The Amorality of UFOs

Copyright InterAmerica, Inc 

When one studies the panoply of flying chariot, flying saucer, and UFO sightings, from early times (and recounted in religious texts, including those in the Hebrew Bible or Old Testa- ment, the Hindu texts, and Oriental annals) right up through the modern era, one is struck by the non-inter- cession in human affairs, especially those that show the incipient evil of mankind, by the phenomenon. 

History is replete with the absence of God in mankind’s horrors, and UFO lore also shows that the ubiquitous phenomenon has not been in attendance when evils have occurred, on scales that any interplanetary expedition could not miss:

The Armenian Genocide (Armenian: Հայոց Ցեղասպանություն Hayots’ Ts’yeghaspanut’yun), also known as the Armenian Massacres and by Armenians as the Great Crime (Armenian: Մեծ Եղեռն Mets Yegherrn) was the Ottoman government's systematic extermination of its minority Armeniansubjects from their historic homeland in the territory constituting the present-day Republic of Turkey. It took place during and after World War I and was implemented in two phases: the wholesale killing of the able-bodied male population through massacre and forced labor, and the deportation of women, children, the elderly and infirm on death marches to the Syrian Desert.The total number of people killed as a result has been estimated at between 1 and 1.5 million. Other indigenous and Christian ethnic groups such as the Assyrians, the Greeks and other minority groups were similarly targeted for extermination by the Ottoman government, and their treatment is considered by many historians to be part of the same genocidal policy.

It is acknowledged to have been one of the first modern genocides, as scholars point to the organized manner in which the killings were carried out to eliminate the Armenians, and it is the second most-studied case of genocide after the Holocaust. The word genocide was coined in order to describe these events. [From Wikipedia]

The Holocaust (from the Greek ὁλόκαυστος holókaustos: hólos, "whole" and kaustós, "burnt") also known as Shoah (Hebrew: השואה, HaShoah, "the catastrophe"; Yiddish: חורבן, Churben or Hurban, from the Hebrew for "destruction"), was the mass murder or genocide of approximately six million Jews during World War II, a program of systematic state-sponsored murder by Nazi Germany, led by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, throughout the German Reich and German-occupied territories.

Of the nine million Jews who had resided in Europe before the Holocaust, approximately two-thirds were killed. Over one million Jewish children were killed in the Holocaust, as were approximately two million Jewish women and three million Jewish men. A network of over 40,000 facilities in Germany and German-occupied territory were used to concentrate, hold, and kill Jews and other victims.

Some scholars argue that the mass murder of the Romani and people with disabilities should be included in the definition, and some use the common noun "holocaust" to describe other Nazi mass murders, including those of Soviet prisoners of war, Polish and Soviet civilians, and homosexuals. [From Wikipedia] 

There are the bombings Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and today the Syrian conflict, the past and  (ongoing) genocidal African “wars”:

The Rwandan Genocide was a genocidal mass slaughter of the Tutsis by the Hutus that took place in 1994 in the East African state of Rwanda. Over the course of approximately 100 days (from the assassination of Juvénal Habyarimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira on April 6 through mid-July) over 500,000 people were killed, according to a Human Rights Watch estimate of the death toll have ranged from 500,000–1,000,000, or as much as 20% of the country's total population. [From Wikipedia]

The Babylonian exile of the Hebrews [circa 587 B.C.], at a time when flying “chariots” were rife in the texts, and going back to the extinction of the Neanderthals, about 30,000 years ago, when cave drawings and pictographs seem to indicate something odd was flying in Earth’s sky, one gets no clue that anyone or anything interceded.

The phenomenon, like God, remained aloof and disinterested, from a moral standpoint.

There are some reading this who will ascribe that indifference to a like kind of scrutiny that scientists engage in when studying ants, or other insect life, or African animals and other fauna.

Then there are those who think UFOs do not exist so my conjecture is remiss in its premise.

But assuming that UFOs and the disks before them contained sentient beings, as some texts indicate (the lost books of Enoch, or the Ezekiel scripture) and the behavior of UFOs in our time show intelligent maneuvering, one has to conclude that any sentience involved is amoral.

That is, the total decimation of human species is something of no concern to visitors from space or time.

What do UFO enthusiasts of the ET persuasion have to say about this?

What do UFO skeptics have to offer about man’s inhumanity to man, leaving UFOs out of the equation? (Yes, that is not a UFO-based topic – off topic here – but of interest to see if UFO skeptics are as disinterested as the UFO creatures seem to be in my suggestion.)

RR  

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A Pre-Roswell Saucer Crash?

From The Aubeck/Vallee book, Wonders in the Sky, one of my all-time favorite books, appears this account which is wonderfully odd (and slightly emended by me):

On July 20th 1571, about midnight, there was a great wind over Prague, Czechoslovakia that made a large rumbling noise which woke people up. As those wakened people looked out their windows, they saw a marching army coming along Spalena Street.

The soldiers held weapons in their hands; the witnesses found their appearance unnerving.

Behind the soldiers came something resembling a large round “chariot” drawn by oxen. The object, which made a loud noise, was apparently made of metal and had no wheels.

Eight large human figures marched behind the vehicle.They looked frightful because they had no faces but wore enormous spurs on their feet, adding to the noise.

A great fire appeared on the ground in front of the Church of the Sacred Heart. The big chariot arrived near the fire.

