"Houston, Futility Base Here, the Boondoggle Has Landed"

Boondoggle (noun) -- "an unnecessary and expensive piece of work, especially one that is paid for by the public"  -- Cambridge Dictionary

In my February 2021 post "The Poor Design of the Latest Mars Mission," written just after the Perseverance rover landed on Mars, I said that because of the poor design of the Perseverance mission, "you will not be hearing any 'NASA discovered life on Mars' announcement anytime in the next few years."  So far that prediction has held up. A NASA page said that the "Perseverance Rover will search for signs of ancient microbial life." But no such signs have been found. 

A February 2023 article on Science News has the title "What has Perseverance found in two years on Mars?" The long answer basically amounts to: nothing of interest to the general public. Some scientist named Horgan claims, "We’ve had some really interesting results that we’re pretty excited to share with the community." But in the long article we read of no interesting results.  The article tries to get us interested by statements like a statement that the Perseverance rover " has found carbon-based matter in every rock" it analyzed. So what? Carbon is an extremely common element in the universe, and is found in many lifeless places.  

There's a big item missing from that February 2023 article: there's no mention of the detection of any amino acids.  The mainstream press keeps misleading us by referring to amino acids using the inappropriate phrase "building blocks of life." One reason the term is misleading is that blocks are simple one-part things, but the twenty  amino acids used by living things are particular arrangements of between 10 and 27 atoms. A bigger reason the term is misleading because the phrase "building blocks of life" suggests that life could be created by assembling an unordered set of building blocks, just like the walls of a house can be assembled using an unordered set of bricks. But even the simplest life requires hundreds of proteins, and each functional protein requires a very specially arranged sequence of amino acids, vastly unlikely to arise by chance. An accurate analogy would be one comparing a cell to a book, each page or chapter to a protein molecule, and each amino acid to a letter in the alphabet used to write the book. You don't get life by piling up building blocks, just as you don't get books by random typing or dumping a truck load of scrabble blocks. Getting life would require a purposeful arrangement of 20,000+ amino acids, just like writing a usable books requires a purposeful arrangement of something like 20,000 letters.

So rather than calling amino acids "building blocks of life," let's call them the simplest molecular components of life. If you haven't found amino acids on a planet, your chance of finding life on that planet is very low. No amino acids have been detected on Mars. 

Table 1 of the 2023 paper here lists all of the missions that have searched for organic compounds on Mars, and exactly what they found. We find no mention of any of the molecular components of living things. There's no mention of amino acids (the components used to build proteins), and no mention of any of the chemicals used to make RNA or DNA. The organic compounds listed as being found by the Perseverance mission are merely benzene and naphthalene, neither of which is a component of living things. The largest abundance mentioned is only 300 parts per billion, about 1 part in 3 million. 

The Perseverance rover has failed to find any encouraging signs suggesting Mars may have life. But its mission designers put in its mission design a kind of "hook" that would lure more money for another Mars mission. The design had the strange plan that the Perseverance rover would dig up some soil samples and then just dump them on the surface of Mars. The idea is that such samples would be retrieved by a future sample retrieval mission. 

What kind of psychology is going on here? What were the mission designers thinking, that they could kind of light a fire under the feet of US congressmen, by using talk such as this to whip up funding for a sample retrieval mission:

"Come on guys, you've got to get going! Those soil samples on Mars have been waiting for so long for pickup! Think of how irritated you get when you even have to wait 30 minutes for a cab to pick you up!"

Now an article on the Ars Technica site has the headline "NASA’s Mars Sample Return has a new price tag—and it’s colossal."  We read this: 

"According to two sources familiar with the meeting, the Program Manager for the mission at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Richard Cook, and the director of the mission at NASA Headquarters, Jeff Gramling, briefed agency leaders last week on costs. They had some sobering news: the price had doubled. The development cost for the mission was no longer $4.4 billion. Rather, the new estimate put it at $8 to $9 billion. Moreover, this only represents the cost to build and test the different components of the mission. It does not include launch costs, operating costs over a five-year period, nor construction of a new sample-receiving facility to handle the rocks and soil from Mars." 

We also read this: "Byrne said most planetary scientists think the mission has only a very low chance of actually finding definitive evidence of life." Of course. If multiple Mars missions have failed to find any amino acids, as they have failed to do, then the chance of a Mars soil sample return mission showing that life exists or once existed on Mars is almost zero. 

In the comments section of the article, we hear people saying how nutty this scheme is, and how the sensible thing to do would be to just ditch the unmanned Mars sample return mission, and wait until a manned mission to Mars, at which time you could do the same soil analysis work that would be done from a sample return mission. In the world of today's science there's a crazy operating principle that you can get billions to look for things scientists hope for that have never been observed (such as life on Mars), but cannot get even a million to study very important things that have been very abundantly observed, but which scientists prefer not to believe in. So tomorrow is a scheduled launch for a billion-dollar Euclid mission that will look for dark energy that no one has ever seen, because dark energy is something that scientists yearn to see. But you wouldn't be able to get even a million to study something such as ESP which has been abundantly observed for centuries, because scientists prefer not to believe in that, and want to sweep under the rug the evidence for it. 

Another NASA project sounding ill-conceived is a just-started project called CHAPEA in which four people will live for a year in what is supposedly a simulated Mars habitat. It sounds like kind of a half-ass simulation in which the four people will be confined to an indoor area of about 1700 square feet. The project reminds me of the 1996 Pauly Shore movie Bio-Dome, which has a 4% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and a 1 out of 100 rating on Metacritic. It seems nothing will be done to simulate what would be a constant worry of living on Mars: the hassle of hard-to-clean Mars dust getting inside a Mars base. The CHAPEA project won't actually be an analog for the psychological stress of a Mars mission, because any of the participants will be free to quit at any time, unlike Mars astronauts who would have no such option. Also, Mars habitation would only occur after a long space voyage, meaning the mission won't simulate how anxious people would be when starting to live on Mars after a long space voyage. People on a Mars mission would be worried about the harmful effects of radiation,  but there will be no such worries for the four "astro-nots" on the CHAPEA project.

Technology moves fast these days, and NASA probably won't be setting up a Mars base before about 2038. Why bother trying to simulate such a base using 2023 technology that probably wouldn't even be used for the actual Mars base? And if you're serious about landing people on Mars, why do an unmanned sample return mission that uses up lots of the money that might be used for such a manned Mars landing?

Postscript: In the middle of July 2023 the press is doing what is has so often done, giving us lying headlines talking about "building blocks of life" on Mars. The molecules they refer to are biologically irrelevant molecules not used by living things. They are neither amino acids nor any "building blocks of life."

