They Said They Saw a Relative's Ghost or Materialization

In the newspaper article here, we read of a woman testifying in court that she saw the speaking apparition of her dead father:

Parents normally die before their sons or daughters, so cases of someone claiming to see the ghost of a son or daughter are much less common that cases of an offspring claiming to see the ghost of a parent. But there are quite a few cases to be found of parents reporting an apparition of their sons or daughters.  Below is one, from page 693 of the November 3, 1933 edition of the journal Light, which can be read here.  The narrator is Shirley Eshelby. 

"My son, who passed over on 12th July, 1933, after an operation for appendicitis, has visited me four times. I have seen him three times, and he has spoken to me in direct voice once. (I cannot see and hear [him] at the same time.) 

The first time he appeared was on 16th July, the day after he was buried, the fourth day after his death, at 7.15 in the morning. When I opened my eyes I saw a cloud over my bed filled with vibrating specks. As I watched it, the specks moved faster and faster until they looked like a spinning coil of wire which gradually became smaller until there was nothing left, but in the place where the ' spinning coil'   had diminished into nothing, the face of my son gradually appeared. The forehead and eyes came first, and then the rest of the face appeared. At first the eyes looked abnormally large and bulged a good deal, but they immediately became normal when the face was completely formed. He looked rather pale but strong and well. After a few seconds he vanished. 

He came again on 6th September and seemed to have less difficulty in 'getting through.' The cloud was there again, but the vibrating specks did not form into a 'spinning coil'  like wire, they simply darted about in the cloud for a second until the face was completely formed and perfect. His third visit was on 30th September. This time he had no difficulty in getting through. There was no cloud and no specks ; he was simply there, and then not there. Each time he came he looked more manly and stronger. 

At the time of his death he was very slim and rather over-grown looking, hut when he appeared the third time he had completely lost the overgrown look and had developed into a fine, strong, well-built man. A few days later he spoke to me in direct voice. This was his fourth visit. I could not see him, but could hear his voice, which was slightly raised so that I could hear every word clearly (I am rather deaf). He spoke right into my ear."

Then there are the cases of parents who report a materialization of a deceased relative. In such a case the witness may report being right in front of a form as solid and lifelike as a regular living human. Here is one such account written by E. G. Pierce of Fort Wayne, Indiana (USA), and appearing on page 132 of the document here. 

"In another seance my daughter materialized in the centre of a large room, not two feet from me and my wife, where the gas light was strong enough to distinguish anyone in the room. Starting with a small white spot upon the floor, slowly ascending like a column of mist to the proper height, the body consolidated itself, and I saw every feature of the face form as plainly as I could wish. When she spoke she told me what no one in the room knew but ourselves. She passed from me to my wife, through the strong gaslight, about four feet, several times. I had her in my arms ; she was as material as I. When she said she would have to go, I grasped her hand, determined that nothing material should escape me. She began to dematerialize, and as I bent forward toward the floor, still holding her hand, with a smile she disappeared through the floor, and my hand was empty."

The account below is told by a noted author, and can be read on page 3 of the document here. The author claims to have seen materializations of three of his relatives at a time when his mother was near death. 

Some of the most convincing evidence for the paranormal is evidence reported by those who have no sympathy for accounts of the paranormal. An example of such evidence appears on page 174 of Volume 41, Issue 242 of the Cornhill Magazine (1916), which you can read here. The very respectable author is Sir Laurence Gomme. He reports going to a seance not long after his father died. Gomme reports being unimpressed by what he saw. But upon returning home, his wife and other relatives reported seeing the apparition of his father, at the very hour the seance occurred. Here is the full account:

"About this time I was being pressed by an official friend to attend a meeting at his house, for the purpose of taking part in a spirit rapping ceremony, but had always declined, because I did not believe in the phenomenon. However he particularly pressed me to come on account of my father’s recent death, saying I should be certain to learn something. Perhaps my nerves had been worn by recent events. In any case I consented to come, and I remember wearing my father’s watch chain and seal for the first time, to attune me to the atmosphere. I told no one at my house that I was going for this particular purpose. They thought I was simply going out to dinner in the ordinary way. My object in this silence was obvious. It was not to disturb the minds of those at home.

