If you want to have your faith in your fellow man lowered (again) by such nonsense (but perhaps raised by the fact that there are those hardy souls who investigate this sort of nonsense), have a look at this post from Silver Screen Saucers.

This “controversy” revolves around the wacky claim made months ago that yet another enlightened researcher (Raul Julia-Levy) had new, incontrovertible proof that the Mayans had been contacted by an ET civilization and was going to release it to a dutifully astonished world. To tease the world Mr. Julia-Levy before his explosive documentary film (“Revelations of the Mayans 2012 and Beyond“) made history, he released unprovenanced (and surely not Photoshopped) pictures of saucers and Mayan sculptures. <GASP>

Even more shocking, the Catholic Church was purportedly in cahoots with this shocking revelation. <B-MOVIE FEMALE SCREAM>

Predictably, as the post details (with links), Mr. Levy seems to be nothing more than a con man.  Too bad. George Lucas’ Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull film was so awful that I was hoping this one would be better.

Technorati Tags: 2012, aliens, extraterrestrial, Mayans, Raul Julia-Levy

Technorati Tags: aliens, Anunnaki, research, Sumerian

I don’t often post things like this here, but examples like this are worth it. Part of the debate over the likelihood of ET life is linked to the debate over the alleged probability that other planets *must* be out there capable of supporting ET life. The other side is the “rare earth” view — that earth is alone (or probably alone) in being home to intelligent life and even complex life forms. That view is consistent with the fine-tuning argument, which posits earth is capable of supporting life because the universe is “fine-tuned” to make that possible. The term naturally implies intelligent design, but there are some fine-tuning proponents that don’t make God part of the equation.

Technorati Tags: aliens, extraterrestrials, fine-tuning

I read Leslie Kean’s book a few months ago but haven’t gotten around to a review until now. Readers should not take that delay as a sign of my own reticence or the book’s quality. UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go On the Record has earned a place on my (very) short list of books I’d recommend to anyone who is either new to the UFO subject, perhaps thinking it a waste of intellectual time, or those who want to read only serious material. In short, this was a very good read and worth the time invested.

As other reviewers have noted, the content of Kean’s book is restricted to the testimony and opinions of a select group of experienced pilots and high-ranking government officials and military brass whose positions put them at the forefront of official UFO investigations in their airspace. Several also have scientific backgrounds. In a nutshell, if one wanted to arbitrarily assemble a “dream team” of serious, technical witnesses to UFO phenomena, it would look a lot like the panoply of individuals featured in Kean’s book. Examples include Major General Wilfrid de Brouwer (tasked with the military investigation of the Belgian UFO wave of 1989 and 1990) and Captain Julio Miguel Guerra of the Portuguese Air Force, whose testimony of a harrowing experience chasing a UFO that ultimately (and literally) flew circles around his fighter jet in 1982. The episode was also witnessed by another pilot.

Due to the nature of the witnesses involved, Kean’s book is not propelled by speculation, weird theories of alien visitation, overly technical descriptions of UFO aerospace capabilities, or conspiracy theories. The recollections are mercifully void of breathless histrionics and New-Agey pablum about aliens so common in other UFO books. The book features highly credible people telling their stories, part of which involve the inner workings of how real government agencies pursue UFO investigations — collecting evidence and analyzing that evidence. The book is committed to factual reporting, something not surprising given Kean’s background as an investigative journalist.

Beyond the reports of the experiences of her star witnesses, Kean spends several chapters discussing the questions that naturally arise from such material. These chapters feature coherent discussion of the efforts to debunk the events in which the witnesses were involved. This is a strength of the book. The weak point of the book, in my view, is Kean’s chapter outlining an action plan that governments ought to follow if they are serious about investigating the phenomenon with a goal toward some sort of resolution. The points of the plan are, on the whole good ones, but Kean is naively optimistic, especially in respect to the current American administration. If Kean spent a tenth of the time looking at the faux transparency of the current administration, she’d temper her optimism. But that is a minor complaint.

Kean’s book is also a very good illustration of why I don’t think that the case for an ET presence is a slam dunk for the UFO phenomenon, even with this cadre of witnesses. That may sound odd. Time and again, those witnesses who come down on the side of the ET explanation do so on the basis of one, and only one, argument: the technology they have witnessed. Since these witnesses know of no analogy to the technology in their own military hardware, or that of other nations they have witnessed, they feel compelled to opt for the ET explanation. I find this understandable, but not coherent or compelling.

Ultimately, the technology argument requires omniscience of the witnesses. Those of us who listen to them and take them as truth-tellers (and I do) are required to believe that since they know of no human analogy for the technology, then none must exist. That is an argument from silence. That argument also cannot be used as proof for ETs since that would mean it seeks to prove something on the basis of what it is assuming. In other words, it is circular (“There must be aliens because the UFOs I’ve seen must be using alien and not human technology”). This is, bluntly, bogus logic. But it’s a genuine, natural response. I seek only to point out its ultimate inefficacy, not to criticize it for its own sake.  And that is where we are. We cannot know for sure (and neither can these witnesses) that if human technology of this sort existed, they would surely know about it. That’s just a guess, and one with a tiny bit of ego infused. We also cannot be sure that nations would share such technology if they had it with their allies. History is filled with such inconsistencies, as military-industrial complexes habitually want to maintain advantages.