Again a frightful wind arose at the same time as a kind of rain of fire, and this horrifying vision disappeared.

However, a luminous object could be made out in the air, a circle of fire that persisted until dawn.

(That year there was a great famine and many people died.)

Original Source: J. Beckovsky, Posekyně starých příběhův českých. Díl druhý Od roku 1526-1715.

[Page 165 ff.]

This is a “journalistic-like report” that has the whiff of authenticity about it. It seems to record a downed UFO or flying disk, still identified, as in Biblical times, as a chariot.

The creatures in attendance are descriptively intriguing -- large, not diminutive -- and what were those spurs?

Were the soldiers marching in front of the object, connected to the object or a Czech military contingent that came across the object and its attendant beings?

Was there any follow-up, in military records of the time or something in the annals of the Church?

RR 

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Waiting for Godot or UFOs?

Copyright 2013, InterAmerica, Inc.

The revival of Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” brought back to mind an earlier suggestion that the wait for a UFO explanation wasn’t far removed from the travails of Vladimir and Estragon in the absurdist play.

Without getting into the philosophical and dramatic ramifications of the play or Godot, those of you familiar with the protract theatrical skit know what I mean.

The two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, wait longingly for the arrival of someone of something called Godot, who shall provide and answer to something, something that haunts the two men.

But Godot never arrives, and during the course of the wait, the tramps confront, sporadically, a messenger for Godot who is mysteriously circumspect:

“Godot cannot come today, but he will surely come tomorrow.” [Act I]

The tramps decide to leave (or do not):

Estragon: Well, shall we go?

Vladimir: Yes, let’s go.

(They do not move)

They engage in stoic patter:

Estragon: So long as one knows.

Vladimir: One can bide one’s time

Estragon: One knows what to expect.

Vladimir: No further need to worry.

They react as some ufologists do to the UFO phenomenon:

Estragon: I’m asking you if we are tied?

Vladimir: Tied?

Estragon: Ti-ed.

Vladimir: How do you mean tied?

Estragon: Down.

Vladimir: But to whom. By whom?

Estragon: To your man.

Vladimir: To Godot? Tied to Godot? What an idea! No question of it (pause) For the moment

Two characters, Pozzo (blind) and Lucky (dumb) – a slave owner and his slave – remind me of those who follow a UFO name only because it is a name, not because that name has every truly delineated the UFO mystery in any way.

The two show up over the course of Vladimir and Estragon’s wait.

Martin Esslen, in his book, The Theater of the Absurd[Anchor/Doubleday, NY, 1961] recounts Jungian psychologist Eva Metman’s take on the play:

“Godot’s function seems to be to keep his dependents unconscious.” In this view, Esslin writes, Godot (or as I see it, UFOs) “the hope, the habit of hoping (ufology’s mainstay) that Godot might come after all is the last illusion that keeps [the tramps] from facing the human condition and themselves in the harsh light of fully conscious awareness.” [Page 24]

Vladimir and Estragon talk incessantly:

Vladimir: You are right, we’re inexhaustible.

Estragon: It’s so we won’t think.

Vladimir: We have that excuse.

Estragon: It’s so we won’t hear.

Vladimir: WE have our reasons.

Estragon: All the dead voices.

Vladimir: They make noise like wings.

Estragon: Like leaves.

Vladimir: Like sand.

Estragon: Like leaves.

(Silence)

Vladimir: they all speak together.

Estragon: Each one to himself.

Vladimir: Rather, they whisper.

Estragon: They rustle.

Vladimir: They murmur.

Estragon: They rustle.

(Silence)

Vladimir: What do they say?

Estragon: They talk about their lives.

Vladimir: To have lived is not enough for them.

Estragon: They have to talk about it.

Vladimir: To be dead is not enough for them.

Estragon:  It is not sufficient.

(And so on, like UFO dialogues…)

The play is precisely existentialist, in the Jean-Paul Sartre sense.

But it applies as a template for the UFO journey and wait that most, if not all, UFO devotees are immersed in.

A UFO explanation is not forthcoming. Like Godot, the arrival is not to be.

That we, who involve ourselves in the UFO enigma, seem like Vladimir and Estragon, or like Pozzo and Lucky, is obvious to me.

The play, in its simple staging and odd dialogues, is a masterpiece of human folly, and a rubric about the study of UFOs.

RR

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Things of interest, besides UFOs

While most of you have a slight or inordinate interest in the UFO phenomenon, most of academia and science find their obsessions elsewhere; UFOs are of little or no interest to intellectuals of various human disciplines.

For instance, Mathematics is/are getting enormous attention by persons for whom mathematics was a peripheral or subsidiary process, for them, at one time.

Edward Frenkel’s book, Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality proposes that mathematical structures (equations, numbers, arithmetic, et cetera) are among the “objects of reality”; they are every bit as real as anything in the physical or mental world. Moreover, they are not the product of human thought; rather they exist timelessly, in a Platonic realm of their own. [Writes Jim Holt, on page 29 in his NYRB review of Frenkel’s book, December 5^th, 2013]

Max Tegmark’s article in Discover magazine [December 2013, Page 44 ff.] from his book, Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality [Knopf/Doubleday/Random House, NY] insists that “Everything in the universe – stars, chess games, and you – is part of a vast mathematical structure.”