False Alarms Are Bad for Firemen, But Can Be Great for Scientists

Misstatements by the mainstream press about the search for chemical precursors of life in space have included the following:

• An article on the web site of Air and Space magazine with the phony title "Fingerprints of Martian Life," one merely reporting some observation of biologically irrelevant molecules. Not even the simplest molecular components of life (amino acids) have ever been discovered on Mars. 
• Another article of the major newspaper The Independent with the misleading title "Best evidence yet for alien life on Saturn's moon found by scientists." one not reporting any evidence for life because it merely reported molecules with a molecular weight of 200, which is a molecular weight 50 times smaller than a typical molecular weight of a protein molecule.
• A story on the scitechdaily.com site entitled "Astrophysicists Identify 'Significant Reservoirs' of Organic Molecules Necessary To Form the Basis of Life."  The molecules discussed were biologically irrelevant molecules found only in the tiniest trace amounts, not in "reservoirs."  
• A NASA announcement that a gigantic "reservoir" of water had been discovered in space, a statement extremely misleading because the water was scattered over so many hundreds of cubic light-years that the density of water was not even the water density in the air above the Sahara Desert. 
• A June 2023 press release from the University of Illinois claims a detection (by 30+ scientists) of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) chemicals in distant space, and incorrectly claims that such chemicals are "considered the basic building blocks for the earliest forms of life."  None of the PAH chemicals are such things. 
• At the major website www.salon.com, we had a very recent article claiming a "recent study in the journal Nature revealed quite significant evidence for life on the distant moon" Enceladus. No such thing was found. The study merely reported the existence of phosphorus, one of the elements used in living things. Claiming that phosphorus is "evidence for life" is as silly as claiming that trees (something that can be converted into paper) are evidence for book-writing. The amount of purposeful work that must be done to make even the simplest living thing from mere elements such as carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and phosphorus is comparable to the amount of purposeful worked needed to make a 200-page well-written book from a tree.
• This week the hype-heavy scitechdaily.com site has a breathless headline of "Foundation of All Known Life: Webb Telescope Makes First Detection of Crucial Carbon Molecule." The molecule in question is a biologically irrelevant methyl cation molecule that is in no sense whatsoever a foundation of any kind of life. 

Also recently we had a press release from EurekAlert!, a source that  often recycles misleading or dubious press releases from various institutions and universities. The press release was entitled "An amino acid essential for life is found in interstellar space." The press release refers to a paper "A search for tryptophan in the gas of the IC 348 star cluster of the Perseus molecular cloud." In the paper the lone author of the paper (Susana Iglesias-Groth) makes no confident claim to have found tryptophan in interstellar space; and the title refers to a search, not a finding. She merely claims to have got some spectrum readings that she claims are compatible with tryptophan. Spectrum readings from very distant space are very often subject to multiple different interpretations. The Perseus molecular cloud is 1000 light-years away, and trying to use spectrum readings to detect a molecule existing only in trace amounts is a dicey business with a large chance of error. 

The Perseus molecular cloud (credit: NASA/JPL)

Interpreting spectroscopic readings can be as subjective as interpreting the ambiguous Rorschach ink blots once used by psychologists for psychological testing. Using a much closer target (Venus), a team of scientists previously announced spectroscopic readings they claimed were evidence of the gas phosphine. But later there followed four papers saying that there is no phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus. One paper by a single author states, "There is thus no significant evidence for phosphine absorption in the JCMT Venus spectra." Another paper with many co-authors is entitled, "No phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus." A third paper states there is "no statistical evidence for phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus."  Another paper says, "These findings, along with the recent papers by Encrenaz et al. (2020), Snellen et al. (2020), Lincowski et al. (2020), and Villanueva et al. (2020) undermine the reported detection of PH3 [phosphine] by Greaves et al. (2020a,b) and its possible biogenic origin."  A news account of this paper says, "The team concluded that what the scientists probably saw was just sulfur dioxide, which is a common gas around Venus and would not indicate the possible presence of life."

The paper "A search for tryptophan in the gas of the IC 348 star cluster of the Perseus molecular cloud" is now behind a paywall, but when I read it before it was paywall-blocked, I could find no plain assertion of a detection. The author merely claimed to have seen some sort of something that she claimed was compatible with tryptophan, and noted that future investigations could determine whether tryptophan really existed at the investigated location. The abstract is not behind a paywall, and that abstract makes no claim to have detected tryptophan, but merely a claim to have searched for it, and to have found something that could be tryptophan. The abstract estimates a particular sparse amount using the phrase "assuming that the detected emission lines are due to tryptophan," as if the author was not sure such an identification is correct. 

The author (Susana Iglesias-Groth) published in 2021 a preprint on this topic, "A search for mid-IR bands of amino acids in the Perseus Molecular Cloud," which can be read here. In that preprint, referring to spectral lines and using the royal "we" she stated, "We tentatively identify 14 lines for tryptophan, 12 lines for tyrosine, 7 lines for phenylalanine and 5 lines for isoleucine and glycine, respectively."  This kind of tentative identification business sounds like very iffy guesswork, rather like trying to guess what type of people are passing by your basement window when you can only see shadows cast upon a wall. The "Data" section mentions "image cleaning to remove bad pixels," and some averaging to produce a "combined spectrum," and we may wonder whether artifacts may have arisen from such debatable manipulation. Figure 4 of the preprint looks unconvincing. We see a bunch of wavy lines, looking rather like brain waves lines or lines of a graph plotting ups and downs of a Dow Jones stock; and above some of the up-blips in the line (up-blips which have varying shapes) we see "Trp," which looks like a guess that the blip was caused by tryptophan. It all sounds terribly tentative and subjective. Interstellar clouds such as the Perseus molecular cloud are hard to reliably analyze, because there is so much signal contamination from a variety of chemical sources. 

It seems rather that people have long been claiming to see interstellar tryptophan that was not actually there. A 1984 paper noted that "Hoyle, Wickramasinghe and their associates have examined interstellar (IS) absorption features in the ultraviolet, visible and infrared" and claimed to see a variety of things including  tryptophan. The paper states, "We conclude that the identifications claimed by Hoyle, Wickramasinghe and their colleagues are unwarranted."

Similarly, in the 2006 paper here we read about an apparent false alarm regarding the detection of the amino acid glycine in interstellar space:

"The early searches for glycine were all negative, but two years ago Kuan et al. (2003) reported detection of a number of glycine lines, some 27 in several astronomical sources. Unfortunately, this claim has not been confirmed. The amount of glycine claimed by Kuan et al. is in conflict with previously published upper limits (e.g. Combes et al. 1996; Ceccarelli et al. 2000), and glycine lines which should have appeared were not found. In a detailed analysis of the evidence, Snyder et al. (2005) recently concluded that few, if any, of the lines attributed by Kuan et al. to interstellar glycine were actually from that molecule. The spectroscopic data on which the claim of Kuan et al. was based have not been published or made available to other workers, and there is now a fairly wide consensus among radio astronomers and laboratory spectroscopists that glycine has not yet been found in space."

A more recent 2022 paper tells us this: "The simplest amino acid, glycine (NH2CH2COOH), has been searched for a long time in the interstellar medium, but all surveys of glycine have failed." 

