Intelligent Design Opens the Door for UFOs, Bigfoot, MIHOP 9/11 in Classrooms

Bruce Wilson on Alternet notices that a CNN debate on Intelligent Design got the representative from the "Family Research Council" to argue for the teaching in schools of all sorts of things mainstream science says isn't true. Anderson Cooper didn't specifically ask about Bigfoot or UFOs or ESP, but that's the obvious implication. This is reminiscent of the cross-examination in the famous Dover trial where a pro-ID witness was forced to admit astrology was equally scientific as ID.

Personally, I think the ufologists and Bigfoot trackers and others should recoil at this. They at least have eyewitnesses and evidence, as blurry as some of it is (hilarious Strong Bad email on Blurry.Photographic.Evidence), instead of just supposition and ideology.

This reminds me of a great piece by George Carlin, from his book When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?, comparing UFO and Christianity believers.



A copy of the text from that excerpt can be found here.

Personal Note - Dissertation Defended

Not an on-topic post, but I just wanted to note that I have successfully defended my dissertation (in Anthropology, on archaeology and the Spanish Conquest of Mesoamerica), and will graduate with the PhD from Tulane in May (presuming I get my final version edited and printed by Friday).

I'm still teaching the course this summer, that doesn't change.

Black Triangle Blog

A blog dedicated to the black triangle UFOs. I like the use of Google Earth.

http://black-triangles.blogspot.com/

My Tulane University Class on Monster Hunters, Ufologists, and Vampire Slayers

It's now official. Tulane's School of Continuing Studies, which runs the Summer School, approved my course.


Monster Hunters, Ufologists, and Vampire Slayers
CSAN 291 (Continuing Studies - Anthropology)

Cultural examination of the beliefs, practices, identity, and history of “alternative scientific” fields of study concerning the paranormal, UFOs, and hidden animals. These subcultures are interesting anthropologically in their own right, but also provide a mirror for understanding mainstream knowledge production, and especially the relationship between science, the media, and the public. Are they science, or could they be in the future? Why or why not? Who decides?

I'll be teaching this for three hours a night, twice a week, from May 14th through the end of June. I was worried the department wouldn't like it (I have my doctoral defense on Monday, but when I proposed the class I didn't know if I would be graduated yet by summer), but they thought it was a really good idea, and it is a hit over at the Continuing Studies school.

We're going to use the following texts. I may also add some readings on as reserve

Brown, Alan
2006 Ghost Hunters of the South. University Press of Mississippi, Jackson.

Daegling, David J.
2004 Bigfoot Exposed: An Anthropologist Examines America's Enduring Legend. Altamira Press, Walnut Creek.

Denzler, Brenda
2001 The Lure of the Edge: Scientific Passions, Religious Beliefs, and the Pursuit of UFOs. University of California Press Berkely.

Mclelland, Bruce
2006 Slayers and Their Vampires: A Cultural History of Killing the Dead. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.

Monaghan, John and Peter Just
2000 Social and Cultural Anthropology: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, USA.

We're reading the book on vampire-slayers as a historical example, and will then focus on ufologists, cryptozoologists, and ghost hunters. We'll look at the basics of the phenomena they are interested in, what they think about the phenomena, what they do about it, who joins in, the structure and nature of organizations and networks, meetings, the history of these fields, and their relation to established science and academia.

I thought about assigning Nick Redfern's Three Men Seeking Monsters or Jim Moseley's Shockingly Close to the Truth. I may assign a chapter or so as reserve reading, or simply recommend them for the feel of these pursuits. I may have to also put Chris O'Brien's The Mysterious Valley on reserve. In addition to being a good book, he talks a lot about how he got into researching mutes and UFOs and other weird stuff, and his rules for research.

But I had to keep the reading low. This is not a grad-level course, it takes place quickly over six weeks in the summer.

I am very excited about this.

As a reminder, I've previously posted a listing of other courses I'm aware of that teach spooky stuff in an academic setting.

Vampire Hunters Drive Stake through Milosevic's Heart

The title says it all. Near the first anniversary of his death, activists in opposition to Milosevic and his living allies drove a stake through the part of his grave where they believe the heart is. Being the Balkans, the symbolic link to the vampire is obvious. Three years ago, a group of Romanians believed they had to stop a vampire from causing the sickness in a local girl

But rather than drive a stake through the creature's heart, the six men dug Toma up, split his ribcage with a pitchfork, removed his heart, put stakes through the rest of his body, and sprinkled it with garlic. Then they burned the heart, put the embers in water, and shared the grim cocktail with the sick child.

