Biologist claims to have studied alien bodies (EBOs - Exo-Biospheric-Organisms)

JMartJr said:
I rise in modified limited defense of Fizzbuzz. I don't think it is a fair comparison to equate an open-minded stance on a specific claimed case, however fantastical seeming, with a near Gishian list of broad-ranging topics -- especially so when everything on your list is (with the possible exception of La Lloronas, I don't know what those are) would be classified as supernatural/magical entities, while aliens from space are at least scientifically possible (however unlikely it seems that they'd be able to come here.)

Also, you listed Banshees and Chupacabras twice each, and Wendigos thrice!;)

This is not to be interpreted in any sense as expressing belief in the topic story of this thread, which seems to me to be pretty obviously an elaborate troll story from the Intertubes. I just don't think trying to saddle Fizzbuzz with a long list of magical creatures was a good argument.
Click to expand...
It doesn't matter what the claim is. It can be God, it can be vampires, it can aliens, it can be ghosts. Doesn't matter. They are all claims and either:
1. you believe the claim is true
2. you do not believe the claim is true
3. you believe the claim is false.

#1 and #3 are positive assertions, meaning they both bear a burden of proof and require evidence. The content of the claim doesn't matter.
 
jarlrmai said:
I am more trying to understand why I should be giving this story any mental energy at all as opposed to all the other apparent fictions we are surrounded with.
Click to expand...
I didn't ask for your opinion. In fact, I didn't ask for anyone's opinion, I just posted the story in case anyone was interested... If you don't find the story interesting, if you have nothing to add, then this thread isn't for you, my friend. And that's OK.
 
Duke said:
No mention of having to have applied for/received a security clearance to work at a military facility known for classified biomedical research on a program dealing with aliens? Our biologist makes it sound like his only vetting was a series of "suspicious" interviews and signing an NDA.
Click to expand...
and signing the NDA only after the interviews? is that common practice?
annarborhawk said:
But I think someone with relevant technical knowledge might be able to comment on whether the poster's description of the biology is something that could work or even makes sense.
Click to expand...
Honestly, the "thermoregulation via pee" (no sweat glands!) sounds fictional. In cold weather, you need more energy = more food = more liquid for these aliens = more pee = cooling off more. It sounds like the motivated setup for "the alien got slippery, that's how I knew it was afraid of me: it had peed itself". There's nothing to disprove the notion that some fiction writer (or zealous GM) is trying to crowd-test a facet of their fictional universe.

fizzBuzz said:
I disagree. He's definitely taking the high road, but I don't think he has any ill-intent with what he's suggesting. It sounds to me like he's suggesting the community to take a scientific approach. When I say he's taking the high road I mean he's suggesting "don't just believe this on face value, don't jump to conclusions here, let's use a scientific approach to this" - as in "I know better than you all because I'm a scientist".
Click to expand...
It's a pseudo-scientific approach, though, and that is never the high road.
There is zero evidence (which he admits), yet he claims there is merit to analysing the claims (but he won't expend the effort himself). This is absolutely the easy road to stoking a conspiracy theory.

The scientific approach is to dismiss the claim as not falsifiable in the scientific sense.
 
jarlrmai said:
This whole post doesn't meet the guidelines for posting in the debunking sections of Metabunk
Click to expand...
Not for us to decide, but how is this any different than the Grusch saga? At least this guy claims to have had first hand knowledge/experience, as opposed to Grusch going public with what even he admits is second/third hand heresay "evidence."
 
Last edited:
I may be in the minority here, and I have not gone through it in any detail, but as someone with a biology degree I think this is actually well done. Unless the writer went through an awful lot of (seemingly pointless) autodidactic effort, they have some expertise in physiology as well as anatomy. I would guess a med-school student. It's not a word salad by a common prankster with Google or a book they picked up at the thrift store, but a work of considerable thought and effort and background knowledge. Someone considered long and hard, what might a real technical report on alien autopsy look like, with as much rigor as possible? For that reason I find it pretty interesting.
ETA: It could have been written partially or totally by GPT4.
 
Last edited:
fizzBuzz said:
Yeah, I figured there's not much here other than interest. But I suppose it's useful if we can tie elements of this story to other claims that have been made. For example, the aliens smell like ammonia - this correlates with the reports from the Brazil incident.
Click to expand...

