The UFO Reality: July 2011

The Roswell Addiction

We see that Kevin Randle spices up his blog by posting regular Roswell tainted posts.

Roswell is a “drug” -- and he’s one of its dealers.

Some present and former visitors to this blog go to Randle’s blog for their Roswell fix.

One can find CDA there, Sourcerer (Don), and the heavily-dosed David Rudiak, among others, immersed in the drug-induced fog that has become Roswell.

Stupifyingly redundant comments are grist of the blog, and nothing of value ensues, ever.

When we provide a post about Roswell, usually from researcher Anthony Bragalia, it, at least, has something new appended to it…something unknown and pertinent.

Randle just likes to fill his blog with a raft of comments, and he doesn’t care if they have an intelligent value or not.

He just likes filler, and Roswell always provides it.

Roswell is intriguing, but well-mined by UFO hobbyists. Yet, some find the incident necessary for their online existence; they need it to feel alive, and intellectual by regurgitating old Roswell detritus, over and over, again.

It’s embarrassing….that is, the “addiction” makes the rest of us who are fascinated by the UFO mystery look as if we are part and parcel of the “addicted” Roswellians, even as we try to distance ourselves from Roswell, just to get on with trying to explain the extant UFO enigma, the phenomenon itself, not the myth and corrupted event that attracts some like moths to flames, when they should know better.

The Higgs Boson (The so-called “God’s particle”) and Ufology’s Atheists

I’m rather surprised at how many of the visitors to this blog, some of whom are my UFO friends, profess to be atheists.

I shan’t name them, but you know who most of them are. They are not “in-the-closet” atheists by any means.

At the same time, many physicists and scientists, generally, say they are atheists also. But their actions belie such a declaration.

At a subliminal level, science, especially physicists, are believers in a supreme deity and all their mathematical machinations and theories are a search for that deity.

Watch a group of NASA scientists when a space probe or experiment is successful. They clap and get giddy, much like fundamentalist Christians at a church rally when someone is cured by an evangelist.

But that superficial observation is bolstered by what science, physicists mostly, spend their lives looking for – the meaning of life – the physical laws of nature – one clue to is the Higgs boson, that elusive particle that is as evanescent as the God of believers but still pursued as diligently as believers and theologians pursue proof of their God.

The money and time spent in the search or Higgs’ particle – at the Fermi lab in Chicago and the newer Hadron Collider in Europe – is nothing more than the pursuit of a footprint of God.

The whole structure of quantum physics and classical physics, since Aristotle through Newton up to today’s theoretical physicists’ obsession with the fundamental laws of nature – God’s principles – is based on a proof for God, no matter how that search is described.

Yet, why do my ufological friends insist that they, too, are atheists? I think it has to do with a desire to mimic science. That science is in a state of denial about its belief in God doesn’t register with the UFO group that professes not to believe. They haven’t thought it through nor have they understood the charade that science, and physicists have foisted on themselves and the public too.

That there is an intelligence at work in the Universe is palpable, even if that intelligence is marred by a psychotic-like behavior.

The UFO clique that insists there is no such intelligence – no God (a term I’m using as a rubric for discussion) – strikes me as incomprehensibly shallow.

I accept that science, physicists mostly, are profoundly shallow – else why do they insist that mathematics portray reality better than any other form of communication – a matter to deal with, again, upcoming – and science is so focused on its subliminal, disguised obsession that it has devolved into a cult of believing non-believers who can’t be trusted to come up with an outlay of truth.

That the denial of a God by physicists is pathological is a given in these quarters. That ufologists say they are atheists is a ploy to appear scientific and foolish, intellectually.

But that’s, as Gilles Fernandez, the French psychologist says, ufology.

RR

An example of UFO testimony that varies because of witness differences

In an article – Alien Contact in Ancient Japan -- by Bruce Schaffenberger in the May 1997 of Official UFO’s Ancient Astronauts magazine, the author presents accounts in Volumes 1 and 2 of the Zuihitsu Taisei of strange women, in or near bowl-shaped objects that appeared, in one instance, on the beach of Harayadori in northern Japan and, in another instance, several hundred miles away, both during the Edo Era (1603 to 1868).

In the first account, fishermen pulled the object ashore, peered inside and saw a peculiar woman with a crystal-ringing box. The woman spoke to the fishermen but they could not understand her.

In the second account, a strange woman was seen near the object on the beach. She held a humming box.

(The account is available on the internet, at many venues, and may be found by a Google search.)

Our point here that it seems both occurrences involved the same object and “woman” but as you can see from the depictions rendered by witnesses, the incidents differ, not in substance but in details – details that may be meaningful but flummoxed by how the witnesses saw or interpreted the episodes.

This is, in our estimation, a recurring problem with witness testimony, in all UFO accounts and reports: witnesses will see, remember, and record events in ways that are shaped by their mental make-up.

This has been the bane of the Roswell story and others, where multiple witnesses are involved. And where one witness is reporting an event, the interpretation or account is surely muddled by the personal vicissitudes of the lone observer.

