading of quantum mechanics to shore up their woo, Neal grasps onto this aspect of QM to shore up his belief matter can come from nothing. Well, I guess he just has to demonstrate that not only can it hang around but can be created in sufficient quantities that it can build planets. I believe this particle creation isn't done in your fridge. You require literally parsecs of empty space before you have the probability of this happening.

Neal's next proof of his expanding Earth theory is that part of the Earth's crust is missing. True. Is that a problem? Well, Neal thinks it’s a problem. See, his reading of the standard theory of Earth's formation is Earth formed, there was a crust covering the whole planet, and we should see all of that crust today. Since we don't, since we can't account for some very large percentage of it, that's evidence for a growing Earth. Neal would argue that crust never existed. The world was ¼ its size, covered by a crust, the Earth expanded 4x, making big gaps in the crust. The problem with Neal's argument is it's yet another misrepresentation. It's a bit like creationists who demand a perfect fossil record. We'll never get that as there are many external factors that prevent a perfect fossil record or destroy such fossils before we can find them.

So how can geologists say Neal's theories are crap when 25% of the crust is missing? Well, simple. Just because the Earth started off with a nice 100% intact crust doesn't mean as it goes through life it will always have that crust. For example, my car had all its paint in 1996. Through a process of dings, car doors being swung too wide in parking lots, me misjudging how much room I had between another car and a brick wall, well, over time some of my car's paint is missing. Does this mean my car is expanding? Would my insurance company believe that? The same holds for the Earth. We've been hit by some pretty fucking big things. There's good evidence the moon was created when something pretty fucking big hit Earth and the knocked off hunk of Earth formed into the moon. There's good evidence the Gulf of Mexico took a big one.

So when scientists see a bunch of the crust missing, they don't go "ah, expanding Earth". They start looking for what might have smacked right into the Earth and vaporized that bit of crust.

The hosts then ask Neal if the Earth expanded, where did all the water come from? Because on a small world, we had these shallow inland seas, surely if they drained into the new cracks of the expanded Earth, there wouldn't be enough.

Easy. The little magic box in the middle of the Earth just makes every possible atom. It makes new oxygen atoms, it makes new hydrogen atoms, these combine as they bubble up. It also makes new gold atoms and new uranium atoms as well. Simple.

Isn't a theory great when you can just invent a process never seen before and there is no physics to account for it? Because according to those ivory tower scientists hydrogen, helium, and a bit of lithium were created after the Big Bang. After that a process called stellar nucleosynthesis took over the job of atom production. A guy won a Nobel prize for this and everything. Basically in most stars, in the pressure and vast heat, elements up to iron are fused. When that star dies, it sends that stuff out into the universe. Above iron, we need the crucible of a supernova. Since the heat and pressure in the middle of the Earth isn't nearly good enough to create anything, Neal has to invent new physics.

And how does he explain that different planets have, as best we can figure, different compositions? Shit. I dunno. With lasers and satellites, can't we measure the Earth and the moon? Shouldn't we notice these growing? But we don't.

In the final run up to the end, Neal gets into his most bizarre line of evidence for his expanding Earth claim. He believes dinosaurs were too big to move around in today's gravity. However, back during the dinosaur era, the Earth was 1/4 as big, hence gravity was 1/4, hence dinosaurs could get that big. Neal cites unknown engineers who support him in this claim. I'm not sure what engineers know about dinosaur anatomy. Bzzzt. Improper appeal to authority. 10 yards. You would think after a couple centuries of studying dinosaurs someone would have gone "hey, could such monsters walk in 1 g? If so, how'd they do it?" Of course people have done the calcs and see no problem.

Karl Mamer is host of The Conspiracy Skeptic podcast, a 12 part look at conspiracies of today and the not too distant past. Karl is also the world's greatest living proponent of Franglais. He also likes to bait Nigerian Bank Scammers and hosted his own podcast about teaching English in Seoul, South Korea. Karl lives in Toronto, Canada and works as a senior technical writer to pay the bills.