UFOs: Skeptical Inquiry or Propaganda

Gilles Fernandez has provided some links to material that supports his report, here, meant to crack the Airship 1890s sightings in California.

Gilles has provided an hypothesis or suggestion that the sightings were the result of the cultural/social milieu exacerbated by area newspapers and the planet Venus.

It’s a suggestion or hypothesis that UFO skeptics find worthy of note. And Gilles’ report is acceptable as a possible – possible! – answer to the Airship wave, in California and elsewhere eventually.

But does Gilles’ provide a valid methodology or has he created a bit of skeptical propaganda?

Loading up links that support his view is grist for winning the debate between Airship disbelievers and those who think the Airship sightings consisted of something substantial, whatever that substantiality might be. (Bruce Duensing provided some alternatives to the sightings and Gilles’ explanation also, in his comments to the postings here.)

UFO research (or ufology as the pseudo-scientists have it) lacks a methodology or regimen that uses scientific protocols.

Forensic information is never adduced by those working on UFO sightings, pro or con,

Details that support or eliminate a proposal are skirted with internet links used as buttress one’s view.

That’s not a protocol; it’s a propaganda technique.

If Gilles and his cohorts wish to convince UFO buffs that the Airship wave was the result of a SocioPsychoCultural (whatever that is) milieu, he and they have to provide citations from Sociologists, Psychologists (and Psychiatry), and Anthropological sources that are relevant to California in the 1890s and elsewhere in The United States for Airship sightings ipso facto.

Giving up links from sources that have little or no credentials in any the disciplines I’ve indicated (Sociology, Psychology, Anthropology) is propagandistic not academic or scientific methodology.

That’s the problem with Ufology and/or UFO “research.” It doesn’t resort to procedures that inure it with those who use protocols and procedures that are acceptable to science, or even theology and philosophy (where logic reigns, or should, as Richard Hall always demanded).

My evaluation of Gilles’ “explanation,” while containing citations about Venus, the planet, from credible sources along with personal experience of an Airship witness, itself is woefully lacking in scientific methodology.

But I was countering propaganda, not scientific methodology, so a more disciplined account by me was unwarranted or unnecessary, I think.

If Gilles wishes to convince me and others that the Airship wave was a product of a “socio-psycho-cultural” milieu, he will have to do better.

And if those who think the Airship wave consisted of actual ships flying through the air, with a technology not yet determined or in situ, they, too, will have to do better,

Otherwise we are playing at research and investigation, as Bruce Duensing continues to remind us.

RR

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Aliens are watching Earth's TV? OMG!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/04/kepler_earth_like_planets_habitable/

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An Evaluation of Gilles Fernandez Airship “solution”

Copyright 2013, InterAmerica, Inc.

Gilles presents an acceptable, to skeptics, scenario for the 1890’s Airship wave(s) that we and Jose Caravaca have dealt with rather extensively in the past.

But looking at his and his team’s presentation, we note that the opening salvo is couched in psychological terminology, leading us (and others) to believe that the explanation for the Airship sightings noted would be explained by psychology perhaps.

But Gilles et al. dispense with their premise and end up citing Venus as the cause of the California sightings, abetted by California newspapers and illustrations therein, with the only psychological element being a kind of watered down use of Freud’s projection theory.

(I assume that the insert of the psychological terms, at the outset of Gilles’ presentation, was a kind of faux imprimatur to give credence to what follows. Gilles, after all, is said to be a cognitive psychologist of some note in France.)

While links to material supporting the Venus hypothesis with which Gilles wishes to explain the California airship wave and those that followed are provided, they are a solipsistic farrago.

Venus, as an explanation for flying saucer and UFO sightings, and now the Airships seen in the 1890s decade, doesn’t register as a methodological explanation for me and others who know from citations in The New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology [Hamlyn, London, 1959, Pages 57, 58, 63, 76, 144, 311, 313, 323, 324, 431, 438, 442] and Mythology: An Illustrated Encyclopedia, edited by Richard Cavendish [Rizzoli/Orbis, London, 1980, Pages 245, 248, 250, 251, 253] that Venus was perpetually seen as a planet or star by ancients and never once observed as a vehicle flying overhead and containing Gods or divinities despite, perhaps, the insinuations of the Ancient Astronaut theorists.

That Gilles and his cohorts, steeped in psychological maladies, present Venus as the observed Airships, exacerbated by newspaper accounts, which may have been bogus is interesting.

That would mean the observers were hallucinating or misperceiving in ways that could be etiologically explained, if one applied psychological methodologies to their observations. Gilles didn’t do that and couldn’t do that; unfortunately, no one has access to such observers (long dead), and one can’t get into the mind of the newspaper reporters and editors (also long dead) who provided the stories (which many think were creations to accrue readers and newspaper sales).

Let me provide this experience:

When I lived in Florida in 1970-71, there was an old man, in his 90s, an artist, Fred Hoertz in an apartment below mine, who claimed he saw an airship when he was a child. While his wife said it was difficult for him to recall details of his sighting, in the 1890s, he did note that it seemed to him to be a flying mechanical device. This was a man with keen vision and painterly acumen. Did he think what he saw was the planet Venus? No. And I certainly didn’t entertain any such idea, foreign to me even then, because this was an intelligent man who provided a brief statement of what he saw and thought it was.

If someone mistakes Venus for a UFO or the Airships that Gilles et al. proffer as an explanation for the 1890s Airship wave, that person should be noted for an hallucinatory episode, and studied from that perspective.

But too many persons saw the Airships under discussion, and Lucius Farish and Jerry Clark have provided exemplary reportage of those episodes, and we have, online here (which you can find via Google), a journalistic account of the sightings in a Midwestern magazine.

