X-Message-Number: 5821
Date: Sat, 24 Feb 1996 21:47:39 -0800
From: John K Clark <>
Subject: STATUE OF ELVIS FOUND ON MARS!
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In #5804 On Fri, 23 Feb 1996 Mac Tonnies Wrote:
>"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,"
>preaches Carl Sagan.
And a very good sermon it is too.
>And yet whenever extraordinary-sounding evidence comes along,
>he denounces it
Whenever the claimed occurrence is extraordinary the evidence supporting it
is lousy. Whenever the supporting evidence is good the occurrence is
pedestrian. I ask you, what can we conclude from that?
>do you honestly know any hard-core neuroscientists committed
>to trans-cerebral study?
No good neuroscientist would bother study the paranormal, not now, it's
already been done and found wanting. Nobody can do everything, part of the
scientific method is finding out what avenues to pursue and what to ignore.
There are too many exciting things to do and find out about to waste time
with dead end spoon bending studies.
>He [Carl Sagan] is committed to selling science to the
>public
And a very noble commitment it is, I hope he becomes very rich.
>even if it means glossing over certain areas of inquiry.
>Witness his faux write-up of the Tunguska explosion of 1908
>in "Cosmos," for example
Like the AWESOME discovery that the Tunguska explosion produced a mushroom
cloud 40 years before Hiroshima?
Any large explosion will do that.
Like the AMAZING claim that thousands of reindeer died of radiation sickness?
No trace of radiation was ever found at the Tunguska site.
Like the ASTOUNDING claim that only a star ship filled with bug eyed aliens
from outer space could possibly change course in the atmosphere and that's
just what the Tunguska object did?
Based on conflicting reports from a few illiterate peasants describing
something they saw for 20 seconds 20 years before.
>The amount of data Sagan excluded from his account is
>nothing short of staggering.
Yes, he routinely excludes data that comes from the illustrious pages of
The National Inquirer or The Weekly World News, for some reason he prefers
rags like "Nature" or "Science". He's sort of funny that way, me too.
>Or read Sagan's facile wrap-up of the "Face on Mars" in
>PARADE magazine: he deliberately used false color images to
>detract from an otherwise anthropoid geomorphic feature.
Oh no! Now we have Martians, Martians who look just like us, Martians who act
just like us, Martians who like to make statues just like us. And not just one,
my all time favorite Inquirer headline "STATUE OF ELVIS FOUND ON MARS!".
They really scooped "Nature" on that one.
The human mind is very good at detecting patterns, especially patterns that
look like a face. We're so good at it that we can find a face even when it
isn't there. No need to look as far as Mars to find faces in sky, just look
at any cloud, you're bound to find several.
By the way, what color are Martians?
>There is too much vested speculation for the mainstream
>scientific community to tackle enigmas like this
Ridiculous, they have tackled this "enigma", you just don't like the answer
they came up with. When Roentgen discovered X rays nobody knew what they were,
that's why he called them X rays. Nobody could explain them and they didn't
fit in with any current theory but everybody accepted that they existed
because although Roentgen's claim was extraordinary so was his evidence.
Far from being shunned he became an instant hero, the most famous living
scientist of his age and received the very first Nobel Prize. The same thing
would happen if somebody could prove that the paranormal existed, even if he
couldn't explain it but don't hold your breath.
>I think it's unreasonable to devaluate a particularly
>emotive field of research such as so-called "paranormal"
>phenomena because proof has yet to be revealed in the manner
>of superconductivity
I think it's entirely reasonable to abandon a line of research if it's not
going anywhere. Forget about explaining it, the evidence that the paranormal
even exists is not one bit better now than it was a century ago, it stank
then and it stinks now. It's time to move on to other things.
>its very nature is intangible
And it seems undetectable, so Science can tell you nothing about it, sounds
like it's in more in religion's line, if you like that sort of thing. I don't.
>it's unrealistic to think that the "scientific community"
>would express interest in it
I agree it is unrealistic for the scientific community to keep paying
attention to the paranormal when they keep getting no results. It's time to
stop spinning our wheels, it's not like there is nothing else for us to do.
John K Clark
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