Spider Star
The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an extinct alien race. But then an archaeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon...
Read More.Praise for Star Dragon
"Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton. His complex characters take you on a voyage that is both fiercely credible and astonishingly imaginative. This is Science Fiction."
-- David Brin"Star Dragon is terrific fare, offering readers a fusion of hard science and grand adventure."
-- Locus Magazine"Star Dragon is steeped in cosmology, the physics of interstellar travel, exobiology, artificial intelligence, bioscience. Brotherton, author of many scientific articles in refereed journals, has written a dramatic, provocative, utterly convincing hard science sf novel that includes an ironic twist that fans will love."
-- Booklist starred review"Readers hungry for the thought-provoking extrapolation and rigorous technical detail of old-fashioned hard SF are sure to enjoy astronomer Brotherton's first novel."
-- Publishers Weekly"Mike Brotherton, himself a trained astrophysicist, combines the technical acuity and ingenuity of Robert Forward with the ironic, postmodern stance and style of M. John Harrison. In this, his debut novel, those twin talents unite to produce a work that is involving on any number of levels. It's just about all you could ask for in a hardcore SF adventure."
-- Paul di Fillippo, SCI-FI.COM
Search
Is there anything to UFOs?
July 16th, 2008
I go back and forth on this issue. I’m generally skeptical, but every once in a while I come across something that looks like real evidence. Recent radar reports requested under the Freedom of Information Act might qualify.
What’s hard about this stuff, assuming there is anything to any of it in the first place, is that there are a lot of crazy and unbalanced people attracted to the UFO community who are full of crap. It seems that any topic outside of the mainstream tends to be more open (hello, sf fans) and more willing to take in the fringe folk. Then when you have the opportunity to visit with community members, the well balanced who may have insight into something a little weird going on get swamped out by the loonies.
I don’t think we know everything going on in and above the world. I want to know, but fringe communities don’t have quality control over information the way we do in science (which is also imperfect, although much less so).
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
The problem with the radar report is that like basically ALL the more “credible” reports, it still has lots of crap mixed in. For instance, a size of 500 to 1000 feet? How do they know? Traffic control radars aren’t imaging radars, basically all you get is a strength of signal for “size”, totally dependent on the rcs….Sounds as though, if it was real at all, that it could well be a test of a “secret” plane (the SR-71 AND Mig 25 can both go faster, for example, though neither can slow to 50 mph without falling out of the sky…..). That explanation is obviously much more likely than ETs (which isn’t to say it isn’t very, very interesting, if true).
Yeah, the best-documented UFO sightings in the past have seemed consistent with secret experimental aircraft.