We do not yet have any robust or replicated evidence for the existence of tryptophan or any other amino acid in interstellar space. The recent press release announcing a discovery of tryptophan in interstellar space seems like another case in the science press of premature overconfident boasting, and people claiming to have seen something when the evidence was all blurry and similar to a tiny hazy blip seen on the far horizon, something that could have been a hundred different things.  Very many or most of the interesting-sounding announcements you read these days in the science news are false alarms, and in fields such as neuroscience, false alarms are strongly incentivized. 

Spectrographic analysis of deep interstellar space seems to be a kind of "wild, wild West" in which there are few or no standards to minimize false alarms. In many cases it seems like subjective squinting at tiny lines, rather like the work of some palm reader looking through a magnifying glass to study tiny lines on someone's palm. In the 2021 preprint "A search for mid-IR bands of amino acids in the Perseus Molecular Cloud" by Susana Iglesias-Groth, published in 2021, which can be read here, we have no mention of statistical significance, no mention of an effect size, no mention of a p-value, no mention of blinding, and seemingly no mention of any observational standard that was met. Such subjective one-person classification guesses mean little until they are replicated by multiple independent observers. 

Consider how unreliable is Case 1 compared to Case 2 below:

Case 1: Scientist gets money to search for chemical X in deep space. Scientist examines thousands of little spectroscopic lines looking for something he can say looks like chemical X. He knows that if he doesn't report finding such a thing, he won't get his paper published, because of publication bias which favors positive results. Scientist then reports seeing some little lines that he thinks looks like chemical X. 

Case 2: Scientist X is given some spectroscopic readings provided by Scientist Y, who says, "Tell me what this looks like to you." Scientist X has no idea what answer is expected, or what Scientist Y was looking for. Scientist X identifies the reading as chemical Z, and Scientist Y, "Yes, that is what I was looking for, and what I thought it was." 

Case 1 is not compelling at all, but Case 2 is much better evidence. 

False alarms are bad for firemen, but can be great for scientists. False alarms can mean more fame for a scientist, more grant money, and more of the cherished paper citations. A scientist can pay the rent for years or decades by milking false alarms. And false alarms can be great for the person trying to show evidence for some untrue dogma that is close to his heart, or the person trying to show that he and his colleagues are making progress when they are mired in the mud, and going in the wrong direction. 

One of the ways in which scientists have milked false alarms is by making dubious reports of an association between a gene and some trait. A 2012 paper tells us that most of the reports of genes claimed to be associated with general intelligence are probably false positives. In their paper "Empirical assessment of published effect sizes and power in the recent cognitive neuroscience and psychology literature," Denes Szucs and John P. A. Ioannidis state "False report probability is likely to exceed 50% for the whole literature," and "In light of our findings, the recently reported low replication success in psychology is realistic, and worse performance may be expected for cognitive neuroscience." 

I predict with only medium confidence that the recent claim about tryptophan in interstellar space will not be well-replicated.  I also predict with medium conference that in the next few years some scientist will capture global headlines by claiming he saw "chemical signatures of life" at some other planet, by analyzing ambiguous hard-to-interpret spectroscopic data from the James Webb telescope. But it will probably be a false alarm. It will probably be another case of some scientist looking at little lines that could be caused by many different things, and making an interpretation of this hard-to-interpret reading that will allow him to say he saw what scientists have been hoping to see for so long. A Harvard astronomer (Avi Loeb) has shown that making a headline-grabbing dramatic-sounding subjective interpretation of some ambiguous marginal observational data can be very profitable. His "interstellar spacecraft" speculations about a strange object named ‘Oumuamua resulted in a lucrative book deal. 

After trying to suggest that another space oddity (the CNEOS 2014-01-08 meteor) was a crashed interstellar spacecraft, Loeb has recently finished his million-dollar oceanic expedition looking for what he hoped would be remnants of a crashed extraterrestrial spaceship (an idea that is implausible for reasons I discuss here).  The expedition seems like a bust, as I predicted it would be.  All Loeb has to report finding are tiny scarcely visible specks and tiny metal scraps. We can imagine what derisive laughter would come if some person without Loeb's following were to try to pass off such measly things as evidence of extraterrestrials. We are apparently expected to think the makers of the ET spaceship were so incompetent that they let their ship get instantly blown up upon entering Earth's atmosphere, so that only the tiniest smithereens remained. Meanwhile two other scientists recently published a paper saying that the simplest explanation for the CNEOS 2014-01-08 meteor is that it was not from some other solar system, and that its speed was simply overestimated.

Explaining Wind, Heat and Lightning Were the Only Major Successes of Reductionists

There has long existed a type of person who has tried to explain phenomena through reductionism. Reductionism means basically attempts to explain things by using "nothing but" explanations. Reductionists make all kinds of boastful, untrue claims about the levels of success of reductionist explanations. But the truth is that almost nothing has been explained by reductionist explanations. In human history there have been only three great successes of reductionism: the explanation of wind, heat and lightning. 

For a long time scientists wondered about the nature of heat. Many postulated that heat was some kind of substance that somehow flowed into things that got hot. They called such a substance caloric. Scientists for a while thought that maybe when something got really cold, it was because that thing had somehow lost some of its caloric substance, and that things got hotter when they gained some caloric substance. We now know this idea is false. Things don't get hotter because they are gaining a caloric substance. 

We now have an explanation for heat, and it's an incredibly simple explanation. Heat is simply how fast the molecules in something are moving. For example, when your coffee is hot, it's simply that the molecules inside your coffee are moving around faster than when your coffee is cold. When you heat something up, you are not adding any substance called caloric; you are simply making the molecules in something move around faster. 

Another great triumph of reductionist explanation was the explanation of wind. To the ancient thinker, wind might have seemed very mysterious. We can imagine him asking: why is it windy on some days, and calm on other days; and are windstorms the wrath of the gods? Now we understand that wind is very simple. Wind is nothing but the flow between differences in air pressure. Whenever there is some region of the air which has greater air pressure, near some other region of the air that has lower air pressure, wind will tend to flow from the region of higher air pressure to the region of lower air pressure. That's all wind is: flows from regions of higher air pressure to regions of lower air pressure. Because it's so simple, a weatherman can reliably predict how much wind there will be, just by looking at a  map showing air pressure differences. If there's big differences, there will be lots of wind; and if there's no big differences, there will be very little or no wind.  For example, a weatherman looking at the map below will know that the low pressure area (marked by L) will be getting a strong wind coming from the high pressure area above it (marked by H). 

Then there was the explanation of lightning, which was another successful reductionist explanation rather similar to the explanation of wind.  Lightning is simply the very rapid flow of electrical charge from one area with a much higher electrical charge to another area with a much lower electrical charge. Just as wind tends to flow from regions of higher air pressure to regions of lower air pressure, electrical charge will tend to flow from one region of higher electrical charge to a nearby region of lower electrical charge. Lightning is simply electricity or electrical charge jumping spontaneously from a part of the sky with much higher electrical charge to some part of the sky (or the ground) with much lower electrical charge. 

Such explanations of nature had been completed by the year 1850. By about this time, there started to arise a group of thinkers with great explanatory greed, who hoped that the biggest mysteries of life and mind could be explained with simple "it's nothing but" reductionist explanations.  We can call this type of thinkers "the nothing butters," because of their love of reductionist "it's nothing but" explanations.

