I've got an article in the current (November 2008) issue of Fortean Times (named, of course, after Charles Fort). It's not at all airminded, it's not really historical either -- it has more to do with my shady astrophysicist past. It's about the famous Betty and Barney Hill abduction incident in New Hampshire in 1961 -- that's alien abduction, supposedly. In a hypnosis session a couple years later, Betty recalled being shown a star map on board her abductor's craft, supposedly of nearby space. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a schoolteacher named Marjorie Fish used the latest astronomical data in a prodigious effort to match the map to real stars near the Sun. And eventually she found a good match, which has been touted by some ufologists as scientific proof of the reality of alien visitation, possibly from Zeta Reticuli.
Except that nobody ever checked Fish's model against new astronomical data gathered over the last three decades, in particular the parallax observations made by the Hipparcos satellite in the early 1990s. When you do this, the Fish interpretation falls to pieces! Using her own assumptions and the new data, six of the fifteen stars chosen by Fish must be excluded, which is no match at all. And that's what my article is about. So I think this makes me, officially, a dirty debunker. Or maybe a noisy negativist.
I have an erratum: a footnote I added late in the editing process didn't make it through. It should have come after the word 'collapse' in the fifth sentence in the last column on page 51:
Since writing the above, I have been made aware of an unpublished and thorough analysis of the Fish interpretation by Charles Huffer of MUFON, which also uses Hipparcos data to reach conclusions similar to mine.
Anyway, I promise there will be some aeroplaney stuff soon :)
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Jonathan Dresner
[satire] Well, they must have come from farther away, then. They had to come from somewhere! [/satire]
You're going to hear it, you know. Sounds like good work, though.
Dr Space Junk
I'm lost in admiration! Must buy November issue. To be honest, I've gone off Fortean Times lately as it seems to have become more lightweight and less interesting - but I'm sure your contribution will help that!
Brett Holman
Post authorJonathan:
I'm sure you're right! It's just a bit of fun, though, so ultimately if people don't want to be convinced I don't mind too much ...
Dr Space Junk:
Thank you -- but since you've had Greg Egan commenting on your blog, I think that makes us even!
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Betty and Barney Hill's UFO Star Map and Their Alien Abductions: | Astronotes
Brett Holman
Post authorI recently came across a blog post by a UFO sceptic who has read my Fortean Times article and challenged the foremost promoter of the Hill star map, Stanton T. Friedman, nuclear physicist, about the Hipparcos data. Friedman's response:
Ah, well.
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Anamorfose, Constelações e Extraterrestres
Steve Pearse
Thanks for your website, I’d like to share my own news about Betty Hills star map
I was the person who discovered Marjorie Fish’s Obituary.
I created the Hill-Wilson Star Map
Brett Holman
Post authorWhat stellar data did you use?
UFO curious
Pearse used the 19th edition of Norton’s Star Atlas, apparently: https://www.academia.edu/54662948/Hill_Wilson_Statistical_Analysis_1
Brett Holman
Post authorThanks for this. Norton's is a very basic reference (I got my 17th ed when I was a kind, still pull it now and then!) and hardly compares in depth with the catalogues Fish was using back in the late 1960s. What I actually wanted to know by 'stellar data' was whether he was using Hipparcos or Gaia (which went into operation after I wrote this article, and potentially shifted the distances yet again), or what. The answer is: none of the above, he's not doing the same kind of analysis at all (I mean, telepathy is involved...), so it's not comparable to Fish's attempt.