NASA, Priests, and Aliens

Today I wanted to really see what I can take from a news item forwarded to me about a recent claim from International Business Times that “NASA hiring priests to prepare humans for alien first contact”.

I thought it would be a great opportunity to practice some skepticism, critical thinking, debunking and fact checking skills, and apply them in a break down of teachable moments below.

I’m keeping this discussion strictly based around the contents of what I was given, it’s always good to stay on track and really address what is at hand rather than shift the goalposts onto other tangents which themselves also require a 1000 document to go into, before returning to this one.

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Expand sections:

Patchwork Video of Sensationalism

Bait and Switch

Terrible journalism

More Visual Stimulation

Appeal to Authority

Sources Check – The Original Article

Sources Check – The Mirror Article

Cherry Picking & False Equivalence

The Carl Pilcher Quotes

More Source Checks – The Clickbait Writer & IBT

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Personal Conclusions and Summary

It’s clear that off the back of a much more detailed and nuanced discussion, the IBT article did a really lazy cherry picked job of piecing together a sensational click bait trash news article. This is typically the way it goes with pretty much any topic, that a legitimate piece of science journalism is taken out of context and bastardised, making it something more profitable to certain websites via click-through traffic.

These twisted versions of articles then receive more attention online, are shared more frequently and as a result rumours are easily spread, whatever the content.

It was twisted to imply that NASA is perhaps secretly preparing humanity for visitation by intelligent life, or hiding a profound alien discovery. In reality, the actual story is more interesting to me – but not necessarily good for drumming up web traffic.

After previously thinking that there were probably no original reports, I now think it more likely the original reports and sources were purposefully omitted to prevent them fact checking their own piece and shatter the illusion. It obviously makes it a lot less exciting when you read the original piece. If I’m being charitable to the writer, I’d say it’s possible that rather than purposefully stir up excitement with misleading articles, he simply didn’t do his due diligence and was pressured for time, as the kind of pressure mentioned above to increase readership is absolutely a plague on online journalism.

The clickbait article is building a picture with sensational implications; the original article is asking hypothetical questions with interesting societal and social implications in mind, not much more than a thought experiment.

The only links found at all in the clickbait article were to yet more UFO clickbait links by the same site. No sources and citations. No external links or references.

During my investigation I came across the fact that it is the week of the James Webb Space Telescope, a massive occasion for astronomy as it is replacing the Hubble Space Telescope and will hopefully allow us to learn lots of new things about the universe. This might have implications on our search for life forms, and this might be where this clickbait article has been inspired.

On a side note - This is a link to a short podcast about the telescope, which I found really interesting. It’s available on Spotify without signing in.