Russian Scientist: UFO Crashed Into Meteorite to Save Earth

[PKIDelirium]

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,522217,00.html

http://img192.imageshack.us/img192/7581/lolwutb.jpg

Dr. Yuri Labvin, president of the Tunguska Spatial Phenomenon Foundation, insists that an alien spacecraft sacrificed itself to prevent a gigantic meteor from slamming into the planet above Siberia on June 30, 1908.

:err:

Most scientists think the blast was caused by a meteorite exploding several miles above the surface. But Labvin thinks quartz slabs with strange markings found at the site are remnants of an alien control panel, which fell to the ground after the UFO slammed into the giant rock.

:lol:

[Zodiac]

It's true, I was there. I made them a sandwich in exchange for them crashing into the meteor.

[curiousuburb]

Keep in mind this is FOX... sponsors of the Moon Hoax documentary, and who have a whole web section devoted to "Evolution controversies" like this one:

As scientists around the world celebrate the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin's seminal work on evolution, Adnan Oktar, a college dropout turned theorist of Islamic creationism, is working on the fifth volume of a 14-part masterwork that he says will bury Darwinism once and for all.

"Darwin and his theory are dead," says Mr. Oktar, founder and honorary president of the Science Research Foundation, an Istanbul outfit dedicated to debunking the Victorian-era English naturalist.

Darwin, says his 52-year-old Turkish scourge, is "Satan's biggest trick on humanity."

Mr. Oktar, who briefly studied interior design, hasn't had much success swaying scientists with the weight of his research.

"He is a complete and utter ignoramus," says Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist and Oxford University professor.

The physical weight of Mr. Oktar's work, however, is considerable. Each volume of his anti-Darwin magnum opus, "Atlas of Creation," weighs more than 13 pounds.

By FOX 'journalism' standards, an Interior Design Dropout is comparable to Dawkins not for good science, but because he writes heavy books... riiiiiiight. :rolleyes:

[pscates2.0]

...ah, and here we go! I've been waiting. I knew you guys wouldn't let me down!

:)

I was going to say something a couple of hours ago, when this thread first came up, about a "countdown to the inevitable Fox-bashing/hysteria sure to ensue" (always the outcome anytime someone here has the gall, or simple lack of foresight, to dare post a link from or about them).

But I thought pointing it out might affect the outcome (people wouldn't say anything just to make me wrong, etc. :D ), so I just waited it out (knowing it probably wouldn't be long). Just over two hours. A bit longer than I expected, but hey...in the end I knew I had it called.

In any case...

You get the prize today, cb.

:p

http://www.thefoodsection.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/12/09/cookie.jpg

...and an autographed Sean Hannity poster. Enjoy!

We return you to your regularly scheduled thread about wacky UFO tales!

[curiousuburb]

Thanks Pscates!

I was going to go the other way and offer competing science from a Research fellow/astronomer/meteor expert I know who recently co-published on Tunguska in a peer reviewed journal (http://star.arm.ac.uk/preprints/2009/539.pdf)

But the scientific/mathematical bar is clearly higher in that article... (I would struggle to follow it except for the fact that I know the author's previous work)... and it's hard to resist mocking FOX for how low their bar seems. :p

[BuonRotto]

Boy, what will FOX do if the Islamic Creationist is convincing? I mean, it's creationist... OK, check that off, but... I-I-I... Islamic?! Nooo! Rpuert Murdoch's greedy little head will assplode.

As for the aliens taking a bullet for Mother Earth. Right on! I'm glad that's been settled. What will we do with the other 8 1/2 hours of this day?

[Chinney]

... But if a network is especially moronic, is it not fair game to point that out? Surely we are not obliged to abandon our critical faculties just because something is especially and repeatedly stupid.

[pscates2.0]

No, of course not.

But some of you could spread it around a bit, that's all. Many here are quite selective in their outrage, and seem to have varying tolerance levels for shoddy, biased or agenda-driven journalism. One outfit, again and again, gets singled out. And the rest, apparently, just get a gigantic, "they're fighting the good fight...and they're not Fox!" pass. Just because you agree with some of the folks at MSNBC and other places doesn't make their conflicts of interest, ethical lapses, sloppy and sensationalist reporting "okay", does it?

