The song was popularized by the Muppets, as noted above, but it made its debut in a 1968 Italian film about Sweden sex practices. Ah, the 60s were a weird and wacky time.
do do do doo doot
Without any doubt the world is full of bullshit and nuttery. The question is whether the things that don’t seem to fit into any plausible scientific explanation are 100.00% bullshit and nuttery. Whether there really is at least some small element of reality that is genuinely preternatural. The standard of proof for making such a claim should be very high indeed, but even if we get perpetually null results, like Houdini searching for and never finding any genuine supernatural phenomena, I don’t think that means we shouldn’t at least check.
I never saw the Muppets but I knew that song. When I looked into Wiki I found it’s from a 1968 Italian movie, Sweden: Heaven or Hell, which then got picked up by tv programs.
Why do we need alien explanations when us puny humans can create brainworms like that?
ETA: ninja’d
[quote=“Just_Asking_Questions, post:61, topic:1018583, full:true”]
Ah. I seem to vaguely recall a television commercial that lifted the tune to advertise ?instant tea? ETA: unless the commercial I’m thinking of had a somewhat similar tune but not the same.
I’m not asking you to believe in the Phenomenon. I’m asking you to recognize that if what is consistently reported is real—entities altering perception, memory, and reality—then it’s not just an exotic science problem. It’s a challenge to the epistemological foundation of science itself.
Science relies on stable observers, consistent causality, and closed systems. The Phenomenon, as described by credible witnesses, government programs, and high-integrity researchers, doesn’t violate the edges of the map—it suggests there’s another map entirely.
So the question isn’t whether we can eventually measure it better. The question is whether our tools and models are even pointed in the right direction to begin with.
If you believe the Phenomenon is bunk, fine—then the integrity of science remains untouched.
But if you believe even 10% of what’s reported by military personnel, astronauts, and researchers like Vallée, Davis, or Knuth… then you have to ask:
Are we facing something real that exceeds our ability to measure it—because our assumptions are too small?
That’s not woo. That’s intellectual responsibility.
But I certainly don’t believe in even 10% of reports. What I and all the other skeptics await is tangible, provable, incontrovertible evidence that can be studied by independent observers.
I’ve done newspaper research on early sightings of UFOs, dating back to the 19th century. I studied the “flying saucer” sightings (which were no such thing - shoddy reporting) of Kenneth Arnold in 1947, tracking down the original newspaper reports and looking at the way that new sightings followed as well as reading Arnold’s book and others written at the time. I’ve read much abducted-by-aliens idiocy to study how the sightings have evolved to reflect contemporary culture rather than actual insight. I read the Air Force’s Project Blue Book. I know that Christopher Mellon, the former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence under the Clinton and Bush administrations, said that "But after all that winnowing, there is still a significant number of cases that are very difficult to explain.”
Continuing to examine difficult to explain cases is the right step and is in fact what is currently happening. What is known is that they are difficult to explain because the evidence is simply insufficient to say anything with certainly. Gathering some physical evidence rather than known-to-be-incredibly-unreliable “reports” will be critical to all future knowledge.
What absolutely should not be done is skip to the end and say these things are real and producing these real effects without any of the effort of performing scientific research.
I’ve done my due diligence. Yet another documentary about yet another form of woo is too dismal to contemplate. If you’ve done some due diligence, give me some meat to chew on.
If you believe that The Phenomenon is something unified and real, tell us exactly how it works and how it explains all the things you mention.
If it’s something unified and real, it would mean completely changing much of our theories of how the universe works. The problem is not that completely changing our theories of how the universe works has never happened before. There have been several such complete changes.
Mankind started by having no idea what all those lights in the sky did or what the difference between the sky and the ground was about. Slowly they realized that there were cycles of two lengths, what we now call a day and what we now call a year that correlated with those lights. They traveled around and realized that the ground was different in different places. Eventually they realized that those things in the sky were a ball called the Sun and another called the Moon.and several more which traveled around differently than others called the planets and thousands of others they called the stars. They discovered that the ground was part of another globe. They discovered these things called lens that allowed you to look at those things in the sky better. This was a complete change.
Then there was a complete change going from Galileo to Newton. They discovered it was possible to explain how those lights in the sky and many things on Earth worked by having a big theory called physics. It says that all the lights in the sky and all the things on Earth worked by the principles of that theory.
Then there was a big change in the early twentieth century that explained many other things they noticed that were slightly different. This happened because of the addition to physics of general relativity and quantum physics. This explained a bunch of slight differences in what we noted about the universe.
