Jennings was on the Jon Stewart show Wednesday night pimping this. He read an utterly hilarious blog entry from a conspiracy head to the effect that Jennings was hosting this show as (paraphrased) the first salvo in the eventual official disclosure: prepping the public mind, so to speak.
He also told Stewart that he went into the project as a skeptic, and he came out as a skeptic, which is why I decided to tune in. I’m definitely interested in the subject, and if you read the “Cecil a UFO debunker?” thread in Comment’s on Cecil’s Columns, you’ll see why. I really want us to discover intelligence in space, but I’m responsible enough to recognize that we cannot yet claim, based on the evidence available, to have done so.
The first part of the program, a litany of eyewitness claims and computer-animated re-enactments, was quite distressing to me, as it seemed to be giving the creduloids exactly what they wanted: unquestioning support. But then came the second part, which was a litany of scientists and skeptics explaining the difference between eyewitness testimony and actual hard physical proof. This pattern continued throughout the show: here’s a bunch of believers, and here’s a bunch of intellectuals who think they’re full of crap.
Personally, I thought the show was rather well balanced, though perhaps a bit too wide-eyed at all the stories told by believers. The producers played dramatic music under these anecdotes, intercutting between different people to show how the stories matched; but when they went to the scientists, no music at all.
The best moment in the program, though, came in the first half. They had a woman who talked about being in a small plane with her pilot husband. They saw a bright light off in the distance, which they couldn’t classify. She said they were getting more and more creeped out: “We’re skeptics! How can we be seeing a UFO?” And then the clouds shifted, and they realized they were seeing a small piece of the moon through a cloudbreak. An illusion of perception.
All in all, I didn’t get a heckuva lot out of the show, in terms of the superficial factual question of whether or not we’re being “visited.” But I was struck by something, which I think is definitely worthy of consideration.
Are we seeing the birth of a new religion?
Seriously. The current phenomenon, anthropologically speaking, matches existing religions almost perfectly. Believers who say they “know what is true” and who maintain faith in the face of adversity. Amazing stories that cannot be disproven. Leadership figures who take these stories and shape them into a larger narrative. Attempts to cast the purported incidents into some sort of larger moral framework, either to warn us away from certain behaviors or guide us toward other behaviors. Contempt and rejection by established religions.
If I lacked ethics, I would capitalize on this, and make myself tremendously powerful and wealthy by writing a “space scripture” or something: taking the famous legends like Betty and Barney Hill, Roswell, Kenneth Arnold, etc., etc., and treating them in a semi-mythical manner like Jonah’s whale and the like, and then padding it with a bunch of moralistic New Age hand-waving and some vague prophesizing. I think this would be easy to do, and the only reason I don’t follow this path to riches is that I would hate myself for doing it.
Somebody will, though. Scientology is sort of like this, but it’s having trouble breaking into the mainstream. There’s a tremendous opportunity here for somebody to capitalize on the growing phenomenon and launch a new church. You watch.
(Oh, and for what it’s worth, I also noticed the uncharacteristic cheapness of the sponsors they managed to get for this. Curious.)