by Billy Cox/Herald Tribune
2-28-14
ARTICLE HERE:
Two years ago, as part of a daytime show whose ratings were so dreadful it was canned in 2013, Anderson Cooper’s “Do You Believe in Space Aliens?” discussion featured a MUFON investigator who had researched a 2008 UFO incident outside Philadelphia. A witness had observed the object showering nearby trees with glittering material.
Two labs reported the recovered samples contained boron and magnesium at levels that far exceeded those in the local environment. Additionally, the targeted leaves had generated a heat-resistent “sunscreen” called anthocyanin, which protects cells from high-light exposure by absorbing UV rays. Prosaic explanations? Probably. But instead of hashing it out with botanists, AC lurched away and careened into guests claiming to be star children.
Years earlier, the Discovery Channel recruited M.I.T. students to duplicate crop circles and some of their signature characteristics — geometric patterns, heat- induced expulsion cavities in grain-stem nodes, and linear-arrayed, 20-micron wide iron spheres in soil samples. The experiments were laughably cumbersome:
— pyrotechnics lighting up the night sky, microwave guns and a “meteorite cannon,” not exactly the most stealthy scenario in a phenomenon noted for stealth. The exercise wound up producing a mild echo of the real McCoy, but it failed to address yet another emerging feature unique to some crop circles
— magnesium carbonate, a fire retardant with an astonishing purity of 99.9999 percent. That’s laboratory-grade stuff. And that's interesting.
Likewise, Science Channel’s “Are We Alone?” Week beginning Sunday [3-2-14] devotes one segment to a 1971 UFO encounter that left behind quantifiably freaky soil samples. But it devotes maybe two sentences to the analysis before reverting to more predictable fare.
“As an investigator, I do appreciate eyewitness testimony,” says veteran UFO researcher Mark Rodeghier, “but that only takes you so far. Anecdotal reports are not good enough to figure out the mechanisms behind UFOs. Anything we can study is always valuable, and we don’t have great sightings that are evidential like trace cases. That’s why it would’ve been a lot better to focus on analysis more than eyewitnesses.”
De Void hates to keep pounding this dead hoss, but “we” ask the same question again and again: Is commercial television even capable of covering the science of UFOs? REST OF ARTICLE HERE:
2-28-14
ARTICLE HERE:
Two years ago, as part of a daytime show whose ratings were so dreadful it was canned in 2013, Anderson Cooper’s “Do You Believe in Space Aliens?” discussion featured a MUFON investigator who had researched a 2008 UFO incident outside Philadelphia. A witness had observed the object showering nearby trees with glittering material.
Two labs reported the recovered samples contained boron and magnesium at levels that far exceeded those in the local environment. Additionally, the targeted leaves had generated a heat-resistent “sunscreen” called anthocyanin, which protects cells from high-light exposure by absorbing UV rays. Prosaic explanations? Probably. But instead of hashing it out with botanists, AC lurched away and careened into guests claiming to be star children.
Years earlier, the Discovery Channel recruited M.I.T. students to duplicate crop circles and some of their signature characteristics — geometric patterns, heat- induced expulsion cavities in grain-stem nodes, and linear-arrayed, 20-micron wide iron spheres in soil samples. The experiments were laughably cumbersome:
— pyrotechnics lighting up the night sky, microwave guns and a “meteorite cannon,” not exactly the most stealthy scenario in a phenomenon noted for stealth. The exercise wound up producing a mild echo of the real McCoy, but it failed to address yet another emerging feature unique to some crop circles
— magnesium carbonate, a fire retardant with an astonishing purity of 99.9999 percent. That’s laboratory-grade stuff. And that's interesting.
Likewise, Science Channel’s “Are We Alone?” Week beginning Sunday [3-2-14] devotes one segment to a 1971 UFO encounter that left behind quantifiably freaky soil samples. But it devotes maybe two sentences to the analysis before reverting to more predictable fare.
“As an investigator, I do appreciate eyewitness testimony,” says veteran UFO researcher Mark Rodeghier, “but that only takes you so far. Anecdotal reports are not good enough to figure out the mechanisms behind UFOs. Anything we can study is always valuable, and we don’t have great sightings that are evidential like trace cases. That’s why it would’ve been a lot better to focus on analysis more than eyewitnesses.”
De Void hates to keep pounding this dead hoss, but “we” ask the same question again and again: Is commercial television even capable of covering the science of UFOs? REST OF ARTICLE HERE:
