I should be grateful to Avi Loeb. He’s done so much to besmirch the power of the phrase “Harvard professor,” which journalists like to deploy as evidence that someone must be a super-smart guy when it means nothing of the kind. Someone must be able to see through the bullshit in his latest claims, right?

A Harvard professor said Monday he may have uncovered evidence of alien life in the universe and told Americans it would fundamentally change their understanding of their existence.

Harvard Professor Avi Loeb said Monday on “Fox & Friends” that he examined an object moving through space faster than 95% of stars near the sun that had material strength and was tougher than most rocks.

The professor, who is also an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, explained that he could not quantify the object that he was studying just yet.

He’s got nothin’, but he’ll babble about nothing to get his airtime on Fox News and his tabloid coverage.

What actually happened is that a meteor plunging through the atmosphere over Papua New Guinea melted and exploded, and Loeb rushed to the area, trawled a magnet through the ocean, and pulled up some tiny metal spherules that he wants to pretend are alien artifacts.

Here, want to see some of his evidence?

Enhance!

Yeah, that’s it. They’re doing an isotope analysis and plan to publish a paper on it. I’m not sure what result that they expect to get that would constitute evidence of alien life — they’re going to find that they’re mostly iron, and any reliable isotope data might show that they’re billions of years old, as we’d expect from an extraterrestrial rock.

Fortunately, some scientists are speaking out.

Now, though, a number of scientists have countered Loeb’s claims. The New York Times piece, for example, points out that Steve Desch, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University, explained that the meteorite would have been completely incinerated entering Earth’s atmosphere if it was traveling at the speed that Loeb claims.

Desch went as far as saying that Loeb’s comments constitute “a real breakdown of the peer review process and the scientific method, and it’s so demoralizing and tiring.”

Peter Brown, a meteor physicist at Western University in Ontario, concurred, suggesting that Loeb shouldn’t make such bold proclamations during the early analysis phase — it’s not uncommon for detected events to appear interstellar at first only to be chalked up to a measurement error.

I think the reason that Loeb still has his position and his appointment to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences is that it is “so demoralizing and tiring” to deal with gullible journalists who’ve fallen for this ridiculous charlatanry.

Hey, journalists: here’s the real question that popped into my head when I read this story. Avi Loeb was able to charter a ship (expensive!) and crew (more expensive!) and load it with some specialized mining gear (not cheap, I imagine) and drag it back and forth across the ocean floor, while getting photos taken of his smug, grinning face. He has sent samples to various labs around the world to be assayed, not something you’ll pay for out of pocket.

Who’s paying for it? I would be shocked if this barebones speculation and literal fishing expedition could have passed peer review, and if it did, there are some committees at NSF that need to be flensed.

So please, this is journalism 101. Follow the money.

I keep hoping we can crush them under the weight of the evidence, but they can scuttle into very tiny space.

Our congress is currently wasting time on hearings about UFOs, or UAPs as they’re calling them now. It mystifies me how anyone can believe the crap the UFO weirdos spew.

One of the witnesses is a guy named David Grusch, who sits there making amazing claims that he can’t back up.

David Grusch, who served for 14 years as an intelligence officer in the Air Force and National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, appeared before the House Oversight Committee’s national security subcommittee alongside two former fighter pilots who had firsthand experience with UAPs.

Grusch served as a representative on two Pentagon task forces investigating UAPs until earlier this year. He told lawmakers that he was informed of “a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program” during the course of his work examining classified programs. He said he was denied access to those programs when he requested it, and accused the military of misappropriating funds to shield these operations from congressional oversight. He later said he had interviewed officials who had direct knowledge of aircraft with “nonhuman” origins, and that so-called “biologics” were recovered from some craft.

Note: he has not seen any non-human biologics, he has heard second hand from unnamed officials that they had seen them.

Grusch said he hasn’t personally seen any alien vehicles or alien bodies, and that his opinions are based on the accounts of over 40 witnesses he interviewed over four years in his role with the UAP task force.

“My testimony is based on information I have been given by individuals with a longstanding track record of legitimacy and service to this country — many of whom also shared compelling evidence in the form of photography, official documentation, and classified oral testimony,” Grusch said, adding that the trove of evidence has been intentionally kept secret from Congress.

It’s a secret, he claims. He constantly deflects when pressed by saying that he can only talk about this extremely confidential information in a SCIF, or “sensitive compartmented information facility”. Right. Why is he there if he has only hearsay to report, and can’t give any details?

