On January 5th of this year, the Morristown area of New Jersey was all abuzz about the UFOs that appeared in the night sky. But as it turns out, it was the plot of two skeptic who could not understand why so many continued to believe in things for which there is no evidence.
Chris Russo and Joe Rudy had long puzzled over why so many people from all walks of life were so gullible. They noted that people believed in "such irrational superstitions as psychic ability, spiritual mediums, alien abductions, and the like. Despite the lack of evidence to support these notions, we were baffled. How could so many people in an age of science still buy into dogma that is no more or less ridiculous than the notion of an elderly obese man delivering presents to every child on Earth in one evening?"
They discussed how they not only pulled off the hoax but how the media covered it in an article. They said that they hatched their social experiment in part to question the credibility of so-called UFO "experts." Their goal was "to fool people, bring the charlatans out of the woodwork to drum up controversy, and then expose it as nothing more than a prank to show everyone how unreliable eyewitness accounts are, along with investigators of UFOs."
They set off into the woods between Hanover and Morris Plains to launch their experiment. The went with a helium tank, five balloons, and flares. They filled up the three-foot balloons and tied about five feet of fishing line to them. One end of the fishing line was taped to the balloon, the other end was taped to a flare. They started the flares and then launched the balloons 15 seconds apart.
After filming the launch, they left the scene. They sat back and watched the media coverage of the event over the next few days. According to the report, there was extensive coverage. One media report carried a quote from a man who said that "the object 'didn’t appear to be manmade.'”
Reportedly, there was one family, the Hurleys, in particular who all the media scampered to for interviews. "Paul Hurley, a pilot, along with his family, made appearances on just about every major news station, describing the strange lights that they saw in the sky."
The pair did this four more times. Each time, there was intense media coverage. They even got in on the fun by releasing the video they shot and posting it on YouTube. Further, they made appearances in the media discussing what they had "seen" and providing their video to drive it home. (Continues below video.)
For them, the "icing on the cake" was when "the popular History Channel show UFO Hunters featured the Morristown UFO as their main story one week. Bill Birnes, the lead investigator of the show and the publisher of UFO Magazine, declared definitively that the Morristown UFO could not have been flares or Chinese lanterns."
The summed up their report of their hoax thusly:
"This begs an important question: are UFO investigators simply charlatans looking to make a quick buck off human gullibility, or are they alarmists using bad science to back up their biased opinions that extraterrestrial life is routinely visiting our planet? Either way, are these people deserving of their own shows on major cable networks? If a respected UFO investigator can be easily manipulated and dead wrong on one UFO case, is it possible he’s wrong on most (or all) of them? Do the networks buy into this nonsense, or are they in it for the ratings? How can a television network that has pretensions of providing honest and factual programming be taken seriously when the topic of one of their top rated shows deals with chasing flares and fishing line? In fact, we delivered what every perfect UFO case has: great video and pictures, “credible” eyewitnesses (doctors and pilots), and professional investigators convinced that something amazing was witnessed. Does this bring into question the validity of every other UFO case? We believe it does."
They have video of the coverage here.
Comments
The media reported an unusual sighting of an unidentified flying object. Where's the gullibility or irrationality?
Not to rain on their parade, but 1. it was a flying object, and 2. it was unidentified to most people. It just wasn't an alien space vehicle.
These two idiots were arrested for disorderly conduct. HA! Serves them right!
And further an Atheist worldview is more logically going to believe in flying saucers and little green men from mars (or planet X) than a theist. So who's really the gullible one?
And where did you pull that little assumption out of Nigel? Trying to make yourself feel better about your irrational beliefs by attributing some irrational beliefs to atheists? Come back when you have some evidence to back up your claims.
SASnSA,
Atheists believe life arose from chance+time+natural selection, therefore, given the universe is incredibly big, and incredibly old, there is a good chance that life has arisen elsewhere in the universe.
Hence it is more logical for atheists to believe in flying saucers and little green men from mars (or planet X) than a theist.
Come back when you understand the ramifications of your own worldview.
That life may have arisen on other planets isn't really the question. That this life has: 1. found us in this great expanse, 2. had a desire the expend the resources required to come all this way, 3. had the time to travel all this way, 4. felt the need for continuous covert study of our planet over nearly a century, while living on a "mothership" away from their own homes, 5. even attained a level of sentience necessary to do any of this early enough on a universal scale to have reached us over that great of distances. There are a lot of extremely low probabilities there, and if the stories are to be believed, this would have happened many times, with each of these fleets avoiding each other behind various planets in our solar system (without any of our probes or telescopes ever noticing or our ground and air based tracking systems confirming anything). And all that just to probe various orifices of a fairly boring life form like us? At least try to be realistic.
SASnSA
Nice try at avoiding the point. I made a statement that as an Atheist it is more logical to believe in aliens, you took offense and challenged me to show how, which I did.
Your latest reply, further shows you don't even comprehend why you were offended in the first place.
Finally, don't even start on probabilities as your "defense" because for you that is very unstable ground. For example, the mathematical probabilities of life arising from non-life, even in a "fifteen billion year" old universe.
I wasn't avoiding the point. I freely admit that there is a possibility of life on other planets. The probabilities of life rising from non-life are actually much better than your Christian apologists would have you believe. More on that here: www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/abioprob.html. And yet again you make an assumption on what others comprehend or believe.
My point is that there are a lot more barriers to consider when evaluating the possibility of extraterrestrial vehicles coming to Earth than just the existence of life elsewhere. First and foremost, what type of life does the planet support. Can it only support basic bacteria, which have been found to survive much harsher temperatures than more complex life forms; or can it support a full ecosystem? How many global events have set back the evolution of it's species? Have any sentient life forms evolved? Have these life forms reached the level of scientific understanding that allows more than brief trips into local space (we haven't, and probably won't for a long time)? They would have to be able to find us, which would be almost like finding an atom in a haystack. Then you have to consider travel. How far away from us are they? Hundreds, millions, trillions of light years away? Is there actually a way around the speed of light barrier? If so, have they found that way or are they limited to some fraction of that speed? Do they have the fuel and resources for such a long trip? How many generations are they willing to waste on the trip? This could go on and on. But through all this we start to realize that the possibility of traveling anywhere we want in the universe or even in our arm of the Milkyway galaxy is far less likely than depicted by sci-fi shows.
So far, scientists, many of them atheists, have found explanations for UFO sightings that they've investigated. In fact if you do any research on who the people are that are reporting these sightings, you'd find that more than average are moderately religious and of average intelligence or less, though some of higher intelligence and yes, some atheists have fallen for it. Skepticism usually wins out though.
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