The nothing-butters tried to claim that more and more of nature was being explained by reductionist "it's nothing but" explanations, and they attempted to cite the success of Newtonian gravity theory as one of the triumphs of reductionist explanation. Citing Newton was not justified, because Newton's explanation of planetary motions was not really a reductionist explanation. Newton found it necessary to postulate a universal force of gravitational attraction acting between all massive bodies in the universe. Such a reality isn't something simple, but something quite complicated. According to the original Newtonian theory, to correctly calculate the gravitational force acting on any astronomical body (call it body X), you must know the masses of all astronomical bodies in the solar system, even objects billions of miles away. And you must also know the distances between all such bodies and body X, and also must know a hard-to-determine thing called the universal gravitational constant, and must also use a particular formula involving squaring the distances between objects.  Newton's theory of gravity was never really a "it's nothing but" reductionist theory, and its Einstein revision makes it even more complex. 

The nothing-butters claimed early versions of the atomic theory as a triumph of reductionism. "We're nothing but bunches of simple atoms," they began to chant. But it turned out the early versions of atomic theory advanced by people like John Dalton were not correct. The main building blocks of humans are not atoms, but much more complex things such as protein molecules consisting of thousands of atoms arranged in a very special way, and cells consisting of millions of protein molecules arranged in a very special way. Once humans found out the details of atoms, they found that atoms are not simple indivisible particles as imagined by thinkers such as Dalton, but instead usually units composed of many individual proton, neutron and electron parts. In additional, there were special fine-tuned forces needed for atoms to exist, such as the strong nuclear force and Coulomb's law. The details of atoms and nuclear physics are so complicated that what we know about atoms cannot be counted as any success of reductionist nothing-butters.

Earthquakes have been explained, but not by any simple "it's nothing but" explanation. The theory that explains earthquakes is a very complicated theory called plate tectonics. For a long time reductionists tried to persuade us that sunlight occurs for the simple reason that Earth has a nearby sun that is "just a big ball of hot gas." We now know that sunlight occurs not by some simple radiation of a hot gas, but from the complicated process of thermonuclear fusion, which involves some deep complexities of nuclear physics. 

Once cells were discovered, biologists tried to cite cells as an example of reductionist success. "We're nothing but bags of simple cells," cried the nothing-butters, who tried to depict cells as real simple things. We now know the folly of such ideas. It turns out that cells are fantastically complex structures so organized and rich in diverse functions that they have been compared to small factories. We now know that cells are made from very complex components called organelles, which are themselves made of extremely complex components called protein complexes, which themselves are made of proteins that each typically have hundreds of well-arranged amino acid parts. There is nothing simple about cells or their components. 

But the nothing-butters kept trying their best to claim explanatory success beyond their successes in explaining wind, heat and lightning. The nothing-butters built one of their biggest legends when they tried to claim the origin of species such as the human species had been  explained in a "it was nothing but" way. "We get new species from nothing but random variations" the nothing-butters began chanting.  The more we learned about all the vast levels of hierarchical organization, very precise fine-tuning, coded information and extremely coordinated functional complexity in living things, the less credible this claim sounded. But this claim that humans are just accumulations of random variations still lives and thrives, because a massive belief community has arisen around it, and the claim is enthusiastically taught by a priesthood of evolutionary biologists who are pillars of a church-like believer community within the halls of academia. 

The nothing-butters also tried to explain the human mind in a "it's nothing but" way. They tried to do this by arguing that all human mental activity is nothing but brain activity. Although very widely held, the idea that the mind is merely the brain is untenable for a host of reasons well-explained at the site here. Among the endless questions that cannot be answered by those claiming your mind is just brain activity (from a brain that arose by mere natural selection) are the questions below:

How are humans able to form abstract ideas, a capability that seems beyond anything that neurons could do?

Why do humans display empathy, compassion and guilt, things that have no clear survival value for an individual organism?

How are humans able to instantly form memories, much faster than can be explained by imagining that synapses are strengthened by protein formation (which takes minutes)?

How are humans able to remember things for 50 years, which is 1000 times longer than the average lifetime of the proteins in synapses?

Why do humans who have their brains shut down during cardiac arrest continue to have extremely vivid near-death experiences that they can remember very well?

Why do such experiences very often involve a visual perspective in which the self views the body from meters away, something that should be impossible if the brain is the source of the self?

Why do humans have so many traits (such as artistic creativity, spirituality and intellectual curiosity) that can never be explained on some natural selection basis?

How are humans able to instantly recall very old memories despite the lack of any known physical characteristic in the brain (such as sorting, indexing, neuron numbering, or a neuron coordinate system) that would allow the brain to perform the “instantly finding the needle in a mountain-sized haystack” operation needed to instantly find an obscure memory?

Why do humans even have a sense of selfhood, something not necessary for biological survival?

How could a conviction of a single self ever arise from the activity of two brain hemispheres which we would expect to create no sense of self, or maybe a sense of two selves? 

Why are savants (such as those described here and here) so often able to have astonishing mental skills far beyond those of ordinary people, even though such savants often have major brain damage?

How is that people with hyperthymesia (and brains not significantly different from ordinary people) are able to remember in great detail what happened to them every day since reaching adulthood?

Why do about five percent of the population (gay people) have a sexual drive completely different from what we would expect from Darwinian assumptions?

Why do some epilepsy patients who have had half of their brains removed (to stop seizures) show little damage to intelligence and memory?

Why do some humans show psychic abilities such as ESP in careful well-replicated scientific experiments, thereby showing capabilities completely inexplicable in terms of brain activity? 

How could a human ever be able to memorize vast amounts of words (such as 10 major operatic roles), when the words use a language that is less than a thousand years old, which human biology (having only very old genes) should never be able to store as neural states?

How could humans be able to perfectly recall very long texts (such as the entire Quran or the very long role of Hamlet) using a brain in which the vast majority of synapses are chemical synapses that do not reliably transmit signals, but only transmit nerve impulses with a reliability between 50% and 10%? 

How could a French civil servant (and the patients Lorber documented) have had either fairly good or above-average minds when almost of all their brains were destroyed by diseases?

How were humans (alone of all species) ever able to develop language, when it seems that you could never establish a language among a group unless you had an existing language to enforce the conventions of that language?

How are toddlers able to learn a language at a rate vastly faster than we should expect from their mere exposure to their parents speaking?

How could a brain store memories, when no memories have ever been discovered by examining brain tissue with high-powered high-tech microscopes that should have found such brain-stored memories if they existed?

How could a brain store memories, when it seems to have neither a mechanism for writing memories, nor a mechanism for reading memories?

Because none of these questions has been credibly answered in a way compatible with "the mind is just brain activity" claim, such a claim has no credibility. Explaining mind activity as just being brain activity is merely a speech custom of reductionists, not something that we should count as an accomplishment of reductionism.  But what about explanations of infectious disease as being caused by microbes? Even the simplest living bacteria is a very complicated thing, and the interaction of microbes and the human immune system (a fantastically complicated body system) is an extremely complicated story. So we can't count explaining infectious disease as any great triumph of reductionism. The full story of what goes on in your body when you get an infectious disease ends up being a story that would take many times longer to explain than an explanation of your symptoms, so there is no "it's nothing but..." triumph here. 

