Dear Michael,

Thank you very much for the birthday present. I have watched the whole
tape right through thrice now (except for all the Starship Troopers bits,
because I recently watched ST both on video and then on the TV the other
week when it was on. Favourite line: "It's and ugly planet. A bug
planet.").

It is quite a provocative tape (in Latin _provocative_, literally means
"for talking about").

Basically you know I am a non-believer and you are a believer, though each
of us has our reservations. I reckon you will however be surprised by what
I am going to write, if perhaps only somewhat mildly. It seems to me
Michael that when someone disagrees with you, you take it personally, as
though the disagreer is tacitly stating that they think you are an idiot
for holding your beliefs. And, I admit, disagreement must always entail
that very message no matter how it is given.

However, when you think about it, any disbelief between two people must
also be a two-way street. I mean surely if I am am thinking `you' are an
idiot for believing in ufos, then surely, by parity, you must think that
`I' am an idiot for NOT believing! There's no way around it, it is
unassailable logic. So you shouldn't take it as a personal assault.

You can if you want, but I don't see the point. Is there some point to
this behaviour I am missing?

But, to the video, entitled "James' tape (It's Mine Man!)".

To start: As we discussed on the phone the footage of that ufo that
follows in the background of a jet and then crashes through the cloudtop I
think is a ufo. Could the footage be a fake? Well, it could, but I don't
believe that for a second. Just look at it, it has absolutely none of the
obvious signs of human tampering - ie, the addition of some fictional like
stylistics that so often can give away phoney stuff. No I don't think it
is a fake.

So, if it isn't a fake, than what is it? Could it be some ultra top secret
new aircraft design? I doubt that too. It had no aerofoils, flew too well,
too fast. Humans haven't ever invented anything like that thing. Nope, I
don't believe that for a second.

There must be some other answer. Certainly it was a craft of some sort. So
that implies an intelligence. Certainly it was not human. So that implies
alien.

Anyhow, there you go.

As for the rest of the ufo footage. Well, they range from intriguing to
obviously just a dot of water on the window (I couldn't believe that
anyone could image that it was anything else than that.) It even refracts
light just like a concave drop of water does!

The one where there is a white object which seems to fly in and out of the
clouds looks to me like it could easily be a thermalling hangglider (it
looks triangular in close up). This would explain why it was going back
and forth. The clouds are some 10 to 20 kilometers off, and if the glider
was in the mid-distance, say about 5k off, then it would still be
unresolvable to sight. The fact that the clouds are so white and have such
a high albedo means that the glider seems to disappear when in from of the
cloud. Though, it could be an alien spacecraft.

A lot of them are so far off to be impossible to say just what they are.
For instance, the one where there is a whole flock (?) of them flying "in
formation" as the voiceover says, well, they could have been plastic bags
caught in an air stream, or white balloons released at the opening of a
big sports event, or something. Against nothing but the sky it is almost
impossible to get any sense of perspective.  I guess they could've been
alien ships, but nothing conclusive there. Could've been plastic bags. Or
something else.

The two Russian ones we discussed on the phone. But on rewatching the
speeding cylinder is also an enigma. What could that be? Certainly not a
plane of human construction. Perhaps it too is an alien craft. Certainly
not any natural phenomenon.

As for the alien autopsies. Bodge-o-rama. You'd think they could have done
a better job than those half-arsed attempts. For instance, in one of them
every time the camera goes in for a close-up it goes out of focus. Now if
you were going to make a record of the autopsy for whatever purpose, you
would get a camera operator who knew what they were doing. I mean, anyone
knows how to focus a camera. They don't make cameras that you can't focus.
Details close-up would be an essential part of any visual documentation of
an autopsy. In fact, we must conclude that the camera operator knew
exactly what they were doing, that is, they deliberately were going out of
focus. Now the most obvious reason for doing this is....? I leave it up to
you.

Also, if the Russian government had gotten hold of alien upon which they
could do autopsies, then surely they would have documented everything with
assiduous care. Not one single cell of the tissue would have been let go
astray. They wouldn't allow any contamination by the human doctors and
assistants (not to mention the possibility of infection from microbial
life on the dead alien). It looks as though these autopsies were done by
complete incompetents! It looks like something out of a 1950s Twilight
Zone episode. In the 1950s they might have done an alien autopsy like
that, but I can't believe any doctor of the last few decades would be
stupid enough not to follow more stringent and careful procedures than
those shown in the footage. If if wasn't the government, but just a bunch
of backyard doofuses who knew no better, well then their stupid knows no
bounds. Because you could easily make millions by leaking the
story...etc., etc.

Clearly fakes. And not very good ones at that. X-Files autopsies looked
more convincing. The reason they are not very good is because to make a
very good fake you would have to spend shitloads of money - like they do
to make an X-Files episode.

Bob Lazar. Well, nothing he says is substantiated in the tape you sent me.
It's just his word. I find it hard to put much faith in him. No more or
less than I find it hard to put faith in most people making significantly
amazing and unsubstantiated claims.

The defence that "he has nothing to gain from it" of course does not hold.
What Bob Lazar has to gain from it is fame. That fame may not turn into
dollars (certainly not lots of dollars) but it is still fame, and fame is
something which drives many people. I know a number of people who want
fame (budding actors, musicians, etc.) and they all want fame merely for
fame's sake. Everyone who writes a book wants fame. Just people choose
different avenues for getting it. Sure, Bob Lazar would deny that he wants
fame, but that doesn't mean he doesn't want it. Certainly he is very
famous amongst ufologists.