The fact is that when we do get details, they’re typically evidence of noisy technology, or reflections. When pilots report that non-aerodynamic objects are flitting at thousands of miles an hour at low altitude, while completely silent, that then abruptly disappear, I think it’s safe to say they’re not chasing physical objects — they are seeing optical artifacts, or technical glitches in their electronics. I don’t find these recordings at all convincing evidence of any kind of alien, or even material, phenomena.

This, for instance, is also not any kind of evidence, except evidence for credulity in some of the people reporting this nonsense.

A 22-year-old from New York City who asked to remain anonymous — “due to stigma that still persists around the subject” — told NPR he made plans to attend “knowing that it’s something that could be a historic moment.”

From an overflow room with about 100 other enthralled spectators, he watched as Grusch, Graves and Fravor — men with long careers in the military — shared their experiences.

Out of context, he said, their stories “sound fantastical” but given the credentials of all three witnesses, he said he’s a believer.

And he wasn’t the only one.

“There was definitely a gasp and everyone was definitely a little bit shocked,” he said, “when Grusch was talking about non-human biologics.” There was a similar response when Grusch later touched on the personal retaliation he suffered, according to the man.

A dubiously reported “gasp” from a meeting of congress means nothing. No history was made.

Grusch is not a credible source.

According to UFO researcher Joe Murgia, Grusch began peddling his UFO story when he attempted to convince Skinwalker Ranch aficionados and dubious UFO weaponizers George Knapp and Jeremy Corbell to help him take it public on their podcast while he was still employed by the government. The two declined, though not before taking him to a Star Trek convention to meet with ufologists, so he turned to the credulous team of reporters connected to his friend, Lue Elizondo.

He’s part of the usual assortment of “UFO researchers” and Star Trek convention attendees, unqualified fantasists with no credentials at all. The association with Skinwalker Ranch is a nail in the coffin. Skinwalker Ranch is an old property in Utah that was bought by con artists who then ginned up an imaginary history of cattle mutilations, Bigfoot, crop circles, and poltergeists, that got turned into books and a Netflix series. It’s bullshit.

Skeptical author Robert Sheaffer believes the phenomenon at Skinwalker to be “almost certainly illusory”, given that NIDsci found no proof after several years of monitoriing, and that the previous owners of the property, who had lived there for 60 years, say that no supernatural events of any kind had happened there. Sheaffer considers the “parsimonious explanation” to be that the Sherman family invented the story “prior to selling it to the gullible Bigelow”, with many of the more extraordinary claims originating solely from Terry Sherman, who worked as a caretaker after the ranch was sold to Bigelow.

In 1996, skeptic James Randi awarded Bigelow a tongue-in-cheek Pigasus Award for funding the purchase of the ranch and for supporting John E. Mack’s and Budd Hopkins’ investigations. The award category designated Bigelow as “the funding organization that supported the most useless study of a supernatural, paranormal or occult [claim]”.

In 2023, ufologist Barry Greenwood, writing in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, criticized the $22 million research program led by James Lacatski. He emphasized the lack of any documentary evidence from the ranch after many decades of exploration and characterized Skinwalker as “always in the business of selling belief and hope”.

I tried watching the series. It’s ridiculous. Ten episodes of silly people making up stories about pixels, dead cows, and people in cowboy hats walking around in the sagebrush and complaining about bad cell phone reception. And this is the culture that is spawning these hearings? Nonsense. This is a clear example of the combination of grifting and cultural contagion.

You don’t believe me? Here’s a map of UFO sightings.

Notice anything unusual in the distribution? UFOs seem to be an odd confabulation fueled by English-language media. Yet Chuck Schumer and other congressional biologics found it necessary to stuff these hearing requirements into a defense budget bill. There’s nothing there.

But sure, wheel a gurney bearing the dead body of an alien into the hearing room, and I’ll pay attention…but that won’t happen.

Really, dealing with creationists teaches you a degree of cynicism in your expectations.

Émile P. Torres has a provocative perspective on the historical views on Human Extinction. He breaks it down into five periods of general ideas about the possibility of humanity going extinct, and here they are:

(1) The ubiquitous assumption that humanity is fundamentally indestructible. This mood dominated from ancient times until the mid-19th century. Throughout most of Western history, nearly everyone would have said that human extinction is impossible, in principle. It just isn’t something that could happen. The result was a reassuring sense of “Comfort” and “perfect security” about humanity’s future, to quote two notable figures writing toward the end of this period. Even if a global catastrophe were to befall our planet, humanity’s survival is ultimately guaranteed by the loving God who created us or the impersonal cosmic order that governs the universe.

