Jun 12 2009
|
|
The UFO Quiz
I have been wanting to put together something like this for a few years now, but “Schuyler” from the Paracast forums and a few of his cohorts beat me to it. It’s a vast and reasonably complete look at the subject, although it’s an essay quiz and may only appeal to the hardcore, as well it should. It’s a little unclear as to how you score yourself. For example, I knew at least a little about all except two questions asked on the test, but sometimes could give only partial answers. Does that mean that I only get the question half or less right?
In any case, it’s as good an intro to the subject as you will find anywhere online, even though I disagree with the assessment of Bill Moore (of course.)
This entry was posted
on Friday, June 12th, 2009 at 4:31 am and is filed under History, UFOlogists, UFOlogy, Wake Up Down There. You can follow responses via RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response or trackback from your site.
del.icio.us Digg Reddit BlinkList Google Ma.gnolia StumbleUpon Technorati Yahoo! Help
- Related News Stories:
- Take the Quiz… »
|
|
Contribute Your Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.
|
June 12th, 2009 at 5:31 am
“The questions probably reflect my own biases and may also reflect my own book collection devoted to UFOs”
You think??. No mentioning of the Varginha case. No mentioning of the Mexican UFO flap of 1991. No mentioning of the Voronezh case. As usual, American Ufologists barely acknowledge that this is a world-wide phenomena.
June 12th, 2009 at 5:32 am
Sorry if I sound too cranky. It’s been a hard week; thank God it’s over.
June 12th, 2009 at 8:45 am
There are forces within our government (American), that seem to seek to undermine what our Constitution represents. We have a right to bear arms but since a very small minority of people have been documented as going on shooting rampages (for example), these same forces have tried to paint all gun owners with a “all gun owners are on the verge of going on shooting rampages” paintbrush. They then use that as an excuse to control (read: limit our freedom) the sale and distribution of arms, either in the form of licenses or extra burdensome “Boston tea party taxes” — who says history doesn’t repeat itself?
The spirit of the Freedom Of Information Act was freedom to obtain any information that is no longer classified. Sounds good, right? But then the above mentioned forces decided to add “search fees”, lose or be unable to find certain documents, and I suspect that soon they will simply reclassify all the documents that are in their (and only their) best interest to keep from the public eye forever. So I propose one small change to this whole process to make it open and free, as originally envisioned, and that is instead of going through the red tape of requesting information and having the government waster their precious time and money to do the “searches”, that they simply make all the information that is available under the FOIA to be placed directly online so people can do their own searches. How can they object to that since it saves them time and money and it conforms not only to the letter of the law, but to the spirit of the law? Let’s watch the politicians try to lie, cheat, and steal their way out of that one.
June 12th, 2009 at 10:41 am
“How can they object to that since it saves them time and money and it conforms not only to the letter of the law, but to the spirit of the law?”
But of course, that initiative implicitly assumes that governments think their citizens to be adults, and therefore should treat them accordingly.
June 12th, 2009 at 10:44 am
BTW, shouldn’t you have written that comment in the Grenewald post by Nick, Sage?
Have you started Friday’s Happy hour without me, as usual?
June 12th, 2009 at 3:31 pm
heh
Does Schuyler know you posted this here? He might be able to respond to comments and talk about scoring.
I plan to take the quiz after my exams are done too.
June 13th, 2009 at 1:29 am
Greg said: “I knew at least a little about all except two questions asked on the test,”
Which ones?
BTW, how do you italicize quotations?
June 13th, 2009 at 3:07 am
Greg,
Thanks. I know the quiz needs work. I was thinking 1 point per correct answer for a total of 101. The idea was that you knew something about the case or event, not that you could make a speech on it. I’ve gotten some excellent feedback for improvements, and after your comments on Moore/Doty I’m feeling much more middle of the road on them.
Junkie, there are only 100 questions. You have to make some choices. Rather than rant about the lack of questions involving {insert your favorite country or region here}, why not do your own quiz? That would help us North Americans learn about the cases important to you. Most of us simply do not have access to the stuff you do. It’s not that we don’t want to; we can’t. It would be very cool to have a quiz on each global region. Of course, that means you’d have to do some actual work and cite your sources.
