An analysis of the Betty Hill "star map"

a reply to: james1947

Have you used any "control" maps? Randomly produced dots for example?

My apologies if this has been addressed.

originally posted by: BenutzerUnbekannt
Therefore your "star map" analysis is pure bunk.

Any analysis of Betty Hill's map suffers from the problem of being based on information that cannot be confirmed, the supposed fact that she drew the map as she supposedly saw it aboard the Alien's ship.

But that doesn't mean that any analysis of the map is "pure bunk", as that depends on the analysis itself and not on the data used as the basis for the analysis.

Even people that want to prove that the Betty's map is bunk need to make an analysis of it to prove their point, just saying that the map was created by Betty Hill (concious or unconsciously) is not a scientific approach either, people should prove their point (pro or against) based on the available data.

Therefore you - "james1947" - are a time-wasting fool. Go away and stop wasting the time of otherwise sensible adults.

That's not a nice thing to say, anyone is free of spending their time the way they want. In the same way you decided that this topic was important enough for you to post in this thread, anyone can decided the their time will be well spent on doing something else.

And nobody is forcing you to read this or any other thread.

originally posted by: Phage
a reply to: james1947

Have you used any "control" maps? Randomly produced dots for example?

My apologies if this has been addressed.

I have three (3) other "dot maps" provided by ATS members...

originally posted by: ArMaP

Any analysis of Betty Hill's map suffers from the problem of being based on information that cannot be confirmed, the supposed fact that she drew the map as she supposedly saw it aboard the Alien's ship.

In Engineering we sometimes have to make, or accept assumptions in order for a design or analysis to proceed. I made the assumption that Betty's scribble was a reasonable replication of what she saw, I then let the results attempt to speak...I feel the results are sufficient to strongly support the hypothesis that Betty did in fact see such a "map" on the Extraterrestrial craft.

That's not a nice thing to say, anyone is free of spending their time the way they want. In the same way you decided that this topic was important enough for you to post in this thread, anyone can decided the their time will be well spent on doing something else.

And nobody is forcing you to read this or any other thread.

Thank you for that ArMaP. I thought I tried to explain that I'm a retired Engineer, and the m a in purpose of this exercise, is to exercise my brain, provide some amount of entertainment to me and the reader. And, perhaps uncover a mystery of the Universe. Anyway, it seems to be fulfilling its original expectations, so, I'm happy with it, AND, the truly big plus; I get to learn new things!!!

a reply to: ArMaP
ATS has used the motto: "Attack the ball, not the player", which is a good policy to discourage ad hominems and focus on the issues, but James called all of us fools first, don't you remember?

originally posted by: james1947
Ya know, IF y'all could actually mount a logical argument, based on something solid, like science, you might have an easier time making your illogical, and quite incorrect accusations of bias, cherrypicking, delusions, or what ever, actually having some small amount of substance. But, as it is you are yelling nonsense at a scientist and making fools of yourselves...

The problem in this thread is when someone tried to question the 99.1% number which James quoted as the ultimate scientific proof of Marjorie Fish's interpretation of Betty's map, challenges were met with a response from James along the lines of appeal to authority with him being the alleged authority, that he has 45 years working with computers and he knows everything and we know nothing and we are all too dumb to understand his advanced scientific method. In fact some of your responses suggested that you didn't understand this, when you were asking "What scientist?" I don't know if you ever figured this out but he was referring to himself.

So any attempts to attack the ball have been diverted by James to say essentially, forget about the ball, I'm the player and I know everything and you know nothing, and you should just accept what I say. So how is one supposed to follow the "attack the ball, not the player" motto when such arguments are used, which by the way are not scientific?