Again, citing Plato, Tegmark writes “that our physical world not only is described by mathematics, but that it is mathematics [which] makes us self-aware [that we are] parts of a giant mathematical object.” [Page 47]

“Modern physics has made it abundantly clear that he ultimate nature of reality isn’t what it seems.” [op. cit]

Tegmark’s piece falls inside that same Discover issue which has Zeeya Merali’s article, “Do We Live in the Matrix,” another ongoing theme of science which is at the top of the discussion ladder lately.

Merali notes that “Tantalizingly, just weeks before The Matrix came out … astronomers analyzing the light from distant galaxies published hints that the universe’s ‘constants” might not be so constant.” [Page 26]

Math and quantum physics meld in such a way that physicists and scientists are questioning reality, abandoning string theory, but still trying to salvage M-Theory, as scientific thought is now geared to the Platonic ideas of reality, existence outside the cave.

(You can find Steven Weinberg’s “Physics: What we Do and Don’t Know” at NYRB.com, the November 7^th issue of the Review for more, if interested.)

Not quite The Matrix but Sue Halpern’s “Are We Puppets in a Wired World” [NYRB, November 7^th 2013, Page 24 ff.] will provide a slew of works showing how the internet and current technologies impact and alter our lives and reality itself.

Consciousness and thought processes are getting a make-over once more, with almost everyone in psychology, philosophy, neurological science, et al. weighing in on the matter of brain versus mind.

Oliver Sacks is my go-to guy for mind/brain analogues but you can find all the current discussions, online (via Google or Bing), although I suggest discrimination about what you find or read. (Some of our visitors here only get their information and “smarts” from writings online or YouTube, not being forensic about the source or authors of the stuff they think is intellectually pristine.)

And, finally, while working on a Shakespeare book, I’ve discovered one more playwright and writer of his time who might have been part of the consortium that created the Shakespeare oeuvre, George Chapman.

That, to me, is more exciting than UFOs, Roswell, or anything in the paranormal realm; it’s to do with our human reality, within or without the Matrix.

So, UFOs be damned. They offer little in the way of practical knowledge about what we are or who we are. And they take us from thinking sensibly often.

Others, of a more-rational bent, eschew UFOs, and one can see why, if they (including me) abandon their obsession with the obtuse phenomenon.

There is more to life and reality than UFOs can resolve, whether they remain unexplained or eventually get a solution from some real UFO researcher.

RR

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Our Stats (Visitors and/or Readers) and Roswell

This is our per day page visits, an average of about 1000+ usually:

This is our page visits when Anthony Bragalia provides something that is Roswell related:

This seems to go to the observation by Aaron John Gulyas in his book, The Chaos Conundrum, reviewed below, in my 11/23 piece.

That observation by AJG is that Roswell, no matter what UFO buffs think about it, pro or con, still generates inordinate attention when UFOs are discussed or presented as a topic, online and off.

That there are other UFO reports that better UFO lore is true but for some reason, not exactly clear, Roswell still haunts UFO mavens and the public, in a way that exceeds its importance as a UFO event.

I invite explication...

RR

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The Chaos Conundrum: A Review

Aaron John Gulyas and Six Degrees of Separation?

AJG, the author of The Chaos Conundrum: Essays on UFOs, Ghosts & Other High Strangeness in our Non-Rational & Atemporal World [Redstar Books, $9.99] is a kind of Hoosier compatriot. 

He once lived in Columbia City, Indiana, which is stone’s throw from our media offices and he now lives near Flint, Michigan, where this writer has a brother, who is also in news media.

AJG is also part of the new influencial ufological breed, consisting of Paul Kimball, Nick Redfern, Greg Bishop, and the departed but not forgotten Mac Tonnies.

Should I look at his book favorably for all that?

I don’t have to. The 145 page book, for a lousy ten bucks, is a gem, flush with informative footnotes (something I extol, as you know) and insights that are personal but reek of substantive knowledge about UFOs, ghosts, and the paranormal generally.

I found much material that I never knew before – and I’ve been around the UFO block – and many suggestions that led me to new discoveries.

Moreover, I was reading along, and suddenly the book was over! I was entranced but snapped out of my reverie when the bibliography and index sneaked up on me. I was saddened that the breezy sojourn Mr. Gulyas had provided was done.

But let me talk about specfics.

Nick Redfern offers the Foreword, in which he gives a laudatory salute to Mr. Gulyas’ effort, of course, while presenting his own paranormal précis.

There follows ten chapters, among them Ghosts, Barker & Moseley, Space Demons, …Wild Bill Cooper, Exopolitics, Breaking Roswell, et cetera.

I, like Mr. Redfern, am not a ghost aficionado but Mr. Gulyas, in a take off about a family photo, from 1932, that contains an uncle who died several years before the photo was taken, his image inserted, spookily (as I perceived it) well before Photoshop was extant, was actually quite interesting

This allowed AJG’s riff on ghosts and uninvited events that he finds intriguing and necessary to understanding the “non-rational and atemporal” world we live in.

In Chapter Two – Experiences – when AJG lived close by us, he writes about his UFO Information Agency, Strategic Investigation Team 1310 and his agency’s “paranormal energy detector” providing dialogue as if it was being replicated from tape recordings.

I laughed (not out loud) at his comical, but half-serious account of checking out a crop circle in the area in 1996.

The chapter contains AJG’s mild obsession with the haunted and mysterious and the intersection he found and finds between paranoia and irrationality inside things we all find disturbing or mysterious.