You’re saying that a lot of differences that we can note can be explained by a completely new theory. Fine. Show us how this theory works. Show us that it explains things better than saying that the things it notes are just matters of human psychology. It would doubtlessly take an entire book to explain this new theory. Come back when you’re written that book and let us know how it works.
You may have ruined my childhood memories. I mean, I’m in love with Janice, Miss Piggy is practically my cousin, I named my motorcycle after Zoot.
Swedish sex practices never entered the range, despite the Swedish Chef being… kind of handsom in a slightly , uhm borg borg borg
From my perspective, two key ideas emerge when considering the so-called Phenomenon. First, human culture and civilization fundamentally develop in response to environmental conditions and forces. Second, there exists a semiotic tendency in human cognition—an innate drive to interpret and structure the world through concepts and meanings that can evolve into a distinct reality, independent of the physical manifestations of the natural world.
However, we live in a multi-layered society where various cultural groups and subcultures each shape their own shared meanings, values, and beliefs. This is why a strange light in the woods at night may be perceived in distinct ways—one person may see an alien encounter, another a ghostly apparition, and yet another a supernatural epiphany.
That’s quite the load bearing “if,” to be perfectly honest.
I don’t think very many people here would disagree with the idea that this thing, if it existed, would be cool and fascinating and such, but ‘it would be if it was’ just isn’t any kind of useful jumping-off point for anything productive.
From Newton onwards, pretty much any new explanation of how things are, has to explain why the previous explanation was good enough - Newton’s stuff was reliable and sufficient as the basis for making a whole load of mechanical contrivances, but Newtonian physics turned out to be something of an approximation that doesn’t hold true for things that move really fast - anything that comes later has to do something similar to that to everything we already know, not because our current science is perfect, but because it works. If we’re wrong about relativity, how does it happen to work consistently enough for things like GPS satellites? Any new system has to explain that, as well as explaining itself.
You’re not wrong to demand rigor. I’m not claiming a finished theory—I’m pointing out that the data itself has been disqualified prematurely.
Yes, paradigm shifts eventually produce predictive models. But that process starts with anomalies that persist despite serious attempts to explain them away. You don’t need to rewrite physics before you’re allowed to ask: ‘Why do these patterns keep showing up?’
Psychology alone can’t explain transmedium craft tracked on radar and FLIR.
It can’t explain military pilot testimony correlating with sensor data.
It can’t explain ancient reports with structural similarity to modern encounters.
If you think it’s all misperception—that’s a testable theory too.
So far? It hasn’t explained the most compelling cases.
This isn’t about abandoning science. It’s about expanding the lens when the picture no longer fits the frame.
I’m not asking you to believe.
I’m asking you to consider whether skepticism still applies when the thing you’re ignoring is repeating itself across cultures, centuries, and modalities.
You’ve done due diligence. Good. Then you know ‘difficult to explain’ doesn’t mean ‘doesn’t exist.’
The real question isn’t whether we’ve proved aliens, it’s whether the data we do have violates known physics.
Transmedium craft. Instant acceleration. No heat signature. Radar + visual confirmation. Military pilots trained to recognize threats can’t explain what they’re seeing—and neither can our tech.
This isn’t woo. It’s a persistent data set that refuses to conform.
Demanding rigor is science. Refusing to follow where the data points because it’s inconvenient? That’s dogma.
The government - well, presumably most of the world’s major governments - have been at these anomalies for over 70 years. Nobody has been ignoring these UFOs or UAPs or anything else they’re called. After all these decades, everything has been eliminated other than a few blips and blurry photos. Not one piece of tangible evidence. No alien craft at Area 51 or anywhere else. Just people who refuse to accept reality.
AFAIK, not one single modern phenomenon that has been dubbed woo has proven to be real. I understand that you would take exception to the term. Nevertheless, until actual tangible evidence appears from the multiple active investigations being undertaken by people who don’t do documentaries I will stand by my characterization of stuff that exists outside of science as being woo.
Or a hoax, fake, etc. Often honest people deluded.
I myself thought I had a UFO- until i pull over and the “very bright object chasing me” was Venus.
People consistently report finding images of the Virgin Mary in bread products. This is because the human brain doesn’t work very well. It doesn’t mean gluten is the path to salvation.
If your evidentiary threshold is “what people say,” you can support any hypothesis you want.
The problem is that you want us to demand nothing. What could possibly be dismissed when there are no standards at all?
I’ve never encountered a compelling case. Would you care to provide one?