James led us on for 13 pages with that argument and when I finally contacted the developer of the software he used to calculate his "scientific" 99.1% match number, the developer confirmed that the tool James used is not capable of doing any kind of sophisticated image comparison like James claimed. So to say James credibility in the subject of image comparison software is zero is not accurate, because zero implies we have no reason to apply a positive or negative correlation between claims made and actuality. In this case not only the software documentation but the software developer directly contradicts James claims so the correlation between James' claim and reality is actually negative. It's not easy to put a positive spin on that and turn it into something nice to say, especially after he called us all fools and still hasn't admitted he was wrong. He said he'd try another tool since I didn't like that one but it's not about me or what I like, it's about what both the software documentation and the software developer say about the tool he used because I figure the developer who wrote it should know the tool better than anybody.

originally posted by: Arbitrageur
ATS has used the motto: "Attack the ball, not the player", which is a good policy to discourage ad hominems and focus on the issues, but James called all of us fools first, don't you remember?

To me, saying "you are a fool" and saying "you are making a fool of yourself" are not the same thing.

The problem in this thread is when someone tried to question the 99.1% number which James quoted as the ultimate scientific proof of Marjorie Fish's interpretation of Betty's map, challenges were met with a response from James along the lines of appeal to authority with him being the alleged authority, that he has 45 years working with computers and he knows everything and we know nothing and we are all too dumb to understand his advanced scientific method. In fact some of your responses suggested that you didn't understand this, when you were asking "What scientist?" I don't know if you ever figured this out but he was referring to himself.

I just like to have straight, clear answers instead of implied things.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

The issue as I see it Arbitrageur is you still do not understand how template matching is performed. So, you insist on the absolutely simplest explanation possible, and it is a complete misunderstanding.

Yes, it performs a pixel wise comparison of the template to a source image. To do this it uses a "sliding" comparison to see if there is a match in a specific "region of interest". This region is the size of the template, and the algorithm keeps track of those matches / non-matches. When it is through the method may provide coordinates of the matching region, and/or an approximation of the quality of the match.

What your misunderstanding actually did was to cause me to find another Computer Vision Library, and guess what? It returns the same result. The problem is that it gives the region of the match, and little indication of match quality, while the AForge method did give a "match quality". So we have tried two different Computer Vision Systems; AForge, and, OpenCV. Both system perform template matching fundamentally the same. Both are capable of recognizing "objects" in images. This kind of template matching is used extensively today in things like Facial Recognition, which in the process of going "main stream" and find applications in places that it perhaps shouldn't.

Oh, and the question you asked the developer? Was the wrong question...if you want to find out IF what I did there is valid, you will need to present the complete context, and not ask a question that is actually unrelated to what's being done.

originally posted by: ArMaP

Even people that want to prove that the Betty's map is bunk need to make an analysis of it to prove their point, just saying that the map was created by Betty Hill (concious or unconsciously) is not a scientific approach either, people should prove their point (pro or against) based on the available data.

I've used data to show how unlikely it is that she could have remembered all of this information -- how accurate is human memory, how accurately can we remember dreams, and how accurate can we retrieve information through hypnosis. Three negatives against her supposed perfect recall. This is the first hurdle that james1947 has to overcome. Mathematical odds after the fact do not supersede this. It has to be avoided because the odds are against Betty having a perfect memory. It's laughable and ridiculous to believe she would. Then you have question the method. So what he has done is to show the map Betty drew to try and convince diehard believers who eat this nonsense up, matches his map, that's it. He can argue it's alien all he wants, but all that hinges on Betty's memory.

Let's go one step further after the fact. If this map is actually alien, that means 4 other stars on the map (Zeta 1 & 2 being the Hill contact) have at least 1 orbiting planet that supports intelligent life. That's because trade routes are noted meaning goods are exchanged between species. That now gives us 4 times the opportunity for contact through radio signals, etc from that area of space. I'm not aware of any verifiable evidence throughout the history of the phenomenon that says intelligent ET exists.

