Alien Abductions: Idiocy of the Worst Kind

November 06, 2009

Today the much-hyped film, “The Fourth Kind,” debuts in theaters with a predictable poster of a pair of other-worldly eyes staring out.

Sci-fi film buffs will remember Steven Spielberg’s sappy 1977 film “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” where flying saucers outfitted with disco lights buzz lone cars and farmhouses, and in a messianic ending aliens carry a few chosen people skyward in a “mothership” that looks more like a chandelier.

“The Fourth Kind” goes one step further and supposedly presents “real footage” clips from alleged alien abduction cases – the so-called “fourth kind” of encounter with extraterrestrials. 

Could Lunar Poles Hide More Than Water?

September 19, 2009

Quick, how far would I have to go to reach the coldest place in the solar system? Most people would say Pluto. But this is a trick question.

It was widely reported this week that NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has measured a record-breaking temperate of -367 degrees Fahrenheit on the moon. 

It gets this cold at the bottom of the permanently shadowed impact craters at the poles. Unlike Pluto, the crater floors have not seen sunlight for billions of years.

Texting Our Stellar Neighbors

August 24, 2009

The cinema this weekend was all abuzz with the new space alien film “District 9” which grossed $37 million as of this writing, making it the biggest-buck debut of the mid-August weekend since 2004's  "Alien vs. Predator."

I won’t go into the story details but suffice to say that, like so many space alien flicks, this presents a pretty simpleminded anthropomorphic view of how we think intelligent life on other planets might behave.

This particular plot shatters all credulity by having the advanced alien culture become subservient to our planet’s society.  Anthropology makes it clear the when an advance culture encounters a less advanced society, guess get who gets the short end of the stick?

The Real Visitors From Space

August 19, 2009

There was a lot of hubbub in the news this week about the British Ministry of Defense releasing declassified UFO reports from 1981 to 1996. Not coincidentally, sightings in Great Britain appeared to increase sixfold with the release of the 1996 space invasion movie Independence Day. But I’m not going to waste  bandwidth to give any further attention to this collection of  space-age fractured fairy tales.

Instead, last month a real interplanetary face-to-face encounter took place between two chunks of metal. One is the Mars rover Opportunity; the other is a 1,800-pound piece of iron. Both fell out of the sky onto Mars. The rover, back in 2004, the meteorite, 3 billion years ago.

Space Trekkers Live in Binary Planetary Systems

July 05, 2009

For years I’ve hypothesized that binary planetary systems exist, and that these are the places to go looking for space-faring civilizations.  By binary planetary system I mean a pair of gravitationally bound stars, each with its own independent family of worlds.

There could be habitable planets around each star in the binary system, if the stars are far enough apart. If technological civilizations independently evolve around both stars, they could actually travel across space and visit each other. This would be a powerful motivation to build the fusion-powered rockets needed to travel back and forth within a reasonable amount of time.

Astronomers have now found such as system, but we’ll have to wait another 4 billion years before an alien civilization manifests itself. Why? Because the double star is just a few millions of years old, and if Earth is any example, it takes a long time to evolve intelligent beings.

Government Hides Alien Moon Base!

July 01, 2009

Now that I've got your attention . . .

Every time I take a stab at debunking pseudo-science topics like UFOs and the 2012-doomsday predictions, it’s like kicking a hornet’s nest, judging from some of the comments posted here.

Some of these counterpoint arguments from readers are tied to references in clips on YouTube (truly a cesspool of idiocy) where self-styled “experts” try and sound authoritative in front of the camera.  More often than not these "whistle-blowers"  assert having special knowledge about  “government conspiracies.” They’ve discovered the Internet is a bottomless pit of people who feel powerless and suspicious of everything. Healthy skepticism is good, which means followers should not unequivocally swallow the tall tales from self-proclaimed "insiders."

Occasionally I’m going to give out a Pants-on-Fire award to those individuals who make outrageous claims that are simply incredulous.  Either they were duped or have endless other motives: selling books, videos, articles, going on a lecture circuit, getting onto radio shows or CNN’s Larry King Live (he loves UFO tall-tales), or simply bolstering their sense of self importance.

A SETI Makeover? call it "SETT"

June 02, 2009

On the 50^th anniversary of the first attempt to listen for artificial radio signals transmitted from an extraterrestrial civilization orbiting a nearby star, astronomer Jill Tarter says it's time to rename the acronym SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). She’s proposing SETT: The Search for Extraterrestrial Technology.

Are Aliens Curious About Hubble?

May 16, 2009

I’ve been in Houston, Texas all week at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in support of the fifth servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. 

An Archive Project for Future Civilizations

May 13, 2009

The phrase “may you live in interesting times” is a purported proverb that really means, “may you live in times of upheval.”

Well, the universe is pretty interesting right now.  Stars are born in fiery crucibles, titanic supernovae rattle space and time, and galaxies collide. But any idea that our time is special is anti-Copernican. In other words, there should be nothing special about the time, or location, we live in.

But we’re pretty sure the universe won’t look the same in the future as it does now.

Astrobiologists Look For "Second Genesis"

May 05, 2009

Astronomers from around the world are gathered here at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore this week to ponder one of the single biggest questions facing modern science: is life a condition of the universe? Or, through some perverse quirk of nature, it only flourishes here on Earth and nowhere else in the universe.