More Commentary on the Needles Object

The more I think about this story, the more it seems like a hoax to me. Take a look at the various factors at play:

• The on-camera witnesses in the article know each other. (I neglected to mention this in the original post, and for that I apologize.) From the article:

"Coincidentally, Frank Costigan, the ex-cop, works on investigations for David Hayes. When he came in to the radio station, he told Hayes about the thing he had seen in the sky, and Hayes told him about the Men in Black."

What this says to me is that two townspeople may have conspired to bring some publicity to their otherwise sleepy hamlet.

• The fact that Knapp said he could not find "Bob on the river." You'd think a guy living in a houseboat in the middle of the nearby Colorado river would be pretty easy to spot. Linda Howe was able to find Bob, although he refused to give his real name, which makes this whole story even more suspicious.

• Knapp said this early on in the article:

"Somewhere in the rough terrain just west of the Colorado River and south of Needles is a point of impact, maybe some burn marks, created by something that fell from the sky."

But he never mentions anyone ever going out there to see for themselves. You'd think a big time investigative reporter such as Knapp would want to go check that out. Also, Knapp admits that his investigative team contact several government agencies about this, but reported no one knew anything about it:

"The I-Team phoned nearly every agency we could think of to see if they had received any report or knew anything. We were not surprised to learn that no one knew anything."

Either this is an elaborate government cover-up, or nothing actually happened.

I decided to send an e-mail to Knapp with these questions. I'll report any reply he sends here.

P.S.
Thanks to the nice people at the Bad Astronomy and Universe Today Forum for the discussion on this topic.

Unknown Object Falls From the Sky in Needles, California

This is the first news story I've posted on which a news team from my hometown of Las Vegas has reported. I must admit, this is fairly exciting. I can't really pinpoint why, maybe because I can actually talk to the report who did the story face to face if I wanted to. Anyway, here it is.

Channel 8 Eyewitness News recently reported that an unknown object with a "turquoise hue" streaked across the sky on the morning of May 14 and struck the dry, cracked earth near the small town of Needles, CA; about 100 miles south of Las Vegas. This story was reported on by Channel 8 chief investigative reporter George Knapp, a local newsman with the reputation of being the "UFO guy" due to his numerous reports on Area 51 over the years.

Knapp talked to two witnesses of the event, one of whom was Frank Costigan. Costigan, who worked as the chief of airport security at Los Angeles International Airport for seven years, said the mystery object flew out of the northeast, heading southwest, traveling very fast, at one point slowing down and then speeding up again.

"'It went behind a hill, and I waited to see if I could hear it crash because as big as it was, it was bound to make noise,' Costigan said. But Costigan never heard a crash."

The second eyewitness was David Hayes, owner of KTOX radio in Needles. Hayes said he saw a formation of dark vehicles getting off the highway hours after the initial impact. He claims the lead vehicle was, "a large truck with a dome on top and a black structure that reminded him of a stealth fighter."

"'It seemed like it was some kind of surveillance vehicle -- four-wheel drive. It had government plates, U.S. government plates and behind it were a couple of vans that looked like support vehicles,' said Hayes."

Hayes claims to have been followed back to the radio station by one of the men in the vehicles, men who Hayes described as a having a "military bearing" but were not in uniform. Knapp asked Hayes if they had a "Men in Black" feel, to which Hayes replied, "Absolutely." Knapp then refers to the presumed government agents later on in the article as the "Men in Black." This decision by Knapp seems a bit irresponsible to me, since Hayes clearly described the men as not in uniform.

A third witness popped up, who was only ever referred to as "Bob on the river." Bob claims he saw the object from his houseboat on the nearby Colorado River. Bob described the object as having the turquoise hue, and landing with a thump approximately 100 yards from the river.

In an interview with journalist Linda Howe, Bob described the object being carried away by a skycrane helicopter. From Knapp's article:

"Bob says he saw at least five helicopters flying in formation, including a large sky crane. The crane picked up the oval shaped object, still glowing, and flew away, heading in the direction of Las Vegas. One odd detail, the choppers arrived only 17 minutes after the object crashed."

