Hoagland says this is conspiracy month

"We're in the midst of an interplanetary war".

        That was Richard Hoagland, early in last Saturday/Sunday's Other Side of Midnight blogradio show. His guest was Christopher Knowles, who calls himself a symbologist — and having such an anti-science person around seemed to encourage Hoagland himself to stray far, far away from anything to do with verifiable fact.

        The first of many ridiculous connections he made was between the US Navy's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, revealed by the New York Times on 16th December 2017, and the recent fire on USS Bonhomme Richard in the Navy Yard at San Diego.

26:06 "The US Navy is almost at the center of a real awakening, and a deepening of the whole idea of Unidentified Flying Objects being intelligently controlled by somebody. And then a ship of the line — another aircraft carrier — based in San Diego suddenly catches on fire, and there's an explosion that is heard 13 miles away, after the fire starts. If that doesn't spell sabotage I don't know what does."

        So an explosion during an extremely hot fire is taken as evidence of sabotage? Right, Richard, got it. What was that you were saying about your science credentials?

Everything's a symbol, apparently
        In case you were wondering what a "symbologist" is and does (and certainly I was), Knowles then proceeded to illustrate it by constructing a tottering edifice of symbolic meaning out of completely random events. I didn't follow it all but it went something like this:

        First, Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested on 2nd July, "World UFO Day" and an anniversary of the Roswell crash. Then, the following day, Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) Executive Director Jan Harzan was arrested in Newport Beach, California, for allegedly soliciting sexual activity from a detective who was posing online as a 13-year-old girl. Then on 18th July the cathedral of Nantes caught fire, causing extensive damage. Meanwhile, a comet was in the sky and we all know that comets are harbingers of bad luck. There's another San Diego connection there, since the last easily visible comet — Hale-Bopp — was the occasion of the mass suicide of a San Diego cult, "Heaven's Gate".

38:52 RCH "These are thoughts on a chain that is incredibly meaningful to only a certain few. And everybody else just dismisses it as a .. as..Oh! Coincidence!"
CK: "Yeah, that's what I'm saying. This has been a very strange month."

        Seems to me that this chain of events is only meaningful to people who don't require any evidence in order to draw a conclusion. To say that Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested on 2nd July, and Nantes cathedral had a fire 16 days later is not coincidence, IT'S NOT ANYTHING.^{note 1}

        So now we know what symbologists do — they make stuff up. Fans of nonsense like this got a chance to hear it all over again 24 hours later, when Hoagland re-ran it owing to yet another power outage in New Mexico. That's been happening an awful lot lately.

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[1] If Harzan had been arrested on World UFO Day that would certainly have been an ironic coincidence, but that's not what happened. Pull Me Under, the blog of UFO Watchdog, just published a useful guide to all the legal problems MUFON leaders have suffered.