January 2024
NCAS
Public Lecture Series
Am I
a "Competent Witness?" —
Would You Believe Me?
YouTube Live
Event with Q and A
Steve Lundquist
Retired US Air Force Pilot
Saturday, January 27, 1:30pm US/Eastern
(UTC-05:00)
"Reliable
Witnesses" are a favorite source for credulous
reports of just about anything. Because these people
have such impressive credentials, the thought of
them being incorrect is just hard to wrap your mind
around. But even someone who should know better is
still subject to all the foibles of being human.
Steve
Lundquist is in the Aerospace Defense industry
working as a leader in the Program Management
Office. He is a retired Air Force pilot, and still
flies today. He is actively involved in the
skeptical community as an advocate for critical
thinking and scientific skepticism. He has been
active with the Granite State Skeptics, New York
City Skeptics, and the Northeast Conference for
Science and Skepticism. He practices everyday
skepticism by infusing it into his work and other
organizations such as Toastmasters.
How
to Watch and Participate in this Online Discussion
Event:
2) Use the link
https://youtu.be/PMZlI4M5ZWY
3) The live stream
begins shortly before 1:30pm US/Eastern (UTC-05:00)
on Saturday, January 27, 2024.
4) To post questions,
you must be signed in to a Google account.
5) Post your questions
in the chat window to the right of the video player when
the live stream is active.
6) Click into where it says "Say something..." and begin
typing (up to 200 characters). Then click the send icon .
Along with your question, please post what city or
town you're in.
December Shadow? Was there a December 2023 Shadow
of a Doubt? No, arrangements fell through for our
prospective event that month.
"Cults and cryptids collide
when a curious Washingtonian investigates local unexplained
phenomena. Explore the lure of the unknown and its
entanglement with DC history in this multi-chapter adventure
across the city."
At the start of the pandemic, the local Rorschach Theatre
company created a unique theatrical experience that extended
over the course of 9-10 months. It was originally a way for
the show to go on when the pandemic shut down stage
performances, but it has been so successful that they've
continued into their 4th year with an all-new story that began
last month (December 2023).
Rorschach often incorporates elements of fantasy, horror,
and/or supernatural. This coming season the Eldritch
Investigations project involves themes particularly close to
NCAS. The company has extended a 20% discount to NCAS members.
Subscribers receive a monthly box or envelope with maps,
directions to locales around DC, and other artifacts such as
postcards, telegrams, and various trinkets that help unfold a
story over the course of 9-10 months. You investigate these
locations at your own pace, on your own time. They also
provide online videos for those who can't visit in person.
The adventure has already
begun, so new subscribers will receive all previous chapters
in the first shipment.
February NCAS Lecture
Peter Grinspoon, M.D., primary care physician and a
cannabis specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital and an
Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School, will present
"Uses and Potential Harms of Psychedelics in Medicine." What
is the exciting new research about psychedelics as treatment
for depression, addiction, pain, and obsessive-compulsive
disorder? What are the barriers (cost, legality, access) and
harms? Saturday, February 10 at 1:30 PM ET, live on the
NCASVideo YouTube channel.
February PhACT Lecture
Our skeptical neighbors to the north, the Philadelphia
Association for Critical Thinking (PhACT), will host their
next online event on Saturday, February 17 at 2 PM ET.
Historian
Robert Hicks, PhD will present
"19th-Century Astronomy." Visitors to Philadelphia’s
Ebenezer Maxwell Mansion might discover a curious object
in the children’s room, a large 1871 cardboard planisphere
that speaks to the widespread interest in astronomy during
the mid to late 1800s. This presentation surveys what
discoveries were made in astronomy during the era and how
it was promoted and taught. What did people then think
about intelligent life elsewhere? The size and nature of
the universe? The presentation concludes with a virtual
1870s public observing night with a telescope! Event
details at
http://www.phact.org/meetings.php.
February Bay Area Skeptics
Lecture
The [San Francisco] Bay Area Skeptics will host their
next online event on Thursday, February 8 at 10:30 PM ET.
