An Alien Abduction Hypothesis?

Alien abduction scenarios have pretty much been anathema for me.

I see “abductions” as a psychological or neurological state, enmeshed in sexual difficulties affecting, mentally, those who think they’ve been taken by extraterrestrial kidnappers.

But there is one possibility that, while oblique, may be possible.

We can assume that the use of space-time will become a reality for future mankind.

Einstein, and other physicists, have thought and/or predicted that time, or space-time, might be amenable to manipulation in the future.

If that is a possibility, would it not allow for the intrusion of future Earthians into our time to correct, alter, or destroy elements that have afflicted or enhanced their time?

That is, suppose the cases of alien abduction are not kidnappings by extraterrestrials but, rather, are visitations by future humans who come back to this time to “fix” whatever they think needs fixing?

This would help explain why common folk are those that are “abducted.”

It’s not those people who the intruders are interested in but their descendants – their children or grandchildren, their descendants.

It’s the Terminator scenario: future Earthians come back, altering space and time to do so, in order to “enhance” or “alter” or “destroy” the genetic or biological elements within those whose progenerated offspring affect the lives of future humankind.

Scientists, evil-doers, cultural figures of the future would be altered, for bad or good, depending upon what is done or has been done to their forebears.

The alleged medical procedures performed on some abductees makes sense in such a scenario.

That abductees are taken through walls or out of closed-door automobiles would be explained by an alteration of the space, the locale, where the “abduction” takes place.

Of course, my sci-fi-like conjecture is bizarre, but it would allow for another abductee possibility, other than such people are just mad with psychological or neurological problems or are bountiful liars.

RR 

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So you think science is saner than ufology?

Watching the Science Channels’ Through the Wormhole, hosted by Morgan Freeman, Sunday night was edifying, but in the wrong way perhaps.

Among several repeat broadcasts were two that I’ll address here: Before the Big Bang and Is There a God?

You can find those broadcasts, I think, by going here:

http://science.discovery.com/tv-shows/through-the-wormhole

The scientists noted included Lee Smolen, Michael Persinger, and, of course, Stephen Hawking, among many others,

The accent was on Quantum Mechanics.

What was offered were theories that said what existed before the Big Bang were other Universes, according to M Theory, where branes bumped into each other creating this Universe and others.

And then there was the Big Bounce Theory which posited our Universe was created when the original singularity reversed itself and during the rebound this Universe, and others, were created.

There was also the Bubble hypothesis: that a number of Universes were created, when the singularity took place, of which are one.

Then a creator (God) was hypothesized as a master mathematician, a computer programmer, or a creation of human imagination.

Michael Persinger, a favorite of Bruce Duensing, was shown placing a young lady in a closed, dark room, with a helmet on that impinged her brain with magnetic impulses, purporting to allow her a vision of God.

Although Persinger’s helmet was said to be not able to intrude the human cranium nor have his experiments been able to be replicated, he got a nice segment as if his studies were significant.

The cacophony of theories about reality, God, and the origin of the Universe were mildly reminiscent of sessions I attended at mental facilities while studying psychology; tha t is, there was an aroma of insanity about the posturings.

And while mathematics are offered as entrée to the realities of nature and is the methodology exemplar of physicists, it is, as intelligent laymen well know, a charade not very different from the methodology used by alchemists of the Middle Ages and, moreover, determining nothing about reality but hat it may be symbolically noted via mathematical equations.

Now, I grant you, ufology seems to be more bogus than today’s physics but is it really?

The only difference, it seems to me, is that the façade of science is a bit more dignified and moderate, but just as loony, when one accesses the content.

Even the scientists used in the Wormhole offerings are as sloppily dressed as those among the UFO crowd, and with as much goofy hair and beards as what passes for quirkiness in the UFO arsenal.

Philosophers always had their presentations mangled by the convoluted word usage and sentence structures that evolved over the years.

Science avoids that by using mathematics, which mask their obtuseness, as lay people have no idea what science is talking about.

Ufology is lamented because its practitioners not only look goofy, en masse, but sound goofy when offering their views about UFOs.

Ufologists don’t have a reputable argot to which they can run when queried about their views. All they have are shallow intuitions based on earlier intuitions that have been dismissed as silly from the outset of the flying saucer era.

But are ufologists crazier than the scientists used on shows like The Wormhole or who put out books, of which I have many, that are as obscurant as anything found in the ravings of madmen and madwomen?

I don’t think so.

Both science and ufology are bogus, in their own ways.

And those who pretend to be intelligent, or are, see through the charade of both.

Copyright 2013, InterAmerica, Inc.

RR

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UFO Believers get a Nod from Jung

During a "discussion" -- at another site I moderate -- about The Book of Revelation and Predictions by alleged seers, the copy below appeared.

I thought it appropriate as to the position of UFO believers and their arch-enemies, skeptics.

(Now some of you are familiar with Jung's nomenclature -- such as numinosity -- and his slant on things, so I've left intact his wording and applied bracketed inserts to make a  specific point.)
  

From The Dark Side of God (Chapter 10) by C.G. Jung in Doomsday! How the World Will End – and When, Edited by Martin Ebon [Signet/New American Library, NY 1977]

The numinosity of the object makes it difficult to handle intellectually. One always participates, for or against, and “absolute objectivity” is more rarely achieved here than anywhere else.

If one has positive religious convictions, i.e., if one believes, then doubt is felt as very disagreeable and also one fears it. For this reason, one prefers not to analyze the object of belief.

If one has no … beliefs, then one does not like to admit the feeling of deficit, but prates loudly about one’s liberal-mindedness and pats oneself on the back for the noble frankness of one’s agnosticism.

From this standpoint, it is hardly possible to admit the numinosity of [UFOs], and yet its very numinosity is just as great a hindrance to critical thinking, because the unpleasant possibility might then arise that one’s faith in enlightenment or agnosticism might be shaken. Both types feel, without knowing it, the insufficiency of their argument.

Agnosticism maintains that it does not possess any knowledge of God or anything metaphysical [such as UFOs], overlooking the fact that one never possesses a metaphysical belief but is possessed by it.

Is not something that is and has real existence for us an authority superior to any rational judgment, as has been shown over and over again in the history of the human mind? [Page 92 ff.]

RR

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Looks like a UFO to me....

http://www.news.com.au/technology/science/possible-meteor-captured-flashing-across-night-sky-in-iowa/story-fnjwlcze-1226791509199

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How to do UFO research [Redux]

Copyright 2013, InterAmerica

A piece in The New York Review of Books [January 9^th2014 issue], The Good Way to do History by Robert Darton reviews a 1989 book by noted historian Arlette Farge: The Allure of the Archives. [Page 52 ff.]

The import of Farge’s book is that one can find accurate historical information in all the archived materials extant, if one has the stamina and wherewithal to prevail in light of what archives consist of.

Mr. Darton, the reviewer, makes the point that the book, just now translated from the French, was written before the web was prominent and the internet the primary source for persons who, wrongfully, think they are getting at the truth of things by searching for information contained via it, the internet, that is.

Darton writs, “The Allure of the Archives should give pause to anyone who thinks it possible to get an adequate picture of the past by looking at a computer screen.” [Page 52]

Now, I know some UFO researchers and investigators (Friedman, Randle, et al.) have doggedly searched various archives – military, governmental, business, et cetera. – for information to substantiate or clarify UFO details.

But Farge suggests that such scrutiny is often cavalier and without proper or sensible procedure:

“Researchers] may feel sympathy for the obscure [information they] encounter but shouldn’t identify with it or you will project your concern on [it]. Keep a critical distance from the material …

Resist the temptation to add fictitious touches about what people thought and felt.” [Page 54, emended by me somewhat]

Darton continues, “The Allure of the Archives can serve as a user’s manual for anyone who undertakes archival research, but it can be read most profitably by anyone who is curious about how history is concocted.” [Page 54]

Farge is quoted thusly about her concept of “the torrent of singularities”:

“Behind every case in the thousands of dossiers … is a singular individual who cannot be assimilated in a general proposition, because there is always another individual whose experience will contradict it. Few historians have wrestled with this problem, because few have attempted to see patterns by examining all the lives exposed in vast stretches of documents.” [Page 54]

Farge collaborated with Michel Foucault and her methodology is best explained in her 1982 book with him, Le Désordre des familles: Lettres de cachet des Archives de la Bastille au XVIIIͤ siecle.

Will UFO researchers/investigators read Farge’s book, and apply the techniques suggested so that they will gain a better understanding of what actually transpired during a UFO encounter or sighting, or how archival material may have been and is compromised by bias and direct subornation, as was the case with the various Haut affidavits about his Roswell press release?

I suppose not.

It seems that most persons interested in UFOs think what they read or get online is enough to provide the truth of things.

Darton via Farge tells us that is not the case.

RR 

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Alan Turing finally vindicated!

Not UFO related but important, over all...

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/12/23/united-kingdom-alan-turing-pardon/4182875/

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UFO UpDates is dead!

Errol Bruce-Knapp has folded the long-running UFO UpDate List.

It lost its cachet a few years back, and it was time to pull the plug.

I understand Bruce's decision. His once vibrant enterprise lost most of the UFO notables (except for Jerry Clark and Isaac Koi).

All that was left were the UFO stragglers and ufological wannabes.

I wish Errol the best. He was a tyrant sometimes but a good soul, and my contacts with him, in the past, were convivial and edifying.

His List will be missed....by some....not many....but a few.

RR

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Kevin Randle: Grasping at what?

UFO writer and investigator Kevin Randle has a blog for which he likes to gather comments, lots of them.

He prefers quantity over quality. I'm not sure why he needs such gratification but he's done it again...

He's now revisiting the Roswell-Mogul balloon controversy which, in the past, has brought the Pro and Con Roswell acolytes out of the woodwork.

The issue has been been feather-dusted and milked like crazy, mostly by the Kevin Randle blog-followers: David Rudiak, Lance Moody, CDA (Christopher Allan) and others.

We suspect this latest mogul rehash will bring the "debaters' out in force once more, to haggle over details that are totally irrelevant and not germane to the Roswell incident, as noted here and elsewhere.

Mr. Randle, once a credible UFO researcher, continues to marginalize himself with Roswell and other UFO detritus that is hoary with age and misinformation.

Why is he committing this ufological suicide? It's baffling, and disturbing to those of us who have admired Mr. Randle, even after his misdeeds during the recent Roswell slide(s) imbroglio.

Maybe Paul Kimball's forthcoming book, about UFO malfeasance and those who have been responsible and continue to be irresponsible, will offer an explanation.

I hope so.

RR

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Plants are intelligent things! (And pilot UFOs?)

Copyright 2013, InterAmerica, Inc.

A while back I posted an item about the book The Secret Life of Plants (by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird) tying it to the idea found in the 1951 sci-fi movie, The Thing from Another World: the being that came to Earth in a flying saucer was an kind of intelligent, advanced vegetable.

The December 23/30 New Yorker magazine has a piece The Intelligent Plant by Michael Pollan [Page 92 ff.] that details the current studies about what appears to be intelligent behavior by plants, noting that The Secret Life of Plants was considered New Age hooey pretty much but contained ideas that are now being taken seriously by botanists and plant scientists:

“…plants reacted to the thoughts (good or ill) of humans in close proximity and, in the case of humans familiar to them, over a great distance.” [Page 92]

“Plants are able to sense and optimally respond to so many environmental variables … that there may exist some brainlike information-processing system to integrate the data and coördinate a plant’s behavioral response … electrical and chemical signaling systems have been identified in plants which are homologous to those found in the nervous systems of animals.” [Page 92]

“… plants exhibit intelligence … an intrinsic ability to process information from both abiotic and biotic stimuli that allows optimal decisions about future activities in a given environment.” [Page 92]

“It is only human arrogance, and the fact that the lives of plants unfold in what amounts to a much slower dimension of time, that keeps us from appreciating their intelligence and consequent success." [Page 94]

The article provides a number of experiments which have shown what appears to be thought processes, telepathy among plants, and plant networks that mimic what goes on in human brains via neurons.

That some plant scientists are aghast at the idea of Plant Neurobiology is solidly presented but offset by detailed procedures that can only be seen, by objective observers, as some kind of thinking or intelligence in plants..

Pollan writes that Darwin was obsessed with plants and in his 1880 book The Power of Movement in Plants “was asking us to think of the plant as a kind of upside-down animal, with its main sensory organs and ‘brain’ on the bottom, underground, and its sexual organs on top.” [Page 95]

With plants, Pollan writes, “there is some unifying mechanism across living systems that can process information and learn.” [Page 98]

And “ … if we decide that [consciousness] as the state of being awake and aware of one’s environment … then plants may qualify as conscious beings …”  [Page 101]

And for our UFO purposes here, “If we could begin to understand plants on their own terms … it would be like being in contact with an alien culture.” [Page 104]

“If you want to explore other planets, the best thing is to send plantoids.” [Page 105, italics mine]

The article is extensive and much more explicit and interesting than my self-serving synopsis here indicates, and you will be edified by seeking it out (online or in the magazine itself).

My point is that we might do well to consider The Thing scenario as one possibility for UFO occupants (extraterrestrial visitors); that is, they are vegetables with sentience (intelligence) seeking the Earth’s waters to sustain their civilization and/or culture, elsewhere in the universe where water has become a lost but necessary commodity.

The idea is not as far-fetched as one might think, once they read the New Yorker piece.

RR

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Arthur Koester’s Coverall-garbed UFO Aliens

Science writer and paranormalist, Arthur Koestler wrote a play, The Twilight Bar, in 1933, which was published in 1945, and is now available from various sources.

David Richie writes in his book, UFO [op. cit] that in the play, two “aliens” arrive on Earth in a craft that looks like a meteorite to warn humankind that it has three days in which to improve its behavior or face destruction. [Page 211]

The play, obviously antedated 1951’s The Day the Earth Stood Still, which was written by Edmund H. North, based on the 1940 short story, “Farewell to the Master” by Harry Bates. [Wikipedia]

The play never really caught on and was initially panned mercilessly by critics.

http://newspaperarchives.vassar.edu/cgi-bin/vassar?a=d&d=vcchro19450915-01.2.20

However, a Norwegian playwright produced the play, not long ago, with a contemporary staging.

The interesting thing, for me, was the description of the occupants of the craft, the alien visitors: they were dressed in white coveralls.

That’s the same descriptive used by Lonnie Zamora for his 1964 Socorro sighting and also factors in the Woomera, Australia 1964 rocket launch where two unauthorized men in white coveralls were spotted, causing the launch to be aborted; that event related to the Jim Templeton Solway Firth spaceman photo (that we’ve addressed here a number of times).

Why the prosaic description – white coveralls – for alleged extraterrestrial visitors, in fiction and UFO accounts?

Koestler wrote the The Roots of Coincidence, a book about ESP, telepathy, and the like. It too is available from various sources and once was held in high esteem, as Arthur Koestler was a noted conservative writer with cachet among literati and scientists alike.

Did Arthur Koestler have an alien mental intrusion causing him to write his play, with a theme not unlike that of the 1950s contactees?

After all, Mr. Koestler wasn’t particularly interested in space visitors or telepathy and ESP early on in his career and life.

He produced a provocative tome, The Thirteenth Tribe, indicating that some Jews, like himself, were of a race quite different from the Shepherdic Hebrews of the Biblical texts.

What caused him to deviate from that interest and his support of the Lamarckian theory of evolution advocated by biologist Paul Kammerer to go astray with a story of white coverall garbed aliens?

And why do white coverall garbed “men” show up in two 1964 UFO-related incidents?

In 1976, Koestler was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and, in 1979, with terminal leukemia. In 1983 he and his wife committed suicide at home in London. [Wikipedia]

RR

Copyright 2013, InterAmerica, Inc.

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Outsider Art and UFOs

Copyright 2013, InterAmerica, Inc.

In Chris Aubeck’s account of the image and vision of Frederick Birmingham in 1868 (which you should read here, in the posting before this one), one has to account for the voice(s) and images imparted to Mr. Birmingham.

While his contemporaries invoked mental aberration to Mr. Birmingham, I’m not so sure that his experience was a schizophrenic episode.

It’s a possibility, surely, but what is he was contacted, as he reported, by something or someone who provided aircraft information to him during the ongoing surge of lighter-than-air devices in the time-frame?

The Birmingham account occurred around the same time as the Henry Wallace incident, outlined by Mr. Aubeck in his book with Jacques Vallee, Wonders in the Sky, and noted in my July 2013 piece:

http://ufocon.blogspot.com/2013/07/tall-tales.html

Something was going on in the 1800s: preparatory aircraft-sightings of a seemingly demented kind, but were they really mental aberrations?

In the Birmingham incident(s) one finds drawings to “corroborate” what the witness experienced. Are these records of actual visions or renderings of a diseased mind?

A search (or scrutiny) of “outsider art” – which has been gathered mostly from patients in mental hospitals – might show intrusions of thoughts (telepathically?) by someone or something hoping to bring about progressive change in human progression, but mistakenly seen as psychological or neurological aberration.

The outsider art one might look at can’t include that from contemporary times or the so-called modern era – 1950 on, to arbitrarily set a cut-off date.

Modern “outsider art” is conflicted by the anxieties of the times, as Jung noted in his book, Modern Man in Search of a Soul.

Here’s outsider art by contemporary “artists”:

It’s useless for our purpose, although it has imagery that seems to pertain.

Here are examples of art from 1911 and 1930 which may contain imagery that is germane to UFOs and those responsible for that phenomenon (perhaps):

Like cave art or pictographs of ancient mankind, which show oddities that are not reconciled by paleontology or scholars, outsider art may contain clues or images that confirm UFOs come from a place outside of time or terrestrial locale, as is the case with Mr. Birmingham’s contact(s) in the mid-1800s.

RR 

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The Birmingham Ark by Chris Aubeck

My contribution to the Fred Birmingham case can now be downloaded from two different servers:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/s8tgdk

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/5w29hnm913j9chy/E9KGcBbuan

The document is around 11 MB in size. You're welcome to distribute it freely.

Best regards,

Chris

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I just cancelled my Xmas gifts to all of you...

http://www.indiatimes.com/technology/science/universe-on-the-brink-of-collapse-117355.html

RR

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A Reasoned [UFO] Debate

In the Journal of Scientific Exploration, Volume 5, Number 1 1991, UFO ET proponent Robert M. Wood presented his argument for extraterrestrial UFO visitations.

Jacques Vallee countered.

Here is Mr. Wood's conclusion from the paper:

"Whether any hypothesis is emotionally exciting or dull should not be a basis for selecting the least unlikely hypothesis. The selection or rejection of the ETH is no exception. This author concluded long ago, along with Stan Friedman and James McDonald, that the ETH was the least unlikely hypothesis.

McDonald (1968) in his testimony to Congress stated, "I now regard Hypothesis 7 ("extraterrestrial devices of some surveillance nature") as the one most likely to prove correct" (p. 36). Twenty-two more years of evidence would seem to merely strengthen this conclusion.

The major assumptions, to be consistent with the ETH, are (1) it is very simple to travel at many times the speed of light, resulting in very short trip times compared to species lifetime; (2) most travelers have knowledge of the locations of other civilizations; (3) "they" have a common policy of noninterference except for a few mavericks; and (4) previous genetic interactions with homo sapiens during our known history may be responsible for similar biology in some extraterrestrials.

As mind-boggling as it may seem, the extraterrestrial hypothesis is not that bad."

Here is Jacques Vallee's counter argument:

"The original article that triggered this discussion was not meant to eliminate the ETH from the list of explanations for UFOs. Indeed, it observed that "until the nature and origin of UFO phenomena can be firmly established it will naturally be possible to hypothesize that extraterrestrial factors, including

undiscovered forms of consciousness, are playing a role in its manifestations."

But, it sought to clarify the difficulties with such a theory and to advance other, equally attractive hypotheses. It also urged that the idea of extraterrestrial intervention be "updated to include current theoretical speculation about other models of the physical universe."

In his well-articulated response Dr. Wood has proposed just such an update, in terms that are both scientifically sound and intellectually appealing. In the process of saving it, however, he has been forced to stretch the "first level ETH" to such an extent that it may no longer be recognizable by most ufologists. While it would be a pleasure, indeed, to welcome him into the ranks of the heretics, I doubt that such a distortion was part of Wood's plans when he wrote his rebuttal. But, what are we to make of a model involving 14,000 different civilizations, all of them humanoid in shape, which travel throughout the universe in ships that can pass through solid objects, yet feel it necessary to stop in the remote countryside to terrify human victims, performing crude operations upon their bodies?

While this revised ETH model does account for some of the observed facts which the first-level ETH

had overlooked, it does not really overcome the five arguments that contradict the extraterrestrial theory.

It is my hope that the debate we have initiated here will continue, and that other scientists will join us with their own contributions. In the process of exploring these issues we may well shed new light on critical factors of the phenomenon that have not been previously recognized."

This is how debates or colloquies should take place; civilized and moderate.

RR

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Nick Redfern has a yen for Roswell

Nick Redfern's latest Mysterious Universe piece is about Roswell:

http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2013/12/did-japan-invade-roswell/

RR

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UFO Elaborations

Copyright 2013, InterAmerica, Inc.

Lance Moody’s recent uncovering of extrapolations by Delbert Newhouse in his late accounts of what transpired during and after his filming of “objects” in Utah in 1952 (the Tremonton film) brings to mind that most initial flying saucer and/or UFO sightings end up being elaborated upon by the originators of such sightings/reports.

I’m exempting Lonnie Zamora whose 1964 Socorro sighting remained fixed and steady right up to his death.

But most other UFO incidents are made elaborate, after the fact, and a 2013 account of the December 1980 Rendlesham episode, recently aired by Destination America’s Alien Mysteries program, indicated, for me, that psychological mechanisms are at work in most UFO accounts.

There are a number of psychiatric and psychological designations that can be applied to the structure of the elaborations made by UFO witnesses: secondary elaboration, displacement, et cetera.

But one doesn’t need to resort to psychiatric etiologies to determine that persons build upon their sightings as time goes along.

These aren’t confabulations but, rather, elaborations, that the UFO witness adds, piecemeal, to flesh out what was a semi-traumatic event for them.

In the aired Rendlesham case, Jim Penniston and John Burroughs did the heavy lifting of the British incident, abetted by Nick Pope, for whom the sighting rivals the 1947 Roswell incident in New Mexico.

In the broadcast, it becomes clear, in this 2013 rendering, that hypnosis fed and extended the incident from its original telling to what has now become an elaborate tale of time traveling, abduction, and government/military cover-up and meddling.

Burroughs and Penniston have come to believe that what they experienced is now determined to be, at least as far as Penniston is concerned, a possible visitation by our descendants from the future.

(The possibility would explain the vast incursions of UFOs that doom the idea of interplanetary visitations to this speck in the Universe.)

However, once hypnosis is used in the exploration of mental memory, one has to throw out the offerings that come forth: they are beleaguered by disconnected memories and extraneous mental detritus, which is why Freud and Psychoanalysis abandoned the procedure early on for that psychological practice.

In the Newhouse/Tremonton elaborations one can determine that a need to fortify a singular event was endemic to Delbert Newhouse’s desire to provide a strident legacy that didn’t happen once his film was dismissed as probably birds in the sky.

The same kind of need for “fame” and/or a significant legacy seems to have afflicted many of the Roswell citizens, who were or are aging without anything notable to add to their meager lives and Roswell was and is a vehicle which has allowed some notability.

Roswell elaborations are legion, and mostly unraveled or unraveling as time has gone by and UFO investigators actually pursue the “facts” in each teller’s tale.

The first flying disk notable, Kenneth Arnold, himself, resorted to building upon his iconic sighting, he abetted by Ray Palmer and also a need to have a worthwhile legacy.

The Betty Hill and Travis Walton elaborations, whether true or not, came much after the initial accounts and, while not outright lies, like that of George Adamski and others, are accretions that disrupt the original story they provided.

Each UFO case needs a psychological evaluation to determine why the stories have been built upon or elaborated.

Yet, that takes us away from the UFO phenomenon and into the personalities of UFO lore, not addressing the enigma itself – a waste of time and effort if one only wants to know what UFOs are or may be.

Nonetheless, it’s an effort worthy of psychological, neurological, and sociological study should one be so inclined.

I only note it here as the Rendlesham program was so blatantly about elaboration and not UFOs, per se, that it irked to see the phenomenon flummoxed by such a charade.

RR 

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Let's say the 1952 Tremonton Film shows Alien Space Craft....

Now what?

(See, that's how stupid the ongoing discussion is at Kevin Randle's blog.)

RR

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UFO “Investigators” and Their “Research”

Aside from the arm-chair UFO research- ers, of which I am one, what do we have with those formidable souls who traverse the landscape using the rubric “UFO Investigator” or “Researcher”?

I noticed, during a UFO showing on The History Channel, a fellow proclaiming he had been investigating triangular UFOs.

His methodology?

He would go to the place where the UFO was seen, seek out the person who said they saw the thing, and he would then ask them some questions: Where in the sky was it? How large was it? How fast was it moving? What did it look like? Et cetera.

That’s about it.

That is and has been the state of UFO “research” and/or “investigation” for years now.

Grabbing soil samples and other flora from supposed UFO landing locales was once de rigueur for UFO investigators, but that was just pretend research. No one ever did any real forensic lab work on samples gathered form UFO landing sites. (Sure, they put some of those samples under a commercial (inexpensive) microscope sometimes but the persons looking through those microscopes rarely had bona fide credentials.)

Today, one can find, online, “research” into classic sightings.

Take the Tremonton film by Delbert Newhouse from 1952, being rehashed at Kevin Randle’s blog.

The “research” consists of argumentation over irrelevant detritus from interviews with Mr. Newhouse and an evaluation of filming procedures and what birds look like in film.

David Rudiak provides crazy data, Lance Moody responds, only because he likes to argue. And Kevin Randle struggles to keep the matter on track; that is, what did Newhouse actually film? – a question that wasn’t answered then and can’t be answered now.

But what’s the point? Even if the discussion ends up disclosing that Newhouse actually filmed a flotilla of UFOs, what do we have?

Where does that take us?

That’s the state of UFO research, nowadays, as it has always been: pretense at forensic UFO study, and a spate of nonsense that doesn’t ever deliver.

Research and investigation are two words that mean something in the academic and scientific communities.

In the UFO world, research and investigation are words used by those pretending to be involved with a real scrutiny for the UFO phenomenon but, instead, are engaged in a kind of foolishness that indicates such persons are fraudulent, to themselves and to those who truly wish to know what UFOs are or have been.

Going to a UFO sighting, after the fact, is ridiculous on the face of it. Arguing over old UFO sightings, that have been rehashed time and time again, is futile at best and silly at least.

Armchairing old UFO cases is proper. That’s all one can do with classic or rare sightings; they are outside the opportunity of hands-on forensics.

Pretending to be doing research by arguing minutiae that is scrummed by time and erroneous accretions is almost insane, but that’s “ufology” as one skeptical wag often puts it.

RR 

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Muting [UFO] Skepticism…

…tempering rabid [UFO] belief systems.

UFO skeptics (sometimes debunkers) are a lousy lot, not really thoughtful skeptics, rather wilding anti-thinkers.

Fortunately, I’ve been able to quell the irrational skepticism of French skeptic Gilles Fernandez here but nudging his vaulted ego with assailing asides.

He’s withdrawn to the cloistered halls of Facebook, where he’s protected from assault by Facebook’s blocking mechanism.

Only his “friends” and like-minded skeptics can read his narrow views.

Christopher Allan [aka CDA] is a skeptic I admire. He’s anti-UFO/Roswell views are laced with subtle British humor and the vicissitudes of age; he, like me, has been around a while, and doesn’t take UFOs seriously, having read and seen all the hogwash that has ensued since the Kenneth Arnold sighting of 1947.

Lance Moody, UFO’s angry man, is also admired by me. He remains, generally, polite and dignified while skewering UFO nonsense, as he defines it.

Tim Printy and Robert Sheaffer are reasonable skeptics. I don’t find their views offensive nor obnoxious; Sheaffer’s UFO invectives are substantiated by reasoned analysis and counter data that is germane.

Zoam Chomsky [aka The Iron Skeptic] has been quiet of late. Did he die?

I like the counter views of intelligent skeptics.

Then we have the die-hard UFO promoters; everything about UFOs are true: abductions, MJ-12, Extraterrestrial agencies working with Earthian governments, Roswellian bodies,

Vast interplanetary visitors (for millennia), and so on….you know the lore they laud as authentic and valid, even in the face of that lore’s absurdities.

There are iffy issues that one has to contend with, such as The alleged Travis Walton abduction.

Walton maintains to this day that he was abducted by a UFO and examined by creatures within it.

His tale is recounted by him in ways that belie falsehood,

For example, Dan Frederiksen provided this, in a comment to an old posting of ours:

“Travis Walton reported a heavy damp atmosphere onboard that was hard to breathe and he felt short of breath. He also felt physically weak as in hard to carry his own weight. He never made the connection himself but it makes perfect sense that the ship had higher gravity onboard because that was natural to them.”

If Walton said that, and I am unfamiliar with it from his conversations (on YouTube) and writings about his sojourn, it makes for an interesting aside, as Mr. Frederiksen notes.

Like Betty Hill’s “Star Map” – an odd thing surely – one finds such an offhand reference to bolster the believability of the event Betty (and Barney, sometimes) revealed.

The there is Roswell.

The recent Kodak slide imbroglio revitalized that ancient, hoary UFO tale. But there is more, and Anthony Bragalia, a Roswell devotee of the highest order, as strong an advocate as David Rudiak, seems to find minute Roswell details that allow one to consider the 1947 incident as possibly extraterrestrial in nature.

But there are enough caveats from the overworked episode that skepticism is warranted, not the skepticism of a Gilles Fernandez, but the rightful skepticism of those who do not find grist in the Roswell mythos.

Witnesses have lied. Balloons were all over the place, near Roswell, in June/July 1947. Nothing has surfaced from an alleged flying disk crash which purports to be from an advanced alien culture or civilization. Alien bodies have not been discovered or their whereabouts disclosed by anyone inclined to present such a monumental truth, despite personal repercussions. [The CDA view]

But yet, something happened near Roswell, in the summer of 1947. What that was remains unknown, as the alien crash crowd and its badgering skeptical counterparts have not deconstructed the matter in any way that brings a conclusive element into play.

That’s true of many UFO accounts; they remain closeted: The Arnold sighting, The Tremonton movie clip (resurrected by Kevin Randle at his blog), the RB-47 event (touted by Paul Kimball and others as a UFO sine qua non), the Phoenix lights, and, my favorite, the 1964 Socorro/Zamora episode.

Skepticism (and/or debunkery) hasn’t demolished any UFO event, fraudulent or real.

UFO proponents, of the ET persuasion or any other conjectural persuasion, hasn’t given the UFO patina a valid gloss that makes the phenomenon compos mentis for the public, news media, or science.

But shutting down those anti-UFO voices may help, along with a concerted effort to separate the UFO wheat from the chaff.

The UFO mystery is a valid topic for the dilettante, a wasteful matter for those who have (or should) an interest in bettering society or, at least, explaining what this life is all about.

Skeptical views and out-and-out acceptance of an ET presence within the UFO phenomenon are both grounds for suppression or dismissal.

Anything less reeks of intellectual cowardice.

RR

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Mind-Meld (or Telepathy)

This is an item from the January/February 2014 issue of Discover magazine [Page 25]:

RR

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Mathematics and UFOs

Professor (in the Department of Computer and Information Science at Brooklyn College) Noson S. Yanofsky in his erudite book, The Outer Limits of Reason: What Science, Mathema- tics, and Logic Cannot Tell Us [The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2013] devotes much material to the mathematical core of physics.

(I’ve noted, earlier here, that mathematics has become the sine qua non of the physicists’ milieu, more so now than any time in the past, some physicists equating math as the language of God or God itself. Of course, the rubric God is not invoked. That designation [God] is anathema to almost all scientists but, when reading between the lines, one has to note that science and physicists, in particular, see themselves as a priesthood using the abstruse machinations of mathematics as their liturgy, and math is, for them, at least, the voice of God.)

Professor Yanofsky Quotes Paul Dirac [1902-1984]:

“It seems to be one of the fundamental features of nature that fundamental physical laws are described in terms of mathematical theory of great beauty and power, needing quite a high standard of mathematics for one to understand it. You may wonder why is nature constructed along these lines? One can only answer that our present knowledge seems to show that it is so constructed. We simply have to accept it. One could perhaps describe the situation by saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe.” [Page 252-253, italics mine]

That is the view of most physicists today, even though they will play down the mention of God, inserting, euphemistically, Math as the sobriquet for the Divinity.

So, if we, like physicists, see math as the “voice of God” or the underpinning language of the Universe, doesn’t it seem likely that any alien life form (or extraterrestrial beings that some UFO aficionados see as occupying flying saucers or UFOs) would also be using the universal language – math?

But how would that Math be rendered?

Since human math is constructed from linguistic symbols of human creation and unique to Earth by virtue of the evolutionary vicissitudes of written communication for this planet, what would an alien mathematical equation look like?

That is, what would the symbolic representation of mathematics look like, if originated from a culture outside this solar system or galaxy, an extraterrestrial culture?

We’ve dealt with symbols allegedly spotted on UFOs from witnesses, the Socorro insignia getting much attention from us, but also the symbols indicated by witnesses of other flying saucer/UFO sightings:

http://ufocon.blogspot.com/2007/02/ufo-symbols.html

Are some of those symbols, if authentic and noted by credible UFO witnesses, elements of an extraterrestrial mathematics – the language of the Universe or God?

Are UFO investigators remiss in neglecting this aspect of UFO sightings and reports?

I think they are, and I bet Professor Yanofsky might agree, if he wasn’t so enamored of what mathematics cannot tell us.

RR 

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Aristotle makes my point!

CDA, in a comment for the item preceding this one, missed my point.

Let me provide this quote, from Aristotle, found in an important and brilliant book I just got from Amazon.com for $20: The Outer Limits of Reason by Noson S. Yanofsky (Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science at Brooklyn College, NY) from The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts:

"... although these opinions appear to follow logically in a dialectical discussion, yet to believe them seems next door to madness when one considers the facts. For indeed, no lunatic seems to be so far out of his senses." [On Generation and Corruption, 325a15]

RR

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The Crux of our Problem with Comments and Visitors Here

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/05/dementia-epidemic_n_4387458.html

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More telepathic UFO communication?

A Dan Frederiksen  left a comment at a 2012 blog item here. (More on that elsewhere).

In it he mentioned the September 16th, 1994 Ruwa, Zimbabwe UFO sighting by some school children, from which the drawing above derives.

In one of the accounts (linked below) was this:

Dr. John Mack, along with researcher Dominique Callimanopulos visited Ruwa...spent two days doing interviews with 12 of the children and their parents. A few of the older students related that they felt they had communicated with the craft's occupants. They were informed that we were were destroying Earth by polluting it, and unless we changed our ways, we would face a failing planet.

The sighting, aside from the telepathic mention, intrigues. Here are links to two reports of the event:

http://ufos.about.com/od/ufohistory/a/ruwa.htm

http://www.ufoevidence.org/cases/case127.htm

For me, whenever children report a strange episode, I tend to accept it as true as, psychologically, children will own up to a created or made-up story. eventually, when queried by adults.

This is one of those cases that smacks of a true, UFO occupant sighting.

(Jose Caravaca may want to apply his Distortion Theory to this incident, but I think the sighting is as reported by the children, and is a bona fide, non-mentally induced sighting.)

The drawings by the children, in the UFO Evidence link (above), because they are strikingly dissimilar, require a forensic or closer look at this UFO case.

RR

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Telepathy and UFOs (at Roswell?)

Christopher Allan [CDA] takes Anthony Bragalia to task in a comment for the Bragalia link in the previous posting here.

CDA objects to the assertion that General Twining allegedly said he communicated with a Roswell alien survivor telepathically.

And CDA also protests that scientists or science eschews the idea of telepathy. Here’s CDA’s comment:

AJB:

You say, based on 2nd or 3rd hand testimony, that the live Roswell alien communicated with General Twining by telepathy.

Tell me please: 

1. Have you any reason for supposing that Twining had telepathic powers? Is this documented anywhere? 

2. Have you any reason for supposing the ET also had telepathic powers?

No such thing as intelligent life outside the earth is known to science; no such thing as telepathy is accepted by science either. Yet you go one step further and tell us that not only do ETs exist and have visited our planet but that they can also communicate with us by telepathy! 

While I [RR] am no fan of telepathy or other vagaries of ESP, I need to note that CDA is not well-versed or versed at all about what science thinks of telepathy.

For instance, there are a number of extant scientific considerations of ESP elements.

And I find one suggestion by Ted Bastins, a one-time Research Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge [in CDA’s backyard], in the chapter “A Clash of Paradigms in Physics” at Page 119 ff. in The Encyclopedia of Ignorance; Everything you ever wanted to know about the unknown [Edited by Ronald Duncan and Miranda Weston-Smith, Pergamon Press, Oxford/NY, 1977] to be applicable to the “discussion” here:

Bastin, defending telekinesis, or psychokinesis, as he calls it, writes, “that I have myself had extensive and variegated first-hand experience of experimentation with two well-known subjects [Uri Geller and Suzanne Padfield] who are able to influence physical objects in a paranormal way (that is to say, to execise psychokinesis.” [Page 124-125]

“Psychokinetic effects show an effect of ‘thought forms’” which he goes on to integrate into quantum theory, or hopes to. [Page 125]

He states that “I do not believe myself that the fact that one has to come to terms with ‘thought forms’ … means that one has to abandon rational inquiry.” [Page 125]

“I described earlier how violent a change the sequential paradigm [of classic physics] would demand” of common sense. [Page 125]

He elaborates on the how a “new paradigm frees us from the preconceptions of spatial and temporal” and how one might consider such paranormal activities, such as psychokinesis (and telepathy) even though contain the attribute that “they are separated in space and in time.” [Page 126]

He concludes, “familiarity may make us see a reasonable coherence where in fact there are great areas of ignorance while denying any coherence to unfamiliar ideas which may be no worse in their incoherence.” [Page 126]

(That conclusion should be read slowly by CDA, Lance Moody, and the marginalized and disappearant French skeptic, Gilles Fernandez,)

So, while telepathy is anathema to my friend CDA, and not an adherent topic I enjoy, one should be disinclined to dismiss it out of hand and make errant generalizations that science eschews the matter altogether.

If Mr. Bragalia’s Nathan Twining says he telepathically interacted with a Roswell-crashed alien, one can, as CDA does, dismiss the alien crash part but not the telepathic part. That would be imbecilic.

RR 

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Nathan Twining said Roswell was an ET event?

Anthony Bragalia reports that Nathan Twining's son was told, by his father, that Roswell was an ET event:

http://bragalia.blogspot.com

N.B. If you wish to comment on Mr. Bragalia's piece, please do so here. (That would save us a lot of Blogger hoody-do.)

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