Russian Rocket, Twin Towers, Big Foot, UFO's

Russian Rocket, Twin Towers, Big Foot, UFOs and the little Kodak Camera I had when I was ten. What do they have in common.

With the spectacular failure of the Russian rocket being caught not only with cameras but on damn good video, by mere phones. Lots of them to boot. With pretty good quality especially at night. This just boggles my mind. Shooting with cameras at night is hard even when prepared, but video!

I love the camera in my blackberry storm, hell I loved the crappy camera in my old flip phone. I love them for the same reason Chase Jarvis loves his iphone camera. Its always there. The camera you have with you is infinitely better than the one you left at home. You can't use the one you didn't bring.

For my tenth birthday I got a Kodak Instamatic. I took that thing with me every where I could. The pictures sucked but I loved it. Latter I would graduate to better film cameras and then digital. Same with video started out with relatively poor equipment and moved on to a digital hand held devise smaller than my old instamatic.

Now my Blackberry does more and better in both still and video. I'm not alone it seems they are every where, absolutely every where. It is truly ubiquitous technology.

Less than ten years ago the world was amazed that some one had actually caught the first plane to striking the Twin Towers on video. Now not only would we expect it we would get it in spades.

It seemed it was only seconds after the video hit the web that the UFO crowd began railing and saying how this was a portal, aliens warping in, all that crappy scyfy channel technobabble bs.

That is what it was, bs easily dismissed. It did however get me to thinking allot about UFOs and something the head of MUFON said a few years ago when asked about the lack of good photographic evidence for flying saucers. He said, "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence".

Let's take a look at that statement by it self. Absence of evidence does not equal evidence of absence. That statement does not lend itself to say big foot. What is the number of North American hunters, Hikers and Naturalist, let's say allot. How many of them have phones? Most of them. How many of the phones have a camera? Most all of them. So now who out of our sample would take a picture/movie if they saw a big foot? Every single one of them. So how many pictures of Big Foot have been taken in the last ten years? How many were taken in the seventies? The difference is not huge but the number of available cameras has increased significantly. With less overall results and an increase in equipment,people and time, there is now good evidence that Big Foot as postulated is not real creature.

Now I can apply that same logic to the claims of extra terrestrials visiting earth by space craft. How many people in the north hemisphere have phones with a camera or just a camera and even a video camera? If you take into consideration just north America and Europe, the number would be just about everyone. Now let's apply the big foot process. How many available cameras in the last decade vs how many in the seventies? Now compare the number difference in just the number compared with available cameras and opportunity to take them. The number of photos is less. Want an example look at the number of videos as well as photos taken of the lights over the New Mexico Mt range just a few years ago. There isn't an event of interest that happens that is not photographed, videoed and almost immediately uploaded to the net.

So yes the absence of evidence can lead to the evidence of absence. Just use critical thinking and you will find the flaw in the most stubborn of the non-rational.