So what does Kean’s book give us beyond lots of credible witness testimony? In sum, while it cannot prove the ET hypothesis, it at least informs the reader that, while an explanation for them is not immediately forthcoming and satisfactory, UFOs are demonstrably real and deserving of serious study.

Technorati Tags: government, Kean, military, pilots, science, UFOs

Technorati Tags: astronomy, astrophysics, extraterrestrial life, habitable planets, inhabited, unique

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For those new to Woit, he is a mathematician at Columbia University whose PhD (Princeton) is in theoretical physics. He is most known for his book, Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law.

The first of Woit’s posts that caught my attention was entitled, “The Ultimate Guide to the Multiverse.” Some excerpts:

Yet another cover story about the Multiverse can be found this week at New Scientist, which calls it The Ultimate Guide to the Multiverse. As just one more in a long line of such stories over the last decade, a trend that shows no signs of slowing down, one can be pretty sure that this is not the yet the “ultimate” one, nor even the penultimate one.

The content is the usual: absolutely zero skepticism about the idea, and lots of outrageous hype from the usual suspects (Bousso, Tegmark, Susskind, etc.) We’re told that scientists are now performing tests of the idea, even at the LHC. The LHC test has been a great success: Laura Mersini-Houghton used the multiverse to predict that the LHC would not see supersymmetry, and that prediction has worked out very well so far.

This past week also saw the premiere of the Multiverse episode of Brian Greene’s Fabric of the Cosmos series on PBS. It’s more or less an hour-long infomercial for the Multiverse, with the argument against it pretty much restricted to some short grumpy comments by David Gross about how he didn’t like it. Brian’s pro-multiverse argument was that many new advances in physics are all pointing to a multiverse, and he showed support for the idea as resting on a three-legged structure. One of the legs was string theory, and I’ve described elsewhere recently how circular reasoning makes this one very shaky.

The multiverse propaganda machine has now been going full-blast for more than eight years, since at least 2003 or so, and I’m beginning to wonder “what’s next?”. Once your ideas about theoretical physics reach the point of having a theory that says nothing at all, there’s no way to take this any farther. You can debate the “measure problem” endlessly in academic journals, but the cover stories about how you have revolutionized physics can only go on so long before they reach their natural end of shelf-life.

Another post of a couple days ago saw Woit defending himself against ad hominem attacks from mainstream string theorists: “String and M-Theory: Answering the Critics.” Again, some excerpts.

Mike Duff has a new preprint out, a contribution to the forthcoming Foundations of Physics special issue on “Forty Years of String Theory” entitled String and M-theory: answering the critics. Much of it is the usual case string theorists are trying to make these days, but it also includes vigorous ad hominem attacks on Lee Smolin and me (I’m described as having an “unerring gift for inaccuracy”, and we’re compared to people who campaign against vaccination “in the face of mainstream scientific opinion”).

Duff explains that his motivation for answering the critics is that we have been successful on the public relations front, supposedly responsible for the British EPSRC “office rejecting” without peer review grant proposals on string theory. I know nothing of this, but I think it’s clear to everyone that the perception of string theory among physicists has changed, and not for the better, over the past decade. One dramatic way to see this is to notice that at this point, US physics departments have essentially stopped hiring string theorists for permanent appointments (i.e. at the tenure-track level).

Duff’s article contains an appendix about this, in the form of a “FAQ”, where he explains that he approved the text of the press release headlined “Researchers discover how to conduct first test of ‘untestable’ string theory” which is misleading hype by any standard. Initially someone who was successfully misled in the Imperial media team added the subtitle “New study suggests researchers can now test the ‘theory of everything’”, which was later removed. Duff claims that Shelly Glashow, Edward Witten and Jim Gates told journalists that they didn’t agree with this because of the “theory of everything” subtitle, implying that otherwise they were fine with the “first test of ‘untestable’ string theory” business (except for Gates noting that in any case this is just supergravity, not string theory). It would be interesting to hear from the three of them if they’re really on-board with this “first test of ‘untestable’ string theory”.

Technorati Tags: multiverse, Peter Woit, physics, skepticism, string theory

The late novelist Michael Crichton gave an entertaining lecture at Caltech in 2003 saying that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a religion. And in a way it is. Carl Sagan, one of its leading promoters, “believed in superior beings in space, creatures so intelligent, so powerful, as to resemble gods.” … That’s religion. The well-known atheist Richard Dawkins shows similar tendencies. He was quoted in the New York Times the other day as saying, “It’s highly plausible that in the universe there are Godlike creatures.” But he was careful to add that “these Gods came into being by an explicable scientific progression of incremental evolution.” (He would not have wanted to see “Gods” capitalized, however.)

These observations and others in regard to the religious commitment of atheist materialists to their quest for non-divine deities make this brief essay worth the read.

Technorati Tags: atheism, drake equation, extraterrestrial, extraterrestrials, God, religion, Sagan, SETI, theism