On arrival at my friend’s house we had dinner and then adjourned to the drawing-room. The whole company sat round a largish table holding hands. Several members of the company described certain experiences and conducted conversations with spirit manifestations. But I was absolutely unmoved and looked upon the whole thing as unreal and made up. I left the house angry with myself for giving way to such nonsense.

Reaching home, not very late, I let myself in with my latch-key, and was immediately met by my wife, my mother and sisters having retired, who was strongly agitated and troubled. The explanation was that about ten o’clock she was working in the library as usual, and looking up from her seat she saw the form of my father seated in his usual way in his old chair. And ten o’clock was the time when I, an unbeliever in spirit manifestations, had been seated at the round table gathering of spirit believers. The coincidence is remarkable, and I have ever since been deeply impressed by it, but it has not made me a believer in spirit manifestations."

We have here an example of the incredible stubbornness of skeptics. Sir Laurence reports that at the very hour he was attending what was apparently the only seance he ever attended, his wife reported seeing the apparition of her father-in-law, Sir Laurence's dead father. But this does not convince our skeptic to become "a believer in spirit manifestations." I would imagine that nothing he could ever see would have. 

The 1875 newspaper account below by Isaac Kelso is one of very many accounts of materializations witnessed at a seance. The author uses the term "apparitions" for what he saw. But since he reports an event of the cutting off a lock of hair from one of these apparitions, it seems more appropriate to use the term "materialization" for what is reported -- or perhaps the term "materialized apparition."  We read an account of a type of wonder I cannot recall reported elsewhere. The account says a lock of hair was cut from an apparition. Later the lock of hair reportedly floats up to rejoin the apparition's hair, at the exact point where it was cut. 

You can read the account here:

https://books.google.com/books?id=q78yAAAAIBAJ&pg=PA3&dq=apparition&article_id=3540,2537826#v=onepage&q=apparition&f=false

The case of the apparition of James L. Chaffin appearing to his son is one of the best documented cases of an apparition appearing long after death. The case was first documented on page 517 in Part 103 of Volume 36 of the Proceeedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 1928, in the November 1927 article "CASE OF THE WILL OF MR. JAMES L. CHAFFIN," which can be read on page 517 of the document here.  The facts and narratives were all entered as testimony in a legal case. 

James L. Chaffin had four sons, and on November 16, 1905 made a will in front of two witnesses, giving his farm to his third son, Marshall, with his widow and other three sons getting nothing. On the 16th of January, 1919 James L. Chaffin made a new will, dividing his property up equally to his four sons, with instructions that his widow be taken care of.  The new will said that it was written "after reading the 27th chapter of Genesis."  James L. Chaffin told no one about the second will, which was placed in an old Bible of his father's. But James did put instructions sewed up in the lining of an overcoat, instructions telling where the second will could be found. James L. Chaffin died on September 7, 1921.  His son Marshall was granted possession of the farm on the basis of the first will, the second will being unknown to the wife or children.

One of the sons of James L. Chaffin (a son named James Pinkney Chaffin) gave this testimony in court about seeing an apparition of his father about four years after the father's death:

"Some time later, I think it was the latter part of June, 1925, he appeared at my bedside again, dressed as I had often seen him dressed in life, wearing a black overcoat which I knew to be his own coat. This time my father's spirit spoke to me, he took hold of his overcoat this way and pulled it back and said, ' You will find my will m my overcoat pocket,' and then disappeared."

James Pinkney Chaffin retrieved the coat from a brother twenty miles away, to whom the coat had been given. Inside the coat (sewed up in its lining) was a piece of paper in the handwriting of James L. Chaffin stating, "Read the 27th chapter of Genesis in my daddie's old Bible."  Accompanied by some witnesses, James Pinkney Chaffin retrieved the old Bible, in which was found (in a spot matching the 27th Chapter of Genesis) the second will of James L. Chaffin. James Pinkney Chaffin filed a court case, giving the testimony above, and demanding that the second will be declared as the valid will. In the middle of the case the opposition to this claim was dropped, and a jury found that the second will (the one found in the Bible, apparently found with the help of an apparition) was the valid will of James L. Chaffin.  The case stands as one of the best-documented cases of an apparition appearing long after someone died. 

The account is told in the 1930's newspaper story below, which draws upon the 1927 account on page 517 here. 

