I was quite chagrined to find out that a couple of student groups here at Sonoma State University (where I work) have invited a UFO True Believer here to give a talk. The guy's name is Robert Hastings. A web search on his name yielded lots of info, including specific references to the talk he usually gives at colleges, called "UFOs: The Hidden History" or some such. He is being paid $1700 to speak here.

I decided to write a letter to the school newspaper about it. The beauty of this is that my letter will come out two days before he gives his talk. It'll be interestign to sit in on the talk and find out what people say.

Below is what I wrote to the newspaper:

This Thursday, February 21, a man named Robert Hastings will be here at SSU giving an invited talk called “UFOs: The Hidden History”. According to his claims, the United States government has been involved in a massive conspiracy, covering up huge amounts of information about the reality of alien spaceships buzzing our nuclear missile silos and military bases.

Right.

He has been making this claim for years, it turns out. He gives this lecture quite often at college campuses (reportedly making between $1700 and $2000 a pop), which is basically him lecturing to a slide presentation. The slides show one government document after another, indicating, in his opinion, that politicians know that space aliens are very interested in our nuclear capabilities.

I’m sure his talk will be well attended, as well as at least marginally interesting. I also suspect it won’t even have a glancing blow at reality.

Let’s face it: our government couldn’t conspire to keep Monica Lewinsky a secret for a year, and only four people on the planet knew about Bill Clinton’s White House shenanigans. How could they hope to have thousands of politicians keep their mouths shut about aliens?

In previous lectures, Hastings has claimed he has uncovered over 10,000 pages of documents with information about UFOs. That sure sounds like a lot! However, I’ll note that a typical aircraft accident investigation report can run for 200 pages or more (I found one that reported about a plane that overran its runway at landing; the report was 230 pages long). Suddenly, 10,00 pages about an alien invasion force doesn’t sound like so much.

And why would aliens care about our nuclear weapons? Certainly an interstellar traveler would consider our most powerful bombs nothing more than quaint firecrackers. Mind you, the amount of energy it would take to cross galactic distances dwarfs our planet’s entire nuclear arsenal. Also, a spaceship that can move that fast would have no problems dropping rocks on enemy worlds; even a modest asteroid a few hundred meters across could wipe out all life on this planet if it impacted at, say, a thousand kilometers per second. Even that is a snail’s pace compared to a spaceship at full throttle. A nuclear weapon really is just a firecracker compared to that.

When listening to people talk about UFOs, it’s worth a moment of your time to question what they are saying. Is there another interpretation? What are the speaker’s references? Has he given you the whole story, or at least enough to make an informed decision about what’s happening? Does he have real evidence, or could it be faked?

If you attend Mr. Hasting’s talk on Thursday — and I encourage you to — don’t just sit there and absorb what he’s saying. Think about it, use some critical reasoning. Question everything he says. In the end ask yourself this: is it more likely that thousands of government officials from many different nations have, for the past 60 years, successfully covered up their knowledge of aliens flitting about our missile silos, or is it just possible that Mr. Hastings may be sincere, but mistaken?

*******************
Dr. Philip Plait is a staff member of the Physics and Astronomy Department at SSU. He also runs a website called “Bad Astronomy” (http://www.badastronomy.com) where he debunks misconceptions about astronomy.


_________________
Phil Plait
The Bad Astronomer
http://www.badastronomy.com
badastro@badastronomy.com

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: The Bad Astronomer on 2002-02-14 11:24 ]</font>