A few minutes ago, I emailed the following to Reuter's corrections department. I feel a little bad about it, as I make a fairly snide accusation against some poor sap who's just doin' his job. But the subtlety of the bias in that article really pisses me off.
Regarding the article 'Former pilots and officials call for new U.S. UFO probe' (Reporting by David Morgan; Editing by Joanne Kenen, David Alexander, Stuart Grudgings)...
In the article, you said Jimmy Carter is 'reported' to have 'claimed' to see a UFO. (Exact quote: 'Former presidents Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter are both reported to have claimed UFO sightings.')
Sounds to me like that writer either hasn't done their homework, or has an agenda they are slickly promoting.
Saying it's 'reported' seems to cast it in the light of hearsay or rumor instead of fact. I realize that may be a touchy subject, since as Reporters you may not feel the term 'reported to' has the same connotations it does to people outside the media. But at the very least it's using an implied and un-named third-party source instead of a readily available primary source.
Saying he 'claims' to have seen a UFO does the same.
There's non-fiction film footage in existence of Carter saying he's seen a UFO. Some of that footage first aired on TV decades ago. I've seen it again as recently as this month.
The U in UFO stands for Unidentified. Carter can be, is, and should be, a definitive source of whether or not he saw something in the sky that he couldn't identify.
To cast a Former President and Nobel-Prize Winner as a dubious source (especially in regards to that President's own visual experiences) speaks to the authors bias or work ethic.
This suggests the author either didn't do his homework (which, in the day of Google and Youtube, wouldn't take much effort to find the footage, You could start with http://youtube.com/results?search_query=jimmy+carter+ufo&search=Search), or he (or the editors) chose words intending to discredit/undermine a particular viewpoint.
So I ask: Which is it? Agenda or laziness? Or is there some other logical explanation I'm missing?
Now, I recognize that You Tube isn't exactly a great source for bias-free news either, but it's what I could find in under 30 seconds of research.
And I was really irked by the subtle language (in Reuter's article) intended to discredit the "UFOs are real" viewpoint. It'd be okay if the article was just some dude's blog, but I demand a little more objectivity from a major news service.
13 comments:
I don't doubt that you believe you saw what you believe you saw. But here are "10 reasons why you shouldn't believe in UFOs."
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/21854
Man, I still marvel at the internet. Some random reporter I don't even know read my blog entry, commented to it, and composed his own counter-argument blog elsewhere within minutes. The net is an amazing tool for finding alternate viewpoints. And (please forgive the cynicism) an incredible tool for that random reporter dude to self promote.
I went over to his blog and responded...
Thank you for providing the link here in your comment on my blog today. Here's my rebuttal.
>10 reasons you shouldn't believe in UFOs
>No alien monkey wrench.
Many ufologists (and yes, I think it's a silly term) do feel we've found just such items, but the media and public buys cover-stories about them weather-balloons and other terrestrial objects.
Debris from the 1947 Roswell crash. Face on Mars. And there's plenty of out-of-place artifacts in the historical record, such as The Antikythera Mechanism or functional copper-based batteries being found in ancient tombs. Not that those OOP artifacts are UFO-related, but they do show us the inaccuracies and grey areas of our modern understanding.
Any "alien monkey wrench" would have to traveled for at least decades (unless Einstien's wrong) to get here, across the resource-less void of space. It's probably a very hazardous journey, one that could easily go wrong. Decades of shipboard conservation of resources would make you keep good tabs on where your monkey-wrenches were.
>There are no secrets. You say the space junk exists but it's being kept hidden by governments including our own?
Yes. We are surrounded by secrets. Can you name undercover police officer in your city? Every person currently getting money from the CIA? How many kilotons of nuclear explosive are at each military base in the country? If you answered no to any of those, then the government is keeping something secret.
A few days ago I posted to my blog something about the conspiracies I've encountered in my life. As far as I can tell, I was the only whistle-blower in either of them. So, don't tell me secrets don't exist. The default paradigm is for secrets to remain secret. They reach the light of day via treachery or bravery. If someone thinks his secret is a matter of national security, he'd need to exemplify BOTH treachery and bravery to spread the word.
> No indisputable visual evidence. That kind of proof is necessary to overturn a ref's call in a football game, so it's necessary if we're going to believe in alien visitors. ...
> This is indisputable: Dreams, hallucinations, pranksters and optical illusions are unquestionably real.
Mexico city is plagued by UFO sightings. They were especially strong in the early 90's, but it's still going on. The most famous of those involved over a thousand witnesses. A few years back there was a sighting in Chicago that involved over 300 people. When over 100 people give corroborating testimony of a single incident, saying they saw something fly with aerodynamics that fit neither a jet nor a helicopter, you still won't believe?