Bob described the object to Hayes as "about the size of a semi-trailer" with an oblong shape. In Howe's article, Bob describes the flames that surrounded the object in more detail:

"Oh, yes, but a turquoise-blue fire with some green in it. And it hit the ground and bounced. But there were many other pieces – there were at least nine other pieces that bounced up in a circle around the turquoise blue-green object."

Knapp claims the radio station received a call from the Laughlin, NV airport, approximately 30 miles north of Needles. The caller from the airport claimed they had seen an influx of so-called "Jenny" planes; the airline that flies workers to military base in Nevada known as Area 51. However, the airport could not confirm this since no one is on duty there after 6pm.

Knapp finished the article by admitting that he could not personally find "Bob on the river," and by promising to keep his readers updated on a few Freedom of Information requests he has filed.

I was pleasantly surprised to not find the words "alien" or "extraterrestrial" anywhere in this article. The article does use the acronym "UFO" in the title, but I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and presume they mean "Unidentified Falling Object." The Men in Black thing was a little goofy, but Knapp does have to make the article interesting.

The object seems, to me at least, to have been a satellite. That would explain the semi-trailer size and the lack of explosion on impact. Most Earth-orbiting satellites run on solar power stored in batteries; that is, contain little that would conceivably explode. Only satellites that don't orbit Earth use nuclear power. The large solar panels that accompany most satellites could have given the object its perceived oblong shape. As for the turquoise flames described by "Bob," I have an inquiry pending as to whether satellites are built with materials that would burn turquoise after being exposed to the heat of re-entry.

Not Alien Abductees, Call Them Cryptomnesiacs

It seems I have been hearing quite a bit about UFOs and alien abductions lately. CNN's Larry King Live has devoted two whole hour-long shows in the last two weeks to UFO hunters and debating the "truth" about what happened in Roswell, NM in 1947. There was a recent article in Scientific American telling the story of a scientist who's working on a "real flying saucer" (I wrote about it here), and now I find this.

It's a story on the io9 blog about a 1993 report, which was published in Skeptical Inquirer. The report, written by professor of sociology at Rutgers University Ted Goertzel, calls into question the findings of a 1992 report that found 3.7 million Americans suffer from "alien abduction syndrome."

The original report, the one on which Goertzel wrote his, offered five experiences that might suggest one was abducted by aliens. But since there have never been any scientifically confirmed cases of alien abduction, I am at a loss as to how these five experiences were chosen. The descriptions of the experiences were as follows:

1. "Waking up paralyzed with a sense of a strange person or presence or something else in the room."
2. "Experiencing a period of time of an hour or more, in which you were apparently lost, but you could not remember why or where you had been."
3. "Feeling that you were actually flying through the air although you didn't know why or how."
4. "Seeing unusual lights or balls of light in a room without knowing what was causing them."
5. "Finding puzzling scars on your body and neither you nor anyone else remembering how you received them or where you got them."

If a participant in the study claimed to recognize four or more of these experiences, he or she would qualify as an "abductee." Again, how the researchers were able to come to such a conclusion based upon what amount to assumptions about what a "real" alien abduction feels like, I do not know.

In an attempt to remedy methodological and logical deficiencies in the original report, Goertzel tasked one of his research methods classes at Rutgers with redesigning the study.

"Our questionnaire included the same items which they believed were indicators of UFO abduction, but added other items designed to place their items in a broader psychological context."

Goertzel's class conducted interviews with 697 residents of Southwestern New Jersey. They found that 3.7% of the residents interview were considered "abductees" by the standards set down by the original study. The 18 other questions designed to gain a more in-depth psychological picture of the respondents asked about beliefs in government conspiracies, astrology and the respondents' ease of trusting others.

The addition of the new questions revealed the "alien abduction syndrome" for what it truly was, a psychological phenomenon known as cryptomnesia.

