colors from space

[melannen]

Last night, driving home at about midnight, the moon was so huge and orange and *pendulous* that I nearly pulled over just to make sure it wasn't trying to follow me home. (Harvest Moon coming, yay! I'm sitting here eating feral tomatoes for lunch, mmm.)

Or maybe it was because yesterday evening I was rereading Jim Macdonald's account on re-tracing the route of Betty and Barney Hill's UFO abduction - and encountering the same UFO they did! (The Betty and Barney Hill case was one of the first, and definitely the most famous, alien abduction case, chronicled in the book The Interrupted Journey, which MacDonald uses as his guide.)

If there's one thing that I love more than a truly unexplained paranormal mystery, it's a previously unexplained mystery getting an actual, inarguable explanation. Because a real true scientific explanation means that the results are *reproducible* at will, and how cool is that? (Anybody want to go up to New Hampshire and take a UFO tour sometime? :D If I do end up moving up there, I will totally be trying it.)

The other reason I love them so, though, is that they tend to make the skeptics look almost as silly as the true believers. After all - if the skeptics had known what they were talking about, it would've stopped being a mystery a lot longer ago, right? Nearly every time something gets explained, it reveals that the methods of the skeptics are quite as bad as the methods of the believers.

For example, with Macdonald's post - nobody, on either side, in *fifty years*, had bothered to actually re-trace the route. The believers took them at their word, and the skeptics assumed that their memories were too inaccurate for it to matter. But according to what Macdonald did, the Hills were actually *amazingly* accurate in their account of the original experience. If you do exactly what they said they did, then you will see and experience *exactly* what they saw and experienced (minus minor perceptual differences.)

If the Hills' account of the light they saw in the sky was perfectly, reproducibly accurate ... what about all those other yet-unidentified lights-in-the-sky stories that we've been chalking up to distorted after-the-fact accounts?

(PS: OMG IS IT DEROS OR IS IT THETANS? (OMG, THETANS. I never made the connection before. I now officially blame Scientology on the Doctor. d-: ))

Comments

[shadowkitty [journalfen.net]]

There was a UFO sighting a couple of towns away from me last night!

[melannen [journalfen.net]]

Ooh, cool! Could it have been the moon illusion? Because I have to say, that moon did *not* look moon-like last night.

[stromatolite [journalfen.net]]

I was reading that account as well, it was a pretty amazing story. Could it be that no other skeptics had noticed the exhaustion, stopped watch, and badly estimated driving times as a possible cause for the missing hours?

[melannen [journalfen.net]]

Those are actually pretty standard explanations for missing hours - most of the skeptical accounts of UFO abductions these days don't even consider lost time to be mysterious, because most peoples' time sense is so unreliable anyway, although I have no idea if anyone had ever actually quantitatively counted up the Hills' driving times and distances before. It wouldn't suprise me if nobody had, because like I said, most skeptics just gloss over missing time as a perceptual artifact, which is lazy even if it's usually right.

It was the mysterious and closely-observed light the followed them (that really couldn't have been astronomical) that I thought was the main thing that needed explaining, and he sure explained it good!

(The one thing that I still find mildly mysterious, if you accept their account as true, is that *both* of their watches just happened to stop. Although if they were wind-up watches, that's not all that mysterious either.)