Gawdzilla Sama
Valued Senior Member
For him it's "they get paid to make the show seem, despite the impossibilities, interesting."
Tales and sightings of skinwalkers
- Thread starter Magical Realist
- Start date
Magical Realist
Valued Senior Member
You don't actually know what "scientist" means, do you?
Gawdzilla Sama
Valued Senior Member
LOL, have you ever even been to school?
Magical Realist
Valued Senior Member
Claiming a TV reality series is totally faked based on no evidence whatsoever is dismissing it out of hand. That way you protect your disbelief system from the very possibility of it turning up threatening evidence. You don't even have to watch it because you know in advance it is all a hoax. Your bubble of disbeliefs thus remains perfectly sealed off from any outside conflicting information. And so you remain blissfully ignorant.
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Gawdzilla Sama
Valued Senior Member
Dude, I've seen them, it's just realty that makes them look contrived and stupid. They know their audience.
Gawdzilla Sama
Valued Senior Member
Any rational person watching them would come to the same conclusion. "We found Atlantis!" And nobody gets to see it. "Consider the source" makes them look stupid.
What a clown you are.
Skinwalker Ranch – Bastion For The Paranormal Or Hoax?
The ranch has become extremely popular on social media, but there really isn't anything to back it up.
www.iflscience.com
For the record, I have not once claimed that it is "totally faked". You should stop telling lies.
You just don't get it, do you? There is nothing the least bit threatening to my "belief system" in all the fluff you post.
Again, I have not claimed it is "all a hoax". Get your facts straight.
There's a lot of high quality TV being made these days. Cheap paranormal entertainment TV masquerading as "reality" isn't worth wasting time on. It's TV for suckers.
Hardly. Remember, you're the one who just claimed that there is no evidence whatsoever that the show is in any way faked.
Back to your clown car, MR.
Gawdzilla Sama
Valued Senior Member
If ANY of those show had produced a cryptid or proof that Atlantis is actually just outside Muncie, Indiana, the news wouldn't be broken on their program, it would hit the world hard. As it is, there's just nothing worth reporting from them, because their "hey, look, a toenail of a giant" routine is just for the lunatic fringe.
TheVat
Registered Senior Member
Several false imputations here. I watched an episode, explained the procedural errors I saw in the data gathering, and made no accusations that the series as a whole is a fake or hoax. My point was that poor procedure yields compromised data. In the Bottle Drop xperiment, cheap GPS configured for surface use and resulting in points of failed triangulation in aerial use would be the most likely explanation for the descent path anomalies. I am in no way ruling out odd geophysical or other effects somehow particular to that area, or saying that scientists and engineers with more competence should not go there. A team which is well paid to generate drama for a tv show is NOT the competent and impartial team required for such research. This isn't biased debunkery, just a basic reality of the entertainment biz.
A perhaps useful parallel may be drawn to the mystery lights of Marfa, Texas - when a trained scientific team went out there, a quite ordinary physical cause was found, based in atmospheric optics. When a state highway was rerouted, the lights vanished.
Magical Realist
Valued Senior Member
LOL I actually read that article you posted. Not a word saying anything about the show being hoaxed much less proving it is. Just some claims that some people who were there never saw anything weird happen there. You should actually read the articles you post. And as far as I can tell Mick West doesn't think the show is a hoax. He is actually taking their experiments seriously, though questioning ofcourse some of their conclusions:
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Magical Realist
Valued Senior Member
No.. the Marfa lights haven't been debunked despite many efforts. The behavior of the lights, the fact that they only appear rarely on certain nights, and the fact that they have been witnessed historically by Indian tribes and in the 1800's and 1940's before there was a highway all discount the headlight theory.
"The Marfa Lights, mysterious glowing orbs that appear in the desert outside the West Texas town of Marfa, have mystified people for generations.
According to eyewitnesses, the Marfa Lights appear to be roughly the size of basketballs and are varyingly described as white, blue, yellow, red or other colors.
There seems to be no way to predict when the lights will appear; they're seen in various weather conditions, but only a dozen or so nights a year. And nobody knows for sure what they are — or if they really even exist at all.
The Native Americans of the area thought the Marfa Lights were fallen stars, the Houston Chronicle reports.
The first mention of the lights comes from 1883, when cowhand Robert Reed Ellison claimed to have seen flickering lights one evening while driving a herd of cattle near Mitchell Flat. He assumed the lights were from Apache campfires.
Ellison was told by area settlers that they often saw the lights, too, but upon investigation, they found no ashes or other evidence of a campfire, according to the Texas State Historical Society.
During World War II, pilots from nearby Midland Army Air Field tried to locate the source of the mysterious lights, but were unable to discover anything.
A superior mirage
Lovers of the paranormal have attributed the Marfa Lights to everything from space aliens to the wandering ghosts of Spanish conquistadors.