Glenn
Branch, deputy director of the National Center for
Science Education, will present "A Child's Garden of Climate
Change Denial." Climate change denial propaganda campaigns
aimed at American teachers and students are not new, but in
2023, no fewer than four — from the Heartland Institute, the
CO2 Coalition, EverBright Media, and PragerU Kids — were in
the headlines. In his talk, he will assess these campaigns
and their likely effects in the context of the advances of
climate change education in the United States over the last
decade. This will be livestreamed on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tx8w5jM8_1U
Torn From Today's Headlines
By Scott Snell
The Washington Post "Notable
Works" of 2023 Includes Poorly-Researched
UFO Book
On November 15, the
Washington
Post published its list of "The year's best memoirs,
biographies, history and more." Among the "50 notable works"
was
UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government's Search
for Alien Life Here — and Out There by Garrett Graff.
The book was also lauded by the
Wall Street Journal
("One of the rare books on the topic that manages to be both
entertaining and factually grounded") and the Associated Press
("
The perfect guide for readers interested in learning
how that discussion has evolved").
A few days later, Graff was
interviewed by David Ignatius of the
Post at a public
event held in the Politics and Prose NW DC bookstore. I
attended the event and was surprised at what Graaf was getting
wrong. Perhaps he misunderstood or garbled information from
experts, didn't research enough, or outright omitted
information and perspectives that would present the UFO topic
in a more accurate and less sensational way. (The event
video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tLX00F5LgQ
)
I first noticed a problem
when he spoke (more than once) of the interstellar object
ʻOumuamua as coming from another "galaxy" instead of "solar
system." (At other points, he did speak of our solar system
correctly, so hopefully he's more of a writer than a speaker.
Presumably publisher Simon & Schuster ensured that the
book is well-edited.)
Some of his facts were correct, but misapplied. "In 1947, we
didn't understand that there could be daytime meteor showers,"
he said with regard to the first "modern" and famous UFO report,
by pilot Kenneth Arnold in June 1947. Sort of true (better to
say, "we hadn't been able to discover daytime meteor showers
until the invention of radar"), but whether a visible daytime
meteor is part of a shower or not isn't relevant. Some of the
public certainly knew about daytime meteors: astronomers.
Daytime meteors have been seen all through history, and there
was no question that some meteors should be visible in daylight,
based on the brightness of the brightest nighttime meteors.
(And Earth's daytime side is getting roughly the same amount and
sizes of incoming matter as the nighttime side. See
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/new-map-shows-frequency-of-small-asteroid-impacts-provides-clues-on-larger-asteroid-population)
Astronomers, including J. Allen Hynek, who later became
consultant for the US Air Force's UFO study, "Project Blue
Book," would've considered such a possibility and rated it
essentially impossible due to the sighting lasting a couple of
minutes rather than a matter of seconds. (Some investigators
have suggested that Arnold didn't correctly read his plane's
sweep second hand clock, but this seems unlikely.)
Graff omitted an
interesting aspect of the first modern UFO reports: the
public was seeing something different than what Arnold had
seen. They saw saucers. Arnold saw nine objects that
"looked something like a pie plate that was cut in half,
with sort of a convex triangle in the rear." The earliest
news stories told the public, "'saucer-like' objects"
(Associated Press, dateline
June
25, 1947) and "flying disks" (AP,
June
27, 1947). Perhaps the power of suggestion caused the
public to interpret their genuine sightings as circular
disks instead of the true shape, as Arnold saw? Or Arnold
was the flawed eyewitness, misconstruing circular disks?
Or, much more likely, the power of suggestion caused the
public to misconstrue all sorts of mundane aerial phenomena
as "flying disks."
When I asked for Graff's
thoughts about this during the Q/A portion of the program,
he got the relevant facts wrong. He stated that Arnold's
"description of what he saw evolved pretty significantly
from telling to telling to telling. The first interviews he
gave, he used the word 'saucers.'" I checked Graff's
assertion by comparing Arnold's "pie plate" description
(excerpted from a recording of a radio interview about 48
hours after the sighting*:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0D8eAm8h2Y)
with what he sketched for authorities in July 1947. One of
his sketches is in the FBI's files related to UFOs in 1947:
https://vault.fbi.gov/UFO/UFO%20Part%204%20of%2016/view
(page 67). That matches well enough to contradict Graff's
claim that Arnold's description was evolving significantly,
at least during the early weeks of the public's saucer
sightings. And whether or not Arnold used the word
"saucers" (he didn't during the radio interview), the point
is that the public was seeing the shape as reported in the
news, not as what Arnold described.
