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eSkeptic

the email newsletter
of the Skeptics Society

Wednesday, May 21st, 2008
ISSN 1556-5696

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To view this newsletter with graphics and formatting,
visit the permanent url:
<www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/08-05-21.html>

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In this week's eSkeptic:

- Shop Skeptic: Physics of the Impossible now on DVD
- feature article: The Phoenix Lights Explained (Again)
- Sunday's lecture: Dr. Gregory Benford & Dr. Elisabeth Malartre
- MichaelShermer.com: this week's additions

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PHYSICS OF THE IMPOSSIBLE NOW ON DVD

One hundred years ago, scientists would have said that lasers,
televisions, and the atomic bomb were beyond the realm of physical
possibility. In this lecture, based his new book, Physics of the
Impossible, the renowned physicist Michio Kaku explores to what
extent technologies and devices deemed equally impossible today
might become commonplace in the future.

READ more about this lecture:
<www.skeptic.com/lectures/2008/03/27/physics-of-the-impossible/>

ORDER the DVD:
<www.skeptic.com/productlink/av183>

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In this week's eSkeptic, Tony Ortega debunks the Phoenix Lights: the
mysterious "vee" configuration that people reported seeing flying
over the state of Arizona in March 1997.

Ortega became editor of the Village Voice in March, 2007. Prior to
that he was a writer or editor at several alternative newsweeklies,
including Phoenix New Times, Kansas City's The Pitch, and New Times
Broward -- Palm Beach. He is originally from Los Angeles, has had a
lifelong interest in astronomy and other sciences, and over his
career has debunked not only the Phoenix Lights, but also a
well-known Wyatt Earp historian who turned out to be fabricating his
sources, as well as various "new religions."

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THE PHOENIX LIGHTS EXPLAINED (AGAIN)

by Tony Ortega

UFOs make great ratings, so it isn't surprising that NBC'S Dateline
aired a special on Sunday, May 18, entitled 10 Close Encounters
Caught on Tape. To its credit, the NBC program at least made an
attempt to provide prosaic explanations for each of the events it
presented. In most cases, those explanations were actually pretty
good, and the "UFO experts" for the most part came off as yahoos.

But when I realized that they were saving "the #1 UFO event caught
on tape!" for last -- the lame Phoenix Lights, the 1997 event that I
helped debunk years ago as a reporter in Arizona, I prepared myself
for yet another time that so-called journalists wouldn't get even
the most basic facts right. I wasn't disappointed.

For starters, there were two separate events on the night of March
13, 1997 over the skies of Arizona. The mysterious "vee"
configuration of lights that so many people across the state
witnessed was seen over Prescott at about 8:15 p.m. and traveled
south to Phoenix at about 8:30 and then passed over Tucson at 8:45.
That's 200 miles in thirty minutes which means the vee was moving at
about 400 miles per hour. Some early eyewitnesses perceived that it
was high in the sky, others swore it was low and moving very slowly.
(And I mention "early" purposely. As the months passed, more and
more elaborate -- and ridiculous -- claims were made by eyewitnesses
who were clearly trying to one-up each other.) As I've pointed out
many times, the eyeball is a poor instrument for judging the
altitude of point sources of light in a night sky. Simple physics,
however, suggests the vee was high in the sky and moving very fast,
even if it looked like it was moving slowly due to the altitude.

As I first revealed in the Phoenix New Times, a young man with a
10-inch Dobsonian telescope, Mitch Stanley, spotted the vee from his
backyard, and saw that it was a formation of airplanes. Using a
magnification of 60X -- which essentially put him 60 times closer to
the vee than people only using their naked eyes -- Stanley could see
that each light in the sky was actually a double, with one light
under each squarish wing. The planes still looked small in his scope
-- suggesting they were flying at high altitude -- and he didn't
know what type they were. But there was no doubt, he told me, that
they were planes.

After his sighting, Stanley tried to contact a Phoenix city
councilwoman who was making noise about the event, as well as a
couple of UFO flim-flam men working the local scene, but he was
rebuffed. I was the first reporter to talk to him, and, as a
telescope builder myself, I made a thorough examination of his
instrument and his knowledge of it. (For the inexperienced: a
Dobsonian telescope is much easier to move than the typical
department store scope; it's child's play for an experienced
observer like Stanley to get a good look at passing planes at
altitude.) And he had a witness: he had told his mother, who was
standing nearby, that the lights were planes. After my story, the
Arizona Republic also found his story credible and wrote about it.

On the night of March 13, news of the 8:30 pm sighting traveled
fast, so a large number of people were outside with video cameras
when the second and unrelated event, at about 10 pm, happened in the
sky southwest of Phoenix. A string of lights appeared in the sky,
and slowly sank until they disappeared behind the nearby Estrella
Mountain range. This was later shown to be a string of flares
dropped by the Maryland Air National Guard over the North Tac
military range. Dr. Lynne Kitei, featured prominently on the
Dateline program, can repeat all she wants to NBC and other media
that these lights were magical and "intelligent" and later showed up
just outside her living room window, but the videotapes taken that
night by many people show without a doubt that this was a string of
mundane lights that fell and disappeared behind the range, exactly
as a string of flares dropped by the military planes would have.