I've recently been browsing Slayers and Their Vampires: A Cultural History of Killing the Dead by Bruce A McClelland. He argues that vampire slayers started primarily as dangerous beings themselves, vampire seers that could identify and deal with the undead in pre-Christian Slavic religions. The vampire hunter meme we have today, of a specialist often with a scientific or occult background, is due in large part to the exploration of exotic (controlled by Turks and Orientals) Eastern Europe by Western Europeans in the Enlightenment. I need to read the whole book, but from what I can tell so far, these Westerners of the Enlightenment didn't understand the context of the vampire legends and actions, and focused on the monster, soon changing it into the vampire of literature, film, and global pop culture (the author liberally sprinkles Buffy's name through the text, but one wonders if he knows about the vampire hunters of Japanese anime). The argument seems to be an interesting historical example of the growth and evolution, and then globalization of a class of supernatural specialist.

Jesus Tomb Part Almost the Last: New Epigraphic Claim and Boredom

This will probably be my next to last post on the topic of the Jesus tomb. An epigrapher has published an article saying the "Mary Magdalene" ossuary is no such thing, and that the inscription has been misread when in reality it isn't one inscription at all. This re-analysis suggests there are two female names on the box written at different times, the result of the box being a multiple burial. This would sink the whole argument if correct. Of course the director of the documentary notes an epigrapher did the original work and reading.

I can't comment on that, I'm not a Near Eastern archaeologist or epigrapher or linguist. I'm going to finally get around to watching the documentary next week. I had my Introduction to Archaeology students watch and report on it for extra credit. Anyway, my experience in epigraphy is with Maya epigraphy, which is a much younger field of study, and one still in development. So I can't apply the tendency for shifting readings in Maya epigraphy on to this case.

I'm somewhat surprised by the reaction to the Jesus tomb. I thought this would have caught more fire, ala The DaVinci Code. But there has been roundly rejected in the media and from what I can tell in much of the blogosphere. I don't think millions of people have all of a sudden developed a love of authoritative academics squelching extraordinary claims, or have become much more critical thinkers than usual. I think the answer proposed by documentary and book were just not popular. Doesn't mean those findings are correct, there are plenty of good reasons to think they aren't.

But I will note that for the first time, I've seen the people behind this documentary resort to one of the common themes of Spooky Paradigm research, the notion of democratizing science, taking power from the hands of the scientific establishment that ignores anomalies it doesn't like. From the article linked above.

Jacobovici attributes most of the criticism to scholars' discomfort with journalists "casting light into their ossuary monopoly."

"What we're doing is democratizing this knowledge, and this is driving some people crazy," he said.

Jesus Tomb Part 2: Serious Critique

This piece from the Washington Post includes the first criticism of the "Jesus Tomb" claims that seem sound, to me. Not just doubting the statistics, but cultural and historical considerations which suggest there may be problems. Still nothing that blows it apart, in my opinion, but worth reading

Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush, the CIA, UFO Disinfo, and Wonkette?

Political gossip blog Wonkette strays into Spooky territory this week with a story on President Jimmy Carter, George Bush I, and claims of a UFO snow job. I've already mentioned Carter's UFO report, but according to Carter administration White House lawyer Daniel Sheehan, fake UFO documents were used in an attempt to embarass Carter and prevent him from reforming the intelligence community, in particular the CIA.

The details of the story can be read at the link, but while the story seems a bit extreme, it is just a larger example of what was done to Paul Bennewitz (as detailed in Greg Bishop's Project Beta), and apparently to Linda Moulton Howe by Air Force Office of Special Intelligence counterintelligence agent Richard Doty.

I was skeptical of this story, told by Sheehan in recent years and pieced together in the 2000s. In particular, I was skeptical that stories of crashed saucers would have been used in 1977. Before Roswell is revived in the very late 1970s, crashed saucer stories were much more obscure than after the publication of The Roswell Incident in 1980. There were a few researchers interested in the topic in the 1970s, in particular Leo Stringfield. But I thought his work on this topic was too obscure, and it wouldn't make sense to have government disinformation utilizing the concept at that time.

