Extraordinary claims. Ordinary investigations.

Brazilian contactee Antonio Alves Ferreira interviewed his alien abductors, Riaus and Telione , when their flying saucer landed. That’s not news. The news is, the aliens graciously allowed Ferreira to record the interview. And we have that recording right here.

It was made in two languages — Portuguese, spoken by Ferreira, and the language of the Protu planet. From where the aliens came from, of course. The full length interview is more than 45 minutes long, just click play to listen to it:

The quality is unfortunately worse than terrible, as it was all recorded on cassette tape more than two decades ago. I tried to filter some noise out, but it also filtered some of the voices and sound effects, so I decided to upload the original, without filtering.

Even the parts where clear Portuguese is spoken cannot be quite understood. It’s not that important, since the parts where “Protu” is spoken are not translated by Ferreira, so we would miss at least half of the conversation anyway.

This recording was made available thanks to Eustáquio Patounas, from SOCEX, the “Society for the Study of Aliens“, who kindly authorized this reproduction.

Of the endless things that a debunker could say about the recording, I’ll first mention that it’s really adorable. Ferreira introduces the aliens in the beginning, and in the end thank them for the interview, just like a gentleman should. He has a slight country accent, and the background noises do remind me of cars and trucks. But they could be from inside the flying saucer, obviously.

Also, you never hear Ferreira speaking at the same time as the aliens. Just like a real gentleman, including one impersonating aliens, I should mention. The Protu language is reminiscent of the Tupi-Guarani language spoken by native South Americans, except for that vague robotic intonation that can be produced when you speak inside a box or something. Like hands.

Granted, there are some “alien” sound effects in the recording, strangely they also affect Ferreira when he speaks Portuguese.

According to Patounas, who met Antonio Ferreira, the man is “intelligent, smart and very, very creative“. Well, honestly, I did find the recording adorable.

To demonstrate the capabilities of a cell phone model with a high resolution camera, Nokia asked a noted photographer to capture fairies. Not real ones, but cutout small fairies posing on idyllic sceneries, on an adorable reference to the Cottingley fairies.

The contemporary fairies are prettier — and so much anatomically correct they come naked — but as the cell phone camera captures much better images than what was possible almost a century ago, they do look obviously fake, my dear Watson.

The old ones also looked clearly fake, but those were other times. If only people strived to hoax fairy images rather than UFOs, we would at least have a more artistically pleasing corpus of evidence to wonder by. Not just insects.

Continue for more fairy images made with a cellphone.

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More than 21.000 cubic meters of solid rock, in individual blocks weighing each up to six tons, making up a total mass of 50.000 tons. It’s not possible to penetrate even a sharp razor blade between the massive blocks, perfectly fit with one another. After millennia, the monument reaching for the skies still preserve its simple and elegant forms that would be mirrored in so many places around the world.

As the old saying go, “man fears time. But time fears the Pont Du Gard“.

Because we are not talking about the Great Pyramid, but about the bridge built by the Romans around the beginning of the Christian Era.

The Pont du Gard. The arrow points to mere human beings. [photo by Jack Johanson]

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It seems I missed the media frenzy over the study that supposedly proved girls really prefer pink, boys blue, and advanced that that was because “it may have helped women gather ripe fruit, or pick healthy mates“.

But as Ben Goldacre over at Bad Science pointed out, the study itself didn’t prove any of those. In fact, it found that this preference is not consistent over culture, exactly the opposite of what it speculates and was widely embraced byt the media.

The most interesting thing here, though, is that Goldacre notes how:

Back in the days when ladies had a home journal (in 1918) the Ladies Home Journal wrote: “There has been a great diversity of opinion on the subject, but the generally accepted rule is pink for the boy and blue for the girl. The reason is that pink being a more decided and stronger color is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.”

The Sunday Sentinel in 1914 told American mothers: “If you like the color note on the little one’s garments, use pink for the boy and blue for the girl, if you are a follower of convention.” Some sources suggest it wasn’t until the 1940s that the modern gender associations of girly pink became universally accepted. Pink is, therefore, perhaps not biologically girly. Boys who were raised in pink frilly dresses went down mines and fought in World War 2. Clothing conventions do change over time.

What do the future reserves for our color preferences? I suspect in the future everyone will be tetrachromat, and the real nice colors will be those us poor trichromats can’t even distinguish.

[via Apothecary's Drawer Weblog]