Tuesday, December 19, 2017

UFOs on the left

Two of my favorite left-leaning journalist went a bit X-Files over the new report in the New York Times about a secret Pentagon UFO unit: Helene Cooper et al, Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program 12/16/2017; 2 Navy Airmen and an Object That ‘Accelerated Like Nothing I’ve Ever Seen’ 12/16/2017.

I mean, I get that it's kind of a fun story. But there's no need to get loopy over it.

Cenk Uygur took the plunge in Navy Jets Intercept UFO The Young Turks 12/19/2017:



Even Charlie Pierce took a bite! (The Pentagon's UFO Program Raises a Serious Policy Issue Esquire Politics Blog 12/19/2017)

But he also tweeted the more skeptical take of his blogging mate Robert Bateman:

I did this mini-tweetstorm on The Young Turks' report:





Bateman's take (A Former Military Strategist Explains Why the Government Is Cagey on UFO Matters 12/19/2017):
The fact is that the Department of Defense looks at a huge number of things, from the future effects of global warming to the games that Chinese strategists play as kids that may affect their modes of thinking. The extreme level of classification of many such studies often comes from one of two reasons. The first and most obvious is a desire to conceal a capability from any potential competitor or enemy. The second is, essentially, political: a desire not to be embarrassed, either by political leaders or the leaders of the various branches of the Department of Defense. In some cases, it’s both. This time, however, it appears to be only the latter. ... The primary reason was likely classified to prevent political egg landing on anyone’s face. [my emphasis]

My go-to website on breaking UFO stories is Bad UFOs, the blog of Robert Sheaffer, an experienced, science-minded investigator of UFO reports and the UFOologists. While he cautions that he's waiting for "some definitive information," he writes in DeLonge Overload - And a Secret Federal UFO Investigations Program! 12/18/2017:

Over on Metabunk, Mick West makes a good case that these images show distant jets. In fact, they seem quite similar to the "Groundbreaking UFO video" that Leslie Kean (one of the authors of the New York Times UFO article) obtained from Chile's UFO investigations group early this year, quite conclusively shown to have been a distant jet aircraft whose position had been misjudged. [my emphasis]
Schaeffer sputters about the $22 million reported to have been spent on this particular Pentagon program. Bateman, having in mind the quantities of cash the Pentagon burn through continually, "Spending only $22 million over five years really is small-beans by most measures. It suggests that this whole effort, averaging $4.4 million per year, was likely conducted by no more than a dozen people."

Sheaffer suggests that the more important mystery is how that money was spent, noting that some of the federal funding seems to have gone to a study he commissioned from the UFOlogist group MUFON:

Unfortunately, Bigelow's deal with MUFON quickly turned sour. According to Richard Lang, who was the manager of the STAR Team, the deal soon got tangled up in financial controversy and audits, and was terminated in January, 2010. He says that MUFON only received about $324,000 total from Bigelow, a small fraction of the money Bigelow received from the federal government.

So far as I am aware (and I talk to a lot of MUFON people), none of them were aware that Bigelow was in essence passing federal funding onto them. In fact, I am sure that some of them will be upset that Bigelow was, in essence, making them unknowingly participate in a federally-funded investigation.
Bigelow was profiled in a front-page feature in the Wall Street Journal of 08/23/1999, "Robert Bigelow, Patron of UFO Investigators, Is Shooting for the Stars," making him sound like a living model of the problems created by drastic maldistribution of wealth:

Over the past several decades, Mr. Bigelow has quietly become one of the world's leading financiers of UFO research. When a Utah rancher found a strangely mutilated cow last year, a Bigelow-funded veterinarian rushed to the scene, and Mr. Bigelow's team eventually published a 45-page report titled, "investigation of the unexplainede death of a cow in northeast Utah, Oct. 16, 1998." He or his researchers have catalogued hundreds of claimed UFO sightings and alleged alien abductions. Now he wants to build a hotel in outer space, and says he is prepared to spend as much as $500 million over the next 15 years to make it happen.
Update fro 18 years later: it hasn't happened yet.
"It's going to cost a lot of money," he says. "So you'd better offer something stupendous."
If he's willing to pay the licensing fee to brand it a Trump property, maybe he can get federal funding for it now. Or maybe a joint US-Russian project?

Bigelow's wealth is based on real estate, too, like the President's:

His plans might seem laughable - and indeed, some people do chuckle at Robert Bigelow. That's all right with him. The4 truth is out there, and he has several hundred million dollars to spend pursuing it.

With little fanfare, Mr. Bigelow has built an impressive fortune, employing tactics that are almost as unusual as some of the things he intends to use it for. The heart of Mr. Bigelow's realm is 14,000 hotel and apartment rooms, mostly in Las Vegas. He is the king of the temporary stay: His properties rent by the week, and they target casino workers who pay their rent in cold cash.

Mr. Bigelow, 55 years old, values his real-estate empire at $900 million. Other estimates range from $600 million to $750 million, but no one doubts he is supremely rich.
He also sounds Trumpian in other ways: "Last year, he paid $1.8 million to settle a lawsuit by tenants who charged they were illegally locked out of their apartments after they were late on their rent. In another case, the Nevada Supreme Court said it found 'strong evidence' that Mr. Bigelow's operations 'engaged in racially discriminating practices'."

Magician and professional debunker of occult claims and pseudoscience scams James Randi mentioned Bigelow in "Randi Foundation Announces 'Pigasus' Awards" Skeptical Inquirer July/Aug 1997:

The award for the funding organization that supported the most useless study of a supernatural, paranormal, or occult claim went to Robert Bigelow, of the Bigelow Tea family. Mr. Bigelow not only gave large sums of money to Harvard University's Professor John Mack and to million-seller author Budd Hopkins on the strength of their "alien abduction" beliefs, bur also purchased (for a purported $230,000) a "haunted ranch" in Utah where UFO attacks and "interdimensional portals" had shown up, in the wake of mysterious "cattle mutilations." Mr. Bigelow lives, perhaps understandably, in a walled-in home in Las Vegas.
Shaeffer himself reported in Skeptical Inquirer May/June 1998 ("From Ark-eology to UFOIogy, from Ararat to Arizona"):

But perhaps the most significant recent nondevelopment in UFOlogy involves the supposedly "haunted ranch" in Utah dial was purchased by Las Vegas investor Robert Bigelow for his National Institute for Discovery Sciences (see http://www.nids.com). James Moseley reports in the Nov. 15 issue of his newsletter Saucer Smear (http://www.mcs.nctt-kvg/smear) that no sooner was the ranch purchased by these investigators eager to confront the paranormal, than all of the unearthly manifestations—UFO sightings, interdimensional portals, even "dog-killing balls of light"—suddenly ceased. Somehow we're not surprised.
Bigelow has since shut down the National Institute for Discovery Sciences, which apparently served mainly to promote his own favorite paranormal fads.
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