This from Joel Achenbach, the wonderful science writer for the Washington Post whose book, Captured by Aliens, got a good review here.
Wednesday, July 12, 2000; 1:51 PM
Carl Sagan is a modern-day hero of science. He inspired millions of people to ponder the beauty of the universe, and to understand that we are a tiny, precious fragment of the cosmos. But he also implored them to be skeptical, to resist superstition and pseudo-science. Sagan told everyone to keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.
Now comes a bit of news that just about knocked me out of my chair. Joe Firmage, a Silicon Valley millionaire who became a highbrow UFO guru after he was visited in his bedroom by "a remarkable being clothed in brilliant white light," has signed a deal with Ann Druyan, head of Carl Sagan Productions--and Sagan's widow--to start a new company that will have a Web portal and produce science-based entertainment.
I want to resist the urge to start babbling hysterically about how wrong this is. But I do think the names "Firmage" and "Sagan" do not belong in the same sentence, unless separated by an extremely elaborate clause. Sagan promoted science and scientific thinking. Frobably aren't here. Firmage says they probably are. It's not a trivial philosophical distinction.
To be fair, Firmage is a cut above 90 percent of the folks who work in the field of "anomalies." He's incredibly smart. He's successful, having started the Internet services firm USWeb before leaving to pursue his UFO interests. He's not crazy. He doesn't scream or rant. He's a perfectly genial fellow.
He's also ambitious. Firmage has said he wants to start a movement. Two years ago he pounded out a rambling book, modestly called "The Truth," and put it up on the Internet, but he's since taken it down, which means we can't link to the part where the mysterious entity in his bedroom emits an electric blue sphere that enter's Firmage's body and triggers "the most unimaginable ecstasy I have ever experienced, a pleasure vastly beyond orgasm."
Druyan has been a fierce defender of her husband's legacy. She's passionate about scientific reasoning. Why would she go into business with Firmage? How could she do it?
Her answer: the new venture will not allow Firmage to advance his fringe theories. There is a specific legal agreement that prevents Firmage from doing so, she said.
"It unequivocably states that if I feel that Carl's legacy has in any way been besmirched by any statement made in the name of our company, then I walk and I'll take everything with me. Nothing less than that can protect the legacy," Druyan told me.
I asked her if this was an unholy alliance. She said no.
"Carl and I worked with a lot of people over the last few decades who had conventional religious beliefs that in some ways are as remote from what I believe as what Joe Firmage believes," she said.
Firmage said, "I want to tread lightly." But he made clear that his new media company--he'll run the Web portal and Druyan will head the production studio--will deal with the kinds of theories that interest him.
"Will I use this media company to inequitably promote my view? No," he said. But he said it would "absolutely" deal, responsibly, with "science anomalies."
The "historic joint venture," as the press release puts it, is code-named Project Voyager. It has $23 million in venture capital behind it. I will admit that despite reading the press release and talking to Firmage and Druyan I remain a bit fuzzy on what this company will actually do. The press release calls it "a new kind of media network that intends to transform entertainment and learning drawn from the rapidly expanding knowledge base of science." The production studio will make TV shows and movies, which will be promoted on the Web site alongside news articles and other educational material. In the press release, Druyan says, "There is a hunger for myths, images and dreams that do justice to our radically altered sense of who, where and when we are... And where we might go and who we might become."
Right.
Firmage will be tempted use his new company to promote his theories about breakthrough physics. He appears to believe that a small group of scientists have discovered a heretofore secret property of the universe that will someday allow us to extract limitless energy from the "vacuum" of space, cancel the inertial mass of an object, build faster-than-light spaceships, and zip around the cosmos at the snap of a finger.
That imminent breakthrough could explain why aliens are here, snooping around, checking us out. They know we're about to go galactic. They want to give us the ground rules, maybe.
It's hard to know how much of this Firmage really believes and how much of it he is merely entertaining with his very open mind. But if humans and aliens get together soon in a formal way, Firmage wants to be at the table.
Firmage argues that he believes in science. He says he only goes where the facts lead him. But I have an unfortunate fact to report: Everyone working in the world of anomalies =96 of UFOs, near-death experiences, reincarnation, cattle mutilations, crop circles, psychokinesis, the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot and so on =96 says exactly the same thing. We're scientific! We're not crazy! We just want to stick to the facts, and the facts tell us there are enormous hairy proto-humans lumbering through the Oregon forests!
Firmage doesn't say that aliens are necessarily here right now. But he thinks it's "highly likely" that we've been visited at some point. A small group of people have had knowledge about this issue for the past fifty years, he said.
"I believe that the most economical explanation for some number of UFOS is extraterrestrial visitation," he said. "Ann disagrees with that view. Both of us agree to let science arbitrate."