Still, the other thing about Bob Lazar's claims. Not only are they
unsubstantiated - they are unsubstantiatable! If it is true, you'll never
be able to prove it. If it isn't true you will still never be able to
prove it. You can't test it.

If the government suddenly has a change of mind and 'fesses up (unlikely),
or, if an antigravity craft crash lands in Times Square, or something,
then perhaps all Lazar's claims may be substantiated. But until then...

The terraforming stuff about Mars was pretty good. Though I must say that
I found Robert Zubrin intensely annoying. He says "The frontier on Earth
is closed. Unless humanity is going to move into an age of stagnation, we
have to be willing to embrace a new frontier." Comments like these make
you stop and think. You know when the Europeans first moved into North
America back in the early 18thC people at the time used identical rhetoric
as Robert Zubrin expounds throughout the doco. Then when the utopian
ideals that were expected did not eventuate, then Yanks started to move
west (Westward Ho!) each time moving towards a new frontier. The same
rhetoric accompanied each successive wave of movement, each new frontier
that opened. Until they finally got to California and could go any
further. The problem was the society did not develop as it moved across
the land. People did not change. Humanity did not see the rhetoric of the
frontier as the empty rhetoric that it was.

He is right, there are no more frontiers left on Earth. What I disagree
with him about is that a new frontier on Mars will be any different. I
just finished reading Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. This gives a good
picture of what colonising Mars might be like if humans don't change they
way they think currently. It ain't no Eden, just another capitalistic,
dog-eat-dog, USA!

The new frontiers for humanity are social. We have to learn to be a
civilised species. To stop killing one another, to stop breeding out of
hand, to stop destroying natural habitat of other lifeforms, to stop
eating other animals, to stop polluting the planet, to manage the
environment, to learn how to preserve the environment, to rid ourselves of
backwards looking religion, etc., etc.

Sure, humanity will in all likelihood spread to Mars. But I hope we have
some better reasons to do so than those put forward in the 18thC or by
Robert Zubrin in the 20thC, who should have a look at some of the
voluminous literature on the frontier mentality.

In fact, Zubrin says some amazingly stupid things. Like, when he suggests
that the people colonising Mars might be refugees. If he hadn't noticed,
refugees, economic or otherwise, are dispossessed people. They are the
poor and unwanted, fleeing for their lives with no possessions to speak
of. How will they afford to go to Mars? No matter what happens in the
future, sending people by rocket to Mars will be more costly than
airflight today. Notice how Zubrin and Savage in their lofty predictions
don't give any costings? They complain about the junking of the
post-Apollo space program, but they don't discuss why it was junked. Nor
do they mention the "real" reason for the Apollo program in the first
place. They pretend it was the grand ideals outline in President Kennedy's
speech, when in actual fact it was merely Cold War posturing. If you watch
it closely you can see Kennedy is reading a prepared speech. A speech
calculated to engender self-esteem in the "American way of life". A speech
of a politician. A speech written by speech-writers and spin doctors.

"Jim Vincent is planning how to make money out of space." Now this guy
represents the ethos of the people who will be colonising space. Why?
Because it costs big bucks to initialise space travel and colonisation.
And the only people with that kind of money already have other agendas,
agendas that are not altruistic in nature, agendas that are self-serving.
The people with money only want to spend it to make themselves more money.
They ain't interested in utopias unless they can charge for them.

Actually, I wish that Zubrin and Savage's ideas were true. Imagine if
humanity did have a real impetus to create an Eden on Mars, to colonise
and spread our splendour among the stars. Imagine we were all of one mind
concerning the enormous expenditure and effort to colonise the Moon and
Mars. However, to achieve this we would have to first go through some of
the social development I talked about before. Hell, we can't even look
after this planet properly, what makes them think we are all of a sudden
going to live utopian lives on Mars? If we all wanted an Eden on Mars then
we would all want an Eden on Earth - which clearly we don't otherwise it
would happen.

Not that I am saying that humanity has no hope. In fact I think we do have
a chance of achieving some kind of civilisation other than the
technological one we have now. I just think it is going to take a long
long time.

The Time Lords. That's a great doco. Stephen J Hawking is pretty damn
smart. That comment of his about not accepting a bet about the possibility
of time travel because his opponent may be from the future and already
know the answer, is priceless. Can't wait until someone works out how to
generate "minus one Jupiter's worth of negative energy". (BTW, I have to
point out that Carl Sagan was not the first SF writer to use wormholes. In
Arthur C. Clarke's _2001: A Space Odyssey_ he mentions them as a means of
space travel, and that was in 1968. Sagan's Contact was 1980.)

Lightspeed. Also very groovy doco. Shows you how human perception is not
reality. Loved the actual view of hitting lightspeed.

Mirror Matter - we discussed on the phone.

Languages. Excellent. I wrote down some of the stats that linguist listed.
And I have found a number of occasions to tell people that there is a
language that uses a bilabial trill! Unfortunately the language, Oro Win,
is doomed to die as there were only four speakers left.

Critter Cam. That was also amazing. How do the whales stand the pressure?

Warrior Sword (Meet the Ancestors) - I watched nearly all the Meet the
Ancestors episodes. They had terrific info but the presenter was an
appalling twerp. Nevertheless this episode was one of the best. I couldn't
believe how much steel was lost in the process.