UFO Symbology and Extraterrestrial Thought

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.

An attempt to decipher symbols or writings seen on UFOs in the few instances where such markings are reported is stymied by misinterpretation of markings that aren’t intelligent attempts to communicate or are hoaxed concoctions, such as the UMMO logo.

One of our obsessions has been the symbol or insignia reported by Officer Lonnie Zamora during his sighting of an egg-shaped craft in Socorro, New Mexico, April 24th, 1964.

His drawing and observation has been compromised by the allegation that the popularly known symbol is not what he really saw, but a substitution, suggested by an Air Force investigator to hoodwink possible copycat UFO witness.

(We’ve dealt with that foolishness earlier here and elsewhere, along with our views of what and where Zamora’s symbol originated; the real symbol and the contrived symbol.)

Another account of symbols allegedly observed shows up in accounts of Jesse Marcel Sr, and Jr. who reported that the debris they gathered or saw was rife with hieroglyphic-like markings.

What those markings were has been debated often and long in UFO circles, and we dismiss the Marcel reports here to avoid a rehash of the controversy.

The question for us is how could an extraterrestrial civilization or culture develop symbols or markings that are clearly recognizable or understood by Earthlings?

Sensate human writing, symbolism, and abstract mathematical renderings evolved from about 10,000 B.C. and derive from the cultural milieu that is unique to this planet and its inhabitants.

Cave paintings originated even earlier, from 40,000 B.C. but also remain unique to the human environment.

And even then, the diversity of writing and pictorial representation, acting to supplement the variety of linguistic communication, could not replicate what an alien culture would have developed to communicate within their civilization.

Ancient alien devotees will say that if there is any similarity between UFO markings and human elements of communication, the similarity derives from contact between ancient astronauts and human beings early in the history of mankind.

I won’t dismiss the AA Hypothesis out of hand, here, but will set it aside to make other points.

Mathematical symbols and mathematical processes are unique to humankind, and a quirky abstraction that could hardly be identical to concomitant extraterrestrial abstractions.

The odds of an alien culture coming up with mathematical symbols and processes like ours is beyond a statistical probability.

(Read Mathematical Thought, Volume 1, by Morris Kline, Oxford University Press, NY, 1972 to see the gist of my view.)

Either human thinking is unique or the culture subtext of imaging and writing permeates the Universe, and would have had to be generated by a prima causa – God?

Non-believers would be aghast at the suggestion that one supreme thought process infected all living, sentient things in the Universe, but that would be the only agent by which alien civilizations could have similar symbolic manifestations to those that evolved on Earth.

(Of course, one can posit that UFOs come from our future, or past, but that begs the question for some.)

Moreover, if UFOs and their markings come from inter-dimensions, alternative universes, or a realm yet to be discovered or imagined, would the mode of communication for the inhabitants of those esoteric venues be similar enough to ours to resonate?

The UFO markings gathered (or created) by Adamski and a few other UFO “witnesses” are so unesthetic and illogically represented that one can discount their authenticity out of hand.


Egyptian hieroglyphics. Sumerian clay indentations, and even cave paintings have an inherent logic and beauty to them, while markings remembered or drawn by supposed UFO witnesses are sloppy and without cryptological sense, as far as we can tell.

(Maybe extraterrestrial cultures are messy or illogical, but that would presuppose an ability to move between realities despite a lack of methodical coherency of any kind.)

If UFOs represent craft of a non-human kind, would they have insignia on them at all?

The Zamora-seen craft’s insignia is conjectured by Anthony Bragalia as a NMIT student creation as part of the activity that he writes they engaged in to prank Officer Zamora.

We see the Zamora symbol as representation by Hughes Aircraft/Toolco engineers who created the prototypical planetary lander for the military or government.

The IU engineer who remembered a hot-air balloon excursion by a paper company sees the Zamora symbol as the paper company’s logo.

Believers in the extraterrestrial explanation see the Zamora insignia as an alien symbol.

The Rendlesham symbols, remembered by one of the military witnesses seems to portray script and/or images that bespeak an Earthian origination.

A true, alien visitation would hardly display a recognizable albeit inscrutable symbol that resembles a human creation….because an alien culture would not have evolved in a way that communication or identifying marks (symbols) would be so near to what humans would construct or create.

It’s an incongruity to conjecture that UFOs would mimic human endeavors or simulated symbols; that is, unless one posits that UFOs are figments of a kind that tease human beings (the Vallee hypothesis) or that UFOs distort reality to some unfathomable end, as Spanish UFO researcher Jose Caravaca believes.