"Psychologist Robert Baker (1992: 78) states that this phenomenon of 'seeing complex visual images in one's head that you cannot remember ever having seen before or...suddenly hearing voices from unknown and unrecollected sources is not only a much more common occurrence than is generally known but is also one of the more interesting and intriguing anomalies in the field of 'normal' human behavior.'"

"To investigate the cryptomnesia phenomenon, Goertzel mapped out the correlation between the various survey responses and the reports of unusual personal experiences. People who believe that high government officials were involved in the Kennedy assassination, for example, had a 21% correlation with those supposed 'abductees.' There was a 20% correlation between 'abductees' and those who think the Air Force is hiding evidence of flying saucers. But the most overlap occurred with two separate groups of survey respondents: Those who admitted to feeling that others were conspiring against them, and those who said they enjoyed 'reading books about UFOs and other strange phenomena.'"

Further analysis by Goertzel suggested that cryptomnesia was rooted in a lack of trusting relationships. The ability to trust others, such as friends or neighbors, was one of the deeper psychological aspects Goertzel's revised study sought to explore.

"The path analysis suggests that cryptomnesia is rooted in a lack of trusting relationships. This problem may have its origins in early childhood, but it continues into adult life with a lessened feeling of trust of friends and neighbors. This lack of trust leads to feelings of anomie and anxiety which make the individual more likely to construct false memories out of information stored in the unconscious mind. People who think in this way are susceptible to belief in conspiracy theories since these theories help them to make sense of an otherwise incoherent world."

Goertzel cautions that his study is hardly comprehensive. He has not done the psychological case studies necessary to prove the conclusions made in his analysis. All his study does, Goertzel writes, is "...provide a more plausible interpretation of the data than the UFO abduction hypothesis." In this case, Goertzel has shown more scientific integrity than the authors of the original study. For one think, he didn't claim that 3.7% of Southwestern New Jersey residents are cryptomnesiacs.

Why do some people feel the need to complicate an incredibly interesting psychological phenomenon such as cryptomnesia with useless nonsense about alien abductions? The same can be said for sleep paralysis, which is a documented condition whose symptoms are incredibly similar to those described by alleged alien abductees; indeed a condition which can account for three of the five experiences described in the original study. When did the wonders of the labyrinthine human mind get replaced by myths?

The World's First Flying Saucer: Made Right Here on Earth

I just love the subtle jab Scientific American took at people who think UFOs are controlled by extraterrestrials with the title of this article.

Subrata Roy, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of Florida, is currently working on plans to build a flying machine that uses electrodes on its surface to ionize the air around it, turning the air into plasma. The positively charged plasma would then repel the neutrally charged air around it, theoretically creating enough force to lift the craft of the ground. Roy plans to have a model of the craft ready to demonstrate his claims within the next year.

"At six inches (15.2 centimeters) in diameter, the device, which Roy calls a 'wingless electromagnetic air vehicle"'(WEAV), will truly be a flying saucer. Theoretically, Roy says, the flying saucer can be as large as anyone wants to build it, because the design gives the aircraft balance and stability. In other words, this type of aircraft could someday be built large enough to ferry around people. But, Roy says, 'we need to walk before we can run, so we're starting small.'"

"The biggest hurdle to building a WEAV large enough to carry passengers would be making the craft light, yet powerful enough to lift its cargo and energy source. Roy is not sure what kind of energy source he will use yet. He anticipates that the craft's body will be made from a material that is an insulator such as ceramic, which is light and a good conductor of electricity."

"Roy has been working with the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, since 2001 to study how plasma could be used to control the flow of air—pushing air in different directions—and thereby the vehicle's movements. "

"At this early stage, and without a clear decision on how the craft will be powered, Roy says it is unclear how much a WEAV might cost to build and operate. Still, he is optimistic. 'All of the materials needed to make this aircraft currently exist,' he says, 'and plasma is the most abundant form of matter in the universe. If we can somehow tap into that in the future we should be able to fly anywhere.'"

You see, this kind of thing is just cool. I simply do not understand why some people need to perpetuate the myth of alien-controlled UFOs when the reality of science is so much more interesting.