Forgotten UFO hypotheses?

There are lots of UFO conjectures out there, but a few “serious” ones have been put on the ufological back-burner.

For instance, the idea that UFOs are visitors coming to visit Earth to enjoy an intergalactic zoo established by extraterrestrials eons ago as an alien tourist site.



And the concept that Earth is an experimental lab, set up by alien scientists, is also not mentioned as it once was.



That UFOs are piloted by advanced, sentient insects (Gerald Heard) gets no copy at all.



And what about the idea that Earth is a leper colony or Devil’s Island outpost for criminals (creatures, plants, and humans) from other worlds, transported here millennia ago, to quarantine them in this part of the Milky Way.



(This is the Australia solution that Britain instituted in the 1880s.)

That (some) UFOs are living entities, not metal objects, is nowhere to be read currently, even in the bizarre world of the UFO blogosphere.



The straight-line theory (orthoteny) of UFO movement, promoted by Aime Michel back in the 50s and 60s, is all but forgotten too.



UFOs from inside the Earth – a form of the Hollow Earth controversy – is not mentioned very much these days, although Mac Tonnies idea of a concomitant Earth race, living sub rosa alongside our known human civilization hints at such.



The NAZI-created UFO theories abound, and have some circumstantial merit but are discounted by more “rational” ufologists.



(The NAZI crafts would have to come from a secret location, and plays into the Tonnies idea, somewhat, of a hidden society.)

These are but a few of the arcane ideas put forth to explain UFO origins or UFO reality.

Should they be re-visited, by ufologists?

You decide….

A Book by Charles Upton

Dear People:

What UFOs are has always been known. If today we think of them as a “mystery,” it is because we are in the habit of concentrating on phenomena, and forgetting to ask about meaning. Investigation of the UFO phenomenon is necessary to our understanding of UFOs, but it is not enough. No matter how much data we amass, unless we understand the nature of the whole universe – material, psychic and spiritual – that data will never lead to finished knowledge.

Cracks in the Great Wall: UFOs and Traditional Metaphysics was written to remedy this lack. Charles Upton has interpreted the findings of UFOlogists Jacques Vallee and John Mack according to the doctrines of French metaphysician René Guénon, with help from Kaballah authority Leo Schaya, Eastern Orthodox priest Seraphim Rose, Christian fantasy writer and popular theologian C.S. Lewis, and “traditionalist” writers Frithjof Schuon and Whitall Perry, thereby producing the most comprehensive theory of UFOs presently available. The author deals with the physical reality, the social significance, the psychic effects and the spiritual meaning of UFOs, also recounting his own small experience of the phenomenon. If we know what the universe is, what a human being is, and what phase of this “cycle of manifestation” we are presently in, then UFOs will no longer be a mystery – they will be a sign.

Are UFOs alien spacecraft? Spirit entities? Human deceptions? What if they were all three? Only traditional metaphysics reveals how these “alternatives” fit together, what UFOs actually are, and what they mean for the human race.

Cracks in the Great Wall:
UFOs and Traditional Metaphysics
by Charles Upton

Sophia Perennis 2005; ISBN 1597310247
Paperback: $18.85 US; ₤12.95 UK
(Trade Cloth also available.)
Order through www.amazon.com. www.barnesdandnoble.com or www.amazon.co.uk

Resellers:
Order through Ingram, Baker & Taylor,
Bertram or Gardner’s
or query Sophia Perennis at
jameswetmore@mac.com

Ufology needs a Blue Book mind-set (sort of)

While the United States Navy remains UFO oriented with an ongoing and above Top Secret program, the Air Force’s UFO program went underground after the Condon Report and the alleged demise of Project Blue Book.

(We assume that Blue Book didn’t get a different incarnation.)

So what can ufologists take from that beleaguered study?

The Air Force’s Blue Book methodology wasn’t flawed but the ultimate conclusions were skewered, for reasons of incompetence or purposeful disinformation, or any number of other reasons (such as an inability to make sense of the flying saucer/UFO sightings the project gathered information on).

Blue Book took, as you know, UFO data and evaluated it, coming to bizarre conclusions in many instances.