The problem developed later when people conflated reports of the two
sightings. For the many people who had seen the earlier vee pass
directly over their heads, the explanation of the flares made no
sense whatsoever. News organizations didn't differentiate between
the two events or report on the Stanley identification -- even the
Republic stopped referring to its earlier solid reporting on the
Lights and began promoting it as "unexplained."

To this day, programs like Dateline invariably question people who
saw the earlier "vee" event, and quote them saying that flares
couldn't possibly explain what they saw. They are right. They didn't
see flares, they saw a formation of planes. Dateline repeatedly
showed people talking about their memories of the 8:30 vee while
showing video of the 10 pm flares. Talk about misleading.

There was at least one person who videotaped both the 8:30 vee and
the later event. I saw his tape myself. It clearly showed the five
lights of the 8:30 vee moving in relation to each other, exactly as
you'd expect in a formation of airplanes.

As for the people who swore they saw a black triangular shape
joining the five lights of the vee, that's a classic contrast effect
of the human eye. In a very telling case, a man who swore he saw a
black shape joining the lights of the vee saw it pass directly in
front of the moon. At that point, he saw not a black shape but wavy
lines pass over the undimmed moon. But rather than conclude that
he'd seen the contrails of planes, the man, whose perception had
already been heavily influenced by the UFO explanation concluded
instead that the pilot of the alien craft had turned his spaceship
transparent right at that moment so the man could see the moon
through it. How convenient!

Part of what fueled so much confusion over the Phoenix Lights event
was the input from a couple of UFO "investigators" on the scene --
one of whom was literally put of business after my stories about him
came out. For example, when it became obvious that the hundreds of
people who saw the vee pass overhead had many different ideas about
it -- some said it was just over their heads, other said it was high
in the sky, and no one could agree on the colors of the lights --
instead of concluding that human beings naturally come up with
different perceptions of the same event, these UFOlogists instead
began to promote the idea that everyone had seen different vees!
Again, going by the early reports, there was no doubt that a single
vee crossed over the state that night in about a half-hour. But by
the time the UFOlogists were through, the credulous came to believe
that Phoenix was practically under attack by dozens of mile-wide
triangular space-cruisers!

Also at fault was the local TV news fraternity, which not only
couldn't get the basic facts straight, but also cynically exploited
the event for ratings. We're still dealing with the misconceptions
they promoted, such as...

Claim: The vee made no sound. (Not true. I talked to witnesses
in Prescott, a quieter environment, who clearly heard jet
noise.)

Claim: The vee didn't show up on radar. (None of the UFO
investigators bothered to ask for tapes from the FAA in
Albuquerque, whose officials at the time told me they only kept
tapes for 11 days. So we'll never know what the radar picture
looked like that night.)

Claim: The 10 pm lights fell in front of the mountain range, so
they couldn't be flares dropped in the distance by military
planes (Videotapes taken by observers from higher elevations in
the Valley saw the flares for a longer period of time than those
who were in lower places, confirming that the flares dropped
behind the Estrellas.)

Perhaps it's a good thing that NBC has now declared this the numero
uno UFO sighting of all time. Few sightings have been so thoroughly
investigated by reporters, and so well debunked. But you won't hear
that from the networks, who can't get enough of the ratings that
come with "the unexplained."

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lecture this weekend!

BEYOND HUMAN:
LIVING WITH ROBOTS & CYBORGS

with Dr. Gregory Benford & Dr. Elisabeth Malartre
Sunday, May 25, 2008 at 2:00 pm
Baxter Lecture Hall, Caltech

Concepts once purely fiction -- robots, cyborg parts, artificial
intelligence -- are becoming part of everyday reality. Soon robots
will be everywhere, performing surgery, exploring hazardous places,
making rescues, fighting fires, and handling heavy goods...

READ MORE about this lecture:
<www.skeptic.com/lectures/2008/02/04/beautiful-minds/>

IMPORTANT TICKET INFORMATION

Tickets are first come first served at the door. Sorry, no advance
ticket sales. Seating is limited. $8 Skeptics Society members &
Caltech/JPL Community; $10 General Public.

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NEW THIS WEEK ON MICHAELSHERMER.COM:
A SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN EXTRAVAGANZA!

This week on MichaelShermer.com we've made available the four most
recent Scientific American columns written by Michael Shermer.

March 2008: Adam's Maxim & Spinoza's Conjecture
<www.michaelshermer.com/2008/03/adams-maxim-spinozas-conjecture/>

April 2008: Wag the Dog
<www.michaelshermer.com/2008/04/wag-the-dog/>

May 2008: A New Phrenology?
<www.michaelshermer.com/2008/05/a-new-phrenology/>

June 2008: Expelled Exposed
<www.michaelshermer.com/2008/05/expelled-exposed/>

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