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Ben Radford's Dubious Debunking of a Non-Existent Ancient Astronaut Documentary

9/17/2012

5 Comments

 
I have a bit of a cold today, so I’m not quite as sharp as usual today. Nor are my fingers doing a particularly good job of typing. So, I’m going to try to keep today’s post a bit short.

The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry today is promoting a piece skeptic Ben Radford wrote for the Discovery News Blog earlier today in which he claims that a British TV series suggested that Easter Island’s statues were carved by extraterrestrials. Radford admits that he did not see the series and is basing his lengthy critique on a summary he gleaned from an “article” on dubious news site Huliq by Dave Masko, a UFO buff whom my readers may remember for his weird claims about Stonehenge as a UFO command center in that same publication this past January.

[Update: Radford has updated his post to correct the errors noted below. My comments refer to the original version of his piece posted on September 15.]

Radford takes Masko for a real reporter and assumes, without checking, that Masko has accurately reported the content of the BBC-Discovery co-produced series, called South Pacific in Britain and Wild Pacific in the United States. Radford’s lack of research about his own employer’s product is evident immediately when he fails to check with BBC Two or Animal Planet to see that the series first aired in 2009, not last week, as Masko claims. This somewhat undercuts the currency of the claim. (Animal Planet, purveyor of Bigfoot and mermaid shows, is a unit of Discovery Communications, owner of Discovery News, for which Radford writes.)

I have also reviewed the “Ocean of Islands” and "Strange Islands" episodes of South Pacific, and it is a standard issue nature documentary. I recommend Benedict Cumberbatch’s BBC narration over Mike Rowe’s Animal Planet version. The only “aliens” it discusses are non-native species that arrived on the island over the past few millennia. Easter Island’s statues are discussed only in passing as a remnant of a fallen (human) civilization, not an extraterrestrial invention: “a solemn reminder of a fallen civilization,” in the program’s words, caused by ecological disaster. Does that sound like aliens to you?

But no matter. Radford also failed to read Masko’s bizarre article carefully. Masko has purposely and confusingly conflated the South Pacific documentary with a French UFO study. Because Masko failed to understand the difference between non-native “alien” species and advanced extraterrestrial intelligence, he applies to it the findings of a non-official 1990s-era French UFO study group called COMETA that Easter Island is an extraterrestrial culture (in Appendix 6, the “antiquity” of the UFO phenomenon). It was the French UFO group, not the BBC, who made the claim about Easter Island. One of the quotes Radford attributes to the BBC came from COMETA instead.

Radford should have read more carefully and done some basic research before going off on a program he had never watched.

I am, however, a bit confused about Radford's claims about the program's script, which he claims to quote directly. The article he cites, naming COMETA as the source, gives the quote at left, while Radford attributes it to the BBC program using different wording at right:
Moreover, with the great stone origins on Easter Island vexing experts for decades - as to “who built these giant stone statues and how did they get there on this remote Pacific Island” – the famed “COMETA Report” was very careful not to go too far in expressing theories about the French government’s extraterrestrial findings...

The Wild Pacific program makes statements such as that “the great stone origins on Easter Island [have] vexed experts for decades: Who built these giant stone statues and how did they get there on this remote Pacific Island?”

Now, since Radford said he never watched the BBC/Animal Planet show (in which this grammatically questionable quote created apparently from a machine translation of the French COMETA study doesn't appear anyway), where did Radford get the rewritten quote? The words don't match, and Radford makes much more of Masko's text part of the quote, with a gerund turning into a verb. 

If this were an ancient astronaut theorist doing this, I'd immediately call this out as poor scholarship and quotation manipulation. I feel compelled to do the same to Radford, the skeptic, and ask him: did you alter this quote, intentionally or not, or do you have an independent source for it?
5 Comments
Ben Radford
9/17/2012 08:59:09 am

Jason-

Thanks for pointing this out; I was sent the Huliq.com article link by the Discovery editors, and I had no particular reason to challenge it. I didn't vouch for the piece's legitimacy, I was quoting from the piece (which as you note has several grammatical problems). I had no reason to doubt it, and of course I can’t always fact-check other reporter’s material and quotes. Upon re-reading the original piece I see you are correct that I mistakenly attributed the COMETA quote; I'm working to address that now, and hope to revise the piece ASAP, including noting that the Huliq.com quotes are questionable.
I hope you found the bulk of the piece factual and interesting.