See how accepting this map as fact only demands more questions to be asked deeper than mathematic probabilities? This isn't only asking the way the map was retrieved. The map in itself isn't evidence that- "screams that.... The source was extraterrestrial" without asking and answering those questions. We're expected to just believe because of the mathematical odds? That's not someone searching for answers, that someone promoting and trying to "sell" their own belief.

All of my responses aren't specifically pointed to you... just in general.

Celestia has quite a few options, can limit how many light years of visibility under the view options.

Still cant get the location just right though.

originally posted by: Ectoplasm8

I've used data to show how unlikely it is that she could have remembered all of this information -- how accurate is human memory, how accurately can we remember dreams, and how accurate can we retrieve information through hypnosis.

Remembered ALL what information? You talk like it required several Gigabytes of memory to remember a few basic graphical shapes...which can be contained easily in only a few 100 kilobytes.

What I'm saying is that there wasn't a lot of information to remember...just a few basic shapes.

Three negatives against her supposed perfect recall. This is the first hurdle that james1947 has to overcome. Mathematical odds after the fact do not supersede this. It has to be avoided because the odds are against Betty having a perfect memory. It's laughable and ridiculous to believe she would. Then you have question the method. So what he has done is to show the map Betty drew to try and convince diehard believers who eat this nonsense up, matches his map, that's it. He can argue it's alien all he wants, but all that hinges on Betty's memory.

Again, this required no feat of memory!!! And your "three negatives" don't really amount to much, especially since you have them seriously misplaced. So, truthfully, I don't even need to address them since this "memory trick" you want to assert can be done easily by your average 5 year old.

None of this "hinges" on Betty's memory, since it isn't really important how accurate Betty's memory was. What I am doing here, is precisely what I originally stated; comparing Betty's map to the real world; she did pretty good!!!

And, that sir is how accurate Betty's map really is: round 90%. And in any case close enough that Computer Vision software could find a match to Betty's map in real stars all within 33 parsec.

Let's go one step further after the fact. If this map is actually alien, that means 4 other stars on the map (Zeta 1 & 2 being the Hill contact) have at least 1 orbiting planet that supports intelligent life. That's because trade routes are noted meaning goods are exchanged between species. That now gives us 4 times the opportunity for contact through radio signals, etc from that area of space. I'm not aware of any verifiable evidence throughout the history of the phenomenon that says intelligent ET exists.

ROFLMAO!!!!! Seriously? Radio signals?!!!???

Do you know that Earth is incapable of receiving any radio signals from more that 5 - 10 light years? You see, the problem is signal strength, and the very best receivers on Earth couldn't receive a signal sent from more than 5 or so light years by any transmitter.

See how accepting this map as fact only demands more questions to be asked deeper than mathematic probabilities? This isn't only asking the way the map was retrieved. The map in itself isn't evidence that- "screams that.... The source was extraterrestrial" without asking and answering those questions. We're expected to just believe because of the mathematical odds? That's not someone searching for answers, that someone promoting and trying to "sell" their own belief.

All of my responses aren't specifically pointed to you... just in general.

Why do some of y'all insist on asking the wrong questions? Yes, I'll agree that the analysis generates more questions than it answers, but, that should have been expected. The problem is that we don't have the technology to answer some of those questions, yet.

You are getting "hung-up" on issues that don't affect the analysis. And, YES the map really does scream "extraterrestrial source", but you and others seem to miss that point. You seem to be forgetting about a few "little details" contained within the map. Like 4 stars that were predicted, and have been identified. Then there is a little matter of the planets; a total of 24 so far, with 16 of them being exoplanets.

Do I expect you to believe based on just the math? No!!! But, the intelligent person, would stop rejecting out-of-hand, and start paying some attention. He might also attempt to gain some understanding of this analysis process. As far as mathematical probabilities goes; we all depend on them, with a spectrum of probability, for just about everything we do every day. From walking, to feeding ourselves, to driving, we are seriously dependent on probability, and probabilistic processes. Without probability we wouldn't exist.

