When I was a kid, the television show "My Favorite Martian" was a particular favorite of my friends and me. This was during the big days of the space race, and we all dreamed of rockets, space stations, and interplanetary travel.

One day, a friend took me into his room, closed the door and said he had a big secret to tell me. He was not the mild mannered fourth grader he seemed to be, but he was actually an adult Martian, sent to Earth on a secret mission. "Right!" I thought, "Good old Greg had told me some pretty big whoppers in the past, but this was genius!"

I thought that I would be able to quickly unravel his fiction with a couple of probing questions. What about your parents and siblings? "They've all been brainwashed." Birth certificate, school records? "Forged and put in place by fellow agents." Your biology and physical age? "We can change our physical form to adapt to various environments." Spaceship? "Cloaked and in hiding."

No matter what question I had, my friend always had a ready answer, usually relying on another equally unverifiable, but nevertheless coherent, claim. While I loved the sparring with him, it was nevertheless frustrating. At some point I just gave up.

Of course, the movie "K-PAX' later explored this same theme. For me, it was the first experience of dealing with self-referential believe systems, and the treacherous reliance on logic when assessing systems that are rational, but also have no limit to making extraordinary claims and can provide a fabrication to turn any evidence into "proof."

LOL I watched that show too.

Yep. That's just like talking to a Mormon who knows that the Church is true, no matter what you say.

I used to have rabbit ears on a head band while watching. LOL

Ron