It would have been courteous if you had contacted me privately to ask about it, instead of going out of your way to write a blog about it, and post comments on both Facebook and the Discovery News site. If I make errors (or repeat others' errors) I neither want nor expect fellow skeptics to ignore them, but that's typically a professional courtesy I extend to others. For me, it goes back to Ray Hyman's suggestion of being charitable, in his classic piece "On Criticism."

cheers,

Ben

Reply
Jason Colavito link
9/17/2012 09:36:11 am

I understand how you feel, Ben. I didn't decide to launch a multimedia campaign against you. I posted a quick comment on your Discovery News page because I remembered that series and knew it didn't say what you said it said. But then I thought to research it more, at which point I reported my research on my blog because it is of interest to my readers, many of whom had already sent me links to your piece. I felt reporting the facts fast was important. As is my practice, I also link my blog posts on my Twitter account.

The bulk of your discussion of Easter Island was very interesting, and I find it fascinating that Discovery News itself sent you the piece so you could criticize Discovery's own program!

While I appreciate your position on fact-checking other reporters' work, as skeptics we are called upon to doubt extraordinary claims, which is why I doubted that the BBC would produce an ancient astronaut program that returned no Google results. The fact is, the program just isn't an ancient astronaut show.

I appreciate the question of professional courtesy and whether to communicate privately about these matters. But where would I be if I treated skeptics differently than ancient astronaut theorists? The fact is that I don't know you or most of the people I write about personally, and I have no way of knowing who would respond, or how. So, my general policy is that material published in public is fair game for analysis in public. Heaven knows I've made my fair share of mistakes, and I usually don't find out until I read about them on somebody's blog!

Reply
Ben Radford
9/17/2012 12:22:14 pm

Jason-

"Where would I be if I treated skeptics differently than ancient astronaut theorists?"

Indeed; I didn't ask you to treat me, or any other skeptic, differently than anyone else; and I have no idea how you treat ancient astronaut theorists! I just noted that I would have handled it differently, but that's my own policy, modeled after Ray Hyman's text on proper criticism, and not one that I expect others to follow. To each his own.

To be fair, I did not fact-check your claim that "Wild Pacific" did not contain the ancient astronauts material, though you may take me to task for taking your word for it and not asking for evidence (other than your statement that you reviewed them). Masko says it did, you say it didn't, and I (like most readers) never saw it to know who's right. For all I know, you're wrong--but I figured I'd give you the benefit of the doubt. Maybe I'm not skeptical enough! :-)

At any rate I appreciate you bringing the issue to my attention, and I corrected it almost immediately.

cheers,

Ben

Reply
Jason Colavito link
9/17/2012 01:01:32 pm

When I find an ancient astronaut theorist saying something that doens't match facts, I put the alleged statement side by side with the original. I catalog these on my site in the "Alternative Authors' Quote Fraud" section.

Masko misunderstands the show's use of "alien" (i.e. non-indigenous) to mean "extraterrestrial" and "other beings" (i.e. non-human animals) as "extraterrestrials," which is not the position of the BBC documentary in any of the episodes I reviewed. The series depicts Easter Island culture as an arrival from outside (i.e. Polynesia) undone by ecological disaster. Again, to be fair, I have not screened the entire 6 hour series, but there is no material online referencing extraterrestrials in this series except in Masko's article, nor in the Easter Island segments from the cited episode(s) that I reviewed.

I think we'd both agree that "proper criticism" should start with a grounding in the facts, and more or less my criticism of you was that you were too quick to slam the BBC and Animal Planet for something you hadn't checked out first. My own view of criticism stems from journalism ethics, in which the author does not share material with a subject before publication, lest it compromise his or her views.

I appreciate you correcting your post, and I wish you the best of luck.

Reply
terry the censor
10/5/2012 07:35:15 am

> It would have been courteous if you had contacted me privately

For what reason, Mr. Radford? To inform you that you hadn't watched the programme you criticised?

> To be fair, I did not fact-check your claim that "Wild Pacific" did not contain the ancient astronauts material...For all I know, you're wrong--but I figured I'd give you the benefit of the doubt.

Which makes snarky statements such as that one plain stupid.

Shame.

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    • Miscellaneous Documents >
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      • The Life and Death of Crown Prince Rudolf
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      • James Dean's Scrapbook
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      • The Amazing James Dean Hoax!
    • Free Classic Pseudohistory eBooks
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