Just added to my ever-increasing pile of books to read: Jim Steinmeyer's Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural (Penguin, 2008). I really do need to make that pile diminish, by magical or other means. The felines keep knocking it over.
MSNBC.com highlights some "weird science" written up by Benjamin Radford here, in a sidebar for an article discusses why Indiana Jones is an entertaining character but a really bad archaeologist. [He seems utterly unaware of the law regarding historic artifacts, even in the 1930s. Ya don't just grab 'n go, pal.] Mr. Radford reviews Bigfoot, near-death experiences, deja vu, psychic detectives, ESP, and the placebo effect, among other unexplained phenoms. All interesting, and worthy of discussion. A tip of the hat to MSNBC and Mr. Radford for this overview of the subject metter.
Okay, now there ARE photos and films of those lights in the sky, over Stephenville and (now) Dublin, Texas. See here.
A number of people near Stephenville, Texas say they saw a UFO, "bigger than a WalMart" recently,(although I don't know how one can judge the size of an object in the sky if one is lacking reference points) that sped away at 3000 MPH. That sighting caused a lot of talk. The media had descended on the town to get first hand reports. The lights in the sky apparently started last week. Here's coverage from The Daily Telegraph. But, strangely enough, no one had video or still pictures, which normally accompany these kinds of sightings. Rats.
Still, if you don't know what it is, to you it's a UFO--an unidentified flying object--until someone explains it to you, which seems now to have happened. The military, which initially said it scrambled no jets to chase whatever the thing was, now says it was on manuevers in the area, flying 10 F-16s, and there was no flying thing as big as a WalMart. Glad we got that cleared up, but why couldn't the DOD have told us that to begin with? Lack of transparency and delay are the sorts of things that encourage otherwise rational people to start constructing conspiracy theories, and I can't say I blame them, particularly.
