My Beef with Owl Guy

Years back, when I was skinnier and possibly not as cranky, I listened to every Oh No, Ross and Carrie podcast episode. I still go back to their reports on the ‘Contact in the Desert’ conference for my comfort listens.

One of these reports was about a man whose presentation was on owls and aliens. I’m not sure what aliens and owls were doing, but he was convinced that owls appearing around reported alien sightings was significant in some way.

Man, did he pad the bejesus out of his presentation. The podcast episode lasted an hour, but I can summarize the whole idea as ‘owls are special, and so are aliens, and they mean ‘something’ (undefined, unclear what) when they appear.’

They later interviewed him in a seperate episode, and it turned out that before he took up the ‘aliens and owls’ beat, he was a travel writer.

All these years later, that interview still angers me. I am a lazy hoe myself, and I am so pissed that Owl Guy figured out a way to write a ‘non-fiction’ book that is so vague and useless that it can never be assessed on any scale and couldn’t take more than asking some people about a ubiquitous bird, and then, even lazier, crowd-sourced a whole bunch of other people’s stories into a book and made money selling their accounts of running into aliens/owls. How is that non-work being rewarded! That he can be that lazy and self-satisfied when I can’t bring myself to do less than years of research makes me rage.

There was never a time when non-fiction books were fact checked or even screened for plausible theories. Any idiot can whip out a book suggesting any old thing, even something dangerous, and never get called on it ever. That’s just the state of an industry whose gatekeeping centers solely on salability. In these days of KDP and self-publishing, you don’t even have to be coherent to get a ‘book’ out.

But, with travel writing there could at least be some outside checking. If he wrote that the Eifel Tower gave free rides every Sunday, then irate readers would contact him or the publisher to complain that he was wrong and that they had wasted a weekend because of him. He would have had to at least read a book from the library and check a website if he wanted to avoid a talking-to.

But tell people to write in about the time they had a dream about a four-foot owl and thought it was an alien, and outside fact-checking disappears. Who is going to complain that he is selling their story and making money off it when he is stroking their ego and telling them they are so spiritual? No one. And who would stop him from adding to the story or making up more? No one. Again, not a single kept gate in sight. No effort beyond asking, “Are you lying?” sometimes involved.

And he rakes it in, peddling nonsense in the laziest, lowest effort way possible. If that isn’t the definition of a grift, I don’t know what is.

Jerk.