At least with multiple witnesses, one has a chance to compare details and data to see what, if any, corroborate the testimonies being proffered.

While the Japanese report(s), above, are minutely different, it is obvious that both accounts are of the same phenomenon. The differences can be reconciled, and they should be able to be reconciled in modern UFO/flying saucer reports too. Witness testimony is inherently flawed, but not to the point that the truthful or real elements can’t be discerned, forensically, by serious researchers.

One last note – in the drawing for the first observation, depicted above, there was a symbol or symbolic writing, reproduced here:

If the 1964 Socorro insignia was not bollixed by an Air Force scheme and the complicity of Ray Stanford, one might see similarities in the Japan symbol to that originally indicated as what Officer Zamora said he saw on his craft and reproduced.

That shenanigan aside, there is grist for study in the Japanese drawing of the symbol seen/reported by witnesses.

So while there are major caveats about witness testimony, there are also nuggets of importance in such accounts…..perhaps.

The Goldbach Conjecture and literal UFO reports

Witness testimony, whether about UFO sightings, crimes, accidents, et cetera, is an iffy thing. And witness testimony after a period of time has passed even more so.

But that aside, I take accounts of events -- historical, mythological, reportorial, Biblical – as a “true” rendering of what witnesses saw or experienced, expressed with caveats about “inflation,” misinterpretation, subjective extrapolation, and mental bias.

Thus, the Biblical account of Ezekiel, for instance, is not a fanciful metaphor to make moral a moral point not is it a confluence of fictional elements imagined for whatever reason by the Biblical writer whose rubric is Ezekiel. It is a representational rendering of what the witness experienced and set down, as best as he could, considering the limited parameters of existence at the time.

Roswell’s wirnesses, at the time of the alleged incident – 1947 -- can be accounted as veracious. (Witnesses, providing testimony, many years later, suffer the vicissitudes on metal acuity that afflicts people as they age and as time passes, so their accounts can be ignored -- should be ignored.)

But to get at the heart of the UFO enigma, UFO researchers may take a serious perusal of witness accounts and testimony, past and present, providing exquisite details and data that has, so far, been sublimated, replaced by the more sensational aspects of what witnesses experienced.

Every UFO report, including those of “hoaxers” such as Adamski or Fry, should be evaluated, vetted, for elements that abut other testimonies, from reliable, credible sources.

The UFO-like reports, from religious and mythical writings – the Bible, the Hindu texts, the Greek myths, the Norse sagas, and all the rest – should be immersed in scrutiny and examined systematically rather than literarily.

And the Goldbach Conjecture?

Goldbach's Conjecture is that any even number may be expressed as the sum of two primes. If this conjecture is false, then there must be at least one even number that cannot be expressed as two primes.

Just as Goldbach’s theorems and musings about integers remains unresolved, the pursuit of verification provides a methodology for study of UFOs, past, present, and future – if UFO mavens are serious about explaining the UFO phenomenon.

Nick Redfern reviews a Michael Swords book

Michael Swords is a long-time UFO habitue, with lots of papers and accumulated material about UFOs, of which this book is one.

Click here for Nick Redfern's review

Nick Redfern on Men in Black (once more)

Click here for Nick's latest on the MIB....

Quantum UFOs

We’ve touched on this previously with several blog postings, but a reading of The Black Hole War by Leonard Susskind [Little, Brown and Company, NY, 2008] allows for an extrapolation of our views.

The whole tenor of Susskind’s discussion of black holes and his consternation with Stephen Hawking’s once held view about black holes and information (the loss of it) revolves around the idea that quantum theory applies to black holes….something macroscopic rather than microscopic, which is generally the province of quantum reality.

Large elements of reality have always been eschewed by quantum physicists, but Susskind, and others, apply quantum mechanics to black holes, which are an egregious element of large reality:

“Jacob Bekenstein [a noted Israeli physicist]…had a sense that black holes had something profound to say about the laws of nature. He was particularly interested in how black holes might fit together with the principles of Quantum Mechanics and thermodynamics that had so preoccupied Einstein.” [Page 147]

So we contend, hypothetically, that UFOs may be quantum artifacts – large quantum particles as it were.

UFOs mimic several aspects of quantum theory: the indeterminacy of location, observation (measurement) of UFOs affect them, and their reality is hypothetical, not actual in practical, classical terms.

Quantum artifacts behave in strange, quirky ways, as you know. UFOs behave similarly.

UFOs, more often than not, disappear when observed, suddenly rather than gradually, according to most UFO sighting-reports.

The Hungarian physicist Eugene Wigner [1902-1995] said this:

“When we become conscious of something, we bring about the crucial collapse of the wave function, so that the perplexing mixed states of [reality] disappear.” [Page 148, Introducing Quantum Theory, Totem Books, NY, 1997].

UFOs behave, usually, as waves rather than particles, but they have had substance, seemingly, as trace elements of them have been adequately reported; however, they behave more readily as waves (of light), especially in current times.

