omgwtf!

Here’s an article from 2002 that’s on the BBC News website today, in conjunction with this article about a newly published report from the British Ministry Of Defense, declaring that there is no proof of alien life.

At the time of his UFO article, David Whitehouse was the BBC News Online Science Editor. He still may be; no idea, really; the last article I could find with his byline in the BBC archives was dated around 2004. If he is, though, he shouldnt be, with the shoddy methodology he has. What a condescending, ignorant little man. I read a number of his stories and they all had the same tone. I wouldn’t trust him with a fact if it had handles.

Here’s an article from 2002 that’s on the BBC News website today, in conjunction with this article about a newly published report from the British Ministry Of Defense, declaring that there is no proof of alien life.

At the time of his UFO article, David Whitehouse was the BBC News Online Science Editor. He still may be; no idea, really; the last article I could find with his byline in the BBC archives was dated around 2004. If he is, though, he shouldnt be, with the shoddy methodology he has. What a condescending, ignorant little man. I read a number of his stories and they all had the same tone. I wouldn’t trust him with a fact if it had handles.

It was my understanding that scientists, in their never-ending quest for the truth, were best served by keeping an open mind and never believing that they knew all the answers. In fact, good scientists dont even believe the answers they do have; any and every fact, no matter how concrete it seems today, could be blown away tomorrow by some previously undiscovered new fact that comes to light. That is the very basis of scientific study. Unfortunately, ego all too often gets in the way, and this is the kind of thing that happens. You see it in Egyptology all the time. Dr Zawi Hawass, secretary general of the supreme council of antiquities in Egypt, is one of the best living examples of the criminally supreme ego scientists can possess. Just ask Dr Robert Schoch.

While I believe that the vast, overwhelming majority of “sightings” are bunk, I also have to say that to insist that we are alone in the entire universe is mind-bogglingly arrogant and narrow-minded. I dont believe we are, and furthermore, it doesnt take a genius…no matter what species you might be…to take one look at our planet and the human race and realize that we are either better left alone, or conquered.

Maybe nobody has found us yet, despite the incredible variety and amount of pollution that emanates from our planet. Maybe they’re all smarter than us; after all, we haven’t really developed much in the way of space travel at all. If whoever else is out there is less intelligent, it seems to me a reasonable thing to assume that they wouldnt have been able to develop such technology, either, unless they’re some crazy mechanized species of super-technological beings. And if theyre more intelligent, why would they want to bother with us, anyway?

The more intelligent a species is, the less inclined they are toward violence…at least that’s what our species has been able to ascertain through studies and so forth. So anyone buzzing by our planet probably parked in orbit for a while, watched us go about our business, and wrote us off as a bad job. Maybe marked their maps to come back and have another peek in a few years’ time, see if we’ve either gotten anywhere or managed to finally destroy ourselves outright. The point is that the idea we are the sole living beings in a universe so unendingly vast is the height of human ignorance and conceit. It’s preposterous, and I dont need a doctorate to know that.

I’ve done a lot of interesting interviews in my five and a half years as a transcriptionist for the entertainment industry, and some of the more fascinating ones have been the interviews of government and military officials of every level, as well as investigators…and I’m not talking about UFOlogists; I’m talking about extremely cynical individuals who utterly rejected the notion of extraterrestrial life, as well as the nutcakes who believe every leaf that falls from every tree is a potential UFO…and I’ve heard stories and seen reports and heard about investigations that simply had no rational explanation to them.

I did a huge series of interviews on Project Bluebook a couple years back that included government officials as well as one of the investigators that the military secretly hired to look into the whole thing, and this guy was unable to explain away a large amount of what it was he discovered during his investigation and research, even though his response to repeated questions of “if that’s true, then how do you explain such and such” was usually “well, I can’t, but I know for certain it wasn’t aliens from outer space.” He was far more interested in denying the notion than he was in explaining his findings, and it’s like that quite often.

