Dead End Street, cont'd.

2014 selfie, at the very moment I finished reading Erol Faruk’s grisly first-person slo-mo descent into the roiling hell-slop of academic elitism.

One of the weirdest and potentially most evidentiary UFO cases on record occurred 51 years ago in Delphos, Kansas, and a few shoutouts are in order for reviving the incident. First, belated kudos to the Liberation Times for updating the story with fresh perspectives from the investigator who’s been pounding this thing since before Reagan. Last month, LT noted his most recent analysis, published by the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, and put it out there. And hats off to to SCU for attempting to alert professional inquiry to the new frontier.

And of course, here’s to Erol Faruk, who includes in his index a fetching but incomplete video from a Kansas State University field-research team.

In 2014, Faruk went public with his demoralizing tale of failed efforts to coax peers into squinting through the telescope. I posted something about it in my old blog, De Void. Revisiting it here, with just a few minor tweaks, in fond hopes that establishment voices are just a little less authoritative about what they don’t know than they were before 12/17.

From 7/23/14  

Seth Shostak is one of the nicest, brightest and most approachable scientists you’ll ever want to meet. Even during disagreements over UFOs, the SETI Institute’s senior astronomer is unfailingly cordial. So when British chemist Erol Faruk tuned into a podcast in which Shostak asked listeners to send him “just one good example” of UFO evidence, Faruk took him at his word.

The results of Faruk’s quixotic quest for a fair hearing from Shostak and mainstream science have just been released in his self-published ebook on Amazon. It rips away the myth about how institutional scholars would gladly welcome new data on the Great Taboo if Only They Had Decent Stuff To Study. The title is a grandiose mouthful – “The Indisputable Scientific Evidence for a UFO Landing and Deposition (aka The Delphos Case) that was denied Publication by Scientific Journals.” But it’s a relatively succinct reiteration of the hallmark timidity that characterizes — or more aptly, impedes — America’s learning curve in terra incognita.

First, Erol Faruk has what exclusive groups like to call standing. He has a PhD in chemistry, worked research posts at Oxford and Nottingham universities, and became a development chemist at the corporation that evolved into GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals. He has published peer-reviewed papers in arcane industry journals such as Helvetica Chimica Acta, and The Journal of Antibiotics. He holds several formula patents. He speaks the language.

Years ago, Faruk discovered the 1971 Delphos, Kan., UFO case and couldn’t let go. You can check it out here. What yanked his bobber was the ring of glowing soil it left behind. The family took pictures moments after the UFO vanished, local media and law enforcement converged on the scene – and the ring scars lingered long afterwards. Fungal growth was the chief suspect at the top of the conventional explanations list, but that couldn’t account for the temporary blindness alleged by one witness, nor the numbing sensation reported by another who touched the glowing earth when it was still fresh.

Faruk, years later, subjected several grams of affected soil to chemical analysis and discovered some puzzling behaviors in the sample compounds, including an apparent paradox in water soluble and water repellent properties. Most intriguing was how, as he would later write, the UFO “appears to have contained within its periphery an aqueous solution of an unstable compound whose likely sole function would be light emission.” Lots of UFOs appear to glow. Maybe the Delphos residue held implications above and beyond this one-off event.

Faruk’s research was published in the Journal of UFO Studies in 1989. Analytical chemist Phyllis Budinger later weighed in with her own study. Budinger interpreted some of Faruk’s findings differently, but she also discovered complexities that he had missed. JUFOS published Budinger’s work in 2002.

Their combined efforts vanished with little comment. Faruk figured the evidence needed more eyes. So he decided to approach mainstream science journals, starting with Nature, the bible, in 2012. Maybe that first flight was doomed on liftoff, given the title of his paper: “The search for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence on earth; strong chemical and physical evidence for the existence of an unconventional luminescent aircraft (commonly called a UFO) observed by multiple witnesses at a farm in Delphos, Kansas, USA.” An editor might’ve helped. But this is where things get interesting.

After being initially rejected outright since his work had been previously published in the UFO forum, Faruk explained to Nature’s editorial boss how his findings could be reworked to satisfy the zine’s exemptions to that rule. But the editor declined to even relay it to journal referees. He said he was “unable to conclude that the work provides the sort of firm advance in general understanding that would warrant publication.”