The Gray Barker and James Moseley chapter (3) offers little know factoids about both men, and some of the people they interacted with, among them Adamski and Albert Bender,.

Recently deceased Mac Tonnies gets extensive paranormal honorariums from AJG, who truly admires the brilliantly obtuse thinker, a favorite pal of Paul Kimball too.

Nick Redfern and the satanic aspects of the paranormal get a nod, but I skimmed, not being particularly enamored of that fringe element of the intrinsically fringe paranormal world.

The Strange Journey of Wild Bill Cooper (Chapter 5), a man killed by sheriff deputies in Arizona, 2002,  was an odd fellow truly, and AJG presents his story in full dress, the MJ-12 fixation and political conspiracy bent addressed rather completely, for the newbie who needs to know about the fastidious details of MJ-12 and those who find it true and worthwhile.

Billy Meier and contactees or abductees, such as Villas Boas [neither, as recounted in Redfern’s book Contactees] get their due.

And, of course, Roswell (Chapter 9), is put in its place, sensibly and rather completely, AJG not accepting it as a valid account of an alien UFO crash but allowing that the story is important within the UFO context, and he explains why.

And Exopolitics (Chapter 8) gets a good explication.

He closes the book on a personal note about, ostensibly, “ghosts of the mind” and how we should deal with things non-rational, paranormal, or just weird.

It’s a good read I can assure you of that.

There is a dearth of pictures of illustrations and, as I noted about a New Page book (that got me blacklisted), a typo – just one I noticed – on page 82: politcal. A small error that is excusable. (I don’t want to get blacklisted from Redstar Books too.)

So let me suggest that for 10 measly bucks you will get a book full of information that a charge card ad would say is priceless.

It’s available at bookstores, online and off, and by way of http://www.redstarfilmtv.com/booksor 2541 Robie Street, Halifax. NS, Canada B3K 4N3

RR

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Hofstadter, AI, and UFOs (peripherally)

Copyright 2013, InterAmerica, Inc.

The November issue of The Atlantic (magazine) has an article by James Somers entitled “The Man Who Would Teach Machines to Think” – Douglas Hofstadter. [Page 90 ff.]

This is a picture of the brilliant Hofstadter, in his study and at his desk – a place not unlike my own (and probably not unlike many of yours):

The article doesn’t have a thing to do with UFOs but there are some insights that are germane.

Somers notes that the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (which you have in your library, or should), Douglas Hofstadter is now 68 years old; he was 35 when he received the Pulitzer for his non-fiction book.

Hofstadter is a professor at Indiana University, and Somers’ article is about how Hofstadter no longer is pertinent to computing’s search for Artificial Intelligence; the programming genre has passed him by.

This is where the UFO connection comes in.

Kevin Randle, Stanton Friedman, Jerry Clark, and a few others you can name, are no longer relevant to UFOs (or ufology, if you like), replaced by time, and younger UFO turks, like Nick Redfern and Paul Kimball.

Hofstadter remains knowledgeable about AI, in ways that others are not. This is true of Messieurs Randle, Friedman, Clark, et al. also. They know more about UFOs than others in the field.

But no one is listening to them, just as AI technicians at Google and other computing venues ignore Hofstadter.

Hofstadter is really interested in cognition, consciousness, and the process of thinking.

The UFO guys – the geezers named here – are interested in what UFOs are but they, like Hofstadter, are wedged in the wall of old UFO tales (as am I). Evidence for that can be found at the current ramblings online at Mr. Randle’s blog, and the restraint of Mr. Friedman lately (because of age and a non-responsive audience), and Mr. Clark, whose UFO palpitations are skewed by his occasional participation in wayward discourse at UFO UpDates.

Somers notes that “The entire effort of artificial intelligence is essentially a fight against computers’ rigidity.” [Page 96]

And in ufology, that is what youngsters deal with: the rigidity of the UFO old guard.

The geezers haven’t heeded what writer Somers provides from Dave Ferrucci, a member of the IBM Watson (computer) team:

‘There’s a limited number of things you can do as an individual, and I think when you dedicate your life to something, you’ve got to ask yourself the question: To what end?”

[Page 98]

What was or is the purpose of the ongoing study of UFOs by Randle, Friedman, Clark and even myself, or you?

Hofstadter said “I don’t need the stimulation of the outside world,” a mantra I like and Paul Kimball says he adheres to, although his Facebook page tells us otherwise, but his UFO interest has, indeed, internalized pretty much.

But Somers cautions that “… if you don’t participate in the fight, in the rough-and-tumble of academia [insert “ufology” here], your ideas are going to end up being sidelined by ideas which are perhaps not as good, but were more ardently defended in the [UFO] arena.” [Page 100]

(This is why skeptics get a foothold now and then. The UFO faithful give way to the rabid arguments of UFO skeptics because the faithful, like Hofstadter, step aside:

“I don’t enjoy going to conferences and running into people who are stubborn and convinced of ideas I don’t think are correct, and who don’t have any understanding of my ideas.” [op. cit]

Me? I’m pushing back….some skeptics are irrational and foolish. I’ve banned them from my life, keeping intact those who are moderate and intelligent: CDA, Lance Moody, and, sometimes Tim Printy or Zoam Choamsky.

Go to The Atlantic online, and seek out the Somers’ piece, especially if you are into computerings’ artificial intelligence, but also to see how a great thinker, Hofstadter, has dealt with his academic love and life in general.

RR

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Gilles Fernandez....