One of the greatest problems of biology is explaining human development, the mystery of how a speck-sized zygote is able to progress to become the enormously more organized reality of the human body. Before the discovery of DNA, the nothing-butters tried to explain this enormously impressive reality by various ridiculous sound bites such as the claim that the appearance of a human body is "nothing but growth" or  "nothing but unfolding" or some such slogan. After DNA was discovered, the nothing-butters started telling a huge lie that they kept telling for many decades: the lie that the appearance of a human body was nothing but the reading of instructions stored in DNA. We now know that DNA has no instructions for building a human body, no instructions for making any human organ, and no instructions for making any of the 200 types of cells in the human body. Clear off from the table all the lies told about genes, genomes and DNA, and we find that the progression from a speck-sized human zygote to a full human body is a miracle of progression and organization utterly beyond the explanation of reductionists, something vastly more impressive than a hundred symmetrical car-sized sandcastles arising on a beach where there is no sand castle builder we can see. 

We can now see that in its long history reductionism has had only three major successes: the explanation of wind, the explanation of heat and the explanation of lightning.  How has reductionism managed to retain its prestige in the halls of academia despite so little success? Because of reasons such as these:

• Reductionists have often practiced pareidolia in which they reported seeing things that they were eagerly hoping to see, things which were not well-supported by evidence. They were helped by loose evidence standards in which a result expected by chance 1 time in 20 is considered a "statistically significant" result good enough for science journal publication. As a result, if 100 scientists look for something not there, each doing 10 experiments,  then 50 of them will be able to publish "statistically significant" evidence for the thing that's not there.
• Reductionists often work in fields where poor research practices prevail, such as experimental neuroscience which these days is dominated by Questionable Research Practices such as using inadequate study group sizes.
• Reductionists have mastered a large variety of "shrink speaking" word tricks that try to make things of vast complexity or oceanic depth sound like things very simple. These included the tricks of referring to human mental phenomena (a topic of oceanic depth) using the diminutive term "consciousness," and the trick of referring to biological innovations (often involving huge leaps of hierarchical organization and great leaps of functional information) using diminutive terms such as "variations" or "diversification." 
• Keeping themselves in a filter bubble, reductionists practice various forms of evidence ignoring in which they pay no attention to fields of study such as parapsychology, and pay no attention to case histories that defy their dogmas.
• Reductionists have given us mountains of lies and misleading statements, such as claims or insinuations that DNA is an anatomy blueprint. Dozens of these lies and misleading statements are listed in my post here. An example of what I refer to in this paragraph is Jacques Monod's bible of reductionism Chance and Necessity, which another book calls "a  morass of undefined terms, contradictory statements and misleading rhetoric." For example, referring to a molecule (DNA) that does not at all specify anatomy, behavior or instincts, the book told us the huge lie that DNA is an alphabet specifying "all the diversity of structures and performances the biosphere contains."

The only major things that were ever successfully explained by reductionists are wind, heat and lightning, which were three very simple things. Our reductionists should have learned a lesson from this: that only very simple things can be explained by "it is nothing but..." explanations. Utterly failing to learn this lesson, the nothing-butters have kept trying to explain the most enormously complex things with their simplistic "it's nothing but" explanations. The more we learn about the complexity and mystifying intricacies of such things, the more absurd such reductionist explanation attempts sound. 

The 11 Most Revealing Statements of Charles Darwin

Let us look at some of the statements of Charles Darwin that reveal the most about his mind, character and reasoning. 

#1: "I suppose  'natural selection' was a bad term ; but to change it now, I think, would make confusion worse confounded."

Darwin made this confession in a letter to Charles Lyell dated June 6, 1860. He thereby confessed that the term "natural selection" was a confusing and inappropriate term.  Similarly, in the 1869 version of The Origin of Species, Darwin confessed that "in the literal sense of the word, no doubt, natural selection is a false term." The word "selection" refers to choice by a conscious agent, but no such thing occurs in so-called "natural selection"; so the term has always been a misleading one. 

#2: "This preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection." 

Darwin made this statement on page 72 of The Origin of Species. The statement is revealing because it shows how tissue-thin his theory was.  His theory was not a theory of organization, but a theory so slight it could be written on the slip inside a fortune cookie, with a slogan such as "lucky things can happen, and such luck can be preserved." 

#3: "Natural selection can do nothing until favourable variations chance to occur."

Darwin made this statement on page 144 of The Origin of Species.  In general in that book, Darwin is very careful to avoid stating that his theory is centered on the idea of miracles of luck occurring. In The Origin of Species he very carefully avoided using the words "luck" and "fortune." But in this statement he lets his guard slip and lets us know that his theory is all centered upon lucky events: favorable variations that "chance to occur." We now have very good reasons for believing that the kind of miracles of luck he presumed could never have occurred. Most types of useful biological innovations require novel arrangements of matter so improbable that we would not expect them to occur by chance even given trillions of years of random mutations. Being something comparable to a typing monkey producing a well-written useful paragraph of 300 words, the origin of a single novel protein molecule (consisting of hundreds of well-arranged amino acid parts) would require an event with a probability of less than 1 in ten to the two hundredth power.  No event so lucky would ever be expected to occur even if there were trillions of years of random mutations occurring on trillions of planets.  The age of the universe is believed to be merely 13 billion years. Inside each of our bodies are more than 20,000 different types of protein molecules, each its own complex invention. 

#4: "He who is not content to look, like a savage, at the phenomena of nature as disconnected, cannot any longer believe that man is the work of a separate act of creation. He will be forced to admit that the close resemblance of the embryo of man to that, for instance, of a dog—the construction of his skull, limbs and whole frame on the same plan with that of other mammals, independently of the uses to which the parts may be put—the occasional reappearance of various structures, for instance of several muscles, which man does not normally possess, but which are common to the Quadrumana—and a crowd of analogous facts—all point in the plainest manner to the conclusion that man is the co-descendant with other mammals of a common progenitor."

This statement appeared on page 927 of Darwin's book The Descent of Man. It is his grand summary statement in which he gives his best evidence that man and other lower species have a common ancestor. The statement is notable for its extreme weakness as evidence. Why would anyone think that an alleged resemblance between the unformed blob of a dog embryo and the unformed blob of a human embryo would do anything to show that humans and dogs had a common ancestor? Why would anyone think that a mere physical resemblance between the shape of a man and the shape of an ape would do anything to show that the two have a common ancestor? We know of all kinds of things that have similar shapes, but no common ancestors.  Why would anyone think that a claimed "occasional reappearance" of some muscles would do anything to show that men and other animals have the same ancestor? 

#5: "My object in this chapter is to shew that there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties." 