If we can tie elements of this story to other claims, it could just as likely mean the author borrowed those elements, rather than those elements are repeating in different circumstances. It could be that other aliens are small and grey with big heads and excrete ammonia, just like the ones he studied or it could be that he simply inserted those elements into his story. To use an upper Midwest term "It's a horse a piece". With no evidence for his story and no evidence for all the other small grey smelly aliens, either scenario is possible, though the lack of evidence leads to borrowed story elements.

One thing that can be done, is to look for some of the elements in SyFy literature. Assuming many UFOlogists are also SyFy fans, maybe some elements have been taken from there. Just a couple here. Upon first reading:

External Quote:
Briefly, we've discovered that the EBO genome is a chimera of genomes from our biosphere and from an unknown one. They are artificial, ephemeral and disposable organisms created for a purpose that still partially eludes us. I'll be substantiating my statements after a brief introduction.
I thought of Greg Bear's The Forge of God and it's follow up Anvil of Stars from the '80s. I don't have the books any more and I'm not going to buy them just for this thread, but IIRC these books contained "disposable" entities that were genetically engineered.

1688746451917.png


As for the excretory system, compare these 2 passages:

External Quote:
Waste is excreted into the equivalent of a ureter, which branches out into four. Each branch flows towards one of the four limbs and in turn these branches divide until they end up as thousands of excretory pores.
1688746224126.png

https://archive.org/details/barlowe... Guide To Extraterrestrials/page/n25/mode/2up Page 26

The second one is from a book I used to have called Barlow's Guide to Extraterrestrials, again I believe from the '80s. It was a collection of artist renditions of ETs from SyFy novels, with the passage above describing a Cygnostik which in turn is from an older book '77, A Little Knowledge by Michael Bishop.

1688748456246.png


Giving more time, one could probably find more parallels between the OP story and various SyFy. titles.
 
Duke said:
Not for us to decide, but how is this any different than the Grusch saga? At least this guy claims to have had first hand knowledge/experience, as opposed to Grusch going public with what even he admits is second/third hand hearsay "evidence."
Click to expand...
Grusch is not anonymous, and appears to have actually worked for UAPTF.

As to "first hand", anonymous writes, "For the sake of clarity, the information that I provide here is an aggregation of what I have observed and what I have read" and "Please be advised that I'm speaking from memory of something I read more than 10 years ago".
 
Last edited:
fizzBuzz said:
It doesn't matter what the claim is. It can be God, it can be vampires, it can aliens, it can be ghosts. Doesn't matter. They are all claims and either:
1. you believe the claim is true
2. you do not believe the claim is true
3. you believe the claim is false.

#1 and #3 are positive assertions, meaning they both bear a burden of proof and require evidence. The content of the claim doesn't matter.
Click to expand...
IDK that's a useful way to divide the world in a debunking forum.

For me anyway, it's more about levels of credence. So I have very little credence in a theory that says aliens have or are visiting Earth. (Though probably greater than most people here). Maybe its something like .005, or whatever. (We should totally have a thread with people showing their hands on what they think the odds are that aliens are visiting us - would be interesting).

Now we see an anonymous sophisticated sounding post on Reddit about alien physiology. I feel like the hypothesis that some creative person with a relevant PhD felt like LARPing a little is more likely than the hypothesis that the post is so sophisticated/plausible sounding enough, that only someone who honestly worked on alien biology could have written it.

So the story doesn't move the needle AT ALL on my credence that aliens are visiting us.

I just don't see a useful way to use your three categories here. But I get the reason for your response to the other poster.
 
And, btw, the Reddit post COULD HAVE altered our credence on aliens visiting Earth. It could have contained information about some never contemplated before biological system or arrangement that is also plausible or workable or testable in a lab.

That's why I am hoping some bona fide biologists will chime in.
 
annarborhawk said:
IDK that's a useful way to divide the world in a debunking forum.

For me anyway, it's more about levels of credence. So I have very little credence in a theory that says aliens have or are visiting Earth. (Though probably greater than most people here). Maybe its something like .005, or whatever. (We should totally have a thread with people showing their hands on what they think the odds are that aliens are visiting us - would be interesting).

Now we see an anonymous sophisticated sounding post on Reddit about alien physiology. I feel like the hypothesis that some creative person with a relevant PhD felt like LARPing a little is more likely than the hypothesis that the post is so sophisticated/plausible sounding enough, that only someone who honestly worked on alien biology could have written it.