Below is a newspaper account from 1889:

At the link here you can read a newspaper account entitled "Ghost Tells Her." We read of a woman swearing under oath to have seen an apparition of her dead mother:

"Mrs. Lillian Higgins, the mother, startled the court by announcing that her dead mother's spirit came to her and told her of the boy's whipping. "It was half past eleven on the Wednesday night after Raymond was whipped that, as I lay awake on my bed, that my dead mother came to me and held up a card on which was
written: 'See what they have done to my boy's legs,' and when I asked who, the words "Ethel Barker' appeared on the card."

The article here from the Chicago Tribune has the arresting headline "Court Took Ghost's Word." We read of a man reporting the apparition of his brother. The latter part of the article is hard to read (being old print). But it seems that some authority found the testimony convincing. 

If the topic of this post interested you, you may want to check out my free 435-page book "Spookiest Years," now available on www.archive.org using the link here. The book discusses phenomena such as spiritual manifestations, seance phenomena, near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, apparition sightings, materialization reports, deathbed visions and precognitive visions.  Using the native www.archive.org file viewer in single-page mode,  you can conveniently read the whole book by finger swiping. Scholars who are interested in following the links may prefer to download the book as a PDF file, which will allow opening links by right-clicking on a link. 

The online book includes my account of spooky events in the year 1874.  I thought that post had "touched all the bases" regarding spooky reports in that year, but apparently in that year there were many more reports of spooky events that my post did not mention.  For example, a Chicago Daily Tribune article from 1874 discusses the following:

Science News BS Heat Map, July 4, 2026

                         