Google or You Tube the UFO Disclosure Project. It includes mostly testimony, but also some radar images. Sure, radar's not as good as photographic proof, but when 400 professionals in the military or civilian air-traffic control, and/or military intelligence fields attest on the record to having seen UFOs first-hand, it should have some weight.
Now, admittedly, they could be lying. But YOU think it's unlikely that thousands of government officials could be lying to cover up UFOs because they were told it was in the best interests of their nation. So I imagine hundreds of former government officials lying for no such patriotic reason should be even harder for you to swallow.
> Alien beings are too quiet. They can get here, but do not communicate, especially with world leaders or journalists?
To say "I wouldn't do it that way if I were an alien" is a straw-man argument.
As a member of 20th-21st century U.S. culture, it's hard for you or I to understand the cultural mores and paradigms that made the Aztecs commit all those human sacrifices. A few hundred miles and years makes it bizarre and illogical to us. So it's ridiculous to assume our thought processes will in anyway resemble those of a being who grew up in non-terrestrial culture on another planet or on-board an alien starship.
It's easy for me to imagine a scenario where the aliens would conceal themselves. I'm not saying I believe in any of these, but for the sake of an argument, they'd explain the quiet:
Aliens could be planning an invasion or conquest, but only scouts are currently in our system. The firepower necessary to take over a nuclear-capable planet could be en route now, set to arrive in 50 years. In that scenario, it's the alien's best interests to lie low and keep us from getting organized.
In a similar vein, non-hostile Aliens could consider us dangerous, and wanted to see if we'd just nuke ourselves into oblivion. They could be watching out of self-preservation, and trying to decide how to proceed. The ET equivalent of Senate could be debating what to do about the "human menace" right now.
Or, if instead UFOs were angels. A quick read of the bible indicates god uses flying messengers, and flaming wheels. Why doesn't he talk to each of us personally on a daily basis? I don't know. Aliens could "work in mysterious ways".
They could even not have a spoken or written language. They may not understand how to communicate with us, let alone who to contact.
Not that I'm saying I think any of those four theories is true, I'm just pointing them out to illustrate that it was easy to come up with several possible explanations.
>Tick-tock, people: This debate has been going on for eons and the pro-UFO crowd hasn't been able to make a case that the anti-UFO crowd will buy.
Consider the Giant Squid. They exist in our oceans - Genus Architeuthis. For hundreds of years, sailors have claimed to see them, but Scientists could only find badly rotted corpses (of which about 20 wash up on shores world wide every year). The only photographic evidence is blurry images from a single underwater camera in 2005. Since that breakthrough image, biologists have also captured paralarval specimens. Sometimes, the truth takes centuries to accumulate the photographic evidence to prove it's not a myth.
It's only been 60 years for UFOs.
It's funny that such educated people fall back on the concept of needing photographic proof to believe. We have no photos of Caesar being stabbed in the Senate, yet we all accept that as part of our shared world.
>SETI, to cite only one example, has been around since 1960 and SETI@home has been crowdsourcing this baby like nobody's business since 1999.
SETI at home will only find them if aliens a) use the EM spectrum to transmit data b) have enough power behind those transmissions to send them all the way here c) were transmitting at least as many years ago as their distance in light-years from earth...
A or B could easily be false - an alien technology could use some other medium we don't know of: due method X being better, or due to some issue with radio that's unclear to us such as them evolving near a static-generating quasar, or just cause they never invented it. To stretch the imagination further, a telepathic or hive-mind alien race could find EM waves redundant.
Even principal C could be false if A&B were true. There was a headline on yahoo about a week ago about scientists getting a particle to jump between two prisms instantaneously, thereby putting Einstein's general relativity into doubt. Jury's still out on it, but if that's correct, then teleportation of some sort is possible. If so, aliens could live thousands of light years away and cross the gap in a heartbeat. Any radio signals they broadcast could still be hundreds of years from arriving.
And if we want to get paranoid (I mean REALLY paranoid), we could also say it requires:
d) the data released by SETI@home is not faked or doctored as part of a conspiracy,
> Speaking for the latter, it's not that we don't want to believe
Well, that's just not true. People believe what they want to believe. WMDs. 30% of Fox News viewers still believe we found them in Iraq, despite the white house fessing up.
I've sighted evidence and anecdotes to support my position. Did that have any effect on your opinion? Do you want it to? Seriously?
>I've never seen a Star Trek movie. Again, I'm not saying this constitutes evidence of anything, just that it might help explain why I don't believe.
