The Adventures of Tobasco da Gama

Via Phil Plait, we learn something we already knew: flares can be mistaken for UFOs. To sum up, a group of skeptics in New Jersey attached flares to balloons using fishing line and released them. Sure enough, local residents and media reported seeing UFOs, hitting all the standard UFO tropes.

I bring it up because this is really indicative of the difference between skeptics and believers. Believers never stop to consider alternate possibilities. They see lights in the sky or crop formations, and then because they can’t imagine any alternative, it must be aliens. Their kids get autism, and then because they can’t imagine or don’t like the alternative, it must be vaccines. They see a weird shape in the water, and then because they can’t imagine any alternative, it must be an unknown species of giant sea creature. If they even consider, say, flares or a prank or a genetic disease or floating logs, the alternative is immediately dismissed as impossible.

That’s what UFO believers said about the military’s explanation for the Phoenix Lights. There’s no way flares could possibly look like what people saw over Phoenix! Right.

Skeptics, on the other hand, consider every alternative unless they have good reason to rule it out. When we say that autism is not caused by vaccines, we have a dozen lines of evidence that rule out a connection. When we say that homeopathy is impossible, we can point to a hundreds of years of modern chemistry that falsifies its theoretical basis, as well as empirical studies that show no efficacy for it. And now, when we say that aerial flares can be mistaken for UFOs, we can point to this simple experiment run by some skeptics who needed nothing more than some road flares, balloons, and fishing line to recreate something that we were told was “impossible” for any terrestrial source to duplicate.

Even more importantly, the skeptics actually had the will to try an experiment, rather than just assuming that they know what is and isn’t possible.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 at 09:35 and is filed under Activism, Science & Skepticism, \m/ Rawk! \m/. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.