So the story doesn't move the needle AT ALL on my credence that aliens are visiting us.

I just don't see a useful way to use your three categories here. But I get the reason for your response to the other poster.
Click to expand...
So, there's no scale for belief. You either believe a claim or you do not believe a claim. On/Off, Zero/One, Black/White. Like this:

1. claim: god exists - I believe that is true (bears burden of proof)
2. claim: god exists - I do not believe that is true
3. claim: god does not exist - I believe that is true (bears burden of proof)
4. claim: god does not exist - I do not believe that is true

Notice - #2 and #4 are logically the same thing

You are talking about the probability of truth - different topic, one that may or may not sway our beliefs, but different indeed. And it's a topic that I wouldn't mind discussing. I'm like you, I think there is an extremely low probability that aliens are visiting Earth. This low probability leads me to not believe aliens are visiting Earth.
 
With respect probability of truth is all we can deal with as a shared group, people's beliefs are personal, we can discuss the reasons people believe things but then we are back to probability of truth
 
NorCal Dave said:
Giving more time, one could probably find more parallels between the OP story and various SyFy. titles.
Click to expand...

It reminded me most of X-COM: Terror from the Deep, a famous 1995 videogame (which I played with much pleasure).

It features alien autopsies and the 'Deep One' autopsy recalls many of the themes reported by the anonymous: mixture of alien and terrestrial features, a brain modified to interact with technology ("It is speculated that these nodules are essential to interact with their technology" in the 'Brain' section of the OP"), an artificial skin.
1688752375347.png

https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php/Deep_One
 
annarborhawk said:
And, btw, the Reddit post COULD HAVE altered our credence on aliens visiting Earth. It could have contained information about some never contemplated before biological system or arrangement that is also plausible or workable or testable in a lab.

That's why I am hoping some bona fide biologists will chime in.
Click to expand...
I don't know about that. Biology, like most disciplines, is heavily specialized. A geneticist could weigh in on the genetics, a physiologist on the physiology, a molecular biologist, etc. That's why I suggested it was done by a med-school student: it's one of the few cases where people need to gain considerable expertise in a lot of areas. Probably not worth assembling an expert panel to assess the plausibility.

Second, plausibility of a story so out there is a difficult thing to measure. For example, copper compounds are generally toxic, but who knows how a micro-engineered biological system could theoretically make use of copper oxide, if we had more information on the mechanisms. Such details beg for arguments from incredulity, which are useless.

Third, an expert in a particular sub-discipline who is a genuine alien-UFO enthusiast might rate the story as plausible, while a skeptic with identical expertise might deem it farcical. Experts are still fallible humans capable of having wild beliefs that trigger motivated reasoning. (See: Dr. Travis Taylor Ph.D. Ph.D., Professor Dr. Steven E. Jones Ph.D., etc.)

I would leave the story as a curiosity concocted by a creative, driven individual. And/or GPT.
 
Mendel said:
Grusch is not anonymous, and appears to have actually worked for UAPTF.

As to "first hand", anonymous writes, "For the sake of clarity, the information that I provide here is an aggregation of what I have observed and what I have read" and "Please be advised that I'm speaking from memory of something I read more than 10 years ago".
Click to expand...
Evidence? None for either.
 
Mendel said:
As to "first hand", anonymous writes, "For the sake of clarity, the information that I provide here is an aggregation of what I have observed and what I have read" and "Please be advised that I'm speaking from memory of something I read more than 10 years ago".
Click to expand...
The poster explains this earlier on. After the interview process and before he begin actually working on the aliens, he was in a briefing state. He spent weeks studying the documentation of things they have already collected on the aliens. He says they wanted "to get him up to speed with things" before he started lab work. And the quotes you provided here are in reference to the religion and culture documents that he read in his briefing - not his first hand observations.

He claims to have had first hand observation of the alien bodies.
 
fizzBuzz said:
And the quotes you provided here are in reference to the religion and culture documents that he read in his briefing - not his first hand observations.
Click to expand...
That's incorrect. The first quote stands at the beginning of the post, and it indicates that the post contains an unmarked amount of second-hand knowledge. Since there was a team of 20 scientists working simultaneously, I'd be surprised if the author claimed to have seen more than 10% of what they write about, especially since their proclaimed field is microbiology and not medicine. We have to assume that most of the information is second-hand, and we don't know what—if it isn't a hoax altogether.

