The other day, I watched a new History Channel documentary, "Secret Access: UFOs on the Record" based on the recent book UFOs by Leslie Kean (which I commented on last year in my old blog, on October 5). The documentary was somewhat repetitious and it had a slightly dated retro design (jittery jump cuts and grainy fonts). It proved to be a mildly interesting update on Kean's book. Some of it was genuinely eyebrow-raising, particularly former Arizona governor Fife Symington's account of seeing the 'Phoenix lights' UFO (described as a huge dark delta shape with lights), and the Belgian wave of UFO sightings (also involving large wing or delta-shaped objects). However, after I saw the documentary, I spent a while on the web looking for critical appraisals. I found a few things that decreased my enthusiasm for the subject. Fife Symington's credibility is perhaps undermined by the fact that he was convicted of extortion (a conviction later overturned; he was pardoned by President Clinton). Also, the documentary highlighted a photo taken during the Belgian UFO wave (showing an under-exposed triangular object with lights on it), but it seems that the person who took the photo now says it was a hoax. The documentary also showed the famous McMinnville, Oregon photo from the early 1950s, taken at face value as genuine; I recall that the oddly-asymmetrical disk seen in that photo was recently identified as a certain model of truck rear-view mirror. (The documentary did stress the danger of taking UFO photos or videos at face value; they showed a couple of nicely-turned fakes, with famous special effects producer Douglas Trumbull explaining how he could tell they are fake.) I was left with the feeling that Kean and her producers were less than careful in their research.
One thing I find exasperating about the hoax photos mentioned above is that they were presented as having survived critical scrutiny by physicists or other experts. Apparently, even a simple hoax can convince a skilled scientist or engineer. An embarrassing recent example of this appeared earlier this year when the Daily Kos political website published detailed analyses proving that the lewd image on Rep. Wiener Twitter page was a hoax planted by hackers seeking to discredit him; Wiener later acknowledged posting the image himself. Some 'Kossacks' were furious at being deceived.
Now it's not surprising that a fringe topic such as UFOs is subject to some telling debunking. But I ran across a curious inversion of this yesterday: A possibly controversial but mainstream claim that has been subjected to some fringe debunking. This is in regards to the work of T. Colin Campbell, author of the popular book The China Study. Campbell claims that a large epidemiological study in China substantiates the benefits of a vegan diet (dramatically lower risks for diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and some cancers); he also described lab work done by himself and others showing that casien (a milk protein) is a cancer promoter in rats, which provides a plausible biological basis for reduction in cancer from a plant-based diet. Other researchers have found similar results, in particular Caldwell Esselstyn and Dean Ornish. But I thought I would look for critical reviews of Campbell's book. What I found was surprising. There were some reviewers (on Amazon) who suggested that Campbell was incorrect on the necessity of a plant-based diet, that many people are healthy and live long lives on omnivorous diets (which is not hard to believe of course). But I couldn't find detailed, informed criticisms that said his diet either wouldn't have the claimed benefits or would be dangerous in some way (beyond the obligatory caution that you need to take vitamin B12). There appeared to be two exceptions to this, repeated on many websites: a critique of Campbell by a writer who examined his statistical conclusions (the raw data of the China Study is publicly available), and another critique by a writer associated with something called the Weston A. Price Foundation. It turns out the former critique was written by an advocate of eating raw meat who lacks statistical training (making basic errors in her conclusions), and it turns out that the Weston A. Price Foundation is a group that advocates dairy and other animal products. (This group names itself after an early-20th century dentist who discovered that people in various countries who eat traditional diets have much lower rates of the modern "lifestyle" diseases we suffer, but the diet the group advocates is actually unlike the diets the dentists observed in the countries he studied.) So both of these critiques were rather on the fringe, and I'm going to stick with the mostly-vegan diet I've been trying for the last several weeks.