This extremely glaring falsehood was told by Darwin on page 99 of The Descent of Man. The statement shows that Charles Darwin was either a very big liar or someone who was enormously self-deluded. It is a very obvious fact of human experience that there are the most gigantic fundamental differences between the mental faculties of man and other higher mammals.  We should have no confidence in anyone claiming the opposite. 

#6: “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.”

Darwin made this appalling racist statement in Chapter VI of The Descent of Man.  He predicted the extermination of what he called "the savage races," including blacks and Australian aborigines, and expressed no remorse about such a thing, suggesting such humans were closer to gorillas.  Erroneous racism was a key element of early Darwinism.  Darwinists such as Thomas Huxley tried to make the giant gulf between apes and humans look not so gigantic by depicting some groups of humans as inferior and closer to the apes. 

#7: "With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated ; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination : we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every cne to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed."

Darwin made these cruel remarks on page 205 of The Descent of Man. We see here some of the toxic moral results of his philosophy emphasizing concepts of "struggle for existence" and "survival of the fittest."  For a full discussion of such toxic moral results, see my post "The Poisonous Effects of the 'Struggle for Life' Ideology."

#8: "It has often been asserted, but the assertion is quite incapable of proof, that the amount of variation under nature is a strictly limited quantity." 

Darwin made this statement on page 360 of The Origin of Species. The statement misleadingly claimed that we have no proof that the amount of variation in nature is limited. We do indeed have such proof, in the form of thousands of years of observations of different species that have shown only very limited variation. Since 3000 BC mankind has observed billions of humans, and have never seen any human born with some visible novel physical innovation that no previous human ever had, such as some functional new organ or some functional new appendage. Humans look the same today as they did in 5000 BC, and we know from the writings of Plato thousands of years ago that humans back then had all of the mental powers we have today. 

From such observations we know that the amount of beneficial variation in species is extremely limited.  In no generation of any species do we see some individual organism born with some complex new biological innovation never before seen in that species, nor do we ever see any individual organism born with a half or a third of some complex new biological innovation. Such a very severe limit to biological variation was a well-established observation of cardinal importance to the claims Darwin was making. But rather than acknowledging such a fact of observation, he misleadingly tried to deny it by claiming that such a fact was "quite incapable of proof."  We now know some of the reasons why we never see any organism born with a new type of organ or useful appendage that was never before seen in its species. One of the reasons is that such things would require a sudden bonanza of new biological information that would never occur by chance variation, any more than a new five-page philosophical essay would appear from the action of typing monkeys.    

Darwinism apologists have tended to follow his strategy in this regard: vaguely talk again and again about natural variation, without ever mentioning the known severe limits of variation, and leave their readers with the impression that new wonders of biological innovation and new marvels of biological organization can arise through mere "variation"  This is a very misleading approach. Similar rhetoric would occur if you were to vaguely say that there are variations in human jumping ability and to then imply that therefore some humans should be able to jump to the top of tall skyscraper towers, without ever mentioning how limited are the variations that occur in human jumping ability.  

#9: " I  can  see  no difficulty  in  a  race  of  bears  being  rendered,  by  natural selection,  more  and  more  aquatic  in  their  structure and  habits,  with  larger  and  larger  mouths,  till  a  creature was  produced  as  monstrous  as  a  whale."

This statement by Darwin on page 184 of the first edition of The Origin of Species shows Darwin's almost boundless credulity in regard to imagining evolutionary transitions, no matter how ludicrous they sounded.  The statement also is an example of the silly argumentative technique Darwin used throughout the book, which was the simple technique of saying something along the lines  that he "saw no difficulty" or that "there is no real difficulty" in some event or transition, no matter how enormously improbable such an event or transition sounded. Just repeating over and over again that you see no difficulty in something is not any argumentation of any weight. Similarly, if a new high school graduate tells his parents that his career plan is to become a street beggar, and he hopes to get a winning lottery ticket as a donation, that person is not presenting argumentation of any weight if he just keeps saying things like, "I see no difficulty in my plan." 

#10: " Until  reading  an  able  and valuable  article  in  the  North  British  Review  (June,  1867),  I did not  appreciate  how  rarely  single  variations,  whether  slight  or strongly  marked,  could  he  perpetuated."  

In this quote, Darwin confesses that his reasoning in the original version of The Origin of Species was based on the naive idea that when a favorable variation occurred in an organism, it would typically be passed on to its descendants. We now why that would very rarely be true. Below is a quote that explains why:

"Moreover,  even  when  an individual  possessing  some  favourable  variation  does  survive, it  will  be  prevented  from  becoming  the  ancestor  of  a new species  or  race  by  the  fact  that,  among  the  higher  animals, every  one  which  is  born  has  two  parents,  while,  by  the hypothesis,  the  favourable  variation  is  found  in  only  one; and  as  the  offspring  are,  on  the  average,  of  intermediate character  between  the  two  parents,  the  favourable  variation will  be  transmitted  to  the  offspring  in  only  half  its  original force ; and  to  their  offspring  again,  with  only  one-half  of  this, or  one-fourth  of  its  original  force  — and  so  on,  constantly  weakening."

#11: "To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree."

Darwin made this statement on page 150 of The Origin of Species. He then tried to extract himself from this difficulty in the space of a single sentence, by stating this in the next sentence: "Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist ; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real."  This failed to credibly remove the difficulty that had been raised. The statement involves a number of fallacies, such as these:

(1) It was utterly erroneous to assume that there ever could have existed any such thing as an eye "very imperfect and simple." Now that we know that eyes are built from incredibly organized things called cells, and that cells are built from hugely organized things called organelles, and that organelles are built from gigantically organized things called protein molecules, we can understand how utterly erroneous it was to appeal to the existence of a "simple" eye.  Every eye in every organism is an incredibly complex arrangement of many millions of well-arranged parts. 

(2) It was utterly erroneous to assume that there could be "numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor." A series of steps can make a simple and very imperfect thing into a perfect and very complex thing, but this in general cannot be done through a series of changes that is each useful. Such a series of steps will require many steps that are not immediately useful, and that may be detrimental until the development process has progressed much further.  Such a progression will typically require passing through non-functional intermediates. The concept is illustrated in the visual below.  A functional Stop sign can be converted to a functional Tow Zone sign through a series of three steps; but in the middle of such a transitional are non-functional intermediates. 

In the case of the eye, we can easily think of a non-functional intermediate. If we imagine an eye without a lens evolving into an eye with a lens, we must first imagine some very imperfect lens. But such a lens would not improve vision, but worsen it. So the progression would go like this, with the middle part being a degradation in performance:

eye with no lens -->eye with very bad lens --> eye with slightly good lens -->eye with good lens

Here is a description of the immensely complicated light-capturing biochemistry going on in the eye, from a biochemistry textbook. The rhodopsin mentioned is a protein molecule with 348 very well-arranged amino acid parts.  The recoverin mentioned is a protein molecule with 200 very well-arranged amino acid parts. The arrestin mentioned is a protein with more than 400 very well-arranged amino acid parts. Altogether this biochemistry requires many thousands of atoms arranged in just the right way. 