Academics, too, have tried to offer a scientific explanation for the enigmatic lights. A group of physics students from the University of Texas at Dallas concluded that headlights from vehicles on nearby U.S. Highway 67 could explain at least some of the reported sightings of the Marfa Lights.
Another possible explanation is the refraction of light caused by layers of air at different temperatures. This optical illusion, sometimes called a superior mirage or a "Fata Morgana," according to Skeptoid.com, occurs when a layer of calm, warm air rests above a layer of cooler air.
A Fata Morgana is sometimes seen in the ocean, causing a ship to appear to float above the horizon. The temperature gradients needed to produce this optical effect are common in the West Texas desert.
Glowing gases
Still others speculate the Marfa Lights may be caused by the same gases that create the glowing lights associated with swamp gas: phosphine (PH3) and methane (CH4). Under certain conditions, these gases can ignite when they contact oxygen.
This glowing phenomenon, sometimes called "will-o'-the-wisp," "ignes fatui" or "fool's fire," has been observed around the world, especially in marshy areas where the decay of organic matter can create pockets of phosphine and methane.
Though the Marfa Lights are nowhere near a marsh, there are significant reserves of oil, natural gas and other petroleum hydrocarbons in the area, which could include methane in quantities capable of producing an effect similar to that created by swamp gas.
'No proven facts'
Retired aerospace engineer James Bunnell chanced upon the Marfa Lights while visiting the viewing platform constructed east of Marfa by the Texas State Highway Department.
"I just got lucky," Bunnell told the Chronicle. "The lights are rare, but I got one of the really good displays."
Bunnell believes the Marfa Lights are the result of the igneous rock under Mitchell Flat that creates a piezoelectric charge (i.e., electricity produced under pressure by solid matter such as minerals, crystals or ceramics).
Karl Stephan, an engineering professor at Texas State University, has considered Bunnell's hypothesis, but hasn't endorsed it. "It may be geological activity that creates electrical activity, but it's all speculation at this point," Stephan told the Chronicle. "There are no proven facts."
https://www.livescience.com/37579-what-are-marfa-lights-texas.html
Gawdzilla Sama
Valued Senior Member
"There are no proven facts."
TheVat
Registered Senior Member
Though I was just using Marfa as a parallel, I suspected MR would chomp on the bait and veer OT with a gigantic wiki quote dump. I'm not going to trundle out all the atmospheric physics re Marfa, but perhaps another thread could explore that. That remains a big nothingburger for me, though I do like stopping in Marfa for the cool art galleries and eccentrics. The piezoelectricity theory is pretty weak sauce.
TheVat
Registered Senior Member
He is a gentleman, and sticks with analysis of the procedures and data (when he can obtain it). From what I've seen of Metabunk, it's a group of science folk who are doing proper science, i.e. carefully sifting all the evidence, poking holes in that which is weak or compromised by collection errors, pointing out mundane explanations that fit the data well, pointing out missing data, and suggesting future avenues of research that might resolve presently ambiguous results, etc.
Magical Realist
Valued Senior Member
So you deliberately posted something untrue just to "bait" me? That's rather trollish don't you think? And that article isn't from Wiki. It's from Live Science.
TheVat
Registered Senior Member
Incorrect. I posted that a scientific team had made a satisfactory explanation using atmospheric physics. The fact that I knew you would jump on it, as bait, does not mean that was my primary intent. I was drawing a parallel:
When I posted a mundane procedural explanation of the bottle drop results, you persisted in your narrative of some weird anomaly possibly paranormal. Just as some Marfa Lights fans persist in their narrative of spooky paranormal lights, rather than an optical effect in desert air. Even after the highway rerouted, there were still light sources that could be refracted in this way. Ockham's Razor remains the best tool in these circumstances.
Magical Realist
Valued Senior Member
I'm just surprised you didn't invoke rayleigh scattering again to explain it away. That seems to be your "go to" debunk for everything.
Not necessarily paranormal. Just a spacetime anomaly of some sort. I learned all my physics from watching Star Trek.
Not necessarily paranormal. Just a spacetime anomaly of some sort. I learned all my physics from watching Star Trek.
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TheVat
Registered Senior Member
Nope. This seems to be the kind of slander that gains you a reputation for bad faith argument here. I mentioned Rayleigh scattering once, in passing, in regard to a shot in the video you posted of a laser experiment, a shot where the laser seems to "stop" up in the sky, and which is a well known optical illusion with lasers so directed.
That seems unfortunate. A lot of tv sci-fi employs rubber science to propel its storylines.
Rubber science - Wikipedia
Magical Realist
Valued Senior Member
The only poster who accuses me of that here is Dave, when he isn't reporting my posts for trolling. I hardly think his opinion constitutes "a reputation". If it does, it certainly isn't one that concerns me in the least.
I'm pretty sure any science or technology set in the distant future of an alien populated sci-fi universe will seem to us to be "rubber science." In fact, as Arthur C. Clarke pointed out, it might even be indistinguishable from magic.
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