Nobody has ever found the slightest smidgen of evidence of aliens, nor any plausible theory of what aliens would be like. It's about as likely as someone inventing a car that runs on water.
Plenty of evidence has been found. For one, the US government has leaked/released a video showing instant acceleration of a flying object. Nothing on earth can do that.
You're heaping one implausibility (aliens) in with another implausibility (violating the laws of physics) making the combined plausibility indistinguishable from zero.
It's not necessary for me to debunk your theory. It is incumbent upon you to prove it valid.
When I was a research physicist I spent a lot of time looking at the effects of ionizing radiation in pictures, although mostly in the context of digital images. The mechanisms are a bit different for photo emulsions, but to me the reason I'd discount radiation is because they're specifically filtering for features that exhibit the expected point spread function (which is a geometric property of the telescope's optic…
> Overall it seems pretty unscientific. I'd agree with all your points and add some things to help people better "sniff-test" these kinds of papers. 1) The paper is suggesting aliens... your suspicion hats should always go on - Carl Sagan said: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". Is the evidence extra-ordinary? 2) The authors aren't experts - Stephen Bruehl: A doctor of Anesthesiology - Brian Doher…
Not gonna lie, the first thing I noticed was that the first author was in an anesthesiology department. Your guidelines for sniff-testing are not unreasonable, and can definitely be helpful to people who are unfamiliar with the research area. But I quite intentionally did not appeal to any of those. As a (somewhat) subject matter expert, it's important to _ignore_ things like ad hominem judgement, and instead address the paper on its self-contained merits. And more importantly, to share my assessment of those with the lay public.
> Overall it seems pretty unscientific. I'd agree with all your points and add some things to help people better "sniff-test" these kinds of papers. 1) The paper is suggesting aliens... your suspicion hats should always go on - Carl Sagan said: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". Is the evidence extra-ordinary? 2) The authors aren't experts - Stephen Bruehl: A doctor of Anesthesiology - Brian Doher…
Not gonna lie, the first thing I noticed was that the first author was in an anesthesiology department. Your guidelines for sniff-testing are not unreasonable, and can definitely be helpful to people who are unfamiliar with the research area. But I quite intentionally did not appeal to any of those. As a (somewhat) subject matter expert, it's important to _ignore_ things like ad hominem judgement, and instead address…
I'm glad you did it that way. I hope, my comment works well as an addendum to your type of comment. I don't think would have worked well on its own, nor prior to yours. Especially since nothing I said is an absolute rule that allows one to reject a work. But this paper sure does smell suspicious. I think it's good to have the stronger reasons to be suspicious and then understand some softer flags to navigate in unfamiliar territory.