Reflections on UFOs, skepticism, and practically anything else by Robert Sheaffer, author of the book "Bad UFOs," plus the "Psychic Vibrations" column in The Skeptical Inquirer).
From my "Psychic Vibrations" column in the Skeptical Inquirer, September/October, 1998:
As you might have heard, approximately 150 members of a Taiwanese UFO cult called Chen Tao (“Perfect Way”) came to the U.S. in 1996 expecting to meet God, who they said would arrive in a flying saucer. They first settled in San Dimas, California, a state where cults seem almost normal. Then suddenly they moved to Garland, Texas, the sort of town where a large crowd of foreign-speaking cult weirdos would not exactly pass unnoticed. A group of homeowners in Garland wrote the mayor and City Council complaining that this bizarre group was ruining their neighborhood. The mayor replied that these people were simply exercising their rights to free speech, and there wasn’t anything he could do. However, what he should have replied was, “Don’t worry, these people won’t bother you for long. They say they’re going to be carried away on flying saucers on the morning of March 31.” For according to the group’s leader Hon-Ming Chen, God was going to arrive at his house on that date at 10:00 AM Central Time with a whole fleet of flying saucers, swooping all of them up from the earth to rescue them from the coming Great Tribulation. Authorities, suspecting that the saucer fleet might not materialize, feared another mass-suicide like the Heavens Gate UFO cult last year, especially since many members carried neatly-packed backpacks with identical white clothing and sneakers for their anticipated heavenly rendezvous. The Taiwanese media had been reporting that Chen was encouraging newcomers to kill themselves so their bodies could be picked up by flying saucers. However, the church members denied having any thoughts of suicide.
cartoon by Rod Pudim
Large numbers of reporters, in addition to Chen’s followers, gathered at the appointed place and time but, alas, nothing happened. Chen had an explanation: God had already arrived, invisibly, and entered their souls. As soon as things quieted down a bit, Chen announced that God would not be gathering people up from Texas after all, but instead from the area of the Great Lakes. He and a small group of the faithful set off for Buffalo, New York. Many of the others returned to Taiwan. While in New York, Chen had a vision of the numbers seventeen and eighteen, which he interpreted as a divine instruction to move his followers to the town of Olcott, where those two numbered road routes intersect. Should anyone care about Chen’s remaining prognostications, he sees Armageddon occurring in August of 1999. Of course, with the year 2000 fast approaching, if the Apocalypse does begin, the doomsayers will be lined up for blocks trying to get credit for the prediction. (For more information on the Chen Tao cult, see http://www.anthroufo.info/un-chen.html).
I should note that I'm currently working on a book of my Psychic Vibrations columns. Rob Pudim has kindly agreed to let me use his cartoons from the Skeptical Inquirer - and there are a lot of them! I expect to have the book electronically published, and it should be available on Amazon.com and elsewhere by the end of the year, if not sooner. I'll keep you posted.
From my column "Psychic Vibrations" in The Skeptical Inquirer, March/April, 1995:
1994 was a great year for the world ending. Indeed, the world ended more times in 1994 than in any other year in recent memory. Harold Camping, president and general manager of a 39-station network of religious radio broadcasters, proclaimed that before the end of September, 1994, the dead would be arising from their graves for their final judgment. Camping explained to the San Jose Mercury News (Sept. 4, 1994) that he had arrived at his prediction by a laborious and careful process of counting off significant dates in the Bible. Furthermore, his math has been checked by a nuclear physicist and “a number of scientists at the Lawrence Livermore lab,” as if errors in arithmetic were the only way such a prediction might go awry. Mainstream religious scholars, of course, suggested Camping was seriously mistaken. Fortunately, Camping exhorted his listeners, “Don't do anything bizarre. Just live the way you should have been living all the time.” His stations are still on the air, and seem to have found something else to talk about.
A current Harold Camping billboard in Stockton, CA. Photo by Michael Fitzgerald
June 9, 1994 was another date on which the world ended. Various fundamentalist prognosticators somehow settled upon that date, and started warning ominously that “June ninth is coming,” the day on which God would supposedly “rip sin out of the world.”Warnings were issued for a major destructive earthquake somewhere along the Pacific “ring of fire,” supposedly only the first event in an eschatological progression. So widespread was the expectation that it was even mentioned on the 700 Club [evangelist Pat Robertson’s popular TV program], although with the clear disclaimer that it would not be the start of the Rapture. When a large underground earthquake, which caused little or no damage or casualties, struck on this date, it was hailed as fulfillment of the prophecy. The last we checked, the world still had plenty of sin.