And, yes that was me searching for answers, and NOT trying to promote anything so ever. Dude, ALL I was trying to do is show you something that shouldn't be! And, you have to argue that is isn't actually! I think it's existence kind of trumps your denial...just sayin'

You should take ArMaP's advice and do your own analysis of the map...and prove me wrong!!!

originally posted by: james1947
But, the intelligent person, would stop rejecting out-of-hand, and start paying some attention.

Please don't go that way. A person that doesn't think the same way you do can be as much or more intelligent, different people think in different ways.

You should take ArMaP's advice and do your own analysis of the map...and prove me wrong!!!

I don't remember giving that advice to anyone, but it's always a good idea.

Even better would be for you to provide all the data you used so anyone could try to replicate your experiment, like they do on real science work.

originally posted by: ArMaP
Please don't go that way. A person that doesn't think the same way you do can be as much or more intelligent, different people think in different ways.

I think you may misunderstand my clumsy language...What I was trying to say is that rejecting things out of hand simply because you disagree with it isn't logical, and that the logical thing to do is to investigate it...I understand that others may think differently than I, and I try to respect that, even when others don't respect me.

Even better would be for you to provide all the data you used so anyone could try to replicate your experiment, like they do on real science work.

I thought I did that!!! What information have I not provided?

originally posted by: james1947
I thought I did that!!! What information have I not provided?

Your database tables and software.

originally posted by: james1947

originally posted by: Phage
a reply to: james1947

Have you used any "control" maps? Randomly produced dots for example?

My apologies if this has been addressed.

I have three (3) other "dot maps" provided by ATS members...

Are any of them within Ursa Major or slightly below and to the right?

originally posted by: ArMaP

originally posted by: james1947
I thought I did that!!! What information have I not provided?

Your database tables and software.

There are three significant data tables: Hipparcos, Extended Hipparcos (XHIP), and the exoplanet.eu datatable. All three are publically available data tables.

However, the software I wrote requires Microsoft SQL Server. So, specific formats are required in order to place the data into a SQL Table / database. Typically that is the CSV (comma separated value) which is also used by Excel.

There are also a couple of "views" (that is a SQL Server construct that allows multiple tables to be combined)...

Some of these elements, unless you are a "DBA" (Database Administrator) are rather difficult, but are available from me, as well as ALL of the imported data (Hipparcos, etc.).

The software I used, and wrote is entirely in C# and Python. The C# components retrieve data from the database, and places that data in so me appropriate place; such as, updating one or more of the imported datatables so as to include important data in a more convenient format (such as floating point number, as contrasted with the string equivalent). Some of the methods I wrote take data from SQL Server, and convert it into 3D XYZ coordinates, and place that data along with stellar class into a Python script used to import 3D models of selected stars into a commercial software package known as: SmithMicro Poser, I currently use "Poser 11 PRO".

If you would like the software I can provide it in two forms; complete source code, Windows 10 executable w/all dependencies, and modules. Microsoft ,NET 4.0 Client profile is also required, though maybe optional. (depends on your computer; mine can compile/run anything .NET).

I'll have to put this together for you, and place it on my server, but that shouldn't take too long. BUT, be very aware, the software should not be considered "stable" in that it will be very susceptible to change and upgrade.

In order to use my software you will need: MicroSoft SQL Server, Microsoft VisualStudio 17, SmithMicro Poser, and a decent photo editor such as Photoshop (for 2D imaging)

Finally, there are elements of the software that have not been fully implemented yet; such as planetary orbits / solar system display. And, of course thing I haven't thought of yet...

originally posted by: InTheLight

originally posted by: james1947

originally posted by: Phage
a reply to: james1947

Have you used any "control" maps? Randomly produced dots for example?

My apologies if this has been addressed.

I have three (3) other "dot maps" provided by ATS members...

Are any of them within Ursa Major or slightly below and to the right?