(Caravaca also questions why Betty Hill’s aliens would have, on their craft wall, a map of their interplanetary routes; such a depiction so unfuturistic and prosaic seemingly, when we humans, today use GPS or Google maps on computers to find our way around our habitable planet.)

Until we get a clear depiction of a UFO symbol or mark, from a credible witness or source, whether by photography or observation, I think we can rule out the idea that extraterrestrials are using insigniae in the same way that we Earthlings do.

RR

Source(s) for real UFO buffs!

Mack Maloney provides many interesting UFO sightings, some well-known, and many more not so well-known, as noted in my slight review earlier here (below) of his 2011 book, UFOs in Wartime (Berkley/Penquin).

But I’d like to note a few that fit with our single-minded efforts to find details that show up, consistently, in early UFO sightings, but not so much in current sightings.

For instance, a strange object spotted by World War I ace, von Richthofen (The Red Baron), in the spring of 1917, was shot down by von Richthofen, according to fellow pilot Peter Waitzrik, crashing in the woods below.

Two occupants of the craft climbed out and ran into the forest.



Two occupants? Again?

The craft was said to be saucer-like, according to Waitzrik. [Page 15 ff.]

And if some UFO buffs think that the mysterious airships of the 1890s went dormant shortly thereafter, Mr. Maloney recounts found in a 1925 book (German Air Raids on Great Britain, 1914 –1918 by Joseph Martin) that indicates the airships were still being seen many and event years later.

On January 31st, 1916, a British Royal Navy Air Service sub-lieutenant J. E. Morgan espied, during one of his nightly reconnaissance flights, what he thought was a German zeppelin over London.

The ship had a row of lighted windows and an under-carriage with drawn blinds.

Despite its weird appearance, Morgan thought is was a German blimp on a mission to bomb England’s capital, as Germany had done earlier in 1915.



The object was about one-hundred feet long and Morgan drew the only weapon he had, a pistol, and shot at the thing, which “shot straight up at tremendous speed and disappeared…”

The airships departure was so fast that Morgan thought his plane was losing altitude. Disoriented by the airships action, Morgan crash-landed in a marsh.

Another pilot sighted, fifteen minutes later, something unusual caught in the searchlights scanning the London skies. Others, on the ground, also said they saw the strange object. [Page 17 ff.]

Just as the Vallee/Aubeck book, Wonders in the Sky, provides sightings from which important clues about the UFO enigma can be culled, Maloney’s book does likewise, and I suggest that those who really are serious about finding an explanation for UFOs or UFO sightings get both books and peruse them for details that might evoke an epiphany of some sort.



RR

UFOs in Wartime by Mack Maloney

Mack Maloney has written the 294 page book pictured here [Berkley Books/Penguin, NY, 2011].

The $7.99 paperback can be found at fine bookstores, and online at Amazon, Powell’s, Barnes & Noble, et cetera, and should be in every UFO maven’s library.

It is a compilation of UFO encounters during armed conflicts, from Constantine’s history-changing vision to the Iraq war.

Along the way, readers also get a general UFO sub-text that underwrites Mr. Maloney’s exegesis of wartime UFO sightings.

Most UFO aficionados think they know every UFO sighting that counts, but Mr. Maloney presents some sightings that have not made the upper layer of referenced sightings, such as those recorded by servicemen in the Pacific arena during World War II, along with numerous sightings over Europe that are subliminal or unknown.

Several World WAR I sightings are recounted, along with a segment about the 1917 Fatima apparitions.

Foo-fighters during WW II are noted, of course, and the ghost rockets over Scandinavia too, plus other UFO sightings that seem to have been submersed in most of the UFO literature.

The United States Air Force’s Project Blue Book is taken to task for its lax responses to such sightings at the famous 1952 Washington D.C. intrusions during the Korean conflict, and Mr. Maloney doesn’t pull any punches about the tepid reactions to UFO sightings at or near U.S. nuclear missile bases.

Of course there is the intimation that governments have covered up or suppressed many sightings, but Mr. Maloney’s book now shines a spotlight on some of those set-aside UFO events.

There is a bibliography, but no Content listing or Index, which I would have liked for ease of skimming.

But this isn’t a book to be skimmed; it’s a book to be savored.

Mr. Maloney touches most of the UFO bases that buffs are familiar with, including, unfortunately the odious Rense site, but that’s a minor misstep.

I suggest that readers here would do well to supplement their UFO acumen by getting Mr. Maloney’s book so they have a fuller picture of how UFOs have been spotted by credible persons, during wartime, when the stress of war normally obliterates outside considerations, but didn’t when something as strange as a UFO shows up.

RR

Quantum Non-locality and UFOs

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.