But even after trying to flummox followers of the “study,” there ended up being over seven hundred sightings that the Air Force couldn’t explain away, as the Keyhoe argot put it.



What “ufology” should do – and not with those old, hammered sightings – is gather data from current sightings, and evaluate that data.

No one is doing that.

Sure, MUFON and other UFO organizations are gathering data, scads of it, but no one, and we mean no one is evaluating, using scientific methodologies, any of that data.

Yes, there are extrapolations by a few ufologists (Rudiak, Sparks, Maccabee, et al.) but those extrapolations are discursive and incomplete, by a long shot.



Blue Book had the right idea; it just wasn’t carried out properly, for reasons cited above.

But the modus was right.

Collect data, collate it (as the robot scientist in the first “Alien” movie had it), and come to a consensus or something more concrete than a consensus.



Can ufologists or anyone in the UFO community do this? Yes, but do they have the will ans/or stamina to do so?

The new “Blue Book” project would be daunting, surely, but if the UFO mystery is to be solved, it will have to be undertaken.

UFO Quest

A very interesting and unique UFO web-site:

UFO Quest

UFOs, from a parallel Universe?

Theoretical physicists have suggested that parallel universes exist alongside our Universe.

The theories have sobriquets such as The Multiverse (a Michio Kaku favorite) or the many-worlds interpretation of Quantum Physics. (See Wikipedia for more.)

The hypotheses intrigue, and are as certain as all the other hypotheses extant in the world of physics; that is, parallel universes have as much validity as string theory or the so-called Big Bang theory – not much.



But for the sake of argument, let’s examine the possibility of a parallel universe to ours, or many of them, as they pertain to UFOs and flying saucers.

We think some flying saucer/UFO sightings may be insertions from universes existing in tandem with ours, intersecting on occasion by mistake or design.

We have to separate confabulations by UFO hoaxers (which are more numerous than ufologists allow) and misinterpretation of military prototype aircraft – the Arnold sighting for instance – along with other prosaic-possible episodes, such as the Mantell tragedy -- from the UFO data and accounts.



This leaves a residue of sightings that might conform to theoretical intrusions by artifacts from universes snuggling up to ours.

The WW II “foo fighters” are possible inter-dimensional intrusions, as were the Washington D.C. appearances in 1952.

The little-beings outside UFOs that showed up in Europe and South America in the 1950s seem more phenomenological than extraterrestrial, but “invasions” from a universe not too dissimilar to ours could account for those sightings.



And what about the abduction phenomenon? Of all the “explanations” for those episodes, the parallel universe explanation makes the most sense. And why?

The movement between our dimension of space (and time) and another universes space (and time) would account for the lack of tangibility in abduction scenarios.

Kaku, for instance, talks about the possible insubstantial (maybe unstable) nature of atoms (and reality) if multiverses or parallel realities were to intersect.

Experiencers (abductees) report a weird kind of intangibility to their “kidnappings.”



And the world(s) they enter are somewhat like ours, but generally of a strange kind, yet not so strange as to suggest existences whose physics are completely foreign to ours.

The evanescent quality of abductions seems to confirm the many-worlds concepts of quantum physics, with all the attributes of quantum reality (if reality is the right word).

Today, when UFOs are more amorphous than structured, the possibility that they are artifacts, of some kind, from another dimension or universe, and maybe not an intelligent insertion but a random, accidental intrusion, with no meaning.



Once the convoluted UFO/flying saucer incidents are subtracted from the UFO oeuvre – the Roswell, Hill, Socorro incidents for example – the parallel universe invasions should be given some research time: the RB47 incident, the O’Hare sighting, and maybe the Stephenville, Texas sightings, among others.

The Life Cycle of UFOs: Born, Live, Die

Hamilton, Lee, Rogers, Ash et al. have provided theories and demographics of life-cycles, for humans, animals, plants, even computer software.

And UFOs have (or had perhaps) a life-cycle also.