One of the insights Graff was offering his audience seemed
poorly considered: "The second half of this book is about the
collapse of truth and trust in government and institutions.
And that, you have — in the wake of Watergate, Vietnam, the
Pentagon Papers, the Church Committee, the Pike Committee —
the rise of these conspiracy theories like the Bermuda
Triangle, which comes out in the '70s..." Was the Bermuda
Triangle a conspiracy theory? In the early and mid '70s, I
was a voracious consumer of books, articles, and shows on the
topic (including/until Larry Kuche's
The Bermuda Triangle
Mystery - Solved in late 1975, which was my first
skeptical "mind opener"). The focus of the story then was on
the mysteries of the missing planes and ships. In any case,
the Bermuda Triangle books/shows were already popular with the
public before anything in Graff's list of government
malfeasance except Vietnam. (For example, the "documentary"
film,
The Devil's Triangle, narrated by Vincent Price,
is from 1970.) There's no reasonable way to connect the
public's brief embrace of the Bermuda Triangle myth with their
suspicions of the US government.
My impression of Graff's
careless/superficial research and analysis seems to be
borne out by at least one skeptic who read the book, Brian
Dunning (host of
Skeptoid, the award-winning
weekly science podcast, and producer/writer/director of
the recent documentary film,
The UFO Movie THEY Don't
Want You to See). Dunning's review:
https://briandunning.substack.com/p/review-ufo-the-inside-story-of-the
On the other hand,
Michael Shermer called it "the best book I've read on the
whole subject," after mentioning his bookcase full of UFO
books. "A perfect blend of history, cultural/mythological
narratives that run through a lot of these stories. You
don't really pass judgment on whether these things
represent aliens or whatever they represent, which I
like. It's a pure journalistic, objective look at the
story." Shermer's interview with Graff:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=od_a1lwN8kM
After watching the
Shermer interview, I think I understand how his praise can
coexist with the critiques of other skeptics. He simply
doesn't have the detailed information at hand to formulate
deeper questions for Graff, such as "You're impressed with
the Zamora UFO sighting in 1964, but what are your
thoughts on the claim that it was a prank by New Mexico
Tech students?" Then Graff could perhaps demonstrate out
loud how he weighs differing claims to reach his
conclusions.
Shermer did respond
skeptically to Graff's suggestion that a tech expert in
the defense/intelligence community may have "seen a piece
of wreckage that they've collected, who says, 'that
doesn't look like anything that's been built on Earth.'"
Shermer: "It's easy to say 'Well, I don't know what it
was, gosh, I've never seen anything on Earth like it!'
Well, that's entirely possible, you probably haven't seen
everything there is on Earth, before you say something's
out of this world, first make sure it's not in this
world."
I see that Amazon.com's
editors also selected the book among the best nonfiction for
November. As of today (January 26), it ranks #11,881 in
Amazon book sales, #32 in Communication & Media Studies,
#44 in Political Science, and #202 in American History. I
don't know what its earlier performance was. Perhaps it's
already run its course in the public's attention.
NCAS Membership
At its September 20, 2023 meeting, the NCAS Board of
Directors approved a change in membership classifications,
effective October 1. Formerly in two classifications,
Single and Double, membership now comprises one or two
individuals at the same home address. In addition to
simplifying transactions for the NCAS treasurer, this
represents a per-person reduction in membership costs.
The former Single membership cost now covers up to two
people. Consider adding a 2nd person in your household to
your NCAS membership at no extra cost! Both will be able
to vote separately in the annual NCAS board of directors
election. Send an email to
ncas@ncas.org
to add a 2nd person to your membership. We hope to add
members, and of course a student or other young person is
always welcome for the future of skepticism. Also see
https://www.ncas.org/p/join-ncas.html.
Shadow Light
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contacts of NCAS receive a postal notification of this and
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Shadow of a Doubt. The
Shadow
Light postcard announces the monthly lecture and
highlights of the electronic
Shadow of a Doubt,
which is available online at
ncas.org/p/shadow.html.
NCAS thereby reduces
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Time to Renew?
Be sure to check your renewal date above your postal address
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Shadow Light postcard. Send any queries to
ncas@ncas.org.
Use the
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membership form to renew.
https://www.ncas.org/p/shadow.html