Discussions here indicate a loathing, by some, to accept UFOs (and flying saucers) as tangible objects; some interpretations centering on psychical manifestations, others centering on a mental interaction between percipient and the UFO (image).

There are other hypotheses, and one that should be addressed is the possibility that UFOs are intrusions of a quantum kind from other places in the Universe or psychic ether, if you want) that appear because of quantum non-locality.

To get a grasp of the thought and theorizing about quantum non-locality, click HERE for a 1997 paper about the topic by John G. Cramer of the Department of Physics, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington.

One paragraph focuses on what Bruce Duensing and Jose Caravaca call “observer-created reality” (which I eschew). Here’s that paragraph:

The nonlocality of the quantum mechanics formalism is a source of some difficulty for the Copenhagen interpretation. It is accommodated in the CI through Heisenberg's "knowledge interpretation" which views the quantum mechanical state vector (y) as a mathematically-encoded description of the state of observer knowledge rather than as a description of the objective state of the system observed. For example, in 1960 Heisenberg wrote, "The act of recording, on the other hand, which leads to the reduction of the state, is not a physical, but rather, so to say, a mathematical process. With the sudden change of our knowledge also the mathematical presentation of our knowledge undergoes of course a sudden change." The knowledge interpretation's account of state vector collapse and nonlocality as changes in knowledge is internally consistent, but it is rather subjective, intellectually unappealing, and the source of much of the recent misuse of the Copenhagen interpretation (e.g., "observer-created reality").

I’m asserting that UFOs may become present when an object tangentially connected to our area of the Universe is made visible because an observer here is conveniently in situ to see the non-local inspired manifestation.

The UFO may even come about by a quantum intersect across dimensions or parallel universes, ours and theirs.

The quantum possibilities strike me as more reasonable (feasible) than the psychic hypotheses.

Psychical hypotheses are prosaic and mundane for me.

The human mind is given too much credence and power in the psychical response, and we all know, intuitively and intellectually, that psychism leaves a lot to be desired in repetitive and scientific experimentation.

UFO mavens want some control over the UFO phenomenon and applying a mind/UFO interaction allows that control to remain intact, somewhat.

This is akin to the Einstein approach about quantum mechanics, and John Cramer’s paper will take you through Einstein’s caveats and the quantum renunciation.

Einstein couldn’t accept the quantum quirkiness, and those in the UFO community can’t accept the UFO quirkiness, unless they keep control of the phenomenon by saying that it’s the human mind that is needed for a manifestation of UFOs.

That view is unimaginative and errant.

The human mind is hardly able to deal with practical reality, let alone incomprehensible reality (such as that in the quantum world).

(Schizophrenics and paranoiacs display examples of what happens when the human mind accesses realities outside the norm.)

While quantum non-locality is best represented by light photons, there are indications that quantum artifacts can exceed the atomic level and are manifested macrocosmically.

(I’ve provided some of that information online here earlier and at the RRRGroup blog.)

More importantly, perhaps, is the notion that UFOs may derive from intrusions, accidental or purposeful, across dimensions or between parallel universes, as string theory allows.

This would keep intact my preference for UFO tangibility, which is obvious and well-witnessed.

The psychic view of Jacques Vallee and his devotees is old-hat for me. It’s something like the hysteria of the Salem witch trials or the insanity of the Catholic Inquisitional thrusts.

More on this approach to the UFO phenomenon will be ferreted out from other sources and pertinent quantum theorizing, and will be presented here upcoming.

Meanwhile, you “UFOs as psychic phenomena” people can have at it.

RR

UFOs with little beings: France in the 1950s

In the 1950s, circa 1954 probably, a spate of flying saucers were spotted, with creatures that were thought to be Martians.

Here are some clips from a major magazine – Life, I think – that described the saucers and the beings seen near them…

Pierre Lucas of Loctudy saw an orange ball fall from the sky, from which a small, bearded figure with one eye in the middle of its forehead emerged and tapped him on the shoulder:



Serge Pochet of Marcoing was approached by two small shadows:



Gregoire Odut saw a golden disk zoom away from Wassy after a two-legged creature leaped out for a look around:



Jean Narcy saw a craft, also near Wassy, from which a little whiskered man in a fur coat and orange corset emerged:



Marius Dewilde of Quarouble is carrying a railroad tie upon which he saw a rust-colored “flying contraption” land:



Yves de Gillaboz (left) and Emile Renard saw a “Matian machine” belching puffs of smoke in the sky over Amiens:



Francois Panero and Jean Olivier draw an image of a “dumpy little space man” they saw land in a luminous sphere on a basketball court near Toulouse:



We don’t get those kinds of sightings nowadays, do we? And why not?

RR