Man, if this post doesn’t get my blog stats up, I can’t imagine anything will!
Citizens of Stephenville, Texas have for several weeks now reported seeing an unidentifiable object flying over the city. To quote CNN:
Several dozen people — including a pilot, county constable and business owners — say they have seen a large silent object with bright lights flying low and fast. Some reported seeing fighter jets chasing it.
“People wonder what in the world it is because this is the Bible Belt, and everyone is afraid it’s the end of times,” said Steve Allen, a freight company owner and pilot who said the object he saw last week was a mile long and half a mile wide. “It was positively, absolutely nothing from these parts.”
Seems UFOs are on people’s minds again these days, what with Dennis Kucinich admitting to seeing an object above Shirley MacLaine’s house (you really can’t make this stuff up). But let’s return to our new Texas sightings.
I don’t doubt that witnesses are sincere, but the accounts strike me as rather odd. The accounts mention low flight, bright lights, and an object possibly a mile long. Looking up the demographics of Stephenville, Texas, we find that the city has a population of roughly 15,000 people, and the county has a population of 33,000! It’s rather hard to imagine that only a handful of people noticed a low-flying monstrous object with bright lights, even assuming the encounter happened late at night in a rural area. The U.S. is simply becoming too crowded to conceive of a genuine craft of that size being noticed by only a couple of people a night, at most.
That doesn’t particularly irk me, though, as much as CNN’s reporting of it. Take a look of this clip from Anderson Cooper 360, in which one of their “I-Reporters” captured “genuine” cellphone footage of the alien craft.
My response to this footage? “CNN, what the Hell is the matter with you??!!” To quote Marge Simpson, “I think this is sick. You’re staring at a dot.” Why is this footage considered interesting at all? You’ve got a wildly shaky cellphone video of a light that looks to be maybe a dozen pixels across. Hey, maybe it is footage of an alien craft – or maybe it’s footage of a nearby airplane, or airport light, or drunken friend on the roof of a barn with a flashlight – there’s no possible way to tell from the quality of the video. The damn thing doesn’t even look to change position!
To the credit of the anchors, they seem equally skeptical (“Are they drunk?”). The person choosing the stories to cover needs a slap-o-gram. If this is what is considered convincing evidence, or even captivating news, I fear for the Republic…
Skulls in the Stars 
SkullsInTheStars wrote: “You’ve got a wildly shaky cellphone video of a light that looks to be maybe a dozen pixels across.”
…and yet I’ll put down even money that you are in line for Cloverfield tonight… 😉
PD wrote: “…and yet I’ll put down even money that you are in line for Cloverfield tonight… ”
That’s a vicious, unfair lie, and definitely not true! The lines will be too long tonight, so I’ll go tomorrow afternoon…
BTW, if you haven’t seen all the wild viral marketing being done for Cloverfield, check out Cloverfield Clues as a nice reference.
Is it just me, or is there a cognitive dissonance between your previous post on the palm trees, in which you say:
“I for one find such discoveries exhilarating: the idea that extremely large species can still be found long after the world has been more or less thoroughly mapped fills me with a bit of the wonder that early explorers and biologists must have felt.”
and your current post on UFOs, in which you say:
“The U.S. is simply becoming too crowded to conceive of a genuine craft of that size being noticed by only a couple of people a night, at most.”
Can’t you maintain your sense of child-like wonder for 24 hours? (Or do you just doubt the observations skills of Texans?)
PD wrote: “Is it just me, or is there a cognitive dissonance between your previous post on the palm trees…”
You answered your own question, with the pieces of my posts you quoted. In the palm tree article, I said, “can still be found long after the world has been more or less thoroughly mapped…”, while in the UFO post, I said, “The U.S. is simply becoming too crowded…”
There are plenty of underpopulated parts of the world which one can conceive of big things existing, or making an appearance, where nobody would notice them. There are even places in the U.S. where this could be true. A town in Texas, only an hour from Fort Worth, with a population of 15,000, doesn’t seem to be one of those.
In other words, it’s just you! 😛
P.S. I’m upset you didn’t acknowledge my excellent use of an old Simpsons quote!
I used to live near Stephenville,,,not the most sophisticated place on earth. Not sure what they saw but an airplane towing a sign would probably have freaked out the population.