Recent Science News Article	BS Rating	Comment
"Perseverance rover finds even more signs of extinct life on Mars"		A very bad example of false clickbait from the British paper The Register.  The subtitle immediately recants, saying "Scientists remain skeptical." All that was found was some carbon compounds that can be formed through lifeless processes.
"Bacteria Can Learn and Form Memories Without a Brain"		What is going on is here mainly the kind of word trickery that would be going on if you claimed that snow can learn and form memories, on the grounds that snow forms a footprint memory of your feet passing over it.
"Mars Rover Spots Complex Carbon on the Red Planet, Marking Yet Another Detection of a Building Block of Life"		It has always been bunk to suggest that life is built from things so simple they can be called "building blocks." Even the simplest living thing is built from very complex components -- hundreds of types of protein molecules, each requiring a very special arrangement of hundreds of parts. The building components of such building components are amino acids. Neither protein molecules nor amino acids have ever been discovered on Mars. The discovery mentioned involved vaguely described carbon compounds that were not any of the known building components or chemical constituents of life.
"An 80-year-old woman with advanced Alzheimer’s regained speech and mobility after taking psilocybin."		This is an important case report that may cast doubt on claims that Alzheimer's patients suffer from a loss of physically stored memories, and may bolster a "haze" or "fog" model of dementia in which poor cognitive performance in such people is mainly the result of something rather like a state of drowsiness or stupor that can go away, with restoration of memory performance. Reports of terminal lucidity in those with severe dementia suggest the same thing.
"She Was Half Ape, Half Human—and She May Hold the Secret to What Makes Us Who We Are"		In this Popular Mechanics article, we read of a 4.4 million-year old skeleton called Ardi. No justification is given that this corresponded to any creature that was "half-ape, half-human." Such a phrase might be justified in describing a creature that had an ape as one parent, and a human as another parent; but no such creature has ever existed.  See the appendix for why the alleged "skeleton" is probably no such thing, but instead a set of bones gathered up from a wide area of about 20 square meters, and arranged to look like half a skeleton. The article has a fake large visual, which is not identified as the fake that it is. See the appendix for details. The visual is a work of "vector art" attributed to a Getty Images source of "Alexander Joe." A look at that artist's pages on Getty Images fails to show the image.
"Consciousness: how ‘working memory’ may mysteriously give rise to it"		The article suggests an idea that makes no sense  Working memory is one of the innumerable capabilities of conscious minds, and does nothing to explain consciousness itself.  Similarly, walking is one of the many capabilities of human bodies, but walking does nothing to explain the origin of human bodies.
"Your Brain Doesn’t Just Turn Off When You Die. What Really Happens Defies Our Understanding of Reality."		The headline is false -- your brain does  just turn off when you die, and does so very quickly (although conscious experience often continues in episodes recalled as near-death experiences, contrary to the dogma that minds are produced by brains). Within 10 to 30 seconds after the heart stops, the human brain turns off electrically, resulting in the flatlining state  called asystole, in which brain waves die off to become flat lines.  The Popular Mechanics article discusses a 2023 study simultaneously tracking brain waves and heart activity. Contrary to the very misleading statements that have been made about the patients in that study, statements debunked in my post here,  that study shows brain waves very quickly flatlining in the patients it tracked when they died.
"For The First Time, Scientists Say They've Built a Synthetic Cell From Scratch"		In a ScienceAlert press release, we have a scientist named Kate Adamala making grandiose boasts that are unfounded. There's no published paper backing up her boasts. There's merely an article at her company's site,  and a preprint. Far from being anything that was created chemically "from scratch" (a phrase wrongly used in press accounts of this research), what went on was cannibalization of components from E. coli cells. The article states, "SpudCell currently uses ribosomes from E. coli bacteria." So ribosomes (organelles much more complex than proteins) were stolen from an existing one-celled life form (E. coli), and then put in some sphere-like fatty unit, wrongly called a cell. That so-called cell was not actually capable of sustained natural reproduction, although some artificially-induced "division" is being sold to look like cell reproduction (many a lifeless blob may undergo division).  The ScienceAlert press release says, "According to Science magazine, SpudCell has met some hurdles in publication: apparently one reviewer at Cell, a prestigious science journal, said the project was not real biology."  An article in Science calls this SpudCell object "far from alive," while noting, "Some have also grumbled about Adamala’s efforts to draw attention to the work, which she says was rejected by Cell after one reviewer said SpudCells were not real biology." In another article, a scientist says of this research, "I don’t think it means we’re close to creating a fully synthetic cell.”
"Experts no longer think life began on Earth. Here's what convinced them."		There is no truth in the claim of the article that there has been some change in the opinion of scientists about whether life originated on Earth. No such change has occurred. The "what convinced them" part is nothing that should justify any opinion change -- the mere reported discovery (in miniscule trace amounts such as 1 part in 100 million) of nucleobases on an asteroid. As discussed here, the claimed result is not a reliable one, because the reported amounts were so tiny that the most likely result is that they resulted from earthly contamination. And even if nucleobases had been found on an asteroid, in the reported amounts, that would do nothing to make if more likely that the first life (or any of its components) had first existed in space (as the reported amounts are so small, we would still have Earth as the most likely place for the origination of such things). The BBC Science Focus article erroneously refers to "the discovery of nucleotides on an asteroid." The reported discovery was something much less: mere nucleobases. A nucleobase is a mere fraction of a nucleotide.
"Modern neuroscience is rediscovering an idea Freud had 130 years ago"		This press-release is the clumsiest attempt to sell a groundless theory of neuroscience trying to describe the brain as a "prediction engine." The theory has no warrant in physical realities of the brain. The press release tries an approach of "Freud thought of it first," which is silly, because the once-highly-regarded Freud is now generally regarded as an erring salesman of pseudoscientific nonsense.
"The Circuit that Lets Your Brain Think and See"		No actual explanation is given as to how a brain could think, and neuroscientists lack any credible explanation for human thinking. Appealing to "a circuit" is the laziest last resort when people lack an explanation of how a brain could do something. We have a discussion mainly of not what was observed in the brain, but in the behavior of some computer model. At least we get this neuroscientist confession contradicting a common tall tale of neuroscientists: "Back in 2015, I began working with patients who are missing the hippocampus, the region that lets us form and hold onto memories. If the brain were truly modular, losing that middle piece should leave you unable to do a great many things. But it doesn't. These patients can still do all sorts of tasks."  So why do neuroscientists keep groundlessly claiming that the hippocampus is "the region that lets us form and hold onto memories"?