And we know from the other quote that this second-hand information was allegedly acquired over a decade ago.

fizzBuzz said:
So, there's no scale for belief. You either believe a claim or you do not believe a claim.
Click to expand...
Would you be surprised to learn that experts disagree?
Article:

The conviction of delusional beliefs scale: Reliability and validity

(DR Combs et al., 2006)
SmartSelect_20230707-213154_Samsung Notes.jpg
 
Last edited:
fizzBuzz said:
The poster explains this earlier on. After the interview process and before he begin actually working on the aliens, he was in a briefing state. He spent weeks studying the documentation of things they have already collected on the aliens. He says they wanted "to get him up to speed with things" before he started lab work. And the quotes you provided here are in reference to the religion and culture documents that he read in his briefing - not his first hand observations.

He claims to have had first hand observation of the alien bodies.
Click to expand...
I was going to reply with pretty much the same points, but didn't have time when I briefly responded to @Mendel earlier.

I'm a nut & bolts engineer. The closest I ever came to taking a biology course was 8th grade Earth Science back during the Dark Ages, so I have no idea if anything our biologist said even makes sense. What I do know is he, like Grusch, made extraordinary claims with zero documentation to support those claims. Whether I believe either of them is immaterial.

One thing I do recall reading in the "Early Bird" 4-5 years ago was biomedical labs at Ft Detrick were shutdown due to biohazard containment issues. Exactly what the hazards were was never revealed, as far as I know. Some conspiracy types tried to tie COVID to Ft Detrick as a result. Is it a matter of time before someone tries to link the alien remains to the biohazard shutdowns?
 
Duke said:
Is it a matter of time before someone tries to link the alien remains to the biohazard shutdowns?
Click to expand...
I can't speak to what people are likely to try, but it's really really unusual for biohazards to jump unrelated species. And here we have biohazards expected to jump biospheres, a much greater adaptation mismatch. Ain't gonna happen.
 
You're very disputatious...

Mendel said:
And we know from the other quote that this second-hand information was allegedly acquired over a decade ago.
Click to expand...
The quote where they say "Please be advised that I'm speaking from memory of something I read more than 10 years ago" is directly in response to the religion and culture question. You said this person didn't have first hand experience with the aliens. Well, this person clearly claims that he did.

Mendel said:
Would you be surprised to learn that experts disagree?
Click to expand...
You either believe or you don't believe. Some beliefs may mean more to you or less (which is what your reference is talking about), but you can't halfway believe something - that doesn't make any sense. "I 40% believe Bigfoot exists"... what does that even mean?
 
fizzBuzz said:
"I 40% believe Bigfoot exists"... what does that even mean?
Click to expand...
It means you think there's a pretty good possibility that Bigfoot exists.

Haven't you ever heard something like, "I think my boyfriend might be cheating on me"? There's obviously gray area between "I'm certain my boyfriend is cheating on me" and "There's no way my boyfriend is cheating on me." This is silly (and off-topic).
 
Mendel said:
I didn't find that in the post, could you quote that for me, please?
Click to expand...
It's in the quote you posted

"For the sake of clarity, the information that I provide here is an aggregation of what I have observed and what I have read"
Click to expand...
Not to mention he talks about what his job was at the facility - hands on stuff. If that person's post makes you think he didn't have first hand experience with the aliens, then I don't know what to tell you... sorry.
 
Edward Current said:
It means you think there's a pretty good possibility that Bigfoot exists.

Haven't you ever heard something like, "I think my boyfriend might be cheating on me"? There's obviously gray area between "I'm certain my boyfriend is cheating on me" and "There's no way my boyfriend is cheating on me." This is silly (and off-topic).
Click to expand...
Yeah, "I think my boyfriend might be cheating on me" is a questionable state. But you either believe it to be true or you do not. You can't halfway believe it.

I think we're just going to agree to disagree here.
 
fizzBuzz said:
He claims to have had first hand observation of the alien bodies.
Click to expand...
fizzBuzz said:
It's in the quote you posted

Not to mention he (?) talks about what his job was at the facility - hands on stuff. If that person's post makes you think he didn't have first hand experience with the aliens, then I don't know what
Click to expand...
He describes that his was a technician's job, that he ran microbiological assays. At worst this means the most he ever saw of the aliens first-hand were some tissue samples.

I believe there is nothing in the post that explicitly says the author saw alien bodies first-hand. It's an inference the readers are supposed to make, not a claim.
 