:)

According to many (most?) here, Fox News is the sole fuck-up. But I know that's coming mostly from a political stance and viewpoint, so it just comes across extra silly when anyone else's piss-poor performance and work never seems to register on your radar.

That's my sole beef with all this...the double-standard and slight hypocrisy.

I think all these huge news outfits and networks are pretty awful and useless, for all kinds of reasons. You cannot constantly single out one, and expect to be taken seriously. It doesn't really work that way.

We've gone over this before, fellas...

:)

But I sincerely don't want to louse this thread up. I was just making a point (actually, some of you above were). I only noted it...

Apologies to PKDelirium. I'm not going to wade into this any further. I don't need to.

:)

[curiousuburb]

Hey, I'm all for equal opportunity mockery of batshit-crazy, bad-science, and/or lazy-journalist media outlets. ;)
I've worked in all major media formats (print/radio/tv/web), from local N. American papers to International radio in Asia to BBC online.

Celebutard publicists? Can't stand them.
Dishonest reporters? Can't stand them.
Hypocritical editors? Can't stand them.
'Hairdo' teleprompter-readers? Can't stand them.

At least Weekly World News seemed self-aware of their irony and hyperbole. :p

[BuonRotto]

Hey now, your beloved CNN, where you get a lot of your thread topics from, displays a good metric ton of asshattery, buffoonery and general dumpth too. It's not fair to say that we single out FOX when we have threads like this (http://forums.applenova.com/showthread.php?t=29149&highlight=CNN+t+shirts) from the past. And remember, as they say on Fark (and I repeat here with some regularity), it's not news, it's CNN!

[Moogs]

This is what happens when you spend too much time in Siberia and start drinking break fluid shots for entertainment at night.

[Luca]

Every major news network is guilty of rampant bad journalism, but three of the worst reports I've seen in recent years were all by Fox News or local Fox affiliates. Of course, I'm sure there are plenty of examples from other news networks, these are just the ones that come to mind when I think of the total lack of journalistic integrity that exists today. The first one is especially bad.

Let's see what I can dig up here:

A local Fox affiliate reports on the fake drug "Jenkem," (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UsNbsjpuLc) a hoax that has existed for years and would have been revealed as such had anyone done even 15 seconds of research. Funny thing about Jenkem is that it was all started by a single person who made up a bunch of stuff, which eventually made its way to a sheriff's department and then the local news, and in its aftermath, it's actually led a few people to experiment with the "drug" who had never heard of it before it became an Internet phenomenon.
A local Fox affiliate reports on "Anonymous," (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNO6G4ApJQY) and while most of the reporting here is semi-true but exaggerated, the worst bits are where the guy flips through a bunch of papers while talking about people hacking Myspace passwords (as if to imply that the papers are actually full of Myspace passwords) and where they show a clip of a van exploding (twice!) for no reason.
Fox News reports on "full digital nudity and sex" in the game Mass Effect, (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKzF173GqTU) even though no one involved actually played the game or even bothered to watch the one 30-second long scene involving any kind of sexual content (which is PG-13 material at worst). They eventually aired an apology for this one.

I suspect, however, that the bad journalism from the other big news organizations is more subtle than these colossal fuck-ups by Fox. I often see extremely short reports on things that would be interesting but leave out a lot of information. There are reports on studies that leave out the most basic information necessary to determine what the results mean. There are reports of violence in the Middle East and other areas that leave nearly everything to the imagination.

At least Weekly World News seemed self-aware of their irony and hyperbole. :p

WWN has long maintained that they simply report the news as it is presented to them. They just don't do much in the way of fact-checking what they get. :lol:

[curiousuburb]

Jon Stewart regularly takes swipes at ABC/NBC/CBS, as well as the cable world of CNN (Crossfire?), MSNBC (Cramer?), and bad journalism generally (WhiteHouse Press Corps?)... but FOX is regularly in a whole other league of dumbed-down asshattitude.