That suggests to me that chances are you've never really examined the evidence closely. If you don't like Sci-Fi, you've probably written UFOs off as sci-fi and just decided they weren't worth your time to really examine. You DON'T want to believe aliens could be near. How many books on UFOs have you read? How may documentaries have you watched? How much time did you actually spend researching before posting your list of 10 reasons to disbelieve, or did you just base it on things "sane people already know"?
In the words of Rosencrantz (or was that Guildenstern? It was Tom Stoppard anyway...), "He has never written home, and thus he has never known anything worth writing home about."
If Geraldo WERE standing on the bumper of a UFO, wouldn't your first thought would be: "How'd they fake that?" If your instinct is to disbelieve, how do you know the evidence doesn't exist, and that you didn't just read the summary version, passed judgment, and dismissed it?
So, now I'm really curious. Did he see my post to our blog, and respond by writing his own?
Or did he write his own, and then search the internet for recent pro-UFO posts to drop links at.
If it's the former (and I hope it is), then that's a cool example of the internet providing for the free exchange of ideas.
If it's the later, then it's just some guerilla marketing trying to stir up traffic to his site. Sad then that I fell for it.
There's also a third possibility, but I feel silly even saying it: This guy could be part of some big conspiracy, and he was hired or ordered to compose something refuting UFOs, and then link to it from places where people were posting about the recent UFO disclosure conference. That'd be scary. But it'd also be damn cool.
Here we go. Repeated Expletives in 3... 2... 1...
Goddamned fucking know it all moron! Were you there when that craft flew over my fucking house? Were you there when my dad felt great relief that somenody else finally saw what he had seen? Fuck you and your inability to understand plain fucking English! Unidentified Flying Fucking Object! There are people including myself who have seen objects that were fucking flying and were beyond all reasonable attempts of identification let alone rationalization. I've also seen fucking millions of unidentified non-flying objects. Nothing half as fucking cool as seeing a giant fucking triangle fly overhead looking larger than when you are standing under a 747 on the ground and I shit you not it was going slow and silent. If you had been there I am pretty damn certain you would not have been able to identify it either. Maybe it was some really fucking cool top secret military craft using a strange new technology I've never fucking heard of, but those are also fucking unidentifiable you shit pile of genetic waste material. Stop being so fucking certain of the world you live in and you just might discover something new, like the fact that the Sun does not orbit the Earth. You don't know! You can't know! You weren't there!
It's people like that rat bastard that have lead me to just keep the experience to myself most of the time.
I'm going to assume you're talking about Netbuzz, and not me. :)
And, for the record, I totally wanted to haul off and cuss him out, too.
But since he was reading this blog, I assumed he was some friend or coworker of yours, your wifes, or X's.
Not a friend or coworker and even if they were they still deserve a good cussing out. Certainty is the arrestation of inquiry. Someone claiming that you or I (or anyone) did not see a flying craft of inexplicable nature just because they weren't there to see it, very few others have seen such things and the photo and video evidence is sketchy is as idiotic as me claiming that Antarctica doesn't exist just because so few people have seen it. March of the Penguins was a hoax!
And what is the point having a blog called Repeated Expletives: if you can't haul off and make a sailor blush? Freebird!
And one last bit...
As for the "convince a reasonable man" thing, I've already done it once. I met one person who was absolute skeptic, he said he would have to see a UFO or meet one credible person to have seen one to be convinced. I told him my story and since it was face to face and he has known me for a couple of years because of work, he is a convert. Because regardless of my online persona and outward appearance and constant efforts to prove otherwise, I am typically a very sane and rational individual... with the exception of the years 2002-2004 and possibly 1989.
Amen, brother! Every snarky skeptic claims they want to be that one "reasonable man". Truth be told, few of them are reasonable, and few of them don't actively want to disbelieve. Even when you find one and convince them with the truth and awe of your tale, there's still a billion more out there wanting to be the "one" reasonable man.
Also of note it that the aliens that are flying the UFOs are attacking ducks... or the ducks are attacking them?? This story shows an Xray of an alien face in the stomach of a duck! Maybe the ducks incubate the aliens?
I think this might be one of those "not so accurate" nuggets of proof. I just want to see floating spaceship. Screw UFOs I want the real deal!
"Screw UFOs"?
Would that make it an Unidentified Fucking Object?
UFO - Unidentified Fucking Object
I have been there brother. One second you are in the bar sober, the next you are in a dirty alley with a half chub and your pants down! I must have locked crotch and swapped gravy with something. Assuming there are crotches and gravy but since it is a UFO how do you know?
So I reword... I don't give a rats kooter about UFOs. I want to see the real deal.
Post a Comment