Discounting early UFO accounts as attempts to bring forth UFO life, as God (or nature) tried so often in the evolutionary process, beginning again and again, with failures aplenty (dinosaurs, Neanderthals, et cetera), we move to the modern era of UFOs, when UFOs came into being as “things” with a life entirely unique: 1944-1945



(The airships of the 1890s are not the UFOs that ufologists have been consumed with, but were human experiments, by aviation adepts.)

When flying saucers appeared for the first time, in embryonic form, as “foo fighters” in the World War II arena(s), that was the birth of UFOs.



By 1947 flying saucers had matured to a stage of “life” not unlike that of a pre-pubescent child, growing to a teen maturity in the 1960s, and then into full-blown adulthood until the 1990s.

From the 90s up to today [2008], UFOs became senile and old, actually dying in most instances, and appearing as “spirits” nowadays, phantasms or ghosts as it were.



And a rebirth of these things? Not likely, in their previous form anyway.

UFOs are dead and dying.

If a “resurrection” or new, evolutionary birth is afoot, flying saucers and/or UFOs will appear as a totally different phenomenon, in different form and appearance – even different behavior so that “ufologists” will not recognize them as UFOs.

Just as Jesus of Nazareth re-appeared, after His “death,” in an untouchable – noli me tangere – unrecognizable form, so too will UFOs re-appear, perhaps, or may have already done so, as amorphous lights and blobs of energy.



But as it is, flying saucers/UFOs were born, lived, and died, and the theology of UFOs is over, or needs a new intellectual process…..

UFOs are things….not human created projections but things!

While UFOs are evaporating into the ether, what they’ve been and what they are is more than creations of the human psyche.

How they’re perceived may be affected by human observation, in the quantum sense, but that doesn’t mean they’re not tangible artifacts.

(Neutrinos are “tangible artifacts” albeit of an immaterial kind.)

This goes to Platonic Forms, as we’ve noted here earlier.



The problem, as we see it, and hope to get more than a few to understand, is that the UFO mystery consists of phenomena; that is, UFOs are many things, not just nuts-and-bolts craft (which they have been in some instances), nor just ephemeral images, created by the psychic aberrations of man (or woman).

UFOs run a gamut of possibilities, and are not limited to the various explanations extant for them.

Stanton Friedman’s flying saucers exist.

Jacques Vallee’s amorphous, demonic (?) messengers exist also. (There are too many written references to them to invalidate the possibility.)



Secret military aircraft and weird atmospheric conditions account for many UFO sightings surely.

But beside all the mundane or even esoteric explanations lie a core enigmatic phenomenon that wipes away all the other phenomena, and it’s that phenomenon which ufologists (a term that really needs to be dispensed with) must address.

Jung’s psychic projections as an explanation is valid for some UFO accounts, accounts that, when validated, can be discarded.



Those accounts are the province of psychiatry, not ufological science.

Friedman’s “saucers” intrigue, more than most UFO explanations, and provide titillation for SciFi advocates, and should provoke science to check into the extraterrestrial possibility.



But as we’ve noted here, many times, science isn’t about to recapitulate and take on the UFO conundrum. It has always been and remains a scientific bête noire.

So where do we go from here?

Newbies to the UFO phenomenon must (and will we hope) pursue, without obsession, the core elements of UFO sightings that have been ignored or passed over by former and present ufologists.

And new sightings, of which there are a dearth, should be investigated with methodologies that have never been part of the present ufological arsenal.

UFOs are not created by mankind. They come from elsewhere, space or time, as Friedman posits or Goldberg suggests.

Some UFOs have been mistaken observations of Skyhook balloons and/or prototypical military aircraft.



And a few UFO accounts ring from meteorological phenomena that is so infrequent as to invite misperception.



But aside from these prosaic explanations, there is a residue of something strange and wondrous, in a poetic sense, or an ominous sense.

It’s nothing to get worked up about, in light of the world’s woes perhaps, but as a quasi-profound curiosity, UFOs should be investigated or researched by those who have the time and wherewithal to do so.

Those who’ve spent sixty unproductive years trying to fathom the UFO riddle should step aside, and let a new crowd of UFO devotees take over.

They won’t of course, but some will force them to, but the sheer power of new insight(s) and hypotheses that have substance.

We can barely wait for the UFO new-age….whatever it’s called.