Weekend Diversion: Fair and Balanced and Aliens

Posted by Ethan on May 30, 2009
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Looking back on this week, I had a post about astronomy with a wide-angle lens and about the Tunguska blast. For this weekend’s music, I’m going to rob South Park and show you South Park Elementary’s #1 TV show of all time:

And for your weekend amusement, I’ll refer you back to my story on Tunguska, which is about one crazy Russian and his insistence that an alien spaceship saved the Earth from an asteroid. Since then — on this site and in person — the following theories have been advanced to me:

  • Nikola Tesla caused Tunguska with a secret, never-been-reproduced energy weapon,
  • The exploding flying saucer caused Tunguska, and there was no meteoroid,
  • There was an interstellar war going on, and a comet was fired at an alien ship hiding in Earth’s atmosphere, destroying it and causing the blast, and, of course,
  • This was a secret airborne explosives test performed by the Soviet Union. (Never mind that the airplane had only been invented 5 years before, and there would be no Soviet Union for another 10 years.)

All crazy talk, right? Guess which news outlet picked up on this story? Take a guess.

I wonder what it takes to become President of the Tunguska Spatial Phenomenon Foundation, or why anyone in their right mind would even bother talking to this kook? And they say that science journalism is dead. (Thanks, Phil.)

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Comments

  1. #1 Sili
    May 30, 2009

    Duh. The USSR just invented timetravelling, too. Problem solved.

  2. #2 Jo
    May 30, 2009

    Fox News, our faith in ye shall never wane.

  3. #3 J-Dog
    May 30, 2009

    Faux Noise… Unfaily Unbalanced watchers, plus the John & Kate Crowd make me wonder about the future of America. Plus Tom Tancredo and the Goopers.

    But I’m looking forward to the eventual FAUX headline where Obama is revealed as an alien – and I’m not talking about Mexico or Pakistan. Watching Hannity and Beck explode however will make it all worthwhile.

  4. #4 Wayne Robinson
    May 31, 2009

    I recently read a German science fiction novel “Schamanenfeuer” by Martina Andre, in which Tunguska was an early (very very very early) Russian attempt to make a hydrogen bomb, because the war with Japan in 1905 went so badly, and the Russians wanted revenge. And they realised that Einstein’s special theory of relativity indicated that enormous amounts of energy could be generated from the E=mc squared part of the paper (the novel was just as silly as the author’s premise. But then again perhaps not as silly as some of these other ideas above… )

  5. #5 Stevo
    June 3, 2009

    I’m a little curious about what these quartz slabs he claimed to find are all about.

  6. #6 rob
    June 4, 2009

    i am reading a novel called “Callahan’s Key.”

    I started to chuckle when one of the secondary characters, Tesla, admitted that he did develop a beam weapon and accidentally shot siberia. oh, and he is immortal and may be bullet proof too.

  7. #7 Martyna
    March 23, 2011

    well, keep people far away from the main stream civilization and expose them to some unresolved science issues. They are going to create… unbelievable worlds, just like the ones they live in.

    So Ethan this is interesting, just think about chatting to those people , their worlds are vastly different.