It Should’ve Been Common Sense

I have read and heard about terrible pranks that get pulled on people which have resulted with bodily harm, property damage, or personal loss. These stories are absolutely horrible. It sickens me that people find amusement in causing others pain. It also seems that these types of occurrences are on the rise. I hear about such terrible things, such as these, happening more and more frequently. Why do people find it so amusing?

Now, I know that anybody can be conned. Nobody is immune to it. No matter how smart a person may be, there will always be a con artist out there that is so good that they can even con the brightest and sharpest individual. I have a lot of sympathy to those who are victims of a con, but I do not have much sympathy for people that can’t simply use their brain and logic in something that “should” be blatantly obvious to anyone.

What am I talking about? Well, I found this news article on The Smoking Gun’s website. Maybe you are familiar with the news story that took place on June 9, 2009. At a Holiday Inn Express Hotel in Conway, Arkansas a prank caller phoned the reception desk posing as an official from Grennel Fire Sprinkler service. The prank caller told the lady at the front desk that there was a problem with the fire sprinkler system and that she had to pull the fire alarm to fix the problem with the sprinkler system. When the fire alarm came on, due to pulling the fire alarm, the prank caller told the receptionist that she needs to smash all the windows in the hotel in order to prevent the water sprinklers from turning on. At this point a customer at the hotel assisted in helping the receptionist break all the windows in the hotel. The prank caller proceeded to tell the receptionist that she now had to physically break one of the water sprinkler heads to prevent them from flooding the hotel. However, by doing this it caused massive amounts of water to flow out of it, flooding the hotel as a result. The customer that was helping her got on the phone with the prank caller to seek advice because he had smashed the windows and the fire alarm had not deactivated. The customer gave the prank caller his mobile phone number so they could keep in touch while the customer was roaming about the hotel trying to help the receptionist. The prank caller then called the customer’s mobile phone and then proceeded to advise him that he needed to find the electrical breaker box and shut down the electricity to the hotel. The customer found an employee and was able to get the employee to unlock the main electrical room and he shut down the main power to the hotel. To make a long story short, the prank caller succeeded in causing an estimated $50,000 worth of damage to the hotel. If you want the full story or if you want to read the police report, which is much more detailed, follow the link I gave at the beginning of this paragraph.

Now, as I said before, anybody can be conned or fooled by someone else. When someone calls over the phone you don’t really have a good way to verify their identity. I don’t blame people for being conned; I do blame people for not using their brain. Let’s think about this logically for a second. If someone called you and told you that the only way to turn off your fire alarm is by smashing your windows would you believe them? What if someone said that the only way to prevent the water sprinkler from turning on is to break the head off of it; would you believe that? If you think about the things that the caller requested that they to do, you will see that the requests are absolutely ridiculous. I don’t care if someone called me and claimed to be the president of the world. If they told me that the only way to prevent a fire is if I drive my car into the elevator and then jump off the roof I wouldn’t do it. Common sense would tell me otherwise. So why can’t people just stop and think once in a while? Even if the caller had truly been an official from the Grennel Fire Sprinkler service or even been a real police officer, since when does smashing windows make a fire alarm deactivate? Since when does breaking the head off of a fire sprinkler prevent it from turning on? What next? I suppose chopping off your right arm will prevent you from aging and drowning kittens will fix your computer problems right?

On top of all of this, I will try to imagine a person that is gullible enough to fall for it; then I find myself baffled by how in the world other people got conned into it as well? There was at least a customer and another employee that were also involved in the chaos. So the prank caller didn’t just con the receptionist, but they conned a customer and another employee. Are people really that dense? What has happened to our minds? I am not the brightest person nor do I consider myself to be very smart, but I at least have “some” common sense. It is possible that someone may con me someday, but this story is absolutely ludicrous!

Can We Believe What We See?

Look at the image above. What do you see? It is the shadow of two people sitting back to back isn’t it? Wrong! It is amazing how our eyes can so easily be fooled into believing we are seeing something that we are not. It certainly looks like two people sitting back to back though. Now this image, as well as the images that follow, were made to intentionally look like shadows of people. However, it is human nature to make sense of things that are completely random such as clouds and smoke taking on familiar forms to us. I don’t think if anyone saw a cloud in the sky shaped like a duck that they would really believe it to be a real duck. I could be wrong, but I certainly hope people are at least intelligent enough to know at least that much.

The images that follow, in this blog post, are not mine; I simply found them while I was browsing the Visual Fun House’s site. From what I read, the human shadow images were made by Tim Noble and Sue Webber and you can view the very same page HERE.

Now, the point I want to make is to pose the question of, “Can we believe everything we see?” Well, can we? What about if we have photographs? Photographs don’t lie or at least that is what I hear people say so often. Well, that is half true. It is true that a photograph won’t embellish upon what the camera saw, we are good enough at doing the embellishing on our own. People have a knack for reading into something what wasn’t originally there. A photograph can take photographs of things that seem one way and in reality they are something else but usually people use common sense and logic to know that what they are seeing isn’t what it seems to be when just purely based on the photograph’s witness alone. For example in the following image of the cat, I believe most logical, thinking people know the cat is merely jumping from one ledge to the other and that the cat, in fact, is not really flying.

People make images similar to the flying cat image rather often. Everyone will jump up into the air and the camera person will snap off a picture at just the right time and it appears as if everyone is suspended in midair.

