by Steven Novella via NeuroLogica Blog
One persistent theme that skeptical investigators encounter is the fact that true-believers of various stripes often whine about the fact that they are not taken seriously by scientists and that their claims are dismissed out of hand. Ironically they often direct their whining at skeptics, even though we are the ones addressing their claims and investigating them. Mainstream scientists won’t taint themselves by even acknowledging their existence.
What the true believers repeatedly fail to appreciate, however, is that it is not necessarily their claims that relegate them to the fringe, but their atrocious methods. 
They giddily squander their credibility by accepting poor-quality evidence, making bad arguments, and dismissing perfectly reasonable alternative explanations.
In short, they are not taken seriously because they are not serious scientists. A version of the Dunning-Kruger effect seems to make them incapable of perceiving their own gross scientific incompetence, and so they have no choice but to whine about those “closed-minded scientists” and the conspiracy of silence against them.
Yet another example of this is the Atacama specimen – a six inch tall humanoid skeletal remains discovered in the Atacama desert, Chile, in 2003.
The Disclosure Project, founded by Steven Greer, has promoted the specimen as evidence of aliens. They make the classic mistake of looking for evidence and arguments to support their hypothesis, rather than properly considering other hypotheses or looking for evidence to disprove their hypothesis.
What they are doing is essentially mystery mongering, as is evidenced by the title of their article on the specimen: Stanford University Research: Atacama Humanoid Still A Mystery.
Atacama Specimen
Their approach is similar to that of the Starchild Skull proponents – take a human specimen and look for anomalies, and then declare those anomalies evidence that the specimen is alien. The problem with this approach is that there are numerous causes of anatomical anomalies, including genetic, developmental, pathological, traumatic, or artifacts of what happened to the specimen after death.
Alien proponents would have to convincingly rule out all such possibilities before Occam would be satisfied that a new explanation was needed. Even then, all we would have in an anomaly – not something alien. That conclusion is a classic example of the argument from ignorance logical fallacy.
One way to address the question of whether or not the specimen is human is to . . .
Related articles
- Atacama Specimen (theness.com)
- Atacama ‘alien’ mystery is no mystery (paolov.wordpress.com)
- Sirius Doucmentary : Atacama Alien Humanoid Creature Survived Post-Birth 6 to 8 Years – UFO Sightings 2013|Unidentified Flying Saucers|Aliens Videos|Extra Terrestrial|Space News|UFO 2013 (2012indyinfo.com)
- Truth Of Atacama “Alien” Revealed: Specimen Is Human [VIDEO] (natureworldnews.com)
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