Loki

Mab, because even though he makes the occasional effort to improve, once every few months he spectacularly throws it all away with a day-long spaz out. Plus his massive over-posting annoys me - like getting the first post in each of these voting threads. It's obsessive, a bit like his extremely unhealthy interest in a pregnant/post-preggers board member.

What's the deal with the Indian Lake Project then? Is it just a blog hoax, or a viral for a film?

I'm putting Showdown in Little Tokyo on my Xmas wishlist. That sounds great.

And they say the Devil has all the best tunes...

http://kotaku.com/5090070/christian-guitar-hero-the-trailer

I can't see it being high on Obama's list of priorities right now, considering the international banking crisis, a recession, 2 wars and the impending climate Armageddon.

How on earth is Katy Perry an unconventional beauty?

Exactly, Wodge. Everyone knows the gays don't like Columbo.

Biggles is a bit shit, from what I remember.

I echo the praise for Miller's Crossing, a simply superb film. I really like Fargo too, though, so take that for what it's worth.

"Eeeuh ma gorsh it's eh you eff euhhh!"

Credible witnesses

It's supposed to be a mess.

It's mainly teenage girls with sawdust for brains. Transformers was completely spoilt for me by the wannabe wags behind me giggling and commenting their way through the film, until I broke with the usual British demeanour and asked them to be quiet, politely. When 5 minutes later they were still at it, I stood up and loudly told them to shut the fuck up or I'd get management to kick them out. Luckily the shock of someone actually telling them off shocked them into relative silence, but of course by then it had fucked up my enjoyment of what was meant to be a nice nostalgic trip. Even my wife got involved, that's how annoying they were.

A large bunch of childrens' balloons?

And stop fucking double posting. You're not twice as interesting as everyone else, you're half.

We're going to have to agree to disagree on this, I'm trying to talk about the larger picture of debate on this subject and you keep missing the point. Clearly I can't debrief Kenny in person to the level I'd like, as he's a poster on the fucking internet! I have already said that, taking his sighting as an example, and assuming as I have repeatedly said that he passes the sort of criteria you mentioned which obviously would be the first points of elimination, assuming for the sake of our hypothetical Kenny witness that he was neither drunk, blind or a lunatic, and a person in full possession of faculties, and therefore a reliable witness, the sort of motion he was describing is strongly indicative of a man-made object. I can't believe I actually have to take you step by step through this, can't we assume some level of intelligence on the part of other people in discussions on this forum?Moving back to the larger point I'm making, there are a number of extremely reliable and often qualified observers who have reported observations that cannot be ruled out as a cloud in the sky or marsh gas or whatever. As these collate together, they form a body of observational data that I think is extremely interesting, particularly as you look at similarities in the reports. Outside of a smoking gun of actually being handed the keys to Area 51 or whatever, all we have to go on is witness evidence that must of course be sifted and critically examined. I do not think it a large leap of logic or feasibility to suggest a hypothesis that these witnesses may in fact have seen man-made craft of types relatively unknown to the public, rather than them being liars, crazy or simply dismissed as kooks. Clearly you think differently, I accept that.

Clearly, it was marsh gas igniting ;)This is the thing, we're not all stupid. The fast changes in motion of objects like the one you saw are a common element of sightings and basically rule out the normal debunk theories. Assuming it's not little green men, then it's a man-made craft, either manned or unmanned, and at that point it's just a question of who made it and why.

See, it's that logical leap that means things that genuinely defy explanation get thrown out along with the nonsense. Absence of one sort of explanation does not automatically mean another sort of explanation is accurate. The movement Kenny described might be from a man (or alien) made craft, or it might not. But it's not certain, just because the sight he saw was unusual. Do you know for certain that nothing naturally occuring could create a vision like Kenny saw in the sky? Are you that prepared, from the paragraph of evidence Kenny gave you, to rule out all the "normal debunk theories" and go straight to some unknown sort of man-made craft?I'm aware I sound like an apologist for the status quo (not the band Status Quo, they're rubbish). I'm not, I'm just a healthy skeptic about second-hand information "definitely" being anything, especially when it's a long way outside what we currently know about science. I don't think there's anything wrong with holding bizarre occurrences to a higher level of proof than normal ones. Like the Bigfoot thing that started this thread, that I said was bullshit and turned out, indeed, to be bullshit. Like virtually every single UFO sighting in the history of the human race. Someone going "oh, a light moving in a weird way, must be some craft created in secret by the Government" is just starting from square one when there's already been tons of research done on this topic.

I saw a UFO once. There was a very bright light in the sky, completely stationary, like a star but about 4 or 5 times the size. If I remember right, it was white, then kinda blue-green, then white again. Suddenly it dropped almost to the horizon, stopped then shot off to the right at a ridiculous speed before vanishing. Each movement took only a split second, so it wasn't a shooting star, and the stop and the right angle move were certainly not natural.I have no idea what it was, but if anyone has any ideas, let me know.