...in repose, now that he doesn't have to defend his irrational skepticism here.

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Everyone's trying to find life on Mars. Why?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/19/aliens-on-mars-photos_n_4303447.html?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000592

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The Airship Wave of the 1890s, The Sonora Aero Club, and The Apotheosis of Human Creativity

Copyright 2013, InterAmerica, Inc.

Readers/visitors here know (or should) about the Airship sightings of the mid-1890s in The United States.

Most also know something about the odd, maybe fictive Sonora Aero Club of California, which I referenced in my earlier piece on the Airship wave.

Let me make clear that I am not advocating the idea that the Sonora Aero Club was the progenitor of the 1896 or other Airship sightings that have been recounted in UFO lore.

The possibility is there – possibilities lying everywhere – but that’s not my point here.

In my previous outing about the Airship sightings, I tried to make clear that the excitable mind-set(s) of the 18^th and 19^thcentury balloonists could account for some creative ballooning in the 1800s that explain the Airship sightings in the literature, some of them anyway.

First, let me sum up what I know or think about the Sonora Aero Club, that I’ve referenced early on here, at this blog and others, which a Google search will provide access to.

But a pithy source, recently read by me, comes from David Richie’s UFO book [ibid], Pages 192-193, quoted and paraphrased:

The Sonora Aero Club was manifest  in the 1800s in and around Sonora, California, known mostly from the writings of C.A.A. Dellschau, pictured here:

Photo provided by Jose Antonio Caravaca

Dellschau wrote about the Club and offered exotic drawings of the alleged aircraft  developed by its 60 members (of German and English descent primarily).

Portions of Dellschau’s discovered manuscript, Richie states, were written in “a cryptic manner.”

Funding was by a group known only as NYZMA.

Dellschau indicated that the “club’s bizarre machines” (Richie writes) were made operational  “by a gas called ‘NB’ or ‘Supe’ which reportedly had the potential to neutralize gravitation (or weight, as Dellschau put it).” [Page 193]

“Dellschau claimed that several airships actually were built and flown, then taken apart so that their workings would remain secret. Two of the craft, he wrote, were destroyed in a fire that swept the community of Columbia, California, some miles from Sonora.” [op cit.]

(That alleged fire could be traced, if anyone cares to try and confirm the story; no date is given however…RR)

Dellschau wrote that “Supe” was the creation of one Peter Mennis, with the manufacturing technique being lost in the 1860s when Mennis died, or was murdered by Club members. [op cit.]

“Dellschau moved to Texas in the 1870s and settled around 1880 in Houston. He left Houston for several months in 1890, on his return, exhibited a changed personality, characterized by fear and anxiety.” [op cit.]

“During this last period of his life, Richie writes, [Dellschau] composed the written accounts of the club’s airships. He attributed the the deaths pf some members of the club to careless talk or to use their knowledge of the airships for personal gain.” [op cit]

Here are a few examples of the drawings Dellschau made of the aircraft the club supposedly created and flew. (More can be found online by a Google image search):

Jose Carvaca provides this, as part of his upcoming December report on the Sonora Club and the Airship wave:

"The story begins when Albert Dellschau arrives at Texas in 1895, one of the epicenters of the wave future, and decides to retake the idea of the Aeroclub in the company of former members as Charles A. Smith and Willard Willson. The financier of the whole operation, according to Busby, was George Hearst, son of former benefactor the group, and newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. On this occasion the group join Samuel E. Tillman and Professor Amos Emerson Dolbearthat curiously are cited at a meeting of the AirShip happened in Stephenville, and witnesses claimed that the project was funded by the people of New York. Michael Busby follows this track and confirms that Dolbear was a professor at the University of Massachusetts, being a specialty electric motors."

Photos provided by Jose Caravaca

The Dellschau tale is fantastical, isn’t it? So one wouldn’t be remiss in discounting it.

It reeks of a schizophrenic savant.

However, in the time period – the 1800s to 1900 – human creativity was resplendent in its imaginative and fecund productions, in music (Wagner, Mahler, et al.), science (Darwin, Freud, Einstein), literature (Dostoyevsky, Melville, Poe et al.), Engineering (Edison, Wheeler, Tesla) and other geniuses, some wild and wooly (like the balloonists mentioned in my previous piece), some sedate and thoughtful.

So I contend that, perhaps – perhaps – the Airships of the 1890s were creations by a dedicated raft of engineering or inventive individuals who took ballooning, reconfigured it, and flew brief unwarlike sorties over populated areas.

Yes, the Airship wave could be the result of a kind of mass hysteria created by newspaper accounts that may have been fraudulent in their reportage (to accrue readers and revenue), but certainly not misperceptions of the planet Venus as one rabid skeptic proposed recently.

But I should like to think that some wildly adventurous humans tried to soar in the heavens, before the time when air flight was said to be possible, and some observers got to see their adventurous rides and aircraft, even if the Sonora Aero Club’s airships were only the imaginative ramblings of a man at the edge of insanity.

For me, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that the Airships of the 1890s were as they were reported.

RR (and JAC) 

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NASA's obsession with Mars: What does it know that we don't?

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What were the Airships of the 1890s?

Copyright 2013, InterAmerica, Inc.

“At 5:45 on the evening of August 27, 1783, the inhabitants of the village of Gonesse, ten miles northeast of Paris, noticed what some of them took to be the moon descending from the sky … for most eighteenth-century peasants, even those who lived within striking distance of the metropolis, supernatural interventions were everyday events, but this was something without precedent … As the mysterious object blundered earthward, it assumed the appearance of a gigantic, shapeless bag of red and white silk … the terrified peasants of Gonesse deliberately destroyed the unmanned alien craft … Some took to their heels; others knwlt down and invoked their patron saint.

“Six years before the French Revolution, and outlandish object … The peasants of Gonesse were … right to be wary.”

Now, is the above from the Aubeck/Vallee book Wonders in the Sky or from an arcane UFO site on the internet?

No, it’s from a review in The New York Review of Books[December 5, 2013, Adventures in a Silver Cloud, Page 4] of the book. Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air by Richard Holmes [Pantheon, 404 pp. $35].

Graham Robb, the reviewer, provides excerpts that “explain,” for me, what the Airships of the late 19^th Century might have possibly been.

Robb writes that “some of the aeronauts, even those who had serious intentions, behaved like irresponsible superior beings. On a dark November night in 1836, the English balloonist Charles Green, accompanied by an Irish musician and a member of the British Parliament, was floating invisibly over ‘the unearthly glare of the fiery foundries’ of Belgium, close enough to hear the coughing and swearing of the foundry workers. He lowered a Bengal light on a rope until its dazzling flare was skimming over the workers’ heads. Then he urged one of his companions to shout out in Franch and German through a speaker trumpet ‘as if some supernatural power was visiting them from on high.’ He amazed the ‘honest artizans’ trembling like a primitive tribe, ‘looking up at the object of their terrors.’ [Page 4]

“The first American flight was made from Philadelphia in 1793 by the French balloonist Jean-Pierre Blanchard, with an ‘aerial passport’ endorsed by George Washington. Vast crowds were entertained by acrobats parachuting from balloons.”

One of Blanchard’s protégées “Sophie Blanchard flew – and sometimes fell asleep – in a small gondola, which [author] Holmes likens to ‘a flying champagne bucket.’”

“It was as though the balloon really had arrived from another planet…” [Page 4]

“…for most balloonists, the main purpose of what Victor Hugo called ‘the floating egg’ was to feed the imagination  and to fill the mind with awe.

“In ballooning, ‘the  boundaries between fact and fiction remain curiously porous…The balloons\ tales themselves often verge on the incredible … Before and after Edgar Allen Poe’s hoax news story of 1844. ‘The Balloon Hoax’ … balloons and the tales attached to them had an air of unreality.

“…Coleridge’s term ‘suspension of disbelief’ takes on a new, strangely literal meaning.” [Page 6]

“[A] mail balloon that almost plunged into Lake Ontario in 1859 eventually struggled on to the eastern shore of the lake …Some homesteaders came to see what had happened and stood about while the aeronauts tried to assemble the wreckage.

“ … an elderly lady … expressed her astonishment at seeing…’so sensible-looking a party [riding] in such an outlandish-looking vehicle. She anxiously enquired where [the crew] came from; and when told from St. Louis, she wanted to know how far that was from there, and when informed it was over a thousand miles, she looked very suspiciously … and said, ‘That will do now.’” [Page 8]

As one can see from reviewer Robb’s excerpts from Holmes’ book, many of the balloon tales are strikingly similar to the Airship wave reports thirty-seven (or so) years later.

Coupling the similarities with the odd story of the semi-secret Sonora Aero Club in Sonora, California, in the late 19^thcentury, derived from the writings of C.A.A. Dellschau, who described the club’s exotic airships called “aeros” [See David Richie’s account in his 1994 book UFO: The Definitive Guide to Unidentified Flying Objects and Related Phenomena, MJF Books, NY] one might attribute the Airship wave to accounts of adventurous balloonists who configured their balloons with technology of the time that allowed them to maneuver in ways that took the indecisiveness out of such travels as those enumerated in Richard Holmes’ book.

This explanation is far better, it seems to me, than that of French skeptic Gilles Fernandez, who attributes the Airship wave to psycho/social factors brought on by newspaper accounts and drawings and the presence of Venus in the night/day sky.

(I’ll provide a more elaborate account of the Sonora Aero Club, upcoming.)

RR 

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Mars -- long ago...

http://news.yahoo.com/nasa-video-shows-ancient-mars-lush-water-world-123342634.html

RR

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UFOs and the Rabble

The problem with the UFO phenomenon is “ufology” – the pseudo-science that the great unwashed, the rabble, has adopted as their sobriquet.

One constantly reads (or hears) that UFO conjecture, or hypotheses, need “peer review,” a phrase taken from academia or science but never accepted as a practice by UFO mavens or researchers.

After all, who in “ufology” is qualified to pass judgment on the poncifs of their fellow ultrafidians? [Explanation: who in the UFO world is qualified to determine if ufological nonsense has validity or not?]

Take the re-constituted Roswell Dream Team for instance. Does the one lone objective partner – Chris Rutkowski – have enough clout – mental and otherwise – to thwart the faith-obsessed mind-sets of his team colleagues; that is, can Mr. Rutkowski stem the belief fervor of Dream Team members when their faith in the ET hypothesis takes hold based upon very circumscribed evidence?

And then we have the UFO skeptics, who bring to the UFO table all kinds of ruminations that have the gloss of serious scrutiny but, when examined carefully, only has the patina of objectivity and academic acumen.