People are very level-headed and logical when they see images of people suspended in the air or what appears to be a flying cat. Even if it is an image that is hard to explain but is known to be impossible, a logical, thinking individual can form an educated conclusion about how such a phenomenon can happen. An example of this would be this dog walking on water, or is it?

Yet, once the photograph is about something paranormal or supernatural people throw all logic and common sense out the window and openly embrace what they see in the photograph or video as real. I have seen a growing hunger for supernatural and paranormal things in people during recent years. It is like people want to find something that is beyond them or higher than them. Many people hope to find life beyond our solar system. I share some of these feelings. It is nice to think there could be a higher power. It is wonderful to imagine other worlds and other life. I am no stranger to this. I love science as well as science fiction and the dream of space travel. I myself also believe in God. However, despite my beliefs, I at least “try” to look at things objectionably. I analyze things and try to explain things rationally and logically. I am aware that belief in God is something that I cannot prove as real to a skeptic. My belief in God is something I believe on faith. Despite having a faith in God, it does not mean that I just openly accept every single thing that comes my way which may prove His existence. In fact, I would love to prove to people that God exists with indisputable evidence. So if a photograph or a video came my way proving that my God is real it would be wonderful. However, despite how much I would like that, I am not so dense as to try to make something out of a photograph or video that is not there. If someone told me they had a photograph or video that had indisputable proof of the existence of my God, I would look at it objectionably and use my brain and logic to see if it is indeed legit or just wishful thinking.

I personally do not know if aliens exist. I am not going to say they don’t exist because I don’t have any evidence to prove such a claim. I am not going to say they do exist because, as before, I don’t have any evidence to prove that claim either. I have never been to any other planet but Earth so it would be folly for me to say definitively that there are or aren’t extra terrestrial beings living somewhere in the universe.

But what about all of the UFO sightings, isn’t that proof? That is proof that you saw something, it isn’t proof that you saw an alien spaceship. I would like to believe just as much as the next person, but despite my desire to validate or justify a belief I refuse to just shut off analytical thinking. When people see UFO’s, they are exactly that, UNIDENTIFIED Flying Objects. Unidentified means that you do not know what they are. If we knew what they were then they would be IFO’s, Identified Flying Objects. So when you see a photograph or a video of something try to look at it objectionably. Just because there is an object that you cannot identify in the sky it does not mean it is a spaceship from another planet filled with aliens that have come to visit us. There are other explanations for these things.

Yet, despite the evidence, or the lack thereof, people insist that they are right. It is amazing how much a person will insist that an object they observe is an alien spacecraft after they see a photograph or video of something they don’t recognize but it resembles a flying saucer. The following video is a perfect example of how unrelenting people are in their beliefs despite the lack of solid evidence. I know that a faith in God is similar in the sense that I claim that God exists despite physical evidence of His existence. However, I will not claim that a photograph or video are proof of such a thing when they are not. I would love to have evidence to prove my faith in God to be true but I know that I do not have the type of proof that a skeptic would require. That is why it is called faith. So why can’t the people who believe they are seeing aliens also call it faith? They are believing in something they haven’t any definitive proof for. The only proof they have is that they have seen “something” up in the sky that is unidentified. They will say, but there are countless reports from people, countless photographs, and countless videos of UFO’s. Yes, that is true, but you only established that people are seeing objects that we can’t yet identify. There are other explanations other than aliens but many people will refute such a statement with such vehemence. Most people will fight until their dying breath that what they believe they saw is in fact real and they are unwilling to accept or consider anything that is contrary to what they believe.

So this following video is a perfect example of how people are so quick to believe that they are seeing a UFO and very unwilling to back down on their belief even after the evidence is presented to them.

Once again, I am not attempting to prove or disprove the existence of aliens. My point here is to encourage people to stop and think before they jump to their conclusions. This next video has been widely accepted as real until it was found out to be a hoax. Yet, despite the fact that it has been exposed as a fake, so many people still insist that it is real. The original was made by person using the YouTube username of BarzolfF814, but this person disabled the ability to embed the video. So the following video is from someone else’s YouTube account that has also posted a copy of the original on YouTube.

After this previous video was put on YouTube and widely believed to be real another video was released by the maker of the original video to show people that it was done with CG. People were still unwilling to admit that it was not real and they continued to insist it was authentic. It is irritating to me how people reacted to the maker of the video. The person who made the fake CG video tried to prove to everyone that it was a fake by making yet another fake CG video revealing how it was done. Despite the author providing evidence of their craftsmanship many people flamed the creator on forums and in YouTube comments. People were angry that the creator of the videos would even try to suggest it wasn’t real when they claim to know that it is.

Later I found another video on YouTube that evaluates the video and reveals details about how to tell if it is a fake or not. Despite the evidence provided, many people were angry and left hateful and vulgar comments on the video. Why are people so unwilling to back down from their belief that the video is real when it is in fact a fake? No matter how much evidence you put in front of their face, they are still unwilling to accept it and or unable to see it. The following video that I came across on YouTube illustrates this point rather well.

In closing, I would like to reiterate that I am not here to prove or disprove the existence of extra terrestrials. I simply wish people would stop to think sometimes. There truly are things in this world that don’t have explanations. There are videos and photographs that are genuinely real. But that doesn’t mean you should immediately accept everything you see. Just because it looks real doesn’t mean that it is real. And just because you believe you are seeing something it doesn’t mean you are actually seeing what you “think” you are seeing. Like I said before, our mind tries to make sense out of the random. We all make images and meanings out of things that do not have meaning. I feel like the wisdom of people and the ability for people to think rationally and critically is rapidly decreasing worldwide.