Debunking and debugging

Oh teachers are my lessons done? I cannot do another one.
They laughed and laughed and said, "Well, child -
Are your lessons done?" - Leonard Cohen

Debunk should be a good word - who wants bunk? - but it's not, because debunking is too often a disingenuous exercise. So we need a new word, for something our thinking needs in order to stay intellectually viable. I suggest debug.

For examples of both, let's look out on the edge of the High Weird, and UFOs, where debunking runs amuck. Yet no subject more deserves a healthy debugging.

One of the defining characteristics of the UFO phenomenon is apparent absurdity, and there are many minds - most of them not on the payroll of alphabet agencies - who balk at letting its absurdity stand. Something rational must be made to account for everything, even when the rational explanations are themselves ridiculous.

For instance, consider the 1959 sightings at the Mission Station of All Saints in Boianai, New Guinea. The case is remarkable for the number and credibility of the witnesses, who included Reverend William Gill (regarded by all investigators as of unimpeachable character), the duration of the sightings, and their considerable absurdity.

Reverend Norman Cruttwell, who had known Gill since his own arrival in New Guinea in 1946, wrote a report of the first event on June 26, reproduced in The Edge of Reality by J Allen Hynek and Jacques Vallee:

Father Gill had just had his dinner and came out of the front door of the Mission House.... He casually glanced at the sky and looked for Venus, which was conspicuous at the time. In his own words, "I saw Venus, but I also saw this sparkling object which to me was peculiar because it sparkled, and because it was very, very bright, and it was above Venus and so that caused me to watch it for a while, and then I saw it descend towards us." ... Eventually it came quite close and hovered at a height which Father Gill estimated between 300 and 400 feet.... He estimates its apparent diameter as about five inches at arm's length. Stephen [a native teacher] said that if he put his hand out closed it would cover about half of it.

Father Gill states that it changed from a brilliant white light, when it was far off, to a dull yellow, or perhaps pale orange, when it was close. When asked whether he thought it was metallic, he answered, "Well, it appeared solid, certainly not transparent or porous; we just assume that it was metallic from our experience of things that travel and carry men."

All witnesses agree that it was circular, that it had a wide base and a narrower upper deck, that it had a type of legs beneath it, that it produced at times a shaft of blue light which shone upwards into the sky at an angle of about forty-five degrees and that four "human figures" appeared on top....

Here are Father Gill's comments on the "men":

As we watched it men came out from this object, and appeared on the top of it, on what seemed to be a deck... There were four men in all, occasionally two, then one, then three, then four; we noted the various times the men appeared.... The men appeared to be illuminated not only by this light [emanating from the centre of the deck], but also by a sort of glow which completely surrounded them as well as the craft. The glow did not touch them, but there appeared to be a little space between their outline and the light.

The object returned the following night, accompanied by two smaller, stationary UFOs. Father Gill reported again that "We watched figures appear on top - four of them - there is no doubt that they were human.... they were occasionally bending over and raising their arms as though adjusting or 'setting up' something no visible. One figure seemed to be standing, looking down at us (a group of about a dozen)."

Father Gill then did something perfectly natural:

I stretched my arm above my head and waved. To our surprise the figure did the same. Ananias waved both arms over his head, then the two outside figures did the same. Ananias and self began waving our arms and all four seemed to wave back. There seemed to be no doubt that our movements were answered. All the mission boys made audible gasps (of either joy or surprise, perhaps both).

As dark was beginning to close in, I sent Kodawa for a torch and directed a series of long dashes towards the UFO. After a minute or two of this, the UFO apparently acknowledged by making several wavering motions back and forth (in a side-direction, like a pendulum).... After a further two or three minutes the figures apparently lost interest in us, for they disappeared below deck.

What does a debunker do with this bizarre contact story? Donald Menzel, from his study in the United States, concluded Gill must have been myopic, and was actually looking at Venus (the other witnesses must have been persuaded by their high regard for Gill). Hynek travelled to New Guinea and interviewed Gill and others, who laughed at Menzel's armchair rationalizing. Hynek left persuaded something inexplicable had happened.