But don't give up on the eschaton merely because the world has survived into 1995. Dr. Leland Jensen of Missoula, Montana says that he is the Second Coming, and that during 1995 the earth will suffer great meteor impacts, earthquakes, and major planetary changes. Those lucky enough to survive all this will enjoy Heaven on Earth. And according to a story in the Washington Post (March 12, 1994), followers of the Institute of Divine Metaphysical Research expect the world to end in an instant, by 1996. So the end may come while you are reading this page. Fortunately, even if these people are right, they won't be in a position to gloat about it!
"In case you missed it, Wednesday, October 28, 1992 was the Rapture, the day faithful Christians dead or alive ascend to heaven. The Rapture kicks off the last days: the appearance of the Antichrist, Armageddon, and the Second Coming.
"Lee Jang Rim, leader of the Dami Mission Church in Seoul, South Korea, spread the prophecy. Followers quit their jobs and sold or destroyed their property in anticipation, even as Rim was arrested for allegedly bilking hundreds of thousands of dollars from church members. The hysteria created a near crisis in South Korea.
"Members of Korean churches in South Korea, Hawaii, Los Angeles, and New York held marathon prayer vigils....
As many of my readers already know, the Rapture and all that end-of-the-world stuff is supposed to start on May 21, only five weeks from now. And of course, there is the biggie on Dec. 21, 2012, when a whole lot of manure is supposed to hit the Great Celestial Fan (different accounts vary, but all agree that something Really Significant is supposed to happen then). However, I just learned that the world is ending (or at least getting all messed up) at least one more time this year, probably in September, when Comet Elenin (C/2010 X1) comes to Perihelion (its closest approach to the sun).
This information (more accurately, misinformation) comes to us from one Laura Knight Jadczyk, who channels messages from the Cassiopeans . Superficially this looks very similar to Nancy Lieder, who channels doomsday messages about Planet X from the Zetas . However, Ms. Jadczyk emphasises that Comet Elenin is not Planet X, and it is not going to collide with earth. The Cassiopeans explain that they are not strictly speaking extraterrestrials, but rather in some way our "future selves."
This is a faint comet, now visible only with difficulty in large amateur telescopes but expected to become visible in binoculars this fall. Why is it of so much interest? For some conspiracy-oriented websites, it's primarily that the media has been strangely silent about the comet. For Ms. Jadczyk, it's because the Cassiopeans told her that the outburst of 596 Scheila, an object believed to be an asteroid that began outgassing and revealed itself to be a comet, was related to Comet Elenin in some unspecified way. She also ties this in with James McCanney's Plasma Theory of comets, and similar "electric universe" theories about comets being "electric."
Just as you don't find "Creation Science" any more, just "Intelligent Design," you also don't find "Velikovskian" theories - it's now the "electric universe." As I understand it,all comets are filled with electricity according to these latter-day Velikovskiians, and so when Comet Elenin reaches the inner solar system, supposedly it's going to zap all of the planets with big lightning bolts. Ms. Jadczyk thinks that the greatest danger to earth will be on Sept. 27 and Nov. 23 of this year, although the comet will never get closer than about 21 million miles from the earth. This is indeed closer than the Earth ever comes to Venus or Mars, but still about 100 times the distance to the moon.
From a standpoint of science, of course this "electric universe" stuff is all nonsense. There are no regions of "positive charge" and "negative charge" in our solar system, and the sun does not produce its energy from electricity. (According to these guys, the sun and other stars are not nuclear furnaces, but rather electric heaters, heated up by supposed massive electric currents circulating across the Milky Way, energy apparently from nowhere.) In any case, Comet Elenin will have about as much effect on earth as did Halley's Comet, which is none at all. And the Comet Elenin Doomsday will be as destructive as was Nancy Lieder's Doomsday from the imaginary Planet X in May, 2003, or that of the asteroid Toutatis in 2006.
I was tempted to make a posting a few days back when the major media made such a big thing out of the 1950 memo written by FBI Agent Guy Hottel, repeating a yarn he'd been told. For example, see this piece from The Telegraph, The International Business Times, etc. But by the time I was ready to get started, several of my colleagues were already producing some excellent pieces so there was really nothing much I could add.
