Tell me all you UFO believers. If these things are being flown by intelligent beings and I assume they do not want to be seen, WHY fly with the lights on? Doesn’t sound very intelligent to me. Hell even us lowly humans can fly around without being seen, Rule number one for NOT being seen, TURN OFF YOUR LIGHTS!  Sound more like an unintelligent phenomena being misinterpreted by people who desperately want it to be aliens. Stories of close or not so close encounters sound far more exciting than saying you got drunk and saw a light in the sky, got all excited but it turned out to be a low flying helicopter or the planet Venus.

Now, If their intension is to be seen why only fly around at night and take efforts to avoid being seen. Why not fly right over Cleveland with a big banner “We Come In Peace”. If they want to tell us something important about world peace or the environment why tell it to some drunk hillbilly, old stoner or woman living in a trailer park, give your big important message to someone who is respected and know for being “non-crazy”. And for gods sake what is with the anal probe thing? And how about this thing with having sex with sad lonely and often ugly women?

This is what is called Critical Thinking. If it sounds like BS, it most likely is BS.

Some of you may remember the sightings of UFOs over Morristown, N.J. earlier this year, it to was captured on video that has been posted to YouTube. And I bet still being used as proof of alien visitors. It turned out to be simply two guys attaching road flairs to balloons. They did it to prove a point, so called “Experts” said they could not explain the light and their movements implying it could only be aliens. The news media made a big point of interviewing a professional pilot who saw the light and recognized they were not airplanes, well yeah, there were flairs tied to balloons.

So imaging getting some cheap bright flashing LED lights and a few good size balloons, instant UFOs. I would bet money a hoax is more likely than aliens pilots.

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Unfortunately debunkers soon pointed out the science journal in question was Bentham Open Journals, a for all intents and purposes a vanity publisher. You pay, they publish. Not exactly a REAL peer reviewed publisher of hard core science information. This did little to get the tin foil hat wearing conspiracy huckster taken seriously by scientist who know what they are talking about.

The dubious quality of Bentham’s peer review process has been brought into clear focus by a graduate student at Cornell University. They got a paper accepted by Bentham that consisted of nothing but computer generated nonsense.

In this section, we discuss existing research into red-black trees, vacuum tubes, and courseware [10]. On a similar note, recent work by Takahashi suggests a methodology for providing robust modalities, but does not offer an implementation [9].

The writers of the paper even dropped a hint of the hoax by giving their institutional affiliation as the Center for Research in Applied Phrenology, or CRAP.

CRAP paper accepted by journal – opinion – 11 June 2009 – New Scientist.

This is not the first time “pay-to-play” journals have been had. The Cornell students withdrew the hoax paper, Why? Because they are students, and Bentham wants $800 to publish.

The 9/11 Truth movement dies a slow but humorous death but does provide a good laugh from time to time.

FBI agents investigating a February 15 bomb hoax that evacuated the mechanical engineering building at Purdue University traced the phone call to the juvenile’s Oxford, North Carolina home. They served his mother with a search warrant and arrested the teen. He does have an attorney and will get his day in court.

The claim that the boy is a victim of USA PATRIOT, though, appears to have been cut from whole cloth. While there’s plenty to criticize in that post-9/11 law, it doesn’t contain any provision that abrogates a defendant’s right to a trial. It’s also not responsible for making it illegal to phone in a bomb threat. That’s been a federal crime since 1939.

Bloggers, TV, Go Nuts Over Misleading ‘Patriot Act’ Arrest Claim | Threat Level | Wired.com.

Blogs and talk radio on the left and right have been howling over the original rumor, but strangely quiet now that the story is proving to be over hyped fear mongering. These so called news sources play to the popular conspiratorial viewpoint, people eat up claims of big bad evil men taking away your rights but suddenly become deaf to the real story.

This is one of those stories that when I first heard it set off my bullshit detector. It didn’t sound right, and sure enough the truth is far less ominous than the ballyhoo.

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