I’d love to do a UFO curriculum. I’m not sure I have the energy to do it, though. We’ll see. I think I may do a version 2.0 first with another 100 questions. Junkie, I’d be happy to include any questions you want to see in there and give complete credit to your contribution. You can find me on the Paracast as Schuyler.
June 14th, 2009 at 1:52 am
You might want to check this site, curious, to answer your html queries:
http://www.htmlcodetutorial.com/
Hope it hels
June 14th, 2009 at 10:02 am
RPJ,
I sort of agree. There is far too little representation of non-US cases. US/ UK researchers are aware of other cases, they just don’t tend to think of them that often.
I would have included the ones you mentioned as well as the Iranian fighter case, the South African schoolyard landing and the JAL pilot/ Alaska sighting.
June 14th, 2009 at 10:04 am
curious,
The two questions I didn’t know were the ones about UFO bibliogrpaher Geroge Eberhart, and the one about Phil Klass’ “UFO Curse.” Whoops. Now I’ve given one away.
June 14th, 2009 at 10:29 am
mschuyler,
Your quiz is very good. There is obviously a lot of work that went into it. I realize that it’s a work in progress.
The thing I didn’t agree with about Moore is the statement about him passing disinfo to Bennewitz. As far as as anyone has been able to determine, he passed just one piece, which Bennewitz never publicized, but this may have affected him nevertheless.
I’d like to see a multiple choice quiz. Perhaps I can make one up.
June 14th, 2009 at 5:52 pm
“that initiative implicitly assumes that governments think their citizens to be adults, and therefore should treat them accordingly”
That is irrelevant to a democracy, since the government is made up of citizens. It might mean that your neighbors are paranoid and don’t trust you, but they can’t stop you.
“BTW, shouldn’t you have written that comment in the Grenewald post”
Yes, I screwed up.
June 14th, 2009 at 10:46 pm
RPJ,
Thanks
June 15th, 2009 at 2:22 am
“Junkie, there are only 100 questions. You have to make some choices. Rather than rant about the lack of questions involving {insert your favorite country or region here}, why not do your own quiz? That would help us North Americans learn about the cases important to you. Most of us simply do not have access to the stuff you do. It’s not that we don’t want to; we can’t. It would be very cool to have a quiz on each global region. Of course, that means you’d have to do some actual work and cite your sources.”
Schuyler, I certainly can agree with your logic that you have to make choices when trying to come up with a limited number of questions.
As I wrote last Friday, I was having a bad time at the office and that affected the tone of my comment; something I regret. However, i still think there’s too much emphasis in the intricacies of the American UFOlogical circles, which could be trimmed to include more “meaty” questions involving cases that happened outside the US.
I also think that by now there’s ample information regarding those 3 examples I gave (Varginha, The Mexican sightings during the 1991 Solar Eclipse, the Russian landing in Voronezh) circling in the net; after all, we’re talking about cases that are between 20-13 years old! (The Voronezh case was even mentioned in the most recently disclosed case files from the British MoD, BTW).
I understand the quiz is a work in progress, and it’s definitely no easy task. Good luck with it, and I’ll try to see if I can contribute with a question or two.
June 15th, 2009 at 10:49 pm
Schuyler I might put together a 50-question Australian UFO supplemental that you can add to version 2.0 if you wish.
My last exam is tomorrow and that could be a fun little project.
Now, to find Bill Chalker’s site.
BTW, curious, doing
HTMLis[color=red] easy[/color]June 15th, 2009 at 10:50 pm
doh! backfire.
That’ll learn me to be a smartie-pants.
June 16th, 2009 at 2:55 am
Curious
Whoops, forgot about the italics question.
You put <> around the letters “em” before the word to be italicized and <> around “/em” after the word. (Sorry, if I typed it out as it should be in actual practice, it would just italicize in HTML and you couldn’t see it.)
June 16th, 2009 at 5:03 pm
There must be a couple ways to do it.
Putting italicised word also works.
(without the spaces)