Ben Radford pointed out in his Livescience blog that the FBI Memo was far from new, and that it had nothing to do with Roswell. Dave Thomas of the New Mexicans for Science and Reason sent around email to many active UFO skeptics and researchers, sharing what he had found so far, and requesting a copy of a report done by Bill Moore on the memo's origin. Dave has produced a really fine analysis telling the complete story of the Hottel memo's origin, and of others' attempts to exploit it. In my files I found this 1983 newspaper article showing how MUFON's Director, Walt Andrus, was shamelessly trying to exploit the Hottel Memo:
I also created a new web page about the Frank Scully / Silas Newton UFO Crash hoax at http://www.debunker.com/Scully.html . On it, you will find a three-part MP3 recording of J.P. Cahn giving a talk to the Bay Area Skeptics in 1984. So far as I know, this is the only recoding of Cahn discussing his research into the Scully Crash hoax. You might enjoy hearing Cahn tell the story in his own words. He was a very entertaining speaker.
By the way, in his talk Cahn relates how he was contacted by UFOlogist William L. Moore, who was one of the first promoters of the Roswell Crashed Saucer story. Moore phoned his house and introduced himself on the telephone. Moore said "I'm an investigative reporter, and I've been looking for you for three years." Cahn questioned Moore's investigative skills, saying "you'd think he'd pick up a phone book," because Cahn had always been listed in the San Francisco White Pages.
The lesson of this whole fiasco is: the next time you hear the major news media reporting some major development supposedly proving the reality of extraterrestrial UFOs, remember how they sensationalized the sixty-year-old, eighth-hand information in the FBI memo. And remember that they're in the business of grabbing readers and customers first, and only secondarily of reporting the news in factual and actual manner.
With the earth now scheduled to end twice in the near future, once on May 21 of this year, and again on December 21 of 2012, let us look at at some of the previous times that the world ended. We will turn to the Zetas and the great Pole Shift that was going to be caused by a supposed "Planet X" in May of 2003.
Nancy Lieder
The "Zetas" are a supposed alien race whose messages are allegedly channeled by one Nancy Lieder of Wisconsin, seen here. (Usually she just goes by her first name). She began posting on the internet her messages from the Zetas in 1995, and soon acquired a considerable following among New Age, UFO, and Conspiracy believers. When the giant comet Hale-Bopp was discovered in 1995, Nancy proclaimed that it didn't exist - it was a disinformation campaign to distract people from the coming doom of Planet X.
According to Nancy's website, "The inbound Planet X was sighted at the coordinates given by the Zetas in early 2001, imaged in infrared twice in January, 2002, tracked by CCD images in late 2002 to early 2003, and thereafter photographed by amateur astronomers around the world. That a middle aged woman with a high school degree, who does not even know which end of a telescope to look into, could pinpoint the RA and Dec of the brown dwarf, Planet X, is astonishing, and speaks to the validity of ZetaTalk." This is, of course, pure nonsense. A few photographs were produced purporting to show Planet X, but there was so little information provided that it was impossible to say what they really were. Nancy boasted of a 68 percent success rate for seeing Planet X during April of 2003, but only for “those educated, who had done their homework and followed the imaging session, noted our words as to what to look for, and oriented themselves in the sky.” Apparently other people didn't see anything. She further informs us that MJ12, the supposedly ultra-secret crashed UFO panel, has “committed suicide to prevent itself from being misused.” Ten years after its alleged "discovery," no reputable astronomer, amateur or professional, has ever confirmed any sighting of the supposed "Planet X."
According to the Zetas, Planet X was approaching earth in early 2003, to cause a “pole shift” and massive destruction on or about May 15. “The 12th Planet will be visible to the common man some 7 weeks prior to the shift, without the use of telescopes,” says Nancy, meaning that it should have become visible around the end of March. “Planet X will have a distinct red appearance, with a roiling tail full of moons, that are more concerned with the dance between them than any affect the solar wind might have upon them. Thus, they swirl, and look like a dragon approaching, not a straight line tail at all. Nevertheless, we anticipate NASA will explain the Planet X complex as any number of things, or rather their lackeys, who will natter the word on every Internet or media source that allows their nattering - asteroid bunch, passing comet, unusual comet, Mars closest pass in many eons, or whatever.” In other words, by May of 2003 “Planet X” would be huge and impossible to miss, but the government will attempt to convince you that you are actually seeing something else. Nancy noted on her website that in December of 2002, the popular late-night radio host Art Bell interviewed Sylvia Browne, “the well-known psychic and author. And she disclosed she is no longer able to see the future beyond the summer of 2003.” Bell also interviewed Ed Dames, who claims to have been a “remote viewer” employed by the CIA. Dames said that “he and his remote viewing team are no longer able to remote view the future beyond next summer.“ From this, Nancy deduces that there will be no future beyond the summer of 2003. The close approach of the mythical Planet X was supposed to cause a Pole Shift on the Earth, with massive accompanying destruction.Of course, it never happened.