(The evidence for cavalier skepticism is made manifest by the lack of academic or scientific credentials by those claiming to be skeptics: they are self-anointed.)

But the essential problem is not the Dream Team or skeptical cliques. It’s the sycophancy of the rabble. That UFO throng weighs in with predilections based upon facile psychological or sociological elements that border upon insanities of various kinds.

Take a look at the comments that abound at various UFO venues: UFO UpDates, Rense, Above Top Secret, and even here, among many others.

The ruminations are patently aberrant.

This has been the case with UFOs since 1947, when the phenomenon reared its head and became a fringe fascination for people themselves on the fringe (of society) or mental competency.

UFOs should have been studied, as Jacques Vallee suggested and tepidly acted upon with his “Invisible College” idea, taken from the Rosicrucians or Robert Boyle’s Royal Society of London clique.

A small, qualified group of credentialed persons, from various academic disciplines should have banded together to study UFOs from the outset.

This didn’t happen at the overt level, and that explains the ongoing belief that MJ-12 may have legitimately existed or still exists: MJ-12 fits with the sensible idea of an Invisible College.

But any idea of a qualified band of UFO devotees getting together now is muffled by the onslaught of the rabble and the rabble’s use of the internet to intercede with ignorance in the matter of the phenomenon.

The vociferous clamor of the UFO underbelly drowns out or dissipates rational discourse.

We even experience that here, although we strive mightily to curb the waywardness of illogic and utter banality of thought that comes our way as comments on our topics.

UFOs, as a phenomenon, has been lost by the gargantuan storm of idiocies that have inundated the subject and continue apace now that the internet has opened the door to every asinine quidnunc who thinks what they have to offer is gold of the gods.

Can we, and a few other UFO bailiwicks, continue to ruminate within this maelstrom or cacophony of nonsense? Should we?

Paul Kimball and other sensate individuals have chosen not to. We like their withdrawal from the blatant UFO scene. And see it as a way out of the madhouse.

RR

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And this is the planet that UFOs find interesting?

NASA's photograph of the Earth from Saturn -- that little white speck: the planet that galactic civilizations and cultures have found so interesting and outstanding that the inhabitants of those civilizations (extraterrestrials) have sent a plethora of UFOs (or flying saucers) here to check it out, for years now.

Should we laugh or cry....at the ridiculousness of that ufological idea?

RR

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Cave Artists from the Present Time?

In the past, here, I've presented various suggestions about cave art, even going so far as to hint that the very modern nature of such art might indicate time-traveling artists.

The December issue of Discover magazine has a piece [Page 18] entitled "Cave Painters Had a Leg Up on Modern Artists" which you can access by clicking this LINK:

RR

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The Origin and Stimulus for the Men in Black tales

This is the film that generated the Men in Black story and descriptive (from Albert Bender):








RR

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Martian UFO?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/08/hubble_spots_lawnsprinkler_asteroid_that_has_boffins_baffled/

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An Authentic 1896 Airship Sighting by Bruce Duensing

Bruce Duensing has provided this newspaper account of an 1896 Airship sighting. His offering was too large for our comment section so, I've added it here:

PEOPLE DECLARE THEY HEARD THEM AND SAW THE LIGHTAERIAL SHIP, GHOST STORY, OR METEOR – AS YOU LIKE ANYWAY, THE LIGHT WAS SEEN, AND IT ACTED VERY STRANGELY

CARMEN TOLD CASHIER LUSK OF WHAT THEY CLAIMED TO HAVE SEEN AND HEARD NOTHING HEARD UP TO DATE AS TO WHAT THE OBJECT IS OR WHENCE IT CAME