Within a day of finding about this story, Nick Redfern posts that Stringfield was under surveillance by the FBI and Air Force. Not so obscure after all.

UFO over O'Hare Redux - The New Swamp Gas

An editorial in the Sacramento Bee (may require registration) points out some interesting FAA behavior regarding last November's famous UFO sighting at O'Hare Airport.

Some of the more important bits

At first, the FAA attributed the incident to some kind of weather phenomenon, and United Airlines advised its employees not to talk about it, according to the Tribune.

"If this had been a plane, it would have been investigated," Hilkevitch says. "The FAA treats the smallest safety issue as very important."

.....

To explain the witnesses' reports, he offered his best "guess." They may have seen a "hole-punch cloud," he said, which is in "a perfect circular shape like a round disc" and has "vapor going up into it."

These unusual natural cloud holes form only at below freezing temperatures, according to climatologists. It was 48 degrees at O'Hare that afternoon.

John Callahan, Division Chief of Accidents and Investigations for the FAA during the 1980s, says it's not at all surprising that the O'Hare UFO was undetected on radar.

Radar technology cannot always capture objects at extremely high speeds. A hovering object wouldn't necessarily show up either. "If it did, it would be a small dot, and air traffic controllers would not give it much concern," Callahan says.

....


One of the things I learned in grad school: Sometimes it is better to say "I don't know" when you don't actually know.

Too bad it isn't as catchy as Swamp Gas.

The Tomb of Jesus and Family

I've posted this to my archaeology blog, In Small Things Found. But I figure the hidden history element, the religious element, etc., makes this something of interest to Spooky Paradigm readers.

This is obviously going to be a big story, especially with the press conference on Monday.

Check the links at the bottom, but in summary, film maker James Cameron has produced a documentary (and the research? I'm not as clear on that) on new analysis and interpretation of what the researchers believe to be the tomb of Jesus Christ and his family. A family tomb in Jerusalem, excavated in 1980, includes ossuaries for a Yeshua (Jesus) son of Yosef (Joseph), Maria (Latin for Mary, and Mary mother of Jesus was referred to in other texts by the Latin), Matia (Matthew). Most stunningly, one ossuary is inscribed Mariamene e Mara or "Mary, known as the Master," a name for Mary Magdalene in Gnostic texts, and Judah son of Jesus.

Furthermore, bits of bone in the Yeshua (yes, you read that right) ossuary and the Mariamene ossuary are not related by blood (DNA was extractable from the remains in those two ossuaries). This leads to the interpretation that Mariamene married into the family.

The linked articles note that while the names are common in that region in the first century AD, the chances of all these names, that are associated as family and associates in the New Testament, occurring together, is 1 in 600.

Now, there is a lot that could be wrong about this. There may be elements of the data that we don't know about, that falsifies the hypothesis proposed by these researchers. With such a spectacular claim, there is always the possibility of fraud (perhaps by someone prior to the discovery). The researchers are suggesting a possible tie to the James ossuary (possibly having been in the tomb), which some researchers have declared a fraud, while supporters have produced 1970s-era photos of the ossuary. Of course, if the latter is true, this presents problems for the 1980 excavation. And of course, even if everything here is above board, at most it points to a likely historical link to the tomb occupants, something not provable beyond an absolute shadow of a doubt. But that's how archaeology often is.

Anyway, it is far too preliminary to judge any of this. But unlike many other media blitz claims about archaeology (this is a book, a documentary being shown on the Discovery Channel, etc.), the evidence seems pretty straightfoward here. And a peer-reviewed article on the statistics is apparently coming out soon, something often not found in media blitzes. And let's be honest: did we really think a discovery of this nature would appear first in a scientific journal. Of course it was going to get the King Kong 8th Wonder of the World treatment.

Here is a Discovery "News" blurb about the discoveries, that detail the basic outline

This is a somewhat detailed presentation of the tomb, in particular pictures of the ossuaries with transcriptions and translations of the inscriptions, and more about each element of the research. I recommend checking it out.

One of the archaeologists involved in the initial discovery says this is all PR and nonsense. But I will wait to see what the new analysis actually suggests, as I've seen this kind of rivalry before, sometimes legit, sometimes not. He is right, that archaeologists are not involved in the new analysis. On the other hand, an epigrapher of texts of this era is involved.

It may all be garbage. It may actually have merit. But regardless, I imagine this is going to be something a lot of people outside archaeology will be talking about.