During June of 2003, Nancy posted numerous accounts of supposedly bizarre phenomena such as unexplained booms, sunspots, a ring around the Moon, and the Sun “rising and setting in the wrong place.” These were labeled as “signs of the times,” and were attributed to the proximity of the dangerous Planet X. Nancy insisted that Earth’s rotational stopping and flipping was indeed still going to occur, but she refused to specify the hour or date. Her followers were carefully noting the times of sunrise and sunset, and the position of the Sun going down, to see if Earth’s expected careening might have already begun. But when these disasters failed to occur, most of her followers turned their attention elsewhere, to different weirdness.
The Global Competitiveness Forum is a meeting of the world's top Movers and Shakers, held each year in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Industry leaders and sheiks rub shoulders with political leaders and intellectual leaders (or at least that's how it's supposed to work - http://www.gcf.org.sa/ ). This year Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were there, as well as Andy Bird, the Chairman of Walt Disney International. And this year, these movers and shakers were treated to a panel (mostly) on UFOlogy, featuring Stanton Friedman, Jacques Vallee, Michio Kaku, and Nick Pope (http://www.gcf.org.sa/en/Program/Program/Welcoming--Networking--0800---900112112/ ) .
When I first saw this in an email sent around by the far-out Bohemian physicist Jack Sarfatti, I scratched my head and muttered "WTF?!!!". Here these (presumably) very hard-headed, results-oriented global leaders have paid a reported $4,000 each, not counting expenses, to attend this seminar in the Middle East, and what they get for their money are tired old claims of extraterrestrial contact that have been kicking around for decades. Even more astonishing, these talks are only about ten minutes each. I forwarded this to several of my skeptical buddies, and they also scratched their heads and muttered "WTF?!!!"
The panel was held on Sunday, January 23 (a workday in Saudi Arabia). The videos are now up on YouTube, saving both you and I $4,000 each, plus airfares and hotel, to learn about how Contact from Outer Space will boost our Global Competitiveness.
Zaghloul El Naggar is a Professor of Earth Sciences of the Supreme Council of Islamic Affairs (the guy apparently has a real PhD in Earth Sciences from the University of Wales). His talk was the most interesting from my perspective, as it was not something we ever hear in the West. He explained that one needs "divine guidance" if one wants to maximize competitiveness, and that the best source for Divine Guidance is of course the Glorious Koran, whose "divine purity" has never been sullied or compromised.
He discussed two Koranic verses that appear to describe the Big Bang: "And the Firmament we have built with might, and verily we are (currently) expanding it." No one asked him if the use of the term "firmament" implied that the stars were attached to a solid sphere, as was believed in Medieval Cosmology. (Indeed, the audience was astonishingly quiet throughout the panel, even when funnyman Stanton Friedman cracked jokes. Maybe nobody actually attended this session, since we can only see the speakers). He then described the Koranic process of "creation, destruction, and re-creation" of the universe, and tied it in to a "Big Crunch" that would occur when the expansion phase of the universe peters out, to be followed by another Bang. Too bad that Dr. El Naggar is a decade or two behind in his knowledge of Cosmology. According to all of the latest evidence, the expansion of the universe is accelerating, not slowing down, an acceleration hypothesized to be caused by "dark energy" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_energy ). So if he's going to claim that science supports the Koran, he at least ought to know what science currently says. But that is not his claim: rather, he says, "We are supporting science with the Koran, not vice-versa." The Koran, he explains, contains over 12,000 verses that have been proven to be absolutely scientifically precise. For example, the Koran tells how Allah formed the heavens and the earth out of "smoke." And "this smoke has just been photographed by satellites that have passed the zone of pollution and the zone of clouds surrounding the earth." It's worth paying $4,000 to get information like that.