In the same job were interviews by military personnel of almost every rank who had experienced…seen with their own eyes…phenomena that they simply could not explain, and when debriefed after these missions were shocked to discover some pretty interesting reactions to their stories by the authorities. Since I’m under NDA I can’t really get into details, but these interviews are out there, these people are out there, and these stories and experiences are all out there, on every side, from every conceivable angle, and I’m here to tell you that they are not all so easily brushed away.

Most UFO-shouters are wacky, sure. But there are some, a handful, of people who have no reason to lie. They have no reason to make up such tales. They have everything to lose and nothing whatsoever to gain by telling these stories. Many of them were very reluctant to talk on camera about what they experienced, and some of them, visibly upset or angered, refused to talk at all.

So yeah, I’m a believer. As far as I’m concerned, there’s something out there. We are not alone. Anyone who insists we are is just as bad as anyone who insists theyve got aliens coming over every Friday for Pokeno.

Dr Whitehouse claims that there is no evidence at all. There is. Dr Whitehouse claims that governments getting involved in UFO-related situations is no proof of anything. Apparently Dr Whitehouse feels he can make such sweeping claims without doing any research of his own, because on the contrary, I saw a great deal of evidence that the US and British governments, at least, have gone through a huge amount of effort to cover up, even going so far as to deny the existence of documents that are then literally handed to them on camera to inspect, for which they have no explanation.

Dr Whitehouse claims that UFOs have only been around for about 50 years, and that only the gullible would believe in such rubbish. It seems to me that Dr Whitehouse, in his unreasoning, closed-minded rejection of the possiblities, is just as gullible. UFOs have been around as long as humans have. There are reports of UFO sightings that go back to our earliest written histories, and there are even oral histories that recount such encounters.

No, I certainly wouldnt call him a very good scientist. The man has no compunction rejecting something he apparently knows almost nothing about. It’d be interesting to find out whether or not he is a religious man. After all, there is no concrete evidence of any kind that proves the existence of God.

To be quite honest, if it came down to a choice between the nutty UFO shouters and the God mob, it’d be no contest who I’d select to be “beamed up.” The world would be a far better place without the fundamentalist crackpots running around killing everyone in the name of God. They’re all just waiting around for the rapture anyway. As long as the beam comes in the form of a pure, white light, they’ll be killing each other in an effort to get to the head of the line. I say good riddance to bad rubbish.

And they can take Dr Whitehouse with them when they go.

Addendum - I was having some difficulty understanding why the BBC, normally a pretty respectable news outlet, would have made such an odd choice for their science editor, so I did a little research on Dr Whitehouse and it seems that he has a bit of a history for neglecting such trifling details as fact checking or other research before publishing articles and so forth.

Apparently, one of the things he is most notorious for is the release of an article regarding a purported ET signal coming from the EQ Pegasi region of space, which he published through the BBC in October of 1998 despite the fact that it was a total hoax already revealed on public lists and elsewhere. He did no fact checking, spoke to nobody involved, went ahead and published the article, and then changes were subsequently made to the article with no disclosure; the article’s date remained the same although the article itself changed later. A quote from one of Dr Whitehouses’ emails on the controversy:

“It is clear that the accumulating inconsistency in the data on EQ Peg force one to believe that it is a hoax but that said, it is a great journalistic
story.”

He is a former astronomer (copied from same email linked above):

Finally a minor point. My Ph.D is in radio astronomy from Jodrell Bank (and
I have used the big dish there many times and always looked in my data for
anything seti-like even though that was not the object of my observations.)
Also I am on the IAF Seti committee.

And he is a signatory on the “Invitation To Eti” website. This site has a page meant specifically for ETI, which I find extremely charming, but borderline wacky. Why he would be a signatory on such a site when the BBC article on UFOs I’ve linked in this post indicates that he flatly rejects such possibilities is beyond me. This stuff is all there for anyone to find; I Googled for maybe five minutes to come up with some pretty revealing stuff.

So, at least at a very cursory (less than an hour’s research) glance, Dr Whitehouse appears to be more interested in press than facts and seems to prefer sensationalistic journalism over actual science. Apparently, his ultimate goal is to be the Jerry Springer of the scientific community.

Maybe that’s the reason why I can’t find anything written by him after 2004 on he BBC’s website, hm?