As for quantum, Niels Bohr said this:

“Whether an object behaves as particle or wave depends on your choice of apparatus for looking at it.” [Page 160, Ibid]

Bohrs insight applies to Paul Kimball’s favorite UFO event, the so-called RB-47 sighting of 1957.

Erwin Schrodinger (of dead/live cat fame) conjectured that particles – let us insert UFOs here – do not exist at all, but are just a “superimposition of waves” [Page 140, Ibid]

While quantum mechanics/theory is abstruse for many, we think it may be a vehicle -- a methodology – for study of the UFO phenomenon.

We’ll continue this hypothetical thrust here (and elsewhere)…..

UFO Movies with Robbie Graham and Dr. Matthew Alford

An abstract called A History of Government Management of UFO Perceptions through Film and Television by Robbie Graham and Dr. Matthew Alford invites your interest as it did ours:

Click here to access it

Plus Robbie Graham has a site devoted to saucers/UFOs in film that aficionados will surely enjoy:

Click here to access that site

Information provided by:

Robbie Graham
Doctoral candidate
University of Bristol
Department of Drama: Theatre, Film, Television

GCHQ: Britain's Most Secret Intelligence Agency

The U.K. agency that really handles UFO sightings for Brits.

Click here for a web-site version of the story

Ted Bloecher's classic report on the 1947 UFO wave

Ted Bloecher, a true UFO researcher, provided a report in 1967 about the UFO events of 1947.

Click here for a copy of that revised and updated report

The CIA and UFOs

Gerald K. Haines provides a paper that peruses the CIA's UFO activity from 1947 to 1990.

Click here for the PDF

A critique of Annie Jacobsen and her book: Area 51

Robert S. Norris and Jeffrey T. Richelson provide an incisive critical analysis of Annie Jacobsen's best seller: Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base

Click here for the link

Jacques Vallee's analysis of metal fragments from 10 classic UFO cases

With the current "excitement" about the alleged non-Earthly aspects of metal(s) found near where the Roswell incident supposedly occurred, here is a paper by Jacques Vallee about the analysis of metal fragments that accompanied some famous or infamous UFO episodes.

Click here for the paper -- a PDF

UFOs, Moby Dick, and Quantum Theory

Herman Melville’s masterpiece, Moby Dick, is an excoriation of God, with a prescient intuition about quantum mechanics.

Melville’s premise that God is Evil, is “footnoted” by the subtle suggestion that those who give credence to God -- pray to Him/It – get His/Its attention and bring catastrophe down upon them.

Their “observation” interacts with God and draws Him/It to behave intimately with the observer, often malevolently (as was the case with Captain Ahab), sometimes benevolently (but such instances of benevolence are rare).

Melville’s literary tenet and insight ends with the maxim that to survive whole and intact in this life one should take a benign attitude when it comes to God (Moby Dick): Ishmael.

The quantum intution is about how observation of events (measurement of them) affects the outcome – the reality – of those events. (Schrodinger’s cat is the theoretical example.)

Lithograph by Jie Qi, 2007

Now, since brilliant UFO mavens, such as Bruce Duensing who visits here, and a few others, think that UFOs are affected by our observation of the things, one can intersect Melville’s view with the ongoing and historical observation of flying saucers and/or UFOs.

The difference is that UFOs are not God – nor even a manifestation of God – and observing them hasn’t brought dire consequences down upon observers, generally.

But observation/measurement of UFOs has, according to devotees of the quantum effect, caused them to behave in ways they are irrational, much as quantum artifacts behave irrationally when observed/measured.

I, personally, don’t think UFOs are metaphorical quantum artifacts. And I think that while observing them in he past may have had an effect upon them, what they do or how they appear now indicates that observation of UFOs has no bearing upon them.

UFOs have become benign, ineffective, and without obvious purpose or intent; they operate like God before Ahab paid attention to Him/It.

Melville’s God is dead, and so are UFOs, as they once were in their reported incarnation(s).

RR

Old UFOs vs New UFOs

Earlier here we’ve posted a view about the evolution of UFOs.

But there seems to be a rather abrupt change in how the phenomenon appears to observers.

During older periods with “historical” references to UFOs, the things either took persons up in the heavens (Enoch, Elijah), inter-acted with humans (Ezekiel), or fought in the skies (the vimanas of ancient India, the Basel, Switzerland battle of 1566).

While there is a lacuna of sorts after that Basel sighting, UFOs appeared as mysterious dirigible-like airships in the 1890s, with sporadic sightings of disk-shaped “craft” up to the 1950s, when UFOs or flying saucers were almost ubiquitous.

See this paper about the 1954 UFO wave – a PDF.

Saucers were debarking creatures:

Saucers were, allegedly, shooting ray guns at observers and abducting them or giving them rides into outer space:

Saucers were skirting the airways of Earth with pronounced chutzpah:

Then a UFO drought began, in the late 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, until today when UFOs appear as triangular or rectangular craft, never descending to the ground, never exuding beings or creatures of any kind, and never coming into proximity with humans.