I saw a documentary-like show on PBS or Discovery or TLC or somewhere… anyway, on this show, a guy set up two cameras, side-by-side. One was a conventional video camera, the other a very high speed, film-based camera. They recorded exactly the same space. When all was done, one camera had recorded the mysterious rods - the other had recorded non mysterious flying insects in exactly the same locations and relative velocities. In fact, rods have never been filmed with true high spped photography - only with CCD-based cameras.
For those wondering about what rods are supposed to be:
Thanks for that link, I find it amusing that they not once even consider insects. Even though they refer to rods flying around people, and have a series of images which any sane person would just say, “oh, it’s a bird chasing a bug.” http://www.roswellrods.com/swrd1.html
The bizarre ways that people misinterpret mundane things as “evidence” of their beliefs could qualify as mild cases of schizophrenic delusion. For example:
-a slightly overexposed satellite photo of the north pole’s ice pack is given as “proof” of the hollow Earth’s inner sun shining through the “hole” at the pole.
-an irregularly shaped depression in a Mesozoic rock is a “human footprint”.
-similarly, an oval-shaped impression from a mollusk shell is a “sandalprint”.
-Photographs and video footage of dimensionless dots (daytime) and moving points of light (nighttime) are “flying saucers”. {Who’s to say what they really were, but we’re supposed to accept zero-resolution photos as proof?}
-A picture of a Manx cat is shown (yet again) as a “cat-rabbit hybrid”.
-Irregularly shaped rock is Martian statue.
-Irregularly shaped stain is face of the Virgin Mary (or Elvis).
-Lump of floating matter spotted at distance of 1KM is Loch Ness Monster.
I could go on and on. Either the people citing this “evidence” are hopelessly self-deluded, or are con artists counting on a plentiful supply of incredulous believers.
I don’t know if Jose Escamilla really believes that rods are mysterious or if he merely believes that he can get rich making other people believe they are. I look at what he’s doing as simply an extension of the “National Enquirer” phenomenon where some people tend to believe what they see in print and other people make money from the believers…
Not the mention the most notorious case of recent years: an overexposed star in a CCD astro-photo of comet Hale-Bopp as a ‘mothership’ UFO. Directly leading to all those Heaven’s Gate brain donors who killed themselves to be able to visit the ‘mothership’. BTW, anyone who has any knowledge of CCD astrophotography could instantly identify the ‘UFO’ as an overexposed star.
Well, I got a special discount deal on slivers of the True Cross… on sale at my website. $50 each, or, a special one-time only offer for SDMB members, three for $200.
In order to donate one’s organs, one’s organs must be healthy. I don’t think their brains would have qualified. Remember what happened in Frankenstein (1931)?