Mendel said:
You cut too much from your quote.
External Quote:
Other than the scientific staff, there were security guards working for one subcontractor or another. There were no support staff such as janitors or maintenance workers.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the correction on that point. Honest mistake, it was late and I guess I was having trouble parsing the wall of text.
 
Mendel said:
Honestly, the "thermoregulation via pee" (no sweat glands!) sounds fictional. In cold weather, you need more energy = more food = more liquid for these aliens = more pee = cooling off more. It sounds like the motivated setup for "the alien got slippery, that's how I knew it was afraid of me: it had peed itself". There's nothing to disprove the notion that some fiction writer (or zealous GM) is trying to crowd-test a facet of their fictional universe.
Click to expand...
It does sound fictional, indeed. Sweat cools us off by evaporation, because water has different specific heat capacity when changing phase to vapor. That difference in specific heat capacity is where the cooling comes from, otherwise just removing liquid from the body makes no difference to it's temperature. Or maybe the claim was that it's sweat was also it's pee? Doesn't make much sense biologically, if that is the case, since it couldn't pee if it was cold and that would have dire consequences on it's ability to stay alive. I have no idea if a biologist would necessarily be aware of how exactly sweating cools the body down though. That's more of a physics thing, maybe?

PS He claimed peeing through the pores. That's a very significant bug in the system which he claims was engineered (proof of which was the efficient genome of the creatures).
 
Last edited:
beakflip said:
I have no idea if a biologist would necessarily be aware of how exactly sweating cools the body down though. That's more of a physics thing, maybe?
Click to expand...
I'm sure the fact is known by every 12-year-old, and the principle is known by all but the dimmest high school student. But I'm not sure that the physics of phase change matters much to a biologist, whose interest is more likely to end at the point where the pore meets the skin. :)
 
Ann K said:
I'm sure the fact is known by every 12-year-old, and the principle is known by all but the dimmest high school student. But I'm not sure that the physics of phase change matters much to a biologist, whose interest is more likely to end at the point where the pore meets the skin. :)
Click to expand...
That, specifically, was not covered in my high school education and the abstract sweat = cooling was enough for me for a pretty long time. Maybe that is a detail that is explained in highschool where you are from. Then again, if it's reasonably expected of a biologist to know this, then I am inclined to think that he doesn't have a higher education in biology.
 
I don't think us non-biologists should speculate on what's biologically possible. Also, an organisms environment determines how it evolves. Maybe their planet is very cold and they need "pee" to warm them... who knows. I think with stuff like this, there's too many unknowns to speculate.

Obviously it sounds like fiction and sci-fi, but imagine aliens were really visiting Earth and they were real... don't you think their biology, culture, technology, etc. would all sound like fiction to us even though it would be true?
 
fizzBuzz said:
I don't think us non-biologists should speculate on what's biologically possible.
Click to expand...
I hear what you're saying here and I respect it, but what we have here in this post is all circumstantial and the only thing even close to something we can talk about and discuss as a claim is the biological description of the EBE. That's what we do here. I would bet that very few of us on MB are aeronautical engineers, but we talk about claims involving those concepts. If we can't speculate on what's possible because we aren't biologists, then why can't we throw out this whole Reddit post because some anonymous stranger made? Just because he claims that he was a biologist doesn't mean he is one.
 
As an author, I recognize creative writing by someone who has experience with human biology.

Also, my [redacted] went through security clearance to work at the Pentagon & the interview process was long and even the FBI interviewed members of the family. But somehow this super secret hush hush project had none of that? Right.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

Edward Current
Claim: Cell phones are bad at photographing things in the sky at night (such as UAP)
Replies
18
Views
2K
JMartJr
JMartJr
NorCal Dave
Claim: UFO's May Be Stealth Aliens Living in Caves, on the Dark Side of the Moon or Alaska
4 5 6
Replies
205
Views
8K
Scaramanga
Scaramanga
S
Cigar-shaped UFO captured by Curiosity [actually long exposures of Phobos]
Replies
21
Views
1K
Easy Muffin
Easy Muffin
Scaramanga
Rony Vernet ( via Ross Coulthart ) - Brazil UFO Claims
Replies
28
Views
1K
Ben Harris
Ben Harris
Mick West
Elizondo's Orbs
2 3
Replies
100
Views
4K
owntheissue
O

Latest posts

Back
Top