Wilhelm wrote:I just read up a bit on this guy, and what a total goof; Same tired nonsense from the Fundamental Materialists. Almost every single thing he says is either a logical fallacy, or completely anti-science.
Here's a perfect example, on astrology:There is no force, known or unknown, that could possibly affect us here on Earth
What? So he's magically aware of every property of some theoretical unknown force which may not even exist? Phil Plait is a clown.
The timing of this thread couldn't be better. A while back I posted this thread as a satire on the JREF Stundie Awards and decided to create our equivalent called the (Al) Bundie Award. The first award went to "Shameless" Joe Nickell for his butchery of a debunking on a History Channel special on Human Levitation in a segment about The Flying Friar:
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=612
I have now chosen the second inductee into the Debunker’s Hall of Shame and awarded the (Al)Bundy award to none other than Phil “The Really Bad” Astronomer for his ‘amateur astronomer’ rationale for a case of non-existence of UFOs. As you can see below, he seems to be betting the whole farm on amateur astronomers somehow being near infallible and somehow give the ‘skies’ more coverage than anyone else even though in the context of astronomy ‘skies’ refers mainly to planets, stars, etc., which are millions of miles away. This includes highly skilled, trained and experienced military and commercial pilots.
I know nothing about astronomy, but I am willing to bet money that if Phil could produce an overview map similar to the one in the link, that it wouldn’t have anywhere near as many dots of light representing telescopes as there are airborne pilots. How can far fewer with a narrow field of vision with little or no depth perception and focused on things millions of miles away somehow be the final say on UFO sightings; shame on you Phil. As you can see from this link, pilots give the ‘skies’ (atmosphere) much more coverage than astronomers ever could or will.
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sust ... images/at/
http://www.npr.org/blogs/bryantpark/200 ... ver_1.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4g930pm8Ms&fmt=18
Quoted from 2:25 in
“Who’s looking at the sky all the time? Some random guy on the street looks up and sees something he doesn’t understand, that’s not surprising, right, because he doesn’t spend a lot of time looking up.
Amateur astronomers spend more time looking up than anybody. They’re all the time looking up at this stuff, and yet they never report UFOs. Why? Because they know what they’re looking at. They know when they’re seeing Venus, the Moon, swap gas, the Araura, satellites, the reflections off things. And so the fact of the matter is, if UFOs were real, if these were really aliens visiting us, overwhelming the most number of reports would be from amateur astronomers, and yet they never seem to report ‘em. And I think that indicates that, you know - - it doesn’t indicate there are no aliens visiting us, but it certainly indicates that the overwhelming number of cases reported
are just simple things being misunderstood.”
I hereby award you the Bundy (as in Al Bundy, the loser) and induct you into the Debunker’s Hall of Shame right next to ‘Shameless’ Joe Nickel. Congrats, Phil. I predict you will probably win many more in the future.