Flying Saucer Scam Busts Pseudoscience

October 20, 2009

The human melodrama aside, last week’s “Balloon Boy” debacle was also an inevitable demonstration of pseudoscience run amok.  

I don’t want to give the purported hoax of the runaway flying saucer balloon any more attention that it has already sucked up in world news. But I do want to point out that beyond the reckless hubris of its accused perpetrator, Richard Heene, the event is an indictment of our sensationalist and fuzzy-brained TV culture. 

Let’s start with the bubble-headed TV “reality shows,” like the wife-swapping program Mr. Heene appeared on, that cultivate and empower publicity mongers. The screwier you think and act, the better.  Add to that the popularity of nutty-professor (sans PhD) pseudoscience shows that cash in on the big public appetite for junk food for the mind.

It was an inevitable “perfect storm” that some desperate entrepreneur would try to cash in on this culture with a bold and dangerous charade that managed to grab more public attention than NASA crashing a dozen rockets into the moon.

According to an article by his former collaborator Robert Thomas, Mr. Heene first sough to go one better than the celebrated 1947 Roswell New Mexico UFO fairy tale by launching a weather balloon shaped like a flying saucer.  He was convinced that the balloon stunt: “will be a dramatic increase in local and national awareness about, the Heene family and, . . . the UFO phenomenon in general.”

The footage of his contraption drifting in Colorado skies (which CNN called the “love child between a flying saucer and Jiffy Pop”) is the most well-documented sighting of a flying saucer shaped aircraft I’ve ever seen. It beats six decades of phony, fuzzy photos of purported real alien spaceships.

Thomas also wrote that Mr. Heene was in a rush to snag a “science” based reality show because he was worried that Mayan calendar based predictions about the end of the world in 2012 will come true.  So time was a wastin’. He needed money to be one of the few post-apocalypse survivors.

If Mr. Heene hadn’t been is a hurry to do anything to grab headlines, he might have actually sold cable TV a “science adventure” show that was going to dabble into just about every numbskull idea out there: seeing inter-dimensional entities, building antigravity machines, extracting electricity from rock crystals, telekinesis,  lizard-alien shape-shifters (including Dick Cheney?), and the most macabre of all: measuring the soul’s mass departing a dying patient.

Regrettably UFO-chasing cable news outlets no longer have a science correspondent like veteran Miles O’Brien who I think would have expressed more skepticism at the live video of the runaway balloon. 

Instead, media will subject us to more pop-psychoanalysis of the Heene family antics and a lot of indignity over the accusation of someone duping us at public expense and potential risk.

But TV and pop culture did a lot to make this monster. And, regardless of what legal actions that may take place, I think Mr. Heene will eventually be back in the spotlight because he’s too outrageous a carnival act to ignore.

It sure beats showing boring real science.

Comments

[London Affiliate]

Good article, liked the sarcasm with the 'boring science' bit at the end.

[speed]

Yo, take at alook at this idiots eyes and face;if thats nots insane I dont know what is!

[george ormondy]

THE WRITER OF THIS ARTICLE WILL EAT CROW VERY SOON.

[B. Duke]

Thank you for writing the actual truth about reality shows. I believe they are the evolution of bad talk shows.

[Jason]

shelter for 2012. If the sun exploded or whatever he thinks will happen, shelter or not you wouldn't live. Period

[CntryGrl]

George is as wacky as Mr Heene is but I just have to ask why the author will eat crow? Do you still belive that the boy was in the balloon? Heene's going to NEED a job to repay all the expenses for the worst hoax (as in badly done) in my lifetime. I mean really...how many people upon seeing that balloon thought there was anything in there? anyone...? It was an obvious fake from the start.

[Essay]

Great post, was realy interesting
___________
essay writing

[John]

Have you ever heard of the Wow Signal received by the Big Ear Observatory? ET is real and we have received a signal.

[John]

http://exterrestriallife.com/direct-search/wow-signal.html

[bondage]

reality tv is destroying our culture.

that about sums it all up.