Several of you, and critics, have written to me over the past several weeks asking how we can legitimately claim the Starchild Skull is “alien” if we don’t have its entire genome to compare to the human genome. In fact, this very afternoon nationally syndicated radio show host Michael Medved bothered himself to excerpt the Wackypedia article about the Starchild on his show, announcing to his audience with apparent authority that Dr. Steven Novella had examined the Starchild and concluded it was a “common hydrocephalic.”
Let me say that Novella is a quack who has never laid eyes on the Starchild other than photos on our website, and I don’t believe he’s even a doctor. As far as I know he is a scam artist of some kind passing himself off as a qualified skeptic. But qualified or not, he doesn’t know anything of substance about the Starchild Skull, having written about it once, way back in 1999, and since then his horribly flawed article has been taken as gospel by mainstream scientists, Wackypedia toadies, and, now, today, Mr. Michael Medved.
That Novella article can be read in its entirety in the “Fight the Stupids” section of the Starchild Project website, along with my explanations of all the asinine errors in it. So now let’s get to some new facts about the Starchild DNA testing and results that should make even “Dr.” Novella and Michael Medved perhaps have second thoughts.
Valuable input from Roger Cunningham
Roger Cunningham is a good friend who recently offered me some great ammunition for dealing with critics and skeptics who insist we can’t assert anything meaningful about the Starchild’s DNA until we sequence its entire genome. We do understand that sequencing the entire genome is a must-do in order to make our case impervious to critics and skeptics. But we also know that from a strictly statistical standpoint, we already have enough fragments in hand to know what the final result will be—absolutely and definitely.
First, some background on Roger. He is an engineer with a degree from Georgia Tech, which has one of the best engineering programs in the U.S. While at GT and the GT Graduate School, Roger took and passed nine courses in Statistics, Probability, and Hypothesis Testing. It is important to know that in the undergraduate and graduate programs of nearly all scientists other than engineers, they take at most two such courses. This is why they tend to be totally inept at grasping the meaning and significance of statistical data.
What follows might at first sound intimidating because of everyone’s basic unfamiliarity with statistic analysis. But if you bear with it and read through Roger’s comments, I feel sure you will understand the great value of what he is putting forth here. At a minimum, if it gets posted in enough places maybe it will give skeptics and critics reason to think twice about where we are with the Starchild Skull, and where we are so obviously taking it–straight into the history books as the world’s first genuinely “alien” being.
The ABCs of statistical analysis direct from Roger Cunningham
(Quote) In Hypothesis Testing, even a .1% sample can be significant if the population being measured has few or no outside influences to cause change. DNA nucleotides and base pairs are just such a population. They exist only in and of themselves, and never change once their host, a living entity, is genetically established during the first few moments of conception and gestation.
(Quote) This is called a “Confidence Interval Test.” Most scientists are not well versed in Confidence Intervals. This is why they can reject a sample that is 2% valid “because it is too small.” However, in real statistics, which scientists are not trained in and receive only introductory-level courses, a verified sample of .1% to 2% can be all that is needed to prove a case, provided the Confidence Interval is sufficient.
(Quote) Because Mitochondrial DNA is so highly conserved, its Confidence Interval is AT MOST only on the order of .1% to .5%. Thus, the Starchild data needs only a 99.5% Confidence Interval threshold for its mtDNA amount to be significant. The actual 9.5% recovery (of mtDNA base pairs) provides a 90.5% Confidence Interval threshold, which can only be termed “overwhelming.”
(Quote) It is completely legitimate to extrapolate that 9.5% recovery (multiplying it by a factor of 10.5) to firmly establish the Starchild as “not human.” If scientists were well-trained in Statistics and Hypothesis Testing, the established 9.5% recovery would have them on their heels.
(Quote) With only .001% recovered base pairs (approx. 30,000) of the Starchild’s 3+ billion base pair nuclear genome, the required Confidence Interval has not been achieved. Nonetheless, by establishing that only 2% of the recovered amount (.02% x 30,000 = 600) was not found in the NIH database (and thus not found on Earth to this point), it would statistically confirm that the ultimate recovery of the entire genome would prove beyond doubt that it is “not human.” And, indeed, the NIH database did not contain at least a few thousand of the base pairs from the Starchild’s nuclear genome.
(Quote) These numbers solidly establish proof of the Starchild’s “alien” genetic heritage. However, because the vast majority of scientists have no understanding of these basic statistical facts, they will stubbornly insist that the only acceptable result is 100% recovery of both the nuclear genome and the mitochondrial genome.
(Lloyd) Anyone who feels like challenging Roger on any of this, or thanking him for sticking his neck out to try to help us in this way, he can be reached at: [email protected]. Don’t ask me about those numbers, he’s an engineer!
What it all means relative to what we do now.
First, I’m going to do what I can to salvage the damage caused by Michael Medved on his radio show, such as it might have been. I’ll ask for at least a few minutes on his monthly “Full Moon” show, which I am told deals with alternative subjects. He could hardly do better than to take anything resembling a fair and objective look at the Starchild Skull.
I also intend to keep pushing hard to try to find the investor that we need to secure funding for the genome recovery and the documentary films that will show the world that the testing was done correctly and the results can be verified by any other genetics lab in the world.
Times are hard everywhere now, and even people with great wealth are waiting to see what the U.S. Congress will do about raising our country’s debt ceiling. Until that issue is resolved, we all seem stalled in a holding pattern. I hope to break out of it when everyone else does, but for now it’s just “wait and see.” I hope you all can have the necessary patience to bear with me as I grind through yet another of the many low points in the Starchild’s story.