Firmage has also been talking with The Planetary Society, which was founded by Sagan in 1980 to increase public support for space science. Some kind of business deal could be announced at any time. Firmage offers one thing to the keepers of the Sagan flame: Money. He has been able to raise tens of millions of dollars in venture capital. What they offer Firmage, in turn, is a big shot of credibility.
The SETI Institute, meanwhile, said no to Firmage. All these groups need the kind of money Firmage has, but they need their good reputations, too, and SETI, which takes on the already rather spectacular goal of detecting alien civilizations through scientific techniques, doesn't need to get mixed up with a UFO person.
Sagan's longtime friend and colleague, Frank Drake, the head of the SETI Institute, told me that a deal with Firmage's firm could have meant sizable streams of revenue coming into his organization. But it wasn't the right thing to do.
"Any connection with Firmage, no matter what disclaimers you put on your site, people will take this as an endorsement of the views of Firmage. This would damage our image in the minds of many of our scientific colleagues and members of the general public, including major donors who support us," Drake said.
There is a thought I've clung to as I've ruminated about this latest move by Firmage. It is that Sagan's legacy isn't up for grabs, no matter who strikes what deal. Sagan's name can't be bought. He put his ideas on the record. He wrote books. The books had readers, and those readers are not stupid.
We know the difference between Carl Sagan and Joe Firmage.
Rough Draft appears three times a week at washingtonpost.com and would very much like to find a way to cancel its inertial mass.
2000 The Washington Post Company
Thanks to Skeptic Senior Editor Frank Miele for passing this along to me:
The Electronic Telegraph July 13, 2000
A father accused of sexually abusing his autistic son, based on evidence gained from a technique likened to using a Ouija board, was cleared by a judge yesterday.
Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, President of the High Court Family Division, condemned "facilitated communication" - a technique designed to allow children with learning disabilities to spell out their thoughts on a keyboard - as "dangerous".
The 50-year-old businessman from the south of England was accused of abusing his 17-year-old son, who also suffers epilepsy and has a mental age of less than two, after the technique was used by a worker at the special needs unit where he has lived since 1992.
It involves an adult lightly supporting the hand of a child over a card with a keyboard and the words "yes" and "no" on it. The device, which led to numerous sexual abuse court cases in America, was discredited when mainstream psychologists said the messages were unconsciously influenced by the helper and had no more scientific validity than a Ouija board.
Dame Elizabeth said the technique should not be used in courts to back up or dismiss claims of abuse. She said: "There is no evidence of child sexual abuse, no evidence that the father or anyone else in the family is guilty of any abusing act. Facilitated communication may be viewed with the greatest possible caution unless further evidence is provided.
"It would be wise that the courts should pay the greatest possible attention to the advice of the American Psychological Association that information obtained by facilitated communication should not be used to confirm allegations of abuse."
Thanks to Brian Siano for passing this along to me, from Technology Review
http://www.techreview.com/articles/july00/amato.htm
Lying With Pixels Seeing is no longer believing. The image you see on the evening news could well be a fake--a fabrication of fast new video-manipulation technology.
By Ivan Amato
Last year, Steven Livingston, professor of political communication at George Washington University, astonished attendees at a conference on the geopolitical pros and cons of satellite imagery. He didn't produce evidence of new military mobilizations or global pandemics. Instead, he showed a video of figure skater Katarina Witt during a 1998 skating competition.
In the clip, Witt gracefully plies the ice for about 20 seconds. Then came what is perhaps one of the most unusual sports replays ever seen. The background was the same, the camera movements were the same. In fact, the image was identical to the original in all ways except for a rather important one: Witt had disappeared, along with all signs of her, such as shadows or plumes of ice flying from her skates. In their place was exactly what you would expect if Witt had never been there to begin with--the ice, the walls of the rink and the crowd. So what's the big deal, you ask. After all, Stalin's staff routinely airbrushed persona non grata out of photos more than a half-century ago. And Woody Allen ushered a variation on reality morphing into the movies 17 years ago with Zelig, in which he inserted himself next to Adolf Hitler and Babe Ruth. In films such as Forrest Gump and Wag the Dog, reality twisting has become commonplace.
What sets the Witt demo apart--way apart--is that the technology used to "virtually delete" the skater can now be applied in real time, live, even as a camera records a scene and instantly broadcasts it to viewers. In the fraction of a second between video frames, any person or object moving in the foreground can be edited out, and objects that aren't there can be edited in and made to look real. "Pixel plasticity," Livingston calls it. The implication for those at the satellite imagery conference was sobering: Pictures from orbit may not necessarily be what the satellite's electronic camera actually recorded.
But the ramifications of this new technology reach beyond satellite imagery. As live electronic manipulation becomes practical, the credibility of all video will become just as suspect as Soviet Cold War photos. The problem stems from the nature of modern video. Live or not, it is made of pixels, and as Livingston says, pixels can be changed.