ufo

At there’s a few US shows that I quite like:  Ghost Hunters International, UFO Hunters, and Hell’s Kitchen.  In Ghost Hunters International a team of everypeople go around the world investigating supposedly haunted places with lots of dubious equipment – like a camera with its IR filter taken out – which they keep referring to as ‘full spectrum’ (it’s not), and, of course, the requisites of any latter day ghost hunt – handicams, closed circuit rigs, digital voice recorders, that sort of thing.

In UFO Hunters three presenters (Bill Burnes – Alien UFO Believer – wears dark glasses indoors, Pat Uskert – UFO believer, Ted Acworth – scientist/sceptic/MythBusters effect beneficiary)  investigate UFO sightings, past and present. Speaking to witnesses, official documents, looking at out of focus videos shot by idiots, and checking for evidence. In Hell’s Kitchen a load of people line up to be sodomised (metaphorically) by Gordon Ramsay in the hopes of winning a job in a restaurant.  And they cook a bit too.

What’s interesting about all three isn’t the content or the subject.  The content and subject of the programmes are delivery mechanisms for the production.  With Ghost Hunters International, and UFO Hunters, the investigations results are usually ambiguous,  a bitch if you want exciting an engaging.  So, almost inevitably, they have exquisitely crafted soundtracks, and suspenseful narration.  Hell’s Kitchen no doubt has its share of in real life drama, but what’s clever is the way that the narrative is formed.

If they didn’t story board it I’d be amazed.   Not because drama didn’t happen, in that sense it’s real, but because they’ve got to convey things concisely as part of an overall narrative.

All three shows have  gone one-step further than old school reality television because the soundtrack is crafted to each situation, which influences the general mood of the content to the point that the content is no longer king.  It’s like selecting paragraphs from a book,  and controlling their new context with an additional narrative driven by the music.  The jarring sound effects on Ghost Hunters International are great, as are the riffs on Hell’s Kitchen.

There’s plenty of other reality shows that are driven by the production, particularly American reality shows, but, Ghost Hunters International and UFO Hunters pretend they’re not  – everything is made to look authentic in an existential sense  – and Hell’s Kitchen is the opposite – it’s very hard to see it as anything other than production driven entertainment, it is so in your face, right down to substantial and dramatic recaps at the start of the show.

All three shows are bollocks.   But that’s not the point.

When newspapers, and many others, use the phrase scientist or scientists, it is usually to assert that something has some kind of innate authority.  It’s silly.   We are all guilty of turning off our brain sometimes when an expert says something, because they’re an expert; we are conditioned somewhat to listen to experts, because, within the scope of their expertise, they’re probably right.  But it’s not clever to accept anything without examination.  It’s not the fault of experts per-se.  It’s a universally accepted truth that some people are arseholes or a bit bonkers.  Even experts. Most people aren’t.

On to Dr Edgar Mitchell – scientist: I don’t think Edgar Mitchell is an arsehole.  I also think what he has to say is somewhat newsworthy because of who he is.

I don’t think he’s a liar (people who believe stuff aren’t).  I don’t think he’s harmful.  Unlike the overwhelming majority of people he has been to the moon.   In a recent Kerrang Radio interview he unequivocally stated that extraterrestrial life exists.  But, from what I’ve read, unless life is very rare, there is likely to be life on planets capable of supporting it.  I’m not closed minded about it.  Belief in extraterrestrial life is not that controversial, it may turn out to be wrong, and I’d accept that.  I think he’s wrong to be so definite about it.

Unfortunately he then goes on to say that extraterrestrials have visited earth.  I think this is highly unlikely because of the stellar distances involved.  Space is very big.  The nearest star to the sun, Proxima Centuri, is 4.2 light years away; at light speed that’s 4.2 years travel.  39.69 trillion km away.  39,690,000,000,000 km.  Fast-as and faster than light travel are probably impossible.  It’d be great if it were possible, imagine a computer that received messages before it sent them.   Life could be much farther away than 4.2 light years.  There may not be life near Proxima Centuri.  Technologically advanced life may be significantly rarer than life.

For such reasons it is highly unlikely any extraterrestrial would visit earth without spaceships that could travel at speeds that make long distance travel practical well within their life-span.  I don’t think that’s a controversial opinion.

Edgar Mitchell elaborates, according to him, not only have aliens visited earth, but they’ve also been in contact with governments.   If aliens were visiting earth, contacting governments superficially makes sense.  They administer a lot of things, and they’re supposed to be representative.  But I question why any advanced beings would want to get involved.   There are several problems.  Firstly, any exchanges of technology or knowledge would give whichever geographic grouping of primitives a huge advantage over the other primitives.  So it would have to be done selectively or globally.  Even selectively as soon as the others found out there’s potential for trouble.

Secondly, assuming that extraterrestrial visitors have paid attention to the last couple of centuries, in which millions of people have died in various conflicts, I would think the transfer of technology to us as a species could be a bit of a risk.  Unless the aliens retained a bigger stick.  We have not behaved rationally towards each other.