(De Void will interject at this point that De Void would’ve run the editors’ names. Faruk, however, stated in an email “I didn’t wish to put any names on journal editors, since this isn’t a personal issue. Each of the editors have to watch their own backs anyway, and aren’t likely to risk their own careers by publishing material their bosses might not be happy about.” De Void would argue the unnamed editors could earn brownie points from colleagues by being recognized for standing tall against the UFO hillbillies, but hey, whatever …)

Anyhow, Faruk shopped it to the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, which informed him “the subject matter is not within the [journal’s] publication scope.” When Faruk reminded the editor a UFO-related paper had in fact been published in its ostensibly unsullied pages seven years earlier, the editor retorted that was under another regime. “As I am Editor of JBIS,” he assured Faruk, “it is not my policy to promote the publication of UFO report papers.” The same editor admitted he hadn’t even read Faruk’s paper — “although I am sure it is a good read.” And oh, btw, “This is not to say it isn’t a worthwhile ‘phenomenon’ to study, I just don’t believe JBIS should be the home of such studies, where a higher standard of scientific rigor is required.”

Oooohhh ....

Faruk would later discover JBIS had run yet another UFO article — about alien abductions, actually — in 2010. JBIS declined to respond to Faruk’s subsequent discovery and appeals for additional illumination.

Enter Seth Shostak’s encouraging podcast solicitation for UFO evidence. So Faruk forwarded his material to this guy.

“I’m not a chemist,” Shostak wrote back, “so can’t really speak to how unusual this ring was … And beyond that, the SETI Institute doesn’t investigate UFO sightings (we don’t have the staff … we’re a very small group.”)

Catch 22. In writing.

Faruk wrote back with emphasis on the “potentially chemiluminescent substance” that could put the evidence into a “special category,” something other than UFOs. Shostak responded that “Odd arrangements (of) unusual material … could have prosaic explanations” falling far short of a smoking gun. But that was the whole point, Faruk argued, to put it out there to encourage more investigation: “The only thing I can think of as a ‘clincher’ is to do an isotopic analysis of the precipitated soil compound and check for anomalies.”

Shostak’s riposte: “What I would suggest is that you submit this to a refereed journal.”

(De Void: EEEEEEEEE!!)

Faruk told Shostak he’d already been rebuffed by JBIS. Shostak wrote “Too bad, Erol. JBIS would have been one of those I would have recommended.”

So, eight months after telling it to the hand, Faruk approached JBIS again, clicking through the website instructions and running smack-dab into the same editor, same response: “Please don’t take the rejection personally. It is simply my editorial policy to not publish UFO papers. This is not because I don’t think that field of study is worthy but because I think there are other more fitting journals which specialise in this area and JBIS does not, by my choice.” Said editor referred Faruk to other UFO magazines.

Faruk protested again. The editor restated his policy, accenting the apparently unanimous consent of his advisory board, none of whom had read Faruk’s article, either. “I agree it’s one of the biggest scientific problems,” conceded the JBIS boss. “Keep in mind that NASA and ESA scientists publish in JBIS. How would they feel about it?” Gulp. Blink-blink. Checkmate. “It’s a tough one. Need to maintain academic credibility. But I say again, this doesn’t devalue the worth of your work. Keep doing it.”

Shostak actually seemed to sympathize as Faruk kept doing it. “I know that it sounds as if the world is against this,” wrote the consoling SETI guru, “but that’s really not true. The International Journal of Astrobiology publishes stuff that’s controversial if the referee feels that the evidence presented is decent.”

So Faruk went to the IJA. The IJA editor replied “This is not a rigorous research paper.” Faruk requested clarification. “We need detailed chemical analyses not just morphological analyses,” the editor countered. “In my opinion you have the ground for the formation of a hypothesis, but not the proof. Suggest a few alternative hypotheses and test them experimentally as well.”

Faruk: “If there is someone out there who could suggest another explanation, I would be interested to hear it. But in order to do that, the paper needs to be published to allow alternative explanations to be forwarded. I cannot myself — in all honesty — suggest an alternative hypothesis.” The IJA locked the door on him this time.

Faruk approached yet another journal, called simply Astrobiology. Response: “We are unable to publish your manuscript as UFO’s do not fall within the scope of our Journal.”

Faruk continued to bounce ideas off Shostak, who was clearly at the end of his rope with Faruk’s persistence as well: “You could always go for a self-published book. I have a stack of those, actually … so yours wouldn’t necessarily stand out, unless what you say is quite different.” Bottom line, Shostak declined altogether any further speculation with Faruk on the Delphos mystery.

So Faruk wrote about Dead End Street in an ebook.

Stale update: Last year, Shostak was named to the Scientific Advisory Board of Harvard’s Galileo Project, dedicated to verifying evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence.