Whats Going On In China?

The UFO area of the internet, wedged firmly between (and overlapping with) the paranoid conspiracy section and the Star Trek fan-fiction boards, has been clamoring over news that the Chinese Purple Mountain Observatory lived up to its name by observing an actual Unidentified Flying Object. And if your bullshit detector just went off, well done on knowing about UFO fans, but in this case there are problems in the reporting as well as the raving lunatics.

Reports in the Telegraph and Daily Mail lent a credence not usually found in the insaner online reporters (like the “All News Web” which not only reported on the UFO, but identified the exact species of alien involved. “Axthadan”, if you’re interested). The articles featured photographs, even videos of mysterious saucer-shaped splodges in the sky – along with confirmed statements from real scientists that they’d seen something!

If you didn’t spot the flaw in that sentence, you’re not alone. The phrasing of the article has observatory director Ji Hai-sheng confirming that they spotted something near the sun, just under photographs taken by a student of the bizarre shape in the sky, and is extremely careful to never prosecutably state that the two are in any way the same thing. They’re just going to put these blurry pictures which make the Loch Ness Monster images look like a passport photo above a scientific statement about an entirely unrelated observation and hope the dumbasses will do the rest. And they did.

It also relies on the average user not being able to translate the Chinese: the televised report does indeed report on recordings of strange shapes in the sky. Recordings taken by a student and his grandmother, not scientists, in fact almost the exact opposite of scientists, and featuring objects so crappily recorded that they’ve as much chance of being the return of unicorns as they have of being alien craft.

Oh, did we mention they totally jam one of the student pictures right in the middle of a paragraph where the scientist was talking about analyzing the unexplained data? We should totally mention that. It’s aggressively misleading presentation of information, an utterly shameless attempt to get attention (success!) without ever quite actually “lying”. Just presenting the information in a way to give a completely false impression. Wait a minute, that is like lying.

Source Telegraph Report