Nowhere does anyone presume to offer Venus as the cause of the sightings enumerated. The idea is silly on the face of it. And I’m surprised that Gilles and his cohorts have the temerity to present such an idiotic idea here or anywhere else.

RR

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Mars: A 3-D Video

http://news.yahoo.com/video/mars-3d-flyover-video-140815389.html

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A Confluence of Reality and Myth

On Page 138 of David Richie’s book, UFO:The Definitive Guide…[noted here several times] under the heading “merger” is this:

"A familiar example of merging, cited by investigator Jacques Vallee, is the so-called Roswell incident, in which alleged incidents at two different locations were merged to produce an account of a single UFO “crash” involving the recovery of an alien spacecraft and the bodies of extraterrestrials."

Is Richie saying that Vallee accepts the two-incident scenario for Roswell, which is what Stanton Friedman believes, as do I and a few other UFO aficionados?

For me, one incident is the balloon scenario of Mac Brazel, a non-UFO event actually and a real event (whose nature is not exactly clear) which is the crux of the UFO story, the Roswell reality.

There is also another “merge” and that is the Roswell/Aztec co-joining, despite the insistence by Frank Warren and Scott Ramsey that Aztec is a bona fide, unique event and Tony Bragalia (and his Dream Team cohorts) that Roswell is not connected to Aztec.

Silas Newton fused what he knew about Roswell into the Aztec saga, for various reasons, enumerated here earlier.

The idea of “merger” applies to many aspects of UFO lore -- movies, book tales, TV shows, magazine articles, et al. combining into a construct that creates what seems to be a singular event but is, in fact, a consolidation of mental configurations that bring forth a singular whole that really consists of an amalgam of individual memories and neurological machinations – the Betty/Barney Hill “abduction” is a prime example.

“Merge” is not the exact word for such constructions. The psychiatric term is mergent; partial or total, “partial mergent” being the more applicable.

RR 

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Paul Kimball recommends a Podcast

Paul Kimball provides a link to an episode of the Where Did The Road Go podcast with New York radio host Seriah Azkath

http://wdtrg.blogspot.ca/2013/10/mid-week-podcast-with-paul-kimball.html

We always find Paul's suggestions edifying..

Check out this one to see what I mean.

RR

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JFK Assassination Article: Primer for Roswell

Adam Gopnik, one of our favorite New Yorkerwriters/reporters, has a piece in the November issue of the magazine, Closer Than That: The assassination of J.F.K., fifty years later [Page 100 ff].

While the article is strictly about JFK’s murder, Mr. Gopnik makes salient points that may illumine the Roswell incident, for skeptics and believers alike.

A connecting thread about patterns in the JFK theories (conspiratorial and “authoritative”), patterns that seem to co-habit views of Bruce Duensing, a regular at this blog.

Writing about a compulsive “hyperperspicacity” JFK assassination researcher, Gopnik says that the motif of the time [1963] caused the researcher to look harder for pattern than the thing looked at will ever provide. [Page 102]

“But there are ways in which the pattern-seeking is a meaningful index of the event, and gives us more insight into its hold fifty years on than the evidence does.” [Page 102]

“The pattern-weaving and unweaving in front of our eyes, [places] unlikely people in near proximity and then removing them again – is its own point.” [Page 107]

 “Where the proceduralists believe that the truth is in there, buried in some forgotten file folder, the fantasists believe, ‘X Files’ style, the truth is out there…” [Page 104]

“It is … possible to construct an intricate scenario that is both cautiously inferential, richly detailed, on its own terms, and yet utterly delusional.” [Page 104, Italics mine]

“The [Roswell] conspiracy theorists are the first and hardiest of those movements … in which the old American paranoid style, once largely marginal and murmuring, married pseudoscience and became articulate, academic, systemized, and loud.” [Page 204, I replaced Roswell for JFK in the sentence.]

“No matter how improbable it may seem that all the hard evidence could have been planted, faked, or coerced – and the hundreds of the distinct acts of concealment and coercion necessary would have been left unconfessed for more than half a century – it does not affect the production of [Roswell] literature, which depends not on confronting the evidence but on discovering new patterns of connection and coincidence.” [Page 104]

“And this is true, any fact asserted can be met with counter-fact – some of them plausible, many disputed. Most creating contradictions that are unresolvable…All Facts in all inquiries come at us with their own shakiness, their own shimmer of uncertainty.” [Page 105]

“… you may not know the answer to a question, but that does not mean that the question is unanswerable.” [Page 105]

“…though, every fact in the case, no matter how solid-seeming, can be countered by some other fact, however speculative. Facts provoke new patterns even as they disprove old ones.” {page 105]

“… the foundational sense that there were bizarre forces at work in the period, paranoid … and tightly interlocked in the strangest imaginable ways, and by their nature resistant to the common-sense impulses of ordinary explanation …is, as far as one can tell, true.” [Page 105]

“Again and again, the investigation discloses bizarre figures and coincidences within a web of incident that seem significant in themselves.” [Page 107]

(Again, I’ve selected segments from Mr. Gopnik’s piece that seem to pertain to the Roswell thing, then and now. For those who are JFK assassination buffs, Nick Redfern has provided a link to a piece in the Dallas Morning News about him and the link between UFOs and the JFK murder:

http://artsblog.dallasnews.com/2013/10/dallas-author-investigates-connection-between-jfk-assassination-and-ufos.html/?nclick_check=1

  

Nick also has an article about the JFK assassination in the December issue of Penthouse, upcoming.)

RR

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