The Great U.F.O. Hoax of 2009!

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We're barely into the fourth month of 2009, and already this qualifies for "UFO Hoax of the Year" (... but don't they all?).

Yay for Fnord's team. Somebody successfully pulled off a hoax, so that proves that everybody who doesn't see things the same as Fnord is dumb and gullible.

Kinda like Piltdown. Some pranksters put a gorilla jaw on a human skull, or was it the other way around, I can't remember.

They were as skilled as these guys who are so smart they choose to live in New Jersey. Fooled all the experts and kept them fooled for years. Creationists like to bring that one up, since it proves how dumb and gullible people who believe in human evolution are. Some people are so dumb they can't see that a literal interpretation of the Bible is the only way to find truth. Same as Fnord, playing the same game, but on a different team.

Gotta admit Fnord's logic is compelling. There couldn't be any aliens around.

Let's see, how many stars in the universe, I don't know, probably more than a dozen, but it's very unlikely that any of them would have a planet approximately the same size as earth.

And if a few of them did, surely not one of them would have a planet that size with the proper orbital distance to sustain life. Sure, life exists on every possible environment on earth, from antarctic glaciers to undersea thermal vents where the temperature is hotter than the water boiling on my stove; life exists in the Great Salt Lake and in mine runoff more acidic than the stuff in my car battery, but that doesn't suggest that life could exist on any other planet.

Okay, maybe they got bacteria or archeae type things someplace. But I'm sure there's no other place where prokaryotes figured out how to blend and combine to form eukaryotic cells.

Well okay, maybe they did in a few other places, but there's no chance that single celled organisms could have clumped together into colonies anyplace else, just because bacteria do it all the time, that don't mean nothing.

I guess maybe they could have cell colonies someplace else, but there's absolutely no chance that colonies of single celled organisms could start up some kind of cell specialization and develop into multicellular organisms, no matter how many billions of years they had. Sure, it happened here, but it couldn't happen anyplace else in the universe. That's obvious.

And even if it did, just because there's been a trend throughout the history of life on earth for multicellular organisms to develop increasingly complex central nervous systems, that doesn't suggest the same trend might occur on other planets with multicellular organisms.

And if it did, I'm sure the process would have stopped before they got to be as smart as us. Humans are really smart, just ask anybody. That's why the other animals got together and decided to call us Homo sapiens.

It takes a third generation star to have the elements necessary for life forms like the ones on earth. There's no possibility the same process could have occurred somewhere else a few million years ahead of us.

Well, okay, the End Permian Extinctions wiped out 95 percent of the species on earth, and it took the world thirty million years for the biosphere to recover to anything resembling normalcy, but just because our bus stopped by the road for thirty million years doesn't suggest another bus might have passed us.

So there aren't any alien civilizations elsewhere in the universe, and since Fnord and the people who think like him are smarter than the rest of us, that proves that...

Fnord is the smartest thing in the universe.

The whole point of the hoax was to expose those who claim that UFOs are of extraterrestrial origin are either (1) delusional fools, (2) deliberate liars, or (3) both. And it succeeded very well!

There may or may not be extraterrestrial aliens. My only claims are (1) there is no valid evidence to back up the claim that there is, and (2) I would be very happy to be proven wrong, provided that the evidence is valid. Word games played with probability and Drake's equation are irrelevant, and serve only to prove only that someone may have read Sagan's "Cosmos."

Piltdown man turned out to be an orangutan jawbone on a human skull.

It's not so much whether there's life elsewhere in the universe. More whether that if it did exist, why would it bother to razz round earth behaving like the aliens in the latest sc-fi extravaganza?

Actually, it's not so much whether there's conscious life out there as whether there's any on Earth yet.

Fnord, I know about your belief in evidence and verification of everything. I agree these are sound principles, my worry is about infinite regress. If I have to verify everything, I have to verify it all the time, to verify that nothing has changed. Is it even worth typing this until I have verified that the WP forum actually exists, let alone a poster called Fnord? Decades ago, people wrote AI programs that could simulate believable responses to typed human input. Maybe WP is just a program that calculates responses. We *easily* have the technology to do this!

FWIW, I don't believe that UFO's exist. But then I don't believe that UFO's are by any means the only mass delusion that people believe purely because other people believe it too. That is how we know 'almost' everything.

Over a 100 years ago, a scientist wrote how amazing and incredible it was that until his day, everybody had lived in a world of dreams and illusions but thankfully science had now revealed the truth. Of course, a 100 years later, we now know that he also was living in a world of dreams and illusions. And 100 years from now??? 1000 years from now people will look on us as a bunch of ignorant, barely fully human primitives who lived lives bordering on barbarism and believed the craziest ideas for no apparent reason. The funny thing is that I see it like this already

For the record, my desire to know whether extra-terrestrial life exists or not is secondary to my desire to expose delusional thinking and outright fraud to the world - challenging people to provide "Evidence, Please" is merely a means to that end. I have not gone so far as to attach road flares to weather balloons (My house is under the approach path to a local airport), but I admire the shear chutzpah of the people that did!

I do not doubt that there are other civilisations in the universe, probably more advanced than ours. I do doubt that people from these advanced civilisations come to this planet to perform anal probes on people, mutilate cattle, and then go home leaving no trace of their passage.

If there were an alien civilisation that had sufficient technology to get themselves to this planet, then we would surely be inundated with tourists and immigrants from that planet. Since we are not, it is safe to say they are not coming here.

Those lights we see in the sky are obviously something else.

The problem I see is that when something cannot be verified, it does not mean it is therefore untrue or non-existant. It means just that we can't verify it. That's all. Most of the established facts (the earth is round, the sun is a ball of fire, the earth is a dream being dreamt by god etc) were non-verifiable for most of our time on earth.

There is often a mass of contradictory evidence and we choose want we want to believe. e.g .the existence (or not) of god, the benefit (or not) of the death penalty, the virtue (or not) or western capitalism, the increase (or not) in crime, the exploitation (or not) of women by men, the decline (or not) in happiness, the existence (or not) of UFO's etc etc etc ....