Good old Stanton Friedman calls himself "The Flying Saucer Physicist", because he worked in physics about fifty years ago, and hasn't stopped talking about it since. Friedman's lecture covered largely the same subjects he has been covering since the 1970s, but held to under ten minutes, long-winded Stanton was clearly vexed. He proposed the use of nuclear fusion for rocket propulsion, without explaining the absurd fuel requirements to get anywhere even near the speed of light (see for example http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17737431 ). He suggests that the most likely place our visitors are coming from is the star system Zeta 1 and Zeta 2 Reticuli (not mentioned by name, but clearly described, and a regular part of Friedman's UFO lectures). This is interesting, because recent satellite data has completely invalidated the so-called "UFO Star Map" drawn up by Marjorie Fish from the map the late Betty Hill drew after her supposed UFO abduction (see my Psychic Vibrations column in Skeptical Inquirer, Sept/Oct 2009, for the full story). Since Friedman endlessly claims to be a scientist, he is obligated to abandon an earlier hypothesis when newer data contradicts it. This has absolutely happened, but not a peep from Friedman about abandoning the tired old Fish Map.
Nick Pope is a British author and journalist who used to handle UFO reports for the Ministry of Defense. He talked about the various ways that researchers are currently searching for extraterrestrial life: through SETI, through the search for exoplanets, and through UFO reports. He was the only one whose talk was actually on-subject, that is, how ET Contact can make you "competitive." He suggested that the discoverer of ET life would presumably own the naming rights, which could be extremely valuable if sold. He also suggested that the information contained in an ET signal might have great commercial value.
Michio Kaku is a theoretical physicist at the City University of New York and science TV personality, who wrote the appropriately-titled Physics of the Impossible, "A Scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel." Kaku urged his listeners to "open their mind" to the prospect that some day we will make contact with ETI. In fact, he predicted that by mid-century we "might" make such contact, a bold prediction that is in no danger of being falsified.
Kaku described three types of advanced civilizations: a Type I civilization controls the resources of an entire planet, which includes controlling earthquakes, and the weather. A Type II controls the resources of a solar system, which includes moving planets around at will. Type III controls the resources of an entire galaxy. (These classifications were actually created by the Russian astronomer Nikolai Kardashev, who was not credited). Kaku did not explain how that could be possible, given that it takes light approximately 100,000 years to cross an average-sized galaxy, meaning that orders from Galactic HQ will be already tens of thousands of years old before they even arrive at the frontiers. But Kaku has never taken speed-of-light limitations very seriously. He even speculated that there might be a Type IV civilization, harnessing the energy of the entire universe! He predicted that our own civilization would become a Type I civilization in about 100 years, meaning that we would become like gods in controlling our planet. I pity whoever has to fill out the Environmental Impact Report for that transition.
Longtime UFO investigator and theorist Jacques Vallee repeated his usual claim that UFO reports are a 'challenge to science,' and are "potentially leading to technology breakthroughs." The problem is, we have no actual data about UFOs, just anecdotes, and the reason that the Royal Society in London adopted the motto "nullius in verba" ("on the word of no man," i.e. words alone count for nothing), is that there were plenty of guys like Vallee back in the 17th century presenting similar "evidence" without tangible proof. Of course, in those days claims were usually about alchemy, religious miracles, or witchcraft. In fact, a serious effort was set forth in the 1660s to prove the reality of witchcraft on purely empirical, not religious, grounds, by appealing to credible eyewitness testimony, exactly as UFOlogists do today. See Chapter 7 of my book UFO Sightings. The Royal Society's 17th Century decision to ignore anecdotes is at the very cornerstone of the modern scientific method. It is what separates "science" from "pseudo".
Vallee served up not the usual long-debunked UFO cases, but some golden oldies that nobody is talking about any more, from the files of France's UFO investigations, supposedly so well-witnessed as to leave little or no room for doubt. One was an aircraft sighting near Dijon, France on March 7, 1977 around 20.30. (Thanks to Jim Oberg for helping with this one). Actually, there were several UFO sightings in France and the U.K. around that time, suggesting that it was likely a meteor high overhead. Unfortunately, so little information has been published about this case that it is impossible to say anything about it with much confidence.
Another sighting was from Orleans in 1956. Perhaps Vallee was relying on the very obscurity of these cases to protect them from refutation.
