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The Morristown UFO Hoax: Gullibility Exposed
How We Staged the Morristown UFO Hoax – eSkeptic
On January 5, 2009, we set out into the woods on the border of Morris Plains and Hanover, NJ, carrying one helium tank, five balloons, five flares, fishing line, duct tape, and a video camera. After filling up one 3-foot balloon with helium, we tied about five feet of fishing line to the balloon, secured the line with tape, then tied and taped the flare to the other end of the line. Once all five balloons were ready for takeoff (with our fingers on the verge of frost bite), we struck the 15-minute flares and released them into the sky in increments of fifteen seconds apart from each other. We filmed the “UFOs” as they floated away, and then walked the half-mile stretch out of the woods to our car. The hoax was underway.
. . .
The icing on the cake came when the popular History Channel show UFO Hunters featured the Morristown UFO as their main story one week. Bill Birnes, the lead investigator of the show and the publisher of UFO Magazine, declared definitively that the Morristown UFO could not have been flares or Chinese lanterns. Surely Birnes, who has written and edited over 25 books and encyclopedias in the fields of human behavior, true crime, current affairs, history, psychology, business, computing, and the paranormal, and the co-author of The Day After Roswell (a New York Times bestseller in 1997 and subsequently a documentary on The History Channel), could not have let himself be fooled by a couple of twenty- somethings with no formal education in psychology. He could.
I strongly recommend viewing the three videos chronicling this UFO hoax: “The Setup,” “The Launches” and “The Reactions.”
One should note one clip from “The Reactions” video where Paul Hurley, a witness who is also a pilot, states, “I’ve been in the aviation business for twenty years and I’ve never seen anything like this.” This testimony from a seemingly qualified and trustworthy person seems persuasive, but deserves little weight according the late Carl Sagan. In one of his last books, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Sagan offered the Baloney Detection Kit. According to this BDK, Hurley’s apparent “argument from authority” should be dismissed.
Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the facts.
Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.
Arguments from authority carry little weight (in science there are no “authorities”).
Spin more than one hypothesis – don’t simply run with the first idea that caught your fancy.
Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours.
Quantify, wherever possible.
If there is a chain of argument every link in the chain must work.
Occam’s razor – if there are two hypotheses that explain the data equally well choose the simpler.
Ask whether the hypothesis can, at least in principle, be falsified (shown to be false by some unambiguous test). In other words, it is testable? Can others duplicate the experiment and get the same result?
In the same video, one witness says that the “lights” looked like they were in a formation and “had a purpose.” Recent studies suggest that the human mind is hard-wired to see purpose or design where there is none. The formation of these balloon supported flares was the result of naturally occurring and well understood wind currents and the the formation itself had no mind or purpose.
Joe Rudy and Chris Russo’s UFO Hoax illuminates the desire of folks to believe in the fantastic, even when much simpler answers can be found. The experiment does not prove that aliens are not visiting Earth, but it does show that skepticism should be heavily applied to the currently unexplained. One of Sagan’s most famous quotes, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” certainly applies to every claim of interstellar visitations.
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