(2) The startling realization that our extinction is not only possible in principle but inevitable in the long run — a double trauma that left many wallowing in a state of “unyielding despair,” as the philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote in 1903. The heart of this mood was a dual sense of existential vulnerability and cosmic doom: not only are we susceptible to going extinct just like every other species, but the fundamental laws of physics imply that we cannot escape this fate in the coming millions of years. This disheartening mood reverberated for roughly a century, from the 1850s up to the mid-20th century.

(3) The shocking recognition that humanity had created the means to destroy itself quite literally tomorrow. The essence of this mood, which percolated throughout Western societies in the postwar era, was a sense of impending self-annihilation. Throughout the previous mood, almost no one fretted about humanity going extinct anytime soon. Once this new mood descended, fears that we could disappear in the near future became widespread — in newspaper articles, films, scientific declarations, and bestselling books. Some people even chose not to have children because they believed that the end could be near. This mood emerged in 1945 but didn’t solidify until the mid-1950s, when one event in particular led a large number of leading intellectuals to believe that total self-annihilation had become a real possibility in the near term.

(4) The surprising realization that natural phenomena could obliterate humanity in the near term, without much or any prior warning. From at least the 1850s up to the beginning of this mood, scientists almost universally agreed that we live on a very safe planet in a very safe universe — not on an individual level, once again, but on the level of our species. Though humanity might destroy itself, the natural world poses no serious threats to our collective existence, at least not for many millions of years, due to the Second Law of thermodynamics. Nature is on our side. This belief was demolished when scientists realized that, in fact, the natural world is an obstacle course of death traps that will sooner or later try to hurtle us into the eternal grave. Hence, the essence of this mood was a disquieting sense that we are not, in fact, safe.

(5) The most recent existential mood — our current mood — is marked by a disturbing suspicion that however perilous the 20th century was, the 21st century will be even more so. Thanks to climate change, biodiversity loss, the sixth major mass extinction event, and emerging technologies, the worst is yet to come. Evidence of this mood is everywhere: in news headlines declaring that artificial general intelligence (AGI) could annihilate humanity, and the apocalyptic rhetoric of environmentalists. As we will discuss more below, surveys of the public show that a majority or near-majority of people in countries like the US believe that extinction this century is quite probable, while many leading intellectuals have expressed the same dire outlook. The threat environment is overflowing with risks, and it appears to be growing more perilous by the year. Can we survive the mess that we’ve created?

I don’t know — it seems to me the big shift was between (1) and (2), and (2) through (5) and more subtle distinctions about how and when the species is going to die. He also argues that these transitions are fairly sharp and clear, but really, Alvarez ended the uniformitarian hypothesis? I don’t think so. But then, I haven’t read his book yet.

Also, just to complicate things, there are a lot of people today who are stuck in the (1) mindset. He gives one horrifying example, of a man who got elected to the American presidency.

As I write in the book, end-times prophesies are both rigid and highly elastic, often able to accommodate unforeseen developments as if the Bible predicted them all along. Ronald Reagan provides an example. In 1971, while he was governor of California, he declared that,

for the first time ever, everything is in place for the battle of Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ. … It can’t be long now. Ezekiel [38:22] says that fire and brimstone will be rained upon the enemies of God’s people. That must mean that they’ll be destroyed by nuclear weapons. They exist now, and they never did in the past.

For Reagan and other evangelicals, the possibility of a nuclear holocaust was filtered through the lens of a religious hermeneutics. Consequently, their mapping of the threat environment was completely different than the mapping of atheists like Carl Sagan and Bertrand Russell. The latter two did not see nuclear weapons as part of God’s grand plan to defeat evil. Rather, a thermonuclear Armageddon would simply be the last, pitiful paragraph of our species’ autobiography. Whereas for Christians, the other side of the apocalypse is paradise, for atheistic individuals it is nothing but oblivion. In this way, secularization played an integral part in enabling the discovery and creation of new kill mechanisms to alter the threat environment and, with these alterations, to induce shifts from one existential mood to another.

Man, Reagan was a batshit lunatic fuck, wasn’t he? And he thought a nuclear holocaust would be a good thing. When Torres says our current mood, that has to be interpreted as a rather narrow “our” because I think a scary huge percentage of the public don’t share that mood with us.