A debunker fabricates an explanation that accords with conventional wisdom, which is taken as an excuse to investigate no further by those who are made uncomfortable by the material. It must be dozens of times in recent months that I've read, with regard to Satanic Ritual Abuse, Oh, that's been debunked, from people who know little more about the subject than a ten-year old TV movie starring James Woods. When figures of authority, even James Woods, claim to debunk an issue, that's enough for many people to check it off as something about which they needn't concern themselves, even those who regard themselves as naturally distrustful of authority. (I see that the SRA debunkers at Democratic Underground are out in force today, to register their incredulity to the story "Satanist paedophile ring 'ritually raped up to 25 children'". "This case just reeks of 'I wanna be on TV,' writes one poster, whose avatar is a pentagram. "I'm going to take a lot of convincing before I'm going to buy this tale." For some, there will never be enough evidence to let go of the security blankets of consoling lies that tell them Don't worry, such things don't really happen.)

Debunkers are True Unbelievers, whose agenda is to discredit inquiry into subjects which do not conform with their presumptions of the universe. In this regard, the incredulous and the credulous travel the same circle, chasing each other's tails, and have little to do with critical thinking. Which is what we should be about.

Debuggers are different. Rather then quash inquiry, they sharpen and refine it. They fix the broken links in our brains and expose our faulty reasoning. And we need our thinking debugged. And we ought to be able to debug the thinking of others without being accused, reflexively, of being "debunkers."

To many UFO true believers - those who grok to Mulder's "I want to believe" flying saucer poster, and uncritically presume the extraterrestrial hypothesis - Jacques Vallee is a "debunker." Except he's not. His thinking is both more radical, and better founded, than theirs. In Revelations, Vallee recounts an encounter with other researchers that could be described as a valiant attempt at debugging. Bill Moore and Linda Moulton Howe are telling him about a joint US and alien underground base in New Mexico, the size of Manhattan, and he stops them short with the question, "Who takes out the garbage?"

The group looked at me in shock. There is a certain unwritten etiquette one is supposed to follow when crashed saucers and government secrecy are discussed....you are not supposed to point out contradictions in the stories. Questions must always be directed at the higher topics...not the practical details. In other words, it is not done to ask any question that has a plain, verifiable answer.

"Well, it's a fair question, isn't it? Who takes out the garbage?" I repeated. "You just told me there was a city the size of Manhattan underneath New Mexico. They will need water. They will generate solid waste. There should be massive changes in the environment. Where is the evidence for it?"

When Vallee later asks "How do you know any of this is real?" he is told by Howe "I've spoken to a military officer in the Pentagon." Here again is an example of an investigator who believes there is a massive government cover-up yet accepts uncritically the word of a government official simply because it's what she wanted to hear. (And Moore, as we've seen, subsequently admitted to having been used by the Air Force to disseminate disinformation among UFO researchers.)

Yesterday morning I was walking along Danforth Avenue to meet a friend for breakfast. To the east, the sky was blue. The western sky had been painted with parallel white lines, running north to south, which were beginning to spread on the wind. I told myself, they're going to start laying down the east to west pattern soon, and almost as soon, I noticed the two white planes, doing just that. After breakfast, looking up, the city sky was a gauze of white. "Overcast," I would have called it, if I hadn't known better.

Now, what did I see? And, significantly, why could I predict it? I don't know what I saw, but I see it often enough that I can anticipate its pattern. I don't know if chemtrails are Edward Teller's "sunscreen." He wrote that "the simplest plan [to reduce global warming] is to put into the high atmosphere small particles that scatter away one or two percent of the sunlight." But it certainly seems to resemble it. And, to my thinking, it is only a campaign with such a purpose that could gain the tacit cooperation of so many different governments, and remain a secret for fear of spreading panic - albeit justified - at the fragility of our environment.

A chemtrail debunker will try to tell me either (a) I don't see anything, or (b) I've seen it all my life. I used to argue with such people. But time is too short, and things are too weird to waste my time on them. I don't know what it is, but I know it is, and I know I didn't see this ten years ago.

So, debug me, please. Help me to understand what I'm seeing. Even a prosaic, non-scary explanation will do, so long as it's the right one. But try to debunk what I see with my own eyes, and can predict with my experience, and you have nothing to say to me. Just as I, likely, have nothing to say to you.