Nitpick case in point: The headline and 5 seconds of fact-checking facepalm avoidance...

In Space they're asteroids/comets/minorplanets/dust/whatever.
Once they enter the atmosphere and burn up, they're Meteors.
Meteorites are the bits that make it to the ground.

So for a UFO to crash into a Meteorite, the object must have already hit the Earth... :| semantics to some, but a screamingly obvious error to any space expert or editor worth their salt. ;)

[@_@ Artman]

When I was about 15 or 16 a friend and I went up on the highest hill in our neighborhood to try out my new pair of binoculars. From that vantage point you could see all around for miles. It was daylight at the time.

While we were trying them out, my friend saw what to him looked like a plane and I pointed the binoculars at it.

Thing was, it wasn't a plane. It had no wings and it was very slow and silent. It looked like a drop of mercury, flat and disc shaped, sort of a silvery reflective surface on it. Which made it very hard to notice. It moved very slowly. It also was not that very high in the air either maybe 3-4 miles above the ground (I'm not good at gauging heights, it was more or less at the average height of a helicopter in flight let's say).

We watched it dumbfounded for a few minutes as it glided across the sky. Then noiselessly it soared up and away within seconds and was gone.

There was absolutely no news of this or of anyone else that we know who saw it.

That's my true UFO story. Anyone else?

[PKIDelirium]

Weather balloon.

:p

[@_@ Artman]

Weather balloon.

:p

Absolutely not. As I said it wasn't round, it was flat and disc shaped. Also it was at least 20 feet or more in diameter. Solid. And it was hovering very low and slowly gliding by. It wasn't a weather balloon. I have viewed weather balloons online since then and haven't seen any that would match what my friend and I saw that day.

And I have never heard or seen weather balloons soar up and into the sky, vanishing within seconds either.

[Moogs]

It was Bill Birnes, prior to infiltrating our race and becoming the world's most hated UFO hunter. And in case you're wondering... yes... Bill *does* in fact wear his sunglasses at night.

http://www.2012quantumleap.com/img/photos/speaker_billbirnes.jpg

[alcimedes]

You're just trying to call me out. Not happening. They might be watching me.....

[addabox]

A weather balloon with a radiosonde came to earth in my neighborhood when I was about 10 years old. It was the greatest thing that had ever happened to us (me and my buddies). It was like our Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Fierce fighting erupted over who got to keep it (based on who saw it first, who touched it first, who knew what it was first, etc.), with an eventual elaborate rotating custody scheme getting worked out and it taking pride of place in successive kid bedrooms.

There were stickers on the thing imploring the finder to return it to the station that launched it, of course, but there was no way we were going to voluntarily let go of a package of instruments that fell out of the sky onto our lawns.

[Maciej]

What's the deal with that guy? Doesn't he run a big UFO-hunter magazine?

[PKIDelirium]

Absolutely not. As I said it wasn't round, it was flat and disc shaped. Also it was at least 20 feet or more in diameter. Solid. And it was hovering very low and slowly gliding by. It wasn't a weather balloon. I have viewed weather balloons online since then and haven't seen any that would match what my friend and I saw that day.

And I have never heard or seen weather balloons soar up and into the sky, vanishing within seconds either.

:no:

Someone's government conspiracy filter is broken. :p

[Dave]

What's the deal with that guy?

With Bill Birnes? My roommate thinks that he always wears those sunglasses because he's actually a 2nd or 3rd generation human-grey (http://www.crowdedskies.com/grey_alien.htm) hybrid (http://www.unexplainable.net/artman/publish/article_2824.shtml) that got left here because the rest of the ship's crew couldn't stand his lunacy anymore.

[Maciej]

I bet he has one glass eye.

[Moogs]

And one testicle.

[addabox]

One glass testicle. Which emits a low humming sound when exposed to UV light.

[PKIDelirium]

http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2009/05/tunguska_101_years_and_1_idiot.php

:lol: Awesome title.