Thursday, November 27, 2008

Now Discovery Channel does the "UFO Thing"

Sensing a pattern here? UFOs Over Earth premieres this week. I haven't had time to check it out, but I'm not holding my breath for it being anything but a bunch of ad hoc arguments, professional kooks and establishment-mouthpiece "skeptics" getting the last word.


I'm pretty tired of these shows, since they never really address the real evidence (Discovery's AAT show was a farce). They exist for two reasons; one, to give the debunkers some publicity, and two, to reassure those who have no real interest in the topic that there's nothing to worry about, so go back to your daily shopping duties.

The so-called skeptic movement is a joke- when the Fundamentalists were storming to power in the 70s and 80s on an aggressively anti-science agenda, the so-called skeptics were more worried about palm readers and crystal kissers. That's because those types have no power and no real ability to retaliate.

But I wonder if any of the debunkers ever stopped to realize that UFO debunking may well be feeding into anti-science sentiment in some parts of the country. When skeptics like Phil Plait make objectively false statements about UFOs, or dismiss out of hand the thousands of good photos or film we have on them, it hardly lends to their credibility when they call someone's religious faith into question- something which a topic like UFOs pales into triviality for true believers.

In the end, however, the debate is irrelevant to what I'm writing about here, since my interest is in how UFOs and all the rest of it are absorbed and processed in the culture. I've never seen a UFO myself, but have a very interesting swamp gas story that I should tell you all about sometime.