Adam Savage channels Penn Jillette

I laughed so hard when I saw this video! As a fan of both “Myth Busters” and “Penn & Teller: Bullshit!” I love Adam and Penn, so this made my day =D

Trust me, I’m a doctor

The University of Melbourne has just honored Martin Plowman with a PhD in UFOlogy.

Now this really piqued my interest! Surely for him to have earned a doctorate in the field he must have a great deal of knowledge regarding UFOs.

Dr. Plowman has never actually had any personal experience with UFOs, and he tells us that he “maintains a healthy scepticism on the possibility of their existence”. Well, let’s see if he actually IS skeptical, shall we?

In researching his thesis, Dr. Plowman traveled to Roswell, the site of the infamous “Roswell Incident”. If you do not know the back story to this one, you have been living under a rock for the past sixty years. Suffice it to say, despite all the furore surrounding the debris at Roswell, what it is, what it may have been, and so forth, the majority view of skeptics is that there is nothing extraterrestrial about it.Mac Brazel, the man who actually FOUND the debris described it as a “large area of bright wreckage made up of rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather tough paper and sticks.” Just exactly how would you travel through the vacuum of space at speeds approaching that of light in a craft made of tinfoil, paper and sticks? Even if an alien made it as far as Earth in such a craft, it would disintegrate when it tried to enter the atmosphere. The mere suggestion that Plowman considered Roswell in his doctoral thesis is absurd.

This is one of the most common images available of the wreckage recovered in Roswell, this junk would not make it across my yard let alone across the universe. For an excellent look at the Roswell Incident, please listen to episode #155 of The Skeptics Guide to the Universe.

Plowman’s next stop was Wiltshire, England. Wiltshire has been the site of many, many crop circles. While the designs in the crop circles are complex and beautiful there is no evidence whatsoever that suggests they were actually made by beings from any other planet. In fact, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley have come forward as the originators of the idea, they have even given demonstations of how they created their circles. Despite this, “believers” assert that there is a massive conspiracy to conceal the truth, that crop circles are interstellar art. There is not one shred of testable, physical evidence to support this claim.

Far more impressive than crop circles, a CAT circle!

Unfortunately I have been unable to find any compelling evidence of alien footprints in Chile. I will continue to search, however.

Indeed, if Plowman actually possesses any skepticism on the matter whatsoever, he might realise just how ridiculous this all is. I think it would be safer to give Martin Plowman a PhD in Bullshit and leave it at that.