The Syfy channel raises the stakes again! Not content to insult our intelligence with pseudoscience 24/7, now it gives us pseudoskeptics! It’s six “experts” pretend to be skeptics, even spend a few minutes debunking a few easy videos taken off the internet (there must be thousands of such videos on the internet, so I imagine they pick the ones where the consensus is already pretty much in favor of them being fakes). But when the “experts” roll up their sleeves and start to “investigate”, it’s Amateur City. They screw around with a lot of silly “experiments” and then announce that they are baffled, so the phenomenon must be real!
Here’s an example. They were “investigating” a photograph of a lake creature taken in Pennsylvania. One of them asks if there were any eyewitnesses. Another says, sure, he found two people who saw the same thing years ago! No, moron, we mean any eyewitness while this photo was taken. Apparently there weren’t. And the photographer wishes to remain anonymous, so they can’t question him. They waste a few hours making a fake monster, which naturally doesn’t look exactly like the one in the photo, so they conclude that the lake creature must be a REAL—whereupon they go trolling for it in their boat! Naturally they don’t find it, so the entire “investigation” is a waste of time.
The same goes for the second segment. This was an “investigation” of ghost writing. A man took Polaroid photos in his house, in which mysterious writing appeared. Now, the “expert” photographer on the team saw right away how this could be faked. You open up the Polaroid cartridge in a darkroom, superimpose over the film a screen with the words you want, do a quick flash to set the words on the film, then load it back into the camera. It’s like making a double exposure. But to make their own faked writing, she used the back of a truck as the “darkroom”. When the pictures were taken in the man’s house, there were “unexplained” globs of light on the film (curiously, right where the words would have shown up). The photography “expert” couldn’t imagine what happened, so their verdict (because their experiment failed)—ghost writing must be REAL!
I hate you SyFy. I hate you so much. You used to be one of my favorite channels. Full of crap and camp and tons of fun to watch at all hours of the day. You were a channel for a certain audience and you knew what you were doing. Then you started to change. Making shitty movies that are only movies in the loosest sense of the word. Then wrestling, reality shows, paranormal bullshit, and finally the name change. Screw you SyFy, screw you.
Even the ones they get right are stupid. In one episode they were “investigating” a pretty nifty video of a hovering flying saucer, taken by a family in their backyard on the fourth of July. First they wasted I don’t know how much time and money trying to make a ridiculously complicated “hoax” UFO in the backyard itself. But just when you think they’re about to rule it REAL, one of them suggests maybe an inflatable balloon, like you can buy on the internet. Of course this means they have to drive over a dozen or to miles to where the UFO was hovering, which turns out to be—get this!—the middle of a parking lot at a STATE PARK! They launch the think and, surprise, it looks exactly like the one on the video. At this point, one of the park rangers informs them that, yeah he did see some people flying a balloon like that on the fourth of July, along with several hundred other people!
Honestly, if you were running an “investigation” of a UFO hovering over a state park on the fourth of July, wouldn’t the FIRST thing you did be to ask if there were any eyewitnesses?
Make a pilot (of your destroying the tv) and submit it the SciFi as a pilot.
But then how would you watch your show when it aired? You know you’d want to see it. After all, I’m sure they’d edit it to look like a Megalodon with wings and laser eyes destroyed your TV. Who wouldn’t watch that?!
Used to love the channel. As of recently, the only thing I enjoyed was the newer Battlestar Galactica. The rest of the channel has turned into ghost hunting woo-woo and shows about co-eds being eaten by mutant piranhas.
Yeah, mutant piranhas are lame ass. Now zombies, zombies I love. That would be a good movie. Co-eds, zombies, maybe some gratuitous boobies…..yeah, good.
