UFOs RIP

I've been telling my friends for years that digital cameras would finish killing the UFO era. When everyone on the planet has a camera in the car and another in their phone, any real UFOs would get snapped from 14 angles.

During any major news event today, from Katrina to the London bus bombing, the most intimate pictures of the event came not from news cameras but from surveillance cameras or home camcorders. Yet despite thousands of more cameras available and at the ready, the pictures of "UFOs" have been going down for years.

Although some -like me- would argue that camera ubiquitousness is the exact reason we no longer hear much about UFOs. We have, in effect, proved a negative. If flying saucers existed (at least in the numbers they supposedly did in the 70s) surly we'd have an abundance of pictures today.

Although recently, Ben Macintyre in The Times of London saw another reason for the demise of UFOs in the pop-culture zeitgeist:

UFO sightings have declined as the internet has expanded. The web is the natural home of every crackpot and conspiracy theorist, but it also, eventually, produces a rarefied atmosphere of rationalism in which aliens and other elusive creatures cannot long survive. In the short term, the internet was a blessing to UFOs; but over time, it has all but killed them off....

The early internet helped to power the UFO phenomenon: instant myths, sightings, secrets and lies scorched around the world wide web. But the web also helped to undermine faith in the paranormal. In the age of instant text messaging and universal webcams, spotting UFOs, photographing them, posting the evidence worldwide and calling in witnesses should have been far easier than ever before. As Douglas Kern writes in a trenchant article for TCS Daily: “Just as our technology for finding and understanding UFOs improved dramatically, the manifestations of UFOs dwindled away.”

Instead, the UFOs have scarpered. The internet works by taking in vast swaths of hokum and ignorance but it gradually sifts out the chaff. Errors inevitably creep, for example, into Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, but because this is a self-creating and self-regulating mechanism, the mistakes and the nonsense are weeded out, or wither away. For every soothsayer and rumour-peddler on the web, there is a rationalist, an expert, a sceptic, calling for common sense. The truth will out, eventually.

Oh, I dunno about that. These guys are trying to put a UFO in the skies near the World Trade Center on 9/11. The National UFO Reporting Center continues to accept and post reports of sightings (the latest are only weeks old). Likewise UFO Evidence, which almost looks like a scholarly journal despite the fact that it features a completely credulous section on “ancient astronauts.” My favorite example of recent UFO nuttiness online? The “stunning” new photo enhancements, posted last summer, of the 1942 “battle of Los Angeles,” when brave American soldiers fought an alien spaceship in the skies over Southern California.

And then there’s this guy:

LONDON (Reuters) - To the United States, he is a seriously dangerous man who put the nation's security at risk by committing "the biggest military computer hack of all time".

But Briton Gary McKinnon says he is just an ordinary computer nerd who wanted to find out whether aliens and UFOs exist.

During his two-year quest, McKinnon broke into computers at the Pentagon, NASA and the Johnson Space Center as well as systems used by the U.S. army, navy and air force.

U.S. officials say he caused $700,000 worth of damage and even crippled vital defense systems shortly after the September 11 attacks.

Okay, then.

Look, like Fox Mulder, I’d like to believe in all sorts of cool stuff like aliens among us and an afterlife and ESP and low-carb bagels, but, you know, my brain won’t let me. And I can’t help but be fascinated by these things because of my steady diet of In Search Of... (with Leonard Nimoy!) and Project Blue Book as a kid. Everything paranormal continues to intrigue me... from a rational perspective. Which is why this, reported by BBC News last week, was so cool:

Students are to investigate the existence of ghosts as part of a degree course looking at people's experience of the paranormal. Coventry University is offering the chance to look into haunted houses, extra-sensory perception and "the survival of bodily death".

Tony Lawrence, director of the two-year parapsychology course, said it would be "controversial yet thought-provoking".

All good. Until this:

The focus will be the "middle ground" between religion and science, he added.

There is no middle ground. Either a phenomenon can somehow be explained scientifically -- either ghosts really exist and this can be proven in a methodical and reproducible manner, or some weird quirk of the human brain can account for what we perceive as the experience of “haunting,” and that can be proven in a methodical and reproducible manner -- or it demands “faith,” either an actively deity-centered one or a “I just feel that it’s real” kind. There is no either/or involved.

Then again, unlike Ben Macintyre in The Times, I don’t believe that “ a fascinating shift in human credulity” has suddenly occurred: people are still stupid. As evidenced by this tidbit, reported today by Reuters:

LONDON (Reuters) - "The Da Vinci Code" has undermined faith in the Roman Catholic Church and badly damaged its credibility, a survey of British readers of Dan Brown's bestseller showed on Tuesday.

People are now twice as likely to believe Jesus Christ fathered children after reading the Dan Brown blockbuster and four times as likely to think the conservative Catholic group Opus Dei is a murderous sect.

So, does The Da Vinci Code, which features all sorts of ideas from the actual, valid study of comparative mythology as well as all sorts of ideas from the conspiracy-theory stewpot, encourage readers to do a bit more reading, figure out for themselves what’s real, what’s made up, and what’s simply entertaining whatever the case? Nope. It just inspires people to switch their allegiance from one “authority” -- religious leaders -- to another -- “bestselling novelist.”

Ya gotta be careful, though, if you’re representing an organization that survives off the intense gullibility of people, when you complain about that shift in allegiance:

"An alarming number of people take [The Da Vinci Code’s] spurious claims very seriously indeed," said Austin Ivereigh, press secretary to Britain's top Catholic prelate Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor.

The same, of course, could be said about the Bible.

(Technorati tags: UFOs, aliens, paranormal, science, religion, Internet, Da Vinci Code)