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  

Read More

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 

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More