1. "Light-absorption converts 11-cis retinal to all-trans-retinal, activating rhodopsin.
2. Activated rhodopsin catalyzes replacement of GDP by GTP on transducin (T), which then disassociates into T_a-GTP and T_by.
3. T_a-GTP activates cGMP phosphodiesterase (PDE) by binding and removing its inhibitory subunit (I).
4. Active PDE reduces [cGMP] to below the level needed to keep cation channels open.
5. Cation channels close, preventing influx of Na⁺ and Ca2⁺; membrane is hyperpolarized. This signal passes to the brain.
6. Continued efflux of Ca²⁺ through the Na⁺-Ca2⁺ exchanger reduces cytosolic [Ca²⁺].
7. Reduction of [CA²⁺] activates guanylyl cyclase (CG) and inhibits PDE; [cGMP] rises toward  'dark'  level, reopening cation channels and returning V_m to prestimulus level.
8. Rhodopsin kinase (RK) phosphorylates 'bleached' rhodopsin; low [Ca²⁺] and recoverin (Recov) stimulate this reaction. Arrestin (Arr) binds phosphorylated carboxyl terminus, reactivating rhodopsin.
9. Slowly, arrestin dissociates, rhodopsin is dephosphorylated, and all-trans-retinal is replaced with 11-cis-retinal. Rhodopsin is ready for another phototransduction cycle."

After studying such complexities, which Darwin knew nothing about, we may realize how bogus are all claims that Darwin did something to explain the appearance of mammal eyes by imagining a progression from a "simple eye" (something which has never existed in nature, all eyes being vastly complex). The text above mentions proteins that are far more structurally complicated than a primitive eye, such as a rhodopsin protein specified in a gene that uses 1000+ base pairs to specify the protein. Such proteins would have had to be part of even the simplest eye, which helps to debunk Darwin's idea that nature could have started out with some eye that was simple and easy to arise. 

If so simple a transition as a transition from a Stop sign to a "Tow Zone" sign requires passing through two nonfunctional intermediates, as shown in the visual above,  how many nonfunctional intermediates would we have in a progression leading from some mere "light sensitive patch" to something like a human eye?  There would be many, each of which stop Darwinian evolution from progressing in the way that Darwinists imagine. The claim that Darwin did something to explain the origin of vision is one of the many unfounded legends of evolutionary biology. I haven't even yet mentioned that organisms don't see with mere eyes, but see with vision systems (consisting of eyes, many specialized proteins, optic nerves, and very complex brain structures) that are in total many times more complex than an eye. 

                                     The intricate structure of recoverin

Reasons for Doubting Claims the US Got Technology From Crashed ET UFOs

Many people are talking about a recent article on the web site The Debrief with the headline "INTELLIGENCE OFFICIALS SAY U.S. HAS RETRIEVED CRAFT OF NON-HUMAN ORIGIN."  Being touted as some major revelation, the article by Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal does not seem to qualify as good evidence for any paranormal claim. The problem is that the article does not give any eyewitness account of anyone seeing anything, nor goes it give any photos or documents. 

The article claims that a former intelligence officer named  David Grusch has claimed that the US government is in possession of "retrieved intact and partially intact craft of non-human origin." But the article fails to quote anyone saying he saw such a craft.  Apparently Grusch has come to believe that such craft exist, not on the basis of something he saw himself, but on the basis of something he was told by other people. Who exactly were these people? We are not told. What exactly did they see? We are not told. 

The evidence level here seems poor. It seems about the same evidence level as if someone told you that he believes in Bigfoot, based on what he has heard about other people claiming that they saw Bigfoot, without mentioning who those people are or what they saw. As we say here in New York City, that and $2.75 will get you a ride on the subway.  All that we seem to have here is some intelligence officer passing around an unsubstantiated rumor.  The article includes another vague quote from some other authority named Christopher Mellon, one saying, “A number of well-placed current and former officials have shared detailed information with me regarding this alleged program, including insights into the history, governing documents and the location where a craft was allegedly abandoned and recovered." But that's nothing specific, and sounds like more rumor spreading. 

We should not at all assume that the claims of Grusch on this topic are believable merely because he has had a distinguished career in the military. In writing the posts of this blog, I have encountered innumerable cases in which authorities such as professors have confidently made untrue, unreasonable or poorly substantiated claims. There are 101 reasons why some authority may confidently make some claim that is not true or is not plausible.  It is a huge mistake to think that some claim is true because it seems to believed by some distinguished authority. 

At the link here we have a transcript of a recent interview with  Grusch. After being asked "We have spacecraft from another species?" he answers "We do? Yeah." Grusch suggests the craft may be from other dimensions, saying "We know there’s extra dimensions due to higher high energy particle collisions, etc." No, humans do not know that there are extra dimensions, and high energy particle collisions do not do anything to establish them. There is a physics theory called string theory which requires extra dimensions, but there is no evidence that string theory is true.  Later in the interview Grusch claims there is "a well established fact at least mathematically and based on empirical observation and analysis that there most likely are physical, additional spatial dimensions." No one has done anything to establish the likelihood of additional spatial dimensions. And if something is merely "likely" it is not a fact and certainly not a well-established fact. Facts are things that are certain, not just likely. 

Asked about whether he has seen spacecraft, Grusch makes this vague and not-very-compelling claim: "I’ve seen some interesting photos. And I’ve read some very interesting reports."  You could summarize the interview by saying Grusch has come to believe there have been crashed UFOs because of some-sort-of-something he was told and some-sort-of-something he saw, but he fails to give any specific account of a particular person seeing a specific thing, and when pressed to give details, he says I can't tell you because it's classified. 

Claims like these recent claims have long been made. The biggest claimant was the late Phillip J. Corso, who wrote a book entitled The Day After Roswell. Corso was a military intelligence officer who claimed that the United States government had recovered a crashed vehicle of non-human origin. Early in the book, on page 2, Corso makes the doubtful claim he knew that "key aspects of American foreign policy were being dictated from inside the Kremlin." On page 4 he states that the "seeds for the development" of technologies such as integrated circuits and lasers were "found in the crash of the alien craft at Roswell" in July, 1947. We then read from Corso a very detailed description that purports to tell us exactly what happened when the Roswell incident occurred. The narration we get is like the text of a novel. It's rather suspicious that we hear lots of dialog including many exact quotes of what people said. How could you know exactly what people said at such a time? Back then there were no portable tape recorders. And presumably there was no stenographer walking around and jotting down what everyone said as they said it. 

By page 32 Corso is telling us that he unpacked a crate to find the coffin of what looked to him like a gray-skinned alien with four fingers,  and a lightbulb-shaped head. He says he found a document describing the creature as an inhabitant of a vehicle that crashed earlier that week. This seems to be about all the relevant "what I personally saw" details we get from Corso, and what is described is something that possibly could have been a human body distorted from a crash and a fire. The clip here summarizes some of the claims in the book. 

