"There's an old saying; just because you're paranoid, that doesn't mean they're not out to get you. I have my own variation: just because you're insane that doesn't mean that things aren't slipping in unnoticed through dimensional gateways..." ~ Christopher Knowles (h/t to The Daily Grail for quote.)



Monday, August 24, 2009

When Skeptics Go Oh So Baaaaaaaad. . . Tyson on UFOs

Usually pleasant enough uber-skeptic Neil DeGrasse Tyson on UFOs, at the Amazing Meeting in Las Vegas, NV. This is so bad, because it's so damn wrong. Surely, surely (I know, don't call me Shirley) he knows better. After all, he's intelligent, right? Right? Thanks to The Daily Grail for the item.

Okay, can't help myself, but I'm going to respond to this. First, for your viewing pleasure. Or, not:


On second thought, you know what? I can't go on. You either get it or you don't.

Source: The Daily Grail: When Skeptics Fail

1 comment:

Interstellar Housewife said...

Obviously, there are a lot of remarks that will be offensive remarks in this video to some, but then I think about people like John Stewart or whoever, who often joke about serious things without necessarily thinking that the subject isn't serious.

However, here, it is done in a way that *feels* a bit more purposely insulting to a certain cross-section of the 'UFO' population. Perhaps not, but it comes across that way, a little.

Some things of note:

I agree with him that a UFO most definitely stands for "Unidentified." Many people do forget this and jump to conclusions with little basis. And while personally, I believe we are being visited in some capacity by extra-terrestrials, I obviously cannot make claims that all UFOs or even any UFOs that have been seen are extra-terrestrial -- simply we have no idea what an extra-terrestrial ship might look like and because of that letter "U".

The reality is that we know very little -- actually, most of us know nothing about what these craft are or who they are piloted by. Whether they are terrestrial, extra terrestrial, or whatever-dimensional.

Tyson says "I'm not anti-alien, I'm anti-your account of the alien"

This quote stands out to me, because I am skeptical, but not so much that there are aliens. I'm more skeptical of the claims many people make about experience with aliens. It doesn't mean it didn't happen, it just means that the evidence presented isn't enough to sway me that the individual had the account they say or think they had.

The whole crash thing towards the end - that was something thatalways bothered me about Roswell. It in't enough to discredit the idea that there was a crash (I think there was) but it is hard not to consider that. Wat made them crash? I feel fairly certain that it wasn't bullets. Perhaps it was our radar interfering with their navigational equipment. Maybe. Or maybe hey were looking at there laptop and overshot Minneapolis/St. Paul international airport, and crashed while viewing porn.

For me, the hardest thing to swallow in the UFO topic is abduction claims. While I do believe it has happened, and I have certain accounts that I give an amount of credibility too, proving an abduction is a lot harder to do than proving a craft that was witnessed by thousands of people.

And a lot of abduction claims do match up with each other, but some do not -- some wayyyyy do not. I can;t say it definitely didn't happen, but there are a lot of cases that I personally do not believe.

However, I am interested in the area of abduction, and tend to read up on it a lot. It's just a very hard to support field with a rather large margin for error in perceptions of some who call themselves abductees.

The real problems with this clip is in the apparent dismissal that the aliens *could* travel here and that an abductee *would* be able to sneak out of a ship with an object they swiped due to the poor attention of those silly, distracted extra-terrestrials ("Hey, what's that over there!"). As many of us have come to understand, in most abduction claims, the individual is not entirely under their own "control" whether it is by drugs or whatever