More Lights in Texas

Okay, things are getting silly in regard to the lights seen in the night sky over Stephenville, Texas.

Anderson Cooper, the silver-haired female draw on CNN, aired a video of what is supposed to be the alleged UFO. However, despite the fact they claim the footage depicts what they actually believe is an unknown aircraft, it's difficult to tell if the videographers are not just some drunks in a field somewhere. They don't seem all that impressed with what they say is a flying saucer.

And the video itself is of such shaky, poor quality, one can't discern anything from it anyway. To me, it looks like it could be an airplane or even a light on a radio tower.

But the most disturbing thing about the case is the manner in which the details recounted by witnesses are suddenly becoming more and more inflated. At first, witnesses just claimed to see a silent, low flying object with randomly configured lights in the night sky over Stephenville. Now, all of a sudden the object is supposed to have been over a mile wide, and was being chased and/or paced by fighter jets!

Just how the witnesses arrived at the "mile wide" measurement is unclear, but did you ever play the chain story whisper game at a party? The final version of the starting phrase is usually nowhere near the original.

I suspect the natural human inclination toward faulty memory and embellishment to be at the heart of this. An object in the sky that stretched a mile wide would have certainly been seen by more than a few locals in Stephenville. Unless of course, it deployed its alien stealth technology so as to be visible only to the "chosen ones" — a detail that very well could be just a few tellings away.

And considering the military has steadfastly denied any fighter jets were in the area at the time of the sightings, the supposed escorts are most likely just more embellishment by folks who find themselves in the national spotlight for the first time, and subconsciously want to make their story sensational.

Heck, if this item stays in the news for much longer, you can bet dollars to alien pastries that someone will surface claiming an abduction, and possibly the ever-menacing alien probe.

You have to love the human imagination, don't ya?

Tuesday Night Lights

Is it surprising when reports of UFOs come out of rural areas or is it just sad?

Stephenville, Texas is the latest farming burg to see strange lights in its usually clear, starlit skies. And chatter in newspapers and on radio stations has turned to little green men from outer space and crazy alien technology.

Several dozen people, including a pilot and a county constable, reported seeing a "large silent object with bright lights" flying low and fast across the Texas sky on Tuesday, January 8, 2008. They also said the object's lights changed configuration, unlike those of a plane.

A large silent object with bright lights that could change configuration?

Egad, these people have seen a giant flying Christmas tree!

I always wondered what they did with that enormous tree in Rockefeller Center when Christams was over. Well, it turns out, they don't do anything with it, other than fly it the hell out of there after the new year. They were probably just on their way to scuttle the huge, decorated tree out in the Gulf of Mexico when the good folks of Stephenville caught sight of it and mistook it for an alien space craft.

"You hear about big bass or big buck in the area, but this is a different deal," Ricky Sorrells of Dublin, Texas said. "It feels good to hear that other people saw something, because that means I'm not crazy."

No, Ricky, you're not crazy. And neither are your friends or the other witnesses --- most likely. But you are grossly ignorant of the way reality works.

First of all, as everyone probably knows, the acronym UFO stands for Unidentified Flying Object. It simply refers to something that is flying, or otherwise airborne, that cannot be identified. If you think about it, we all probably encounter at least one UFO on a daily basis. There is no shortage of things in the sky that are flying, or appear to be flying, that we cannot identify. That does not mean, however, that they are unidentifiable.

And the fact that we cannot identify them, does not automatically mean they are alien ships from another planet, or time machines, or vehicles from another dimension. It simply means we cannot identify them. I would wager that an extremely high percentage of these types of sightings are nothing more than mundane objects in flight that have been misconstrued as something peculiar.

Either that or these things are objects of man-made origin with which we are simply not familiar.

Imagine the first rural people to set eyes on a dirigible. They saw it flying, but had no idea what the hell they were looking at. More recently, the same thing was true of the stealth bomber. Folks saw this thing flying over them, and since they were unfamiliar with the new aircraft, jumped to all sorts of outrageous conclusions.

In addition to that, we must also take into account how fallible our eyes are.

While federal officials say there's a logical explanation, locals swear that it was larger, quieter, faster and lower to the ground than an airplane.

But was it really?

We know that accuracy of perception diminishes at distances, as do reliable judgement of speed and direction of motion. Heck, our eyes can be tricked at close range, depending on vantage point and field of view. Consider a magician's illusions for example. We know white tigers don't float around a stage unencumbered by gravity, but with what the magician allows us to see, it sure looks like they do.

Another example of how our eyes are fooled was in the news not long ago. Remember Hogzilla, the supposed enormous hog?


Well, this hoaxed photograph takes advantage of a principal called forced perspective. By placing the boy at some distance in a precise pose behind a fairly ordinary size hog and the hog itself closer in the camera frame, our brains are forced to see the perspective that the boy is actually leaning on a giant pig. The reality is, he's not even close to it. He's well behind it.

So taking this into consideration, how low was the object the witnesses saw in the sky really flying? How fast was it really moving? Was it really emitting no sound?

Now, I can't say for sure that these principals were at play in the Stephenville sightings. I wouldn't presume to know, because I wasn't there. But when evaluating something you think is unusual, it's a good idea to know how we perceive things before jumping to the conclusion that we're being visited by Klingons or some other form of alien creature.

The good news is, some people take that exact approach:

Maj. Karl Lewis, a spokesman for the 301st Fighter Wing at the Joint Reserve Base Naval Air Station in Fort Worth, said no F-16s or other aircraft from his base were in the area the night of January 8, when most people reported the sighting.

Lewis said the object may have been an illusion caused by two commercial airplanes. Lights from the aircraft would seem unusually bright and may appear orange from the setting sun.

"I'm 90 percent sure this was an airliner," Lewis said. "With the sun's angle, it can play tricks on you."

Well, whether an airliner, a planet, the moon, a kite, a blimp, or something else completely ordinary, seeing something that we can't explain is fun. But folks let's be realistic when we start looking for explanations and leave the slimy lizards and space monkeys to Will Smith and Stephen Spielberg.

Rats Make the Heart Grow Stronger

Well, science is at it again.

Apparently, creating new tickers for severe heart patients is becoming a reality.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota were able to create a beating heart using the outer structure of one heart and injecting heart cells from another rat.

The experiments have so far only been performed on rat hearts, but historically that's where it begins; from new rat parts to eventually new human parts. Soon these new techniques will no doubt be applied to humans with great success, saving many lives and making life better for a lot of people.

This is amazing medical news, and just further testament to the power of science and the human drive to stave off mortality.

However, I don't think we should stop striving to be healthier. There's no reason to begin an all Big Mac and cheesecake diet, simply because it looks as though doctors will be able to make new hearts for us when the ones we're born with wear out. I mean, from a practical standpoint, it seems like we could do just that without major consequences. But aesthetically speaking, who wants to look at a bunch tubs of lard cruising around on Rascals for the rest of eternity, or for however long science will keep us alive.

Please, let's continue to be concerned about our health and appearance, if for nothing else than to ensure our libidos have fair rewards, since they, too, are being given new and longer lives. I mean, who really wants to be horny forever if there are nothing but fat people to lust after. That's a practical joke of Luciferian proportions, isn't it?

Still, one can't deny how good these types of advances make us feel. Anytime we push death back just a little bit farther, we breathe a collective sigh of relief. My only hope is that soon scientists will be growing new knees, so I can play my games like I could 20 years ago. Or even better, if they develop working bionics, I'll be able to play my games like I never dreamed I could.

And that whole everlasting libido thing will take on outrageous, Olympic implications.

Fingers crossed.