No...two of them were a "take" on the original (Betty's drawing), the third was a complete "fabrication", in that it was apparently intended as a "non-match".

originally posted by: james1947
In order to use my software you will need: MicroSoft SQL Server, Microsoft VisualStudio 17, SmithMicro Poser, and a decent photo editor such as Photoshop (for 2D imaging)

Microsoft's SQL Server and Visual Studio have free editions, Poser and Photoshop do not, as far as I know.

Unfortunately, I don't have the time for trying it myself, but maybe some other member(s) can have a go at it.

originally posted by: ArMaP

originally posted by: james1947
In order to use my software you will need: MicroSoft SQL Server, Microsoft VisualStudio 17, SmithMicro Poser, and a decent photo editor such as Photoshop (for 2D imaging)

Microsoft's SQL Server and Visual Studio have free editions, Poser and Photoshop do not, as far as I know.

Unfortunately, I don't have the time for trying it myself, but maybe some other member(s) can have a go at it.

Yes, I use SQLServer Express, a free version, and VisualStudio 17 "Community Edition", also a free version, and is very good for individual developers.

So...anyway, what I will do is place the whole software development under "version control", build a "package" with all the code and dependencies, I will even include the Poser ".pz" 3D model files, and I guess I should include my 2D files as well. This should give anyone with the time and resources to duplicate what I have done.

While I was working on the software I have written for this project; an attempt to put it all into a more convenient form for others to use. I had occasion to use the "Hill-Wilson" interpretation and star list to assist in a Habitable zone / exoplanet tool development.

Anyway, in the Hill-Wilson map what is currently seen is a collection of mainly dying stars. In a list of 20 stars 12 of them are "past" main-sequence, they are in the dying phase of stellar evolution with most of them in the "giant" phase, mainly type III, The remaining 8 stars are all main-sequence.

There are apparently no discovered exoplanets associated with any of those stars...but then again, my exoplanet database is around 8 months old...

Who would believe that Betty Hill, sweet little old lady from the woods, had any reason to make up such a crazy story, there is no way she'd lie about it, right?

She must have really been abducted by aliens. She recalled her experience with aliens, under 'hypnosis'!

And how could anyone draw that 'star chart' if they didn't go there, far away from Earth, where those very same stars are known to exist?

How do we know these stars exist, so far away from Earth? Because our great astronomers found all of those same stars really DO exist - years after Betty Hill had drawn the 'star chart'!

Who could ever draw this 'amazing star chart', unless she was really there, far away from Earth, to see those very same stars, in exact position, as NASA found out, years later?


Assume that there are some aliens far away in 'space', to begin with.

Then, assume such aliens that have no proof of existing, which exist in space, which is also not proven to exist, another claim of NASA without proof of any sort, but nobody cares, so let's just move along...

This whole story had this sweet little lady, who lived peacefully in the woods, with her husband, and she recited her alien abduction under hypnosis. She drew a 'star chart', which was later confirmed to be accurate, by NASA, only years later on, and confirmed the stars exist, as shown in her 'star chart'!


Who would ever suggest such aliens are not really true, when space is endless, and so life would be abundant, as well...

Life must exist beyond Earth, it is 'arrogant' and 'naive' to think no other life would exist in the whole, endless universe...


Anyway, to accept there are aliens from far away is not a big stretch, if you believe it's endless, and Earth flies in space, as well..

I'm not saying that aliens would not exist if space was endless, but it is just another massive lie...


But let's go back to the 'star chart'.

Aliens have abducted Betty, but nobody really knows why. But they did.

These aliens also wish for Betty Hill to know where they reside, for some reason.

However, the aliens do not want Betty to remember where they live, after they show her, for some other reason.

So the aliens remove her memory of where they live, but not really, since Betty recalled it, under 'hypnosis'.


Why would aliens want Betty Hill to know what stars exist where they live, but then, want to remove her memory of it all?


It's a ridiculous story to begin with, but it works like a charm.




The 'star chart' story is a pure fantasy.