FOLK HEARTH

How Science, Technology, and Culture Created the UFO Mythos

Late 19th Century: The Observation That Started It All (1877–1897)

The story of modern UFOs and alien belief begins not with extraterrestrials, but with human perception and misinterpretation. In 1877, during a particularly favorable opposition of Mars, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli carefully mapped the planet’s surface.

• Through his telescope in Milan, he observed a network of faint linear markings across the reddish disk. He labeled these features canali.

• In Italian, canali simply means “channels” or “grooves.” However, when the term entered English publications, it was widely translated as “canals,” implying artificial construction.

“Ghosts Don’t Exist Because If They Did, CERN Would Have Detected Them”

A Logical Fallacy Analysis

(Using the Brian Cox Argument as a Case Study)

Physicist Brian Cox has argued that ghosts or spirits cannot exist because the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN would have detected any new particles, energy, or information-carrying mechanisms associated with them. In a discussion on The Infinite Monkey Cage, Cox reasoned that if human consciousness or a “spirit” persists after death, it must interact with matter or energy in a way detectable by modern particle physics. When Neil deGrasse Tyson summarized this as “CERN has disproved the existence of ghosts,” Cox replied, “Yes.”

While Cox’s argument is coherent within the assumptions of particle physics, it nonetheless rests on several logical and category errors that prevent it from functioning as a valid disproof.