Appendix:  The original source of the claim about the Ardi skeleton is the edition of Science you can read here. On page 77 we have the images below:

At right is the "skeleton"  corresponding to this so-called skeleton called  Ardi. It is some bones gathered from a rather wide area of maybe 20 square meters. Someone has arranged the bones into something looking like a third of a skeleton. But that could be a misleading act of social construction. We don't know whether there ever existed a single individual having the bones shown in the right part of the visual above. The bones could be fragments from different individuals of different species. So it is very dubious to claim that a skeleton was ever found. 

The Popular Mechanics article mentioned above has a large visual showing a fairly complete skull. The article does not match the so-called skeleton named Ardi, which (as you can see in the top right of the image above) merely has some fragments of a skull. So where does the skull image in the Popular Mechanics article come from? It is apparently just a fake image. A reverse image search shows the image has been used about 30 times since 2014, to adorn various stories about evolution. The use of fake images in articles about human evolution is  an ongoing scandal discussed in my post

"Visual Fakery Is a Pillar of Darwinist Propaganda," which you can read here.  Nowadays online articles about human evolution are massively making use of fake images. 

Nonsense in the Science TV Show "The Hunt for Planet B"

The HBO Max TV show "The Hunt for Planet B" is one that starts out with a scientist spouting bad reasoning right at its beginning. Around the 3:20 mark we see an MIT scientist named Sara Seager  saying this in some congressional hearing:

"Well let me just say that in our own Milky Way galaxy there are a hundred billion stars and we now believe in our universe we have more than a hundred billion galaxies. So if you just do the math, the chance that there's a planet like earth out there with life on it is very high."

This is fallacious reasoning. You do not "do the math" by merely computing the total number of chances for an unlikely event to occur.  That's not "doing the math," but doing only half of the math.  Unless you have also estimated the chance of success on any one trial, you have only done half the math.  

The argument Seager gave is the "many chances equals some successes" argument. When this argument occurs, someone reasons that the chance of at least one success must be high, because there were many chances for success.  The argument is fallacious. If the chance of success on any one trial is sufficiently low, then many chances will probably equal zero successes. For example, if you spend every Sunday afternoon throwing a deck of cards into the air, there will be many chances for the full deck of cards to accidentally form into a triangular house of cards consisting of multiple rows of cards. But you will never, ever see such a house of cards resulting from your tosses. 

In the TV show  Seager follows her junk reasoning with the extremely false claim (at the 4:00 mark) that "scientists never like to speculate." 

At the 11:12 mark in the TV show some scientist says this: "I think people want us to build this telescope because they want to know how we got here."  That's a silly statement to make. Telescopes cannot tell us how mankind got here. 

Around the 14:19 mark Seager escalates her fallacious "many chances equals some successes" reasoning, in a way that makes her sound like a True Believer. She goes from "highly likely" to "certain," saying nothing to justify her claims. She says this, using the phrase "another Earth" to mean another planet with life:

"Another Earth is undoubtedly out there. In our Milky Way galaxy we have hundreds of billions of stars. Our own universe has hundreds of billions of galaxies.  To me personally it is definitely there. "

Here unscientific and unphilosophical. The correct way to reason on this topic is to make a sound estimate of the chance of success on each trial, taking into proper account the very high organization of the simplest living things, and to compare that estimate to the number of trials (the number of planets in the observable universe), rather than to just mindlessly refer to a high number of trials as proof that one of the trials must have succeeded at something vastly improbable, like some person senselessly reasoning that he must have won the Powerball lottery because he bought lots of tickets. 

Around the 16:37 mark  astrochemist Clara Sousa-Silva claims that "some molecules, like phosphine, only life sends out into the atmosphere." At the 16:53 mark she says phosphine is "an unequivocal sign of life." This is not correct. Referring to lifeless planets and a type of star called T-dwarfs, a scientific paper claims that we should expect to find phosphine in the atmospheres of large planets and "hotter objects":

"Disequilibrium abundances of phosphine (PH3) approximately representative of the total atmospheric phosphorus inventory are expected to be mixed upward into the observable atmospheres of giant planets and T dwarfs. In hotter objects, several P-bearing gases (e.g., P2, PH3, PH2, PH, HCP) become increasingly important at high temperatures."

A study in 2025 reported finding phosphine in the atmosphere of a brown dwarf star, which helps show that you do not require life for phosphine to be produced.  Another paper suggests that volcanoes can explain phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus.

