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Oh noes! Aliens in Denver!

Bad Astronomy
By Phil Plait
May 29, 2008 10:00 PMNov 5, 2019 7:07 AM

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I am getting a gazillion emails about a guy in Denver who claims to have the "the final visual confirmation" of aliens visiting Earth. It's a video of a four foot tall alien looking out a window, and you can see it blinking! And it's in infrared! Color me convinced. The article says:

Jeff Peckman, who is pushing a ballot initiative to create an Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission in Denver to prepare the city for close encounters of the alien kind, said the video is authentic and convinced him that aliens exist.

The video will be released Friday, and of course lots of local news stations and websites are talking about it. That's very irritating, because they tend to produce those news items seriously, but deliver them (at least on air) somewhat snarkily, giving them plausible deniability when the story (inevitably) turns out to be more blurry footage that was either faked or misinterpreted. Here's my prediction: the article says it's an IR video (it doesn't say if it's thermal IR or enhanced near-IR), which means we'll see a blurry false-color of something that looks like a blobby head. We'll see it blink, and that's it. In IR things look pretty funky, so this will either be something else entirely from a head, or maybe a kid. I may be wrong, of course. I'll wait and see the video tomorrow before stating anything more solid than this. But we have seen so many of these claims come and go, with just as much hoopla. But where are the aliens? The White House lawn is conspicuously absent of them.

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