I got a video on my YouTube homepage about the CBS story on the Norwegian Spiral. They said it was a malfunction of a Russian missile. They showed another example of such a malfunction when some missile came out of the water and started spiraling. I remember a while back seeing another example, a Delta II where one of the motor mounts broke, kicking the engine off to the side. It was spectacular, the big rocket flipping end-over-end and then the Range Safety Officer hitting the "destruct" button. Seems that's a common malfunction, hell, motor mounts break in cars sometimes.
That was the first time I called up a YouTube page and all ten of the comments were definitely "thumbs down". Yet, you could tell these guys thought it was funny to accuse the CBS personnel whose faces and names appeared in the video of engaging in an evil "New World Government conspiracy". I thought it was jokefail. So I decided to defend the honor of Ms. Sheila MacVicar.
So I posted a really acid comment about all ten posters, "…especially the 2012 guy…" whose anonymous coward posting name was justin123323. But you're only allowed 500 characters so I wrote justin123323 a personal note, pointing out that he had attacked the professional credentials and personal integrity of Ms. Sheila MacVicar. I figured he'd never thought of that.
Instead of hitting the reply button to the private post, he hit it on the video's comment section. YouTube's reply function malfunctions sometimes and I was really lucky to catch what he said, since it wasn't under my post. (YouTube tech hint: put "@justin123323" to avoid isolated-looking out of context replies from embarrassing you).
The post I replied to said,
Shit has an AT-field, its a real life angel, Armisael, everybody have to say it 2nd impact is coming on 2012 so stay above the equator!
But he admitted,
First off jerk offs i was joking earlier, but its clearly not a missile . not saying its aliens or something but its not what the explanation says it is by a long shot.
See, he was joking. I guess he got stung by my response. And, I owe him an apology, too. I was in considerable pain from dental surgery a couple of days before and moreover, the doctor persrcribed Vicodin, which I took.
It's become traditional in this society to treat UFO's and things like that as a suitable source of humor. If you're an astronomer it's pretty easy sometimes to take offense when somebody comes up with something completely off-the-wall and here you are trying to actually find out if there really, really might be aliens and to make some kind of statistical analysis of it, or to actually be searching, with a telescope or a computer program, for objects that might actually hit the Earth and might actually cause a real catastrophe. Comedians don't see that, they see they are getting a rise out of you and the attack instinct kicks in. Haha, it's even funnier now!!
Well, I'm going to write this person I have wronged and ask for his perspective. It might be enlightening.
-Michael C. Emmert