At the 16:59 mark we get more groundless optimism from Seager, who attempts to justify a dubious belief by using an ad populum argument in which she claims that her opinion is that of "my generation." She says this:

"My generation, we're betting on the fact that nature delivers. That life can originate and evolve anywhere given the chance and we're planning on finding it. There's no question."

There's nothing scientific going on in such silly talk, which has a "True Believer dogmatist" sound to it. All attempts to produce life in experiments realistically simulating the early Earth have been dismal failures. They failed to produce life; they failed to produce any of the main building components of life (functional protein molecules); and they did not even produce any of the building components (amino acids) of the building components of life.  There was a famed experiment that produced some amino acids (the Miller-Urey experiment), but it was not a realistic simulation of early Earth conditions, requiring a special glass gizmo unlike anything that would have existed on the early Earth, and involving a very prolonged high degree of electricity exposure that no place on Earth would have naturally received.  

The fact that Seager says "we're betting...that life can originate and evolve anywhere given the chance" shows what an act of faith is going on here.  Seager here is like some fundamentalist betting that the Rapture will occur in her lifetime.  Various observation developments make Seager's faith in blind chance unreasonable. The first is what we've learned about the complexity and organization in even the simplest living things, that even the simplest one-celled life requires hundreds of types of protein molecules, each its own separate complex invention involving hundreds of specially arranged amino acid  parts. Faith that chance can produce such results is like believing in the power of accidental ink splashes to produce 100-page technical manuals.  Another is the complete failure to discover radio messages from extraterrestrial civilizations, despite many years of well-funded searches. If "life can originate and evolve anywhere given the chance," we would expect that such searches for extraterrestrial radio signals would have succeeded long ago. 

Around the 26:31 mark SETI astronomer Jill Tarter is asked about the failure of searches for radio signals from extraterrestrials, searches which have now gone on without success for more than 60 years.  She gives an answer that is not candid. A sensible and candid answer would be, "Yes, we have not found anything yet, and this may suggest that extraterrestrial civilizations are much more rare than we had thought."  But Tarter instead gives us a misleading answer, saying, "We just haven't looked far enough." She then gives some analogy trying to persuade us that very little of space has been checked for radio signals from extraterrestrials. Her language is extremely misleading. 

Below are some of the SETI searches that have occurred over the past 65 years (some of the observation time figures are taken from the source here):

• The SERENDIP I project, which from 1979 to 1982 surveyed a large portion of the sky, the portion depicted in Figure 4 of the paper here, a project which a Sky and Telescope article tells us surveyed "many billions of Milky Way stars."

• The Southern SERENDIP project lasting 1998 and 2005, which surveyed for some 60,000 hours a large portion of the sky, the portion depicted in Figure 2 of the paper here.

• The SERENDIP II project from 1986 to 1988, involving some 17,000 hours of observations. 

• The All-Sky Search at Ohio State University from 1989 to 1996 (Childers, Dixon and Bolinger), involving 60,000 hours of observations, 

• The Astropulse and Fly's Eye SETI projects surveying a significant portion of the sky, the portion depicted in Figure 2 of the paper here. 

• The SETI@Home project, which according to the source here covered 20% of the full celestial sphere, and 67% of the sky area observable from the Arecibo observatory. 

• The Harvard BETA all-sky SETI survey discussed here, which operated continuously for more than four years (1995-1999), scanning the whole part of the sky observable from Massachusetts, USA, and doing 35,000 hours of observations. 

• Years of SETI searches using the Allen Telescope Array, involving 12 hours a day of SETI searches, 7 days a week, for years (such as 2007 to 2010), resulting in 95,000 hours of observations (discussed here). 

• An optical search for extraterrestrial intelligence, searching 577 nearby stars that might have habitable planets, looking for laser signals.

• All of the optical searches for extraterrestrial intelligence listed on the three pages you can view here, including three searches each involving more than 7000 hours of telescope time, and one search involving 200,000 objects and other searches involving thousands of stars. 

• The two-year southern sky SETI search discussed here, which observed for 9000 hours and "covered the sky almost two times."  

• The five-year META SETI project discussed here, which between 1988 and 1993 spent about 80,000 hours of telescope time searching for extraterrestrials. 

• A META II SETI project between 1990 and 2010, involving 9000 hours of observations of the southern sky.

• All of the radio telescopes searches listed on the seven pages of search results you can review at the link here, including a Dixon, Ehman and Raub search from 1973 to 1986 involving 100,000 hours of telescope time, 

• A failed search of 10 million stars using what in 2009 was the latest and greatest technology.

• A SERENDIP III project from 1992 to 1997, involving 40,000 hours of observations, and surveying 30% of the sky. 

• Extensive SETI searches carried out by the 500-meter FAST radio telescope in China. 

• The ASTROPULSE project discussed here, involving 21,000 hours of observations from 2006 to 2010. 

• The SETI-Italia project discussed here, involving 30,000 hours of observation from 2006 to 2010.

• The Breakthrough Listen project described here, which began in 2015, and has run for 10 years with 100 million dollars in funding, involving thousands of hours each year of dedicated SETI searching, on two of the world's largest radio telescopes.

• A failed search of 1300 galaxies, reported in 2024, using low frequencies and the  Murchison Widefield Array (MWA).

At the 27:23 mark we have someone named Matt saying  "Ultimately science is about observation. Because it's only observation which actually gives you the truth." To the contrary, while observation is the most important source of truth, there are other things that can give you the truth, such as mathematics, logic, analysis and deduction.  

At the 30:35 mark we hear some scientist driving a car, praising the James Webb Telescope, while strangely saying, "So you know, I mean I don't know: what else would you want to do with your life?" An answer might be: "Any of a million jobs more useful than astronomy." At around the 32:07 mark, we hear some authority say, "I've learned one does not argue with Nobel Prize winners." It sound like an authority-kneeling sentiment contrary to the true spirit of science, and contrary to the motto of the Royal Society, which translates to English as "Take no man's word for it."

Around the 35:49 mark we hear Sarah Seager boasting "we've made a giant accelerated leap forward in the search for habitable worlds," followed by another scientist making the false claim that the discovery of planets at Trappist-1 "gives us a hint that finding a second Earth is not just a matter of if, but when." No, a second Earth would be a planet containing life, and all attempts to find such a thing have failed. So it very much is a matter of "if" rather than just "when."  

Around the 50:50 mark we have chemist Nick Lane saying this, after referring to hydrothermal vents and the origin of life.  

"There's a particular type of mineral. It's called olivine. You find it as dust throughout interstellar space. This is a really common mineral.  And the thing is it will react with water bubbling hydrogen gas out. And that's basically an environment that's giving rise to life." 

What utter BS, baloney and hogwash that statement is.  Even the simplest living thing is an extremely high level of organization, component interdependence  and information richness; and the origin of such a thing is utterly beyond any explanation of hydrogen bubbling in water. No one has ever observed life or any of the building components of life arising from nonlife because of a mere action of minerals and hydrogen bubbling in water.  We have here more biological origins nonsense from Nick Lane, who has sometimes misspoken on this topic, as I document here and here. 

Around the 54:07 mark we see a scientist named Maggie talking to a retail clerk, and saying that she is working on the search for life in outer space. Asked whether she has found such life  yet,  she gives the misleading answer, "No, but we're getting ever closer." Asked whether she believes that life exists in outer space, she gives some more of the bad "many chances equals some successes" reasoning discussed above. She says, "Surely life arises when the conditions are right." That does not make any sense, given the failure of all experiments realistically simulating the early Earth to produce either life or any of the building components of life (protein molecules). Scientists have never observed life arising from non-life whenever they tried to create ideal sterile conditions for such a thing to happen. 

Around the 1:02:57 mark in the show, we see chemist Nick Lane staring at skulls in a glass museum case. One or more of the skulls are fake. If you pause exactly at the  1:03:12 mark, you can see that the skull closest to Nick is an Australopithecus afarenis "skull" that is labeled as a "skull model," which means a fake. That skull is not an actual skull from an organism that once lived.  

Posing a question presuming Darwinist dogmas, someone asks Lane what he thinks when he contemplates "our cousins and our ancestors?"  At the 1:02:54 mark Lane says, "It's more and more clear that you know, looking at these skulls, that there have been numerous human species and they've all gone extinct apart from us, usually because of us, usually after interbreeding with us." Lane is using the long-running language abuse of Darwinists in which non-human species with shapes rather like human shapes are misleadingly called "human." One of the defining characteristics of humans is their use of symbols. The word "human" should never be used for any species that did not use symbols. The "skull" closest to Lane when he makes this statement is a fake skull of Australopithecus afarenis, which did not use symbols, and is not correctly described as "human." 