On page 122 Corso makes this statement about extraterrestrial biological entities (EBEs):

"We didn't know what the EBEs wanted at first, but we knew that between the cattle mutilations, surveillance of our secret weapon installations, reports of abductions of human beings, and their consistent buzzing of our unmanned and manned space launches, the EBEs weren't just friendly visitors looking for a polite way to say, 'Hello, we meant you no harm.' They meant us harm, and we knew it."

This rather sounds like unhinged paranoia. Corso has linked together very diverse observational reports, none of which involve harm of humans or killing of humans, and has cited these as evidence not merely that extraterrestrials are visiting us, but that they are hostile to us. None of the items mentioned justify a claim of hostile visiting extraterrestrials, and claiming "we knew" of such hostility seems absurd. Corso sounds very much here like someone who does not know what he does not know, someone who mistakes scattered suspicions for knowledge.

On page 267 Corso gives us this little bit of speculation, which sounds rather "off the wall":

"These creatures weren't benevolent alien beings who had come to enlighten human beings. They were genetically altered humanoid automatons, cloned biological entities, actually, who were harvesting biological specimens on Earth for their own experimentation."

You got it? According to Corso, the ETs were "actually" kind of like cloned robotic gene-spliced half-human cow-mutilating zombies. Is it any wonder why not too many people believed Corso's story?

I will give some reasons below why I don't believe Corso's claims that some important US high technology was derived from technology recovered from a crashed vehicle from another planet. Before discussing such reasons, let me state two background assumptions:

Background assumption #1: An extraterrestrial civilization would probably be vastly older than ours. I can explain why scientists presume that if an extraterrestrial civilization existed, it would be very much older than humanity. The universe is believed to be about 13 billion years old, and if intelligent life were to arise on some other planet, such a thing might have occurred at any time in the past billion years. Human civilization is less than ten thousand years old.  So mathematically it seems far more likely that civilized life arising on some other planet would have arisen very many thousands or millions of years before civilized life first appeared on planet Earth.  Since a billion years is a length of time 100,000 times longer than 10,000 years, it would seem to require about a 1 in 100,000 coincidence for Earth to be visited by some extraterrestrial civilization that was only a few thousand years more advanced than ours. It would seem to be vastly more likely that a visiting spacecraft would come come from a civilization very many thousands or millions of years older than ours.   

Background assumption #2: Traveling from a civilized planet in one solar system to a civilized planet in another solar system would require technology vastly beyond anything humanity has. Any type of travel between stars would require technology vastly greater than anything humans have. While the distance to the planet Saturn is almost a billion miles, the distance to the nearest star is about 23 trillion miles, a distance 25,000 times farther than the distance to Saturn. Traveling such a distance would require some technology vastly beyond what humans have. Moreover, there is every reason to suspect that travel between two different solar systems that independently evolved intelligent life would require journeys far greater than the distance between our solar system and the nearest solar system. There are all kinds of reasons for thinking that the appearance of life and intelligent life should be rare blessings rather than something we would expect to find in every solar system. So a spaceship from another solar system would probably have to travel a distance many times greater than 23 trillion miles.  This would be all the more reason for assuming that such a journey could only be made by some civilization vastly more advanced than ours.  

Having given such background assumptions, I can explain two reasons for doubting that humans could get a technological boost by studying crashed extraterrestrial spacecraft. 

Reason #1: It Would Be Very Unlikely That a Technology Vastly Greater Than Ours Would Produce Spacecraft That Would Crash

Compared to the enormous technical difficulty of traveling between solar systems containing civilizations, it would seem to be "child's play" to develop crash-proof spacecraft that could explore a planet without any risk of crashing. We can presume that humans will invent crash-proof cars and crash-proof aircraft within a few centuries, and we can presume that some extraterrestrial civilization would have invented crash-proof craft for exploring a planet very long before it mastered the vastly harder feat of being able to successfully travel the vast distances between different solar systems containing civilizations. Therefore, claims that humans recovered bodies or technology from crashed extraterrestrial spaceships seem to be intrinsically implausible. (In the interview mentioned above, Grusch claims that earthly authorities have "quite a number" of alien spacecraft, and that "some are landed and some are crashed," giving the additional implausible idea that the government stole ET spacecraft which had not crashed.) 

Reason #2: It Would Be Very Unlikely That Humans Could Use a Crashed Extraterrestrial Spacecraft as a Springboard to Technological Advances 

In general it is hard for one group to benefit from accidentally getting or seeing an example of some technology beyond their technology, unless the gulf between the two technologies is relatively small.  An example was the famous visits Steve Jobs and Apple engineers made to the XEROX Parc facility, where they saw a mouse-driven computer graphical user interface. The visits were beneficial because Apple had already developed a personal computer, and had some idea of what needed to be done to make the leap to a GUI computer like the one seen in the visits. 

But if you had given an Apple iPad to, say, Thomas Edison, he would have been unable to use it as an inspiration for new inventions. Advanced ideas such as a computer operating system and software applications would have been utterly foreign to him, and he wouldn't know where to begin in reverse-engineering an Apple iPad. There is a chain of technological innovation lasting 80 years, stretching from World War II machines like those that cracked the Enigma code, to the big refrigerator-sized computers of the 1960's, to the first personal computers of the 1970's and early 1980's, to the first computers with graphical user interfaces (such as the Macintosh), and finally leading to a device like the iPad. Edison would not have been able to imagine that chain of innovation, and if he were given an iPad it would seem like mysterious black magic that he could never reproduce. 

If humans were to discover some crashed vehicle created by visitors from some other solar system, it would in all likelihood be some technology we could make no use of, because it would be so far above our own technology that we could never figure out how it worked. Similarly Leonardo da Vinci would not have been able to make any progress in electronics or computer software if he had been given an iPad early in his career and if he had tried to pry it open and figure out how it worked. 

Postscript: A general reason for doubting sensational claims from intelligence officers such as Corso and Grusch may be that government intelligence agencies such as the CIA and the KGB sometimes deliberately put out false information to confuse people, and send them in the wrong direction. This is sometimes done to minimize the chance that people will discover information that such agencies wish to keep secret. A famous historical example of this was Operation Bodyguard, which involved creating false impressions that the D-Day landing would occur using the shortest invasion route rather than the longer route leading to Normandy. 

The post here speculates about a reason why the US government might want to put out false stories about technology obtained from recovered crashed extraterrestrial spacecraft: simply to make foreign adversaries more likely to fear the US military's technology, and be less likely to attack the US. 

On July 26, 2023 Grusch testified before a congressional committee, with two other people. But he failed to give us any reasons for believing his previous claims. His testimony was the same kind of claims he previously made: statements that he believes the US has one or more recovered non-human vehicles, based on things he has been told by others. He failed to give any specifics on who it was who told him these things, and what it was he was told  So thus far all we have is what could be mere rumor-mongering. Grusch made the very vague claim that "non-human biologics" have been recovered from crashed vehicles, but that term could apply to living matter from non-human earthly organisms. When Grusch is asked to supply specifics, he often says something like "I can only say so much to the general public," or some such evasive phrase suggesting classified information. I suppose secrets have to be kept, but so far Grusch's statements should convince no one, because of their lack of specificity.