VOICES IN THE SKY Last evening between the hours of 6 and 7 o'clock, in the year of our lord eighteen hundred and ninety six, a most startling exhibition was seen in the sky in this city of Sacramento. People standing on the sidewalks at certain points in the city between the hours stated, saw coming through the sky over the housetops, what appeared to be merely an electric arc lamp propelled by some mysterious force. It came out of the East and sailed unevenly toward the Southwest, dropping now nearer the Earth, and now suddenly rising into the air again as if the force that was whirling it through space was sensible of the dangers of collision with objects upon the Earth. That much hundreds of the people saw. That much caused consternation in the city last night among groups gathered to hear the tale. What follows some of the witnesses to the strange spectacle assert to be true as the circumstances stated. VOICES IN THE SKY Startled citizens last night living at points of the city along a rough diagonal line, yet far distant from each other, declare that they not only saw the phenomenon, but that they also heard voices issuing from it in midair - not the whispering of angels, not the sepulchral mutterings of evil spirits, but the intelligible words and merry laughter of humans. At those intervals where the glittering object, as if careless of its obligation to maintain a straightforward course, descended dangerously near the housetops, voices were heard in the sky saying: "Lift her up quick! You are making directly for that steeple!" Then the light in the sky would be seen obeying some mystic touch and ascending to a considerable height, from which it would take up again its southwesterly course. The light sailed along the line of K St., so it appeared from those in the eastern part of the city, although it appears that after it passed 14th St. it was wafted far south of K. Laughter and words sounding strange in the distance, though fairly intelligible, fell upon the ears of pedestrians along the course of the light who had paused to look up at the novelty. COMING TO CALIFORNIA Last night's BEE contained a telegram from New York announcing that a man had perfected an airship and would on Friday of this week, accompanied by one or two friends, ascend from a vacant lot in the metropolis and go directly to California, which he promised to reach in two days. The description furnished in the telegram included an apparatus which was electrical to supply light and power to the astonishing contrivance. It is not regarded as likely, in view of the announcement carried in the dispatch, that last night Sacramento was overswept by this aerial ship. But here is the incident -- here the chronicle of words heard, of a strange spectacle witnessed. Whence the light, which was not a meteor all agree, came, whither it went, where it is now—these things it is not within the capacity of this article to deal with. MR. LUSK'S STORY Charles Lusk, Cashier of the Central Electrical Street Railway Company, was at his home at Twenty-Fourth and O Streets, last evening when, having stepped outside, he saw the remarkable appearance in the sky. He went into the house and told the inmates of what he had seen. This morning Mr. Lusk mentioned the incident to some of the Carmen, and was amazed to learn from them that they had seen such a light as he described while they were in the neighborhood of East Park. More than that, they heard music and voices. One voice distinctly said: "Well, we ought to get to San Francisco by tomorrow noon." The Carmen say they caught some faint idea of the shape of the object that was floating in the air. It was of balloon shape, and they concluded that it was a balloon. THEY SAW IT Foreman Snyder of the Car Barn, Says it Was Not a Meteor This afternoon, G.C. Snyder, foreman of the car house of the Electric Car Company, gave the following to the BEE: "I assure you there is no joke about this matter, so far as I am concerned. Last evening, about ten minutes before 7 o'clock, I saw a light, which was then above, approximately, Twenty-Seventh and P Streets, sailing in a southwesterly direction. It rose and fell and swayed from right to left as if it were being propelled by some motor power. It was a white light, and was not a star or meteor, I am certain of that." "Mr. Lowry, who used to be connected with the car company, told me that he saw the thing when it was directly overhead and that it had a wheel, which was going round." "I don't think it was a balloon, for it was going in the southwest and a heavy wind was blowing from that direction. David Curl, a horsetrainer at the race track, told me he heard voices in the balloon or whatever it was." "I learned that Michael Shelley, Carman on car 103 on the J. Street Line, distinguished the shape of the affair."  ----------------------------------------------- Bruce sent this addendum (via e-mail):  In terms of the state of technology available at that time lead me to the eye witness account of G.C. Snyder, foreman of the car house of the Electric Car Company. Snyder would have been intimately familiar with the  characteristics of carbon arc headlights used on interurbans \ streetcars at that time and this was the only lamp available at that time to produce such an effect as seen from the airship in the form of a searchlight. Steam driven electric dynamos that would have needed to produce the current used to drive the airship searchlight had long since been perfected. Another consideration is that in 1897, gasoline engines had been perfected and while a gasoline engine to drive the dynamo was certainly possible, the availability of refined gasoline in terms of a long distance trip was a hugely formidable challenge, hence the consideration of a small steam plant. Combine these three elements of the searchlight as well as Snyder’s discounting of any other natural source makes for an interesting read in terms of what he thought he saw could have been feasible. Another interesting element was the straight line trajectory across Sacramento as well as this occurred before nightfall in the early evening hours. One final oddity that struck me was the “set up” of this event by the telegram as it could have easily been planted as well as either coincidental or anticipatory as well as the sender being unnamed. According to the procedures of sending a telegram, it would have been impossible to hoax from whence the message came, so it’s likely this message did come from out of state. If this was a hoax or trick telegram and there was no airship to appear, what is the point of  the expense of specifically notifying the newspaper in advance of a non event? Odd. BD

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A Truly Wonderful UFO Site

Anthony Bragalia brought this site to my attention. Check it out:

http://www.educatinghumanity.com/

RR

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Atheists and UFOs

Atheists can’t offer the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis as thecausa principia of UFOs, and here’s why…

Aside from our long-expressed view here that the Earth is an inconsequential planet in a wayward Solar System on the fringe of the Milky Way (our galaxy), a planet that doesn’t call attention to itself, amongst the other wonders of the known Universe, and therefore hardly a beacon for alien cultures advanced enough to know that.

But the primary reason that atheists can’t proffer the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis for UFOs derives from the fact [sic] that evolution is unique to this planet, this Earth.

There are no other planets, anywhere in the Universe, -- or so infinitesimally few – with the environmental factors like Earth’s, that evolution, as it took place here, could not have happened there.

Human beings, as Darwin’s evolutionary string provides, would not appear anywhere outside of Earth. It’s a virtual impossibility.

However, one can posit that a Divine Presence or Intelligent, Sentient Force or Entity, may have seeded the Universe with beings selected by the Imaginative Mind of that Omniscient Being, or God, if you will.

But atheists find such a view to be anathema.

(I haven’t brought up the difficulty of alien peoples visiting Earth in the droves that UFO reports seem to indicate. The economies for such travels would be staggering, let alone the sheer numbers of such travelers, mincing their way to the Earth, rather than visiting more luxurious venues or elementally fecund locales. Earth has no minerals or elements unique to it.)

This leaves us with the Multiverse scenario, bringing it with it like caveats for interstellar travel, or the Time-Travel option, which is an acceptable hypothetical explanation not foreign to current thinking of theoretical physicists.

But those UFO explanations are thin and not fleshed out by most in the UFO community.

The ETH is the simpleton view that UFO mavens can hunker down with, and not strain a neurological muscle.

But it’s based upon premises that make intellectuals cringe.

RR

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