The attempt here to promote Darwinist ideas is a bungling one. Instead of having a tale of an ancestry from human ancestors to humanity we have a story of species going extinct because they interbred with us.  At the 1:03:17 mark Lane asks the ludicrous question "Do you feel some guilt when you look into those eye sockets?" (a reference to the extinction of species who died out before recorded history). Lane gives the equally ludicrous answer "I do."

At the 1:04:45 mark a scientist named Matt Mountain gives this vacuous hand-waving explanation, "Physically, evolution made us, biology made us." Not being a theory of organization but a mere theory of the accumulation of random mutations, Darwinist ideas of evolution offer no credible account for the origin of the first human bodies or the first human minds. And if you are talking about "us" in the sense of you and me,  you are not giving any credible explanation of the origin of you and me by referring to evolution (something happening before we existed) or by the hand-waving vagueness of appealing to "biology."  You might have a credible explanation for you and me if you had (1) a credible theory explaining how a speck-sized zygote existing just after impregnation progresses to become the vast organization of a human body; (2) a credible theory of how a human mind can arise from a human body. Scientists utterly luck both of these things. The idea that brains give rise to human minds is not credible, for a host of reasons explained at my site here. 

While giving this hand-waving explanation, Mountain literally waves his hands. 

Around the 1:08:19 mark Seager refers to her search for a second Earth and says, "I have to do something that has some importance as seen by myself because otherwise I have nothing. Does that make sense?" No, it doesn't make sense, because a bit earlier Seager said that she had kids, and a person lucky enough to have children has the most wonderful treasure, the exact opposite of having nothing.  And even a single average person has a body that is the wonderful marvel of organization, and a mind that is the most glorious marvel of cognitive functionality. Such things are the opposite of "nothing." 

 The TV show discussed above ("The Hunt for Planet B") was made in 2021. The James Webb Telescope was launched near the end of 2021. The telescope has run for four full years, and has failed to produce any evidence of a planet with life. Scientist  Nikku Madhusudhan claimed to have found a biosignature on planet K2-18 b, but the claim was unfounded, for reasons discussed here. 

If they made a movie about astronomy failure

Postscript: I noticed today how books in the field of astronomy and astrobiology are engaging in outrageous misrepresentations about the productivity of their authors. I got out from the library several books by scientists (not anyone mentioned above). In the dust jacket of one book by an astronomer, we have the false claim that the person is the "author of eight hundred scientific papers." That is not true, because most of those papers are papers with multiple co-authors, very often more than three. The same type of misrepresentation appeared on the dust jacket of another author in the same field. The person was described as having "written over six hundred peer-reviewed publications." But the person was a mere co-author of most of those publications, which had an average of three or more co-authors. It's not hard to speak truthfully about paper authorship, by using a phrase such as, "He is the author of 100 papers, and the co-author of 212 other papers." 

Wayback Machine Archive Snapshots of This Blog's Content

Should it ever happen years in the future that you attempt to access this blog but find it is not available, you will always be able to read previous snapshots of this blog's contents using the Wayback Machine facility at www.archive.org. 

The way this Wayback Machine works is that you must type the full URL of some site whose content you want to view by examining previous captures of the site.  Follow this procedure to access previous snapshots of this blog's contents:

1. Go to www.archive.org.

2. In the search box at the top, type in the following:

3. You will see an interface allowing you to choose any of various snapshots of this blog's contents taken over the years. Choose the latest one. After doing that, you will be able to navigate this site's pages. 

The only reason I can imagine that someone would do this would be if there were some reason why the regular site (the site you are now at) was not available.  That could conceivably happen if this site were to be hacked by malicious actors, or conceivably it might happen long after my death. 

The Wayback Machine has many snapshots of the previous contents of my three blogs. You can access them by typing these URLs into the search bar of the Wayback Machine, shown above. 

https://orbpro.blogspot.com/

https://headtruth.blogspot.com/

https://futureandcosmos.blogspot.com/