Man, do I love the creepy gnome. My favourite Fortean stories are by far those weird one-off ones, as opposed to the big sweeping subgenres like UFOs or ghosts. It's also a great look into the cultural belief of other countries, when stuff like India's monkeyman and the Popabawa bat-rapist of Indonesia are believed in by so many people. One of my favourite youtube prank clips is a really fake looking skeleton riding a bike through the streets of Brazil, cackling and saying (through speakers) it was going to take everyone to hell, with everyone who sees it shitting themselves. If that happened in England, people would just idly throw cans of Redbull at it.

Cool!Sadly, as you say the existence of an "alternative" take of the video exposes it as a fake. Scary though.

Without getting into a linguistic argument, the stuff you highlighted as "Weasel Words" aren't actually examples of that. They are qualifiers "probably, unlikely" used to signify the acceptance of doubt in a situation, in this case showing that I wasn't trying to present my hypothesis as fact, but show a reasonable series of logical steps. Weasel words are phrases used to present the appearance of fact, such as "It is accepted that" or euphemisms etc.Anywhoooo... What logic hole? I'm saying that I believe it perfectly reasonable to suppose that the US military has the capability to fly into near-earth orbit and even to and from the moon (though not building huge skyscrapers on it, I accept that) using technology that is not public knowledge. It's not even like it's impossible given known technology! Your argument against this is "if they had, we'd have found out" and to then dismiss out of hand any possible pointers towards its existence. I'd say that that is pretty circular logic.

I fucking hate the stupidity and obsessively blinkered nature of conspiracy nuts, Woyzeck, but (and I suspect you feel similarly) I often also wonder if they don't actually stumble upon something interesting from time to time. Those sort of sites have absolutely no quality filter on them, but the obsessive nature of conspiracy nuts means they do trawl through a lot of bland data that most people wouldn't normally bother with, and I suspect from time to time they do find a gem. Only problem is, people are rightly disinclined to believe them in the traditional spirit of the boy who cried wolf.I think there was a film based on this premise a few years ago, about a nut who stumbled into the middle of an actual real conspiracy. Can't remember what it was called.

That's a little patronising, which is unlike you Mortimer. There's nothing wrong with hypotheses in the absence of verifiable fact, and I'm setting out a hypothesis, not using weasel words to mimic fact. The declassified MoD reports released yesterday raise currently unanswerable questions that I am suggesting possible answers to. I don't actually think there are bases on the moon, that is pretty far-fetched, though as I said it wouldn't completely surprise me. All I am saying is that the traditional sceptic response of "oh, they are lying or accidentally mistook a funny shaped cloud" etc to well-documented and expertly-witnessed sightings is as far-fetched an explanation as thinking they are aliens.I am advocating a pragmatic approach to such things, neither dismissing out of hand nor leaping off the conspiracy deep end, but looking at the world with less naive eyes and accepting that there are plenty of things out there that are not public knowledge, that everyday folk sometimes spot or bump into. Given the hugely important part that secrecy plays in the development of new weaponry and military technology, this is a perfectly valid extrapolation of previously-classified and now public domain information.

One might argue that the incidents of reliable aviation sources seeing unidentified flying objects constitutes some proof that there are things up there that they don't bother to tell us about publicly.The space race may have started as a PR war, but created so many side benefits in terms of huge technological advancements that it seems unlikely to have halted in the way you suggest. The military importance of near-earth orbit is huge, and was undoubtedly hotly contested, but it's pretty hard to spot it going on as the BBC doesn't have a correspondent up there The US military budget over the past 40 years has been absolutely huge, and it seems reasonable to suggest that a large chunk has been spent on continuing aeronautic and orbital technology. Just as the Stealth plane and Aurora weere rumoured for decades before becoming "fact", so the likelihood is that there are plenty of other classified projects that would explain away ongoing UFO sightings and the like.Just as Aurora was years ahead of conventional Lockheed-Martin or Boeing technology, so there are probably orbital spacecraft operated by the military that are frankly decades ahead of NASA. It's not as exciting as alien conspiracies and all that, but much more plausible and indeed likely.

This might appeal to some people.NASA edit out UFOs 'n shit

Shatner may be shit in that, but he's absolutely brilliant in Boston Legal, so forgive him this one.In the spirit of JLM, I watched Clueless last night. I can't say whether it was any good or not, I was too busy knocking one out to Alicia Silverstone and Britanny Murphy. I feel I've failed you, JLM.

The Knightmare game had a bug where you couldn't get out of the first room. You can try and try and try to give the bread to the old man, but he'll never take it. Every single Spectrum copy had that, too. Evidently playtesting didn't exist in the eighties.