Thursday, June 4, 2009

Science lite at PM UFO and NASA

Thursday, June 4, 2009
http://www.wikio.com

It’d be great if Popular Mechanics could get off its plowed field and hoe a new row that might be a little less predictable. In February it produced a puff piece on “UFO Myths” and slurped down the USAF cover story on Stephenville like a greasy bucket of Original Recipe. This week, it was “Footage in the Sky: The Truth Behind NASA’s ‘UFO’ Videos.”

PM writer Erik Sofge targeted a series of NASA videos posted on YouTube by Canadian researcher Martyn Stubbs, who unfurled the accusing headline: “Will the US Government Finally Admit There Are Aliens?”

Stubbs first lit the scopes in Y2K with a video anthology of NASA downlinks he titled “The Secret NASA Transmissions: The Smoking Gun.” Some of the images were interesting, but they didn’t validate the title. Besides, if they were so secret, why were they in the public domain? And his latest offerings on the Net don’t settle anything, either.

Nevertheless, Sofge used the opening Stubbs gave him to tee off on every unusual clip ever recorded by NASA cameras in its half-century history. And he did it by getting two space shuttle astronauts (2) to comment on footage acquired during their two (2) separate missions.

“Lacking quality in their evidence,” Sofge concluded, “UFO believers” — there’s that B-word again — “are left with quantity, a rambling collection of indistinct imagery and allegations that now includes a batch of space shuttle mission video clips that were never buried or classified in the first place.”

A casual PM reader scanning this condescending brushoff would never suspect that not everyone studying the NASA data just fell off the turnip trucks. One of the most controversial sequences in the space agency’s archives — the 1991 mission of Discovery, aka STS-48 — pits two credentialed analysts against each other.

This clip, at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5007681655624638451, involves either an ice particle making a buttonhook turn during the firing of Discovery’s thruster jet, or a legitimate unknown scrambling in an evasive maneuver. Making a detailed argument for the former is erstwhile NASA/Houston mission control operator Jim Oberg (see http://www.igs.net/%7Ehwt/zigzag.html); Dr. Jack Kasher (http://www.nicap.org/muj_kasher_sts48.htm), a professor emeritus in physics and astronomy at the University of Nebraska, employs equally forbidding terminology to discredit the ice particle theory.

If PM really wanted to perform a public service, it could’ve devoted an entire article to STS-48 alone, cutting through the geekspeak and examining the merits of both arguments in language Joe Sixpack could understand. In the right hands, physics should be accessible to everybody.

But if you’ve got an agenda, as Popular Mechanics obviously does, why bother?

0 comments:

Post a Comment