But…

What really annoys me about Edgar Mitchell, and disclosure UFO people in general, is that it rests on foundations that are made of anecdotes.  It’s always something that has been heard ‘in intelligence circles’ or something on the grapevine.  Some expert clique.  If they want to be taken seriously by sane people they need Who, Where, When, and Why  – but they conveniently hide behind the same secrecy they claim to be against.

“Who told you?”

“Can’t say – it’s secret”

If I here another news reporter saying the UFO files released by the MOD (available in PDF here) were in any way secret I will, compounded by a seriously bad back, throw something hard at my television screen. Shame on these guys. Firstly, anyone who even vaguely knows their shit, will tell you that the documents are largely unclassified (the lowest possible security concern) . Labels like secret and restricted have very specific meanings within government. And those UFO files are about as unexciting as it gets in terms of classifications. All the ’secret’ shit is bollocks. If they were some variety of eyes-only, caveatted up to the eyeballs, with crypto codewords, then it would probably be half as interesting as the press is implying about today’s release of UFO documents. People are strictly vetted to make sure they are boring enough to view such documents. The stuff released today is vanilla drudgery.

A lot of intelligence work is carried out by unsung heroes who quietly collate, analyse and disseminate, working in organisations such as the MOD’s Defence Intelligence Staff. During much of the last century the UK’s airspace was routinely intruded upon by Russian aircraft (no doubt we did the same to Russia). So it made a great deal of sense to log UFO reports and contextualise them in order to ascertain if the objects sighted were of defence significance. No matter how barmy. Or not entirely barmy: Many people spotting stealth planes, prior to them being made public (which sometimes takes years, and the prototypes may never be declassified), would, given the cultural collateral of ‘unidentified’ flying objects, view them as little green (or grey) men operating some kind of intergalactic free prostate checking clinic. Likewise a Harrier Jump Jet showing off, at night, viewed from 5km away. Or a missile test. Or atmospheric research that also provides handy surveillance platforms. Taxes at work.

So having a civil servant take reports between more important tasks makes sense. If a pattern emerges of some potentially unknown novel foreign aircraft regularly violating national airspace it is a major concern. The files were not secret, it’s more likely the reason some of the documents weren’t released sooner was a combination of laziness and stinginess. There are interesting bits buried in there, but if I can spot them, despite having the invisible Jolly Green Giant knee me in the back, I’ll be fucked if I’ll point them out. Do not ask me to point them out. I won’t point them out to anyone on principle.

FYI I think alien life exists and possibly super advanced aliens also (I was going to say super intelligent but then it dawned on me that intelligence is a very human concept). It’s just that the distances involved are huge and beings clever enough to travel faster than light (if it’s even possible), or some kind of time-travel (if it’s even possible), will likely have cleverer ways of studying intergalactic flora and fauna. In the event of time travel the computing possibilities are endless.

Jon Ronson often respects the people he writes about and has empathy for the people he writes about. Here’s an article in today’s Guardian about Robbie Williams’ search for answers. I think that’s what it is. I suspect that Robbie Williams, given his experience with psychics, is on a road to scepticism, by a circuitous route. I think there’s a lot of people, like Robbie, who are intelligent, and looking for answers, and find out bit by bit that the paranormal does not stand up to scrutiny. People like Robbie are distinct from those who are deluded or refuse to hear counterarguments. He’s actively seeking answers and discarding things that he finds out are false. Given he was in Take That from aged 16, he’s probably playing catch-up. Robbie Williams is the kind of person that should be visiting websites like The Skeptics Dictionary and reading about critical thinking. To get both sides of the story, in a spirit of balance.

Imagine a world before science: a world of the supernatural - hunches dictating belief, of sun blotting fallacy.  For some seriously lolworthy quackery and pseudoscience watch UFO uHnters.  For fuck’s sake.

I was sitting eating cheese with my friend Megan when lightening struck and their was a power cut.  I woke up. To find there was a thunderstorm outside and there had been a power cut.  And that I wasn’t friends with Megan and I’d run out of cheese.  Life’s like that.  One time, hiding behind a mud bank, while a farmer paced beyond with a shotgun, in a cold, grey Suffolk winter, having been chased by pigs, I can remember thinking “by God.  I’ve got cold feet.  And they’re wet”.  Porcine pursuit is scarier.  Being chased by angry future bacon  is disturbing.  Farmers get bored.  And shotgun shot isn’t lethal from a distance.  A pig will chew your bollocks off.

Although the porcine pursuit may have been motivated by curiosity rather than anger.  What kind of idiot hangs around to find out?   I was over the fence faster than George Blake. That night, lying on an insulating mat, on a slab of stone, in a very flat field, in Norfolk, I looked up at the sky and thought “there’s more black stuff than stars.  It must be better”.  And fell asleep for a bit, only to be woken a short time later by a coach load of UFO hunters from Birmingham, who I amused with drunken tales of being abducted by UFOs, which they bought wholesale, until I brought UB40 and the Second World War into it. Talking colons while lecturing about the bombing of Coventry was over egging the story.