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Hairdryers & UFO marks + Report hints new research just another Project Blue Book

#1
C C Offline
Hairdryers and UFOs
https://skepticalinquirer.org/2022/10/ha...-and-ufos/

EXCERPTS: I first became aware of the crosshairs mark phenomenon while watching an interview with Stanford scientist Garry Nolan, who gave an account of a UFO sighting that mysteriously did not show up in photographs.

Interested, I looked up the case and found a presentation by legendary UFO researcher Jaques Vallée (Vallée 2020). The disappearing UFO part of it was discussed, but what caught my attention was that the witness had, eight months earlier, discovered a strange mark on her hip...

[...] So I started to do some research. I googled “Hairdryer burns” and found a paper in the International Journal of Legal Medicine that showed a very similar image. I posted this on Twitter, with a comment (perhaps overly flippant) about how Vallée was mistaking hairdryer burns for messages from interdimensional tricksters. (Vallée does actually propose interdimensional tricksters as the cause of a variety of phenomena.)

[...] I then watched more of the hour-long video. A few minutes after declaring the marks a mystery, I was surprised to hear Vallée actually address the hairdryer hypothesis:

"Look at the end of the hairdryer, it looks like [the mark] … So maybe she burned herself with her hairdryer. Well, if you try to do that, you’re going to get burned, alright. But it’s not going to look like this. Okay, you will have a burn. And so, so it’s not that. Although in some cases, the dimensions are pretty much the same as the ones on the grid in the front of your hairdryer. But it’s not always the same pattern."

So Vallée was in fact aware that the patterns match hairdryers but dismissed it with two objections: “It’s not going to look like this,” and “It’s not always the same pattern.”

[...] The hairdryer hypothesis seemed very sound. The marks looked like the front grills of hairdryers, and some people had found such marks and determined that they were from hairdryers. Yet most of the cases either did not even consider it or they rejected it, saying they would have remembered such a painful burn.

Would they, though? Not willing to experiment full scale (and full pain) I hit upon a safer experiment. [...] This showed that it is entirely possible to burn yourself with not much pain. Your skin would show no damage (if you even checked). The burn mark, painless, would show up a little later, by which time you may have dressed. Then you might not notice it for hours or even days. By that time, you could easily have forgotten such an inconsequential event, especially if there were a lot of other things going on... (MORE - missing details)


Halloween-timed government UFO report seems to downplay spooky sightings
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/ha...-rcna54820

EXCERPTS: Monday’s report comes after Congress called for the establishment of a permanent office to study UAPs [...] at the Pentagon last year and then held its first public hearing on the topic in more than 50 years this spring. That hearing discussed an unclassified report issued by a Department of Defense task force in 2021.

[...] Many UFO investigation proponents like myself were underwhelmed by the Pentagon’s unclassified 2021 report, which offered an explanation for only one of the 144 incidents the department said were being investigated... But leaked details and communications from officials ahead of Monday’s report and the announcement of NASA’s new team suggested that some in the government are eager to put the issue to rest without a full, open-minded investigation — just as it did in the last open attempt to get to the bottom of the phenomena back in the 1960s.

It’s particularly frustrating that NASA seems to be drawing its conclusions before even really getting started. In its tweet announcing the UAP panel members 10 days ago, NASA declared: “There is no evidence supporting the idea that UAP are extraterrestrial in origin.” This statement seems to prematurely signal its conclusions so no one will be surprised when the final report repeats the same finding.

Meanwhile, the headline of a New York Times article on Friday based on what it said was classified information from the intelligence report read, “Many Military U.F.O. Reports Are Just Foreign Spying or Airborne Trash.” Nodding to the Halloween timing, the author of the article, Julian Barnes, tweeted what might have been the subtext: UFOs are nothing “spooky or hypersonic” — in other words, just ordinary things, there’s nothing to see here and it’s time to move on.

[...] Unfortunately, there is precedent for the Defense Department, scientists and the media playing down reports of UFOs rather than prioritizing truly open scientific inquiry. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Air Force established a UFO task force named Project Blue Book [...that...] concluded that UFOs warranted no further study; the headlines it generated were used as justification to shut down Project Blue Book later that year.

But Northwestern University professor J. Allen Hynek ... came forward to say that much of the work of the project was to debunk UFO reports rather than understand them. [...] findings were “singularly slanted” because it only looked at easy-to-explain cases. Moreover, more than a third of the cases remained legitimately unexplained.

The accusation of cherry-picking data was repeated by others, including renowned atmospheric scientist James McDonald, who accused the committee of mostly being a whitewash, continuing a disinformation process started by the CIA in the 1950s to convince the public and scientists that UFOs were nonsense. McDonald also pointed to a memo leaked from the project administrator that assured his colleagues that the conclusion was predetermined.

There is now a danger that the NASA study, which is also supposed to be objective, may not live up to this scientific ideal [...] While some of NASA’s top brass and study team members have tried to reassure the public that they don’t have pre-conclusions, others have already raised concerns. Loeb points out: “Some members of the panel expressed explicit views against scientific research on UAP. Their selection raises concern about the neutrality of the panel.”

[...] It’s often said that those who don’t learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it. If government and academia don’t do so with UFOs, we may end up with another independent scientific panel in another 50 years, but be no closer to the truth. (MORE - missing details)
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#2
Kornee Offline
Regarding the 2nd article linked to in #1:
The NBC news article reflects essentially my repeated claims regarding the fate of any Congressional Pentagon briefings or such e.g. NASAs new tab at it, e.g:
https://www.scivillage.com/thread-13070-...l#pid54087
At best, they will rediscover that within the otherwise randomness are some patterns - so-called UFO hot-spots or alleys that have been long known to exist.
Beyond that kind of thing, nothing radically new in true understanding will or could come of it from anything officially funded.
And the propensity to downplay what is publicly available, and continuing to hide classified data, is just deja vue. From 1979:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGts5UH1BT4
Somewhat better quality version available at https://store.earthstation1.com/ufos-are...l-dvd.html
Discounting the narrator's strong bias in favor of ET hypothesis, it's the testimonies, and references to past Congressional hearing(s) and UN delegation(s) that signals nothing new is coming around the corner.
It's all been done before and always fizzles.
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