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Description
While visiting my family for Thanksgiving, I talked to my grandma about what I should do for my final project and described the class to her. She then proceeded to tell me this story about when her grandma saw a UFO. At first, I thought she was just crazy. She left the room and came back with this old photo album of pictures of this UFO. Apparently, it crashed in 1897 in Aurora, Texas. There was also an alien who died at the crash site, but the people in Aurora decided to give him a respectful burial, and to respect him refused to take any pictures. There was even a newspaper article about it. My grandma could tell that I was still skeptical and she told me that she had absolute proof that her grandma had given to her. It was physical evidence from the UFO. My grandma went and got it and brought it back. It was this black liquid, but then when a magnet was put underneath it, it turned into solid spikes! So, for my project, I just decided to recount this story and show the evidence so that everyone could know that aliens really have visited our earth as long ago as 1897.
Theoretical Grounding
So if you hadn't guessed, that story was not real, and my real project was trying to blur the line between fact and fiction through a story that had some truth, but then became exaggerated. One of the readings in class called "Inhaling the Spore" blended the line between real science and fiction really well. I found this line between fact and fiction really interesting, and I decided that I wanted to play with that idea for my final project. My family had just visited Roswell around the time when I was thinking of what to do for my final project. When they were telling me about the museum and all of the strange cases and unexplained things dealing with that incident, I thought that a similar story may be the kind of thing I was looking for in telling my final project. After some digging around on the internet, I found a newspaper article about a UFO crash in Aurora, Texas and out of that article, my project was born!
How It Was Made
For my story to be more convincing, I decided that I needed to present my story in more than one medium. I printed out the newspaper article and soaked it in tea to make it look older. I, then, went to a park and took pictures with a disposable camera of a large frisbee thing covered with paper plates and bowls wrapped in aluminum foil being thrown up into the air. While this produced some rather strange looks from other people in the park, the end result was pretty good. I edited the photos on my computer to adjust brightness and contrast and put them into black and white. I put all of that into my "family photo album." In addition to the photographs, I also made ferrofluid, which is a black liquid that spikes up in the presence of a magnetic field. I mixed iron oxide and cooking oil together to make the ferrofluid. I then came up with a story to show why I would have these things and just hoped that the class would at least be in doubt as to what parts of my project were real.
My Thoughts
I was really nervous about being able to pull off this project because I thought if it didn't work just right then it would just be stupid. A big part of my project was also in the presentation of my "evidence" and I am not very good at public speaking so that concerned me. Overall, I think my project turned out reasonably well. The class seemed to find the ferrofluid really interesting and were unsure if I had completely made up everything or what I made and what I found off of the internet or other places. When I was making the ferrofluid, it took a while to figure out the right combination of iron oxide and cooking oil, and I was very concerned I was not going to be able to make it well enough to look "out of this world." I was also concerned that my photographs would look too unbelievably fakey, which would just make my project seem like a joke, but they turned out alright. I think that this was my best project, and it combined some researching, making things, and some creative storytelling. When I was developing this project, I finally kind of realized what this class was about at the end of the semester!
The Existence of UFOs