The UFO Reality

UFO Witness Testimony: True or False?

2012-01-21T10:12:00.003-05:00

Copyright 2012, InterAmerica, Inc.

The Michalak UFO encounter at Falcon Lake, Canada in 1967, noted earlier here, has dubious value for some of you.

I think it has a patina of authenticity.

Speculating about witness testimony creates all kinds of amateur opinion and brings forth shards of erroneous information from the internet.

However, witness testimony is often, or usually, all that we have when it comes to UFOs.

When someone or a few people report a strange light in the night sky or a strange object in the daytime sky, one can equate the observations with misperceptions of mundane things or one can catalog the observations for what they are: strange lights or objects seen my normal people with normal or near-normal eyesight.

And that’s it. Nothing more can be done with such observations.

Our foray into witness testimony from Roswellians always causes a ripple of contention and debate.

But Roswell’s witnesses, for the most part, didn’t see a UFO, in the sky or on the ground.

Some said they held pieces of “metal” that behaved oddly when toyed with.

Some said they saw a field of debris that was different from what they normally saw in the deserts and farms around Roswell.

Some even said they saw bodies of entities, in the desert, in hangars, and other venues.

But no one saw a UFO or flying saucer, and all the testimony about bodies and strange metal fragments came forth in the late 1970s and early 1980s after some UFO hobbyists started poking around, culling testimony that is besmirched by flawed questioning and psychological projections by the hobbyists.

So Roswell isn’t a platform from which worthwhile UFO testimony can be gotten or evaluated.

Roswell is a potpourri of maltreated memories and contrived imaginings better left to psychiatry and sociologists.

But there are many other UFO-related encounters, like that of Stefan Michalak, or Lonnie Zamora, the police officer who came across a unique craft and attending entities.

There are dozens, hundreds even, of accounts where people have seen something that has come to be defined as a flying saucer, and many of those accounts include entities that rival creatures from fiction.

UFO books and the internet are replete with such accounts.

But what are we to make of such accounts?

I think that what has been presented by those who’ve experienced encounters with craft and creatures are as they have been recounted, caveated by the personal peccadilloes of observation that plague human beings.

But those peccadilloes are minor, and the over all experiences provided are essentially as they are described.

Michalak encountered a machine that caused him some physical pain and markings.

The 1959 Father Gill sighting in Papua, New Guinea is what it is: a sighting by an Anglican priest and his mission staff and members of a object that floated above them, from which entities waved or interacted with the observers.

The sighting may be ascribed to a kind of mass hysteria, but it makes more sense to allow it to be as it was recounted, without the psychological overlay.

The following accounts are detailed in John Spencer’s World Atlas of UFOs; Sightings, Abductions, and Close Encounters [SMITHMARK Publishers, NY, 1992]

The 1979 Mindalore Quezet “abduction” was what it was: a experience of a mother (Meagan) and son (Andre) who, under hypnosis, elaborated on a sighting of this object and its occupants:

Was there an Oedipal element that explains the sighting? Perhaps. Or it was as it later was remembered. (More of this, upcoming.)

The 1970 Imjärvi, Finland encounter, in which two young fellows (Aarno Heinonen and Esko Viljo), while skiing, spotted a saucer-like craft that shot a beam of light to the ground near them, from which a short humanoid creature emerged, wearing a helmet, and glowing like “phosphorous.”

The being held a black box that emitted a light that struck the young men, creating a mist, that beclouded the creature, and the beam of light that went back up into the craft, taking the little being with it.

One of the boys, Aarno, was partially paralyzed, and both fellows had symptoms similar to radioactive poisoning.

(Aarno went on to have other sightings and encounters with space women and men. He became a kind of contactee.)

Did these young men actually have the experience they reported? Their after-event symptoms indicate that something happened, but like Mr. Michalak’s encounter, exactly what?

The 1979 Taylor encounter in Livingston, Scotland, detailed here in an much earlier blog posting,
fascinates me.

Sixty-one year-old Robert Taylor was a forester who, while inspecting some new trees, was confronted by a globular object from which emerged to spiked spheres that grabbed Mr. Taylor by the legs, dragging him toward the large, globular object.

Mr. Taylor lost consciousness, but awoke disheveled and unable to stand comfortably. His truck was mired in mud and he had to walk home.

He suffered a headache for some hours after the incident and had a inordinate thirst that lasted for two days.

His heavy blue serge trousers were torn, ostensibly from the spikes on the spheres that grabbed him.

Mr. Taylor had an unsullied reputation in his community and BUFORA, a British UFO investigative group, found ground traces that seemed to confirm Mr. Taylor’s account.

Did Mr. Taylor concoct his story? Why?

Like Mr. Michalak, Lonnie Zamora, Reverend Gill, and the others noted here, what would be the motive, the reason for such bizarre contrivances?

Did each of these people misperceive a mundane event? Unlikely. Misperceptions with such similarities would create a category of hallucinations that would throw psychiatry in to a dither.

Are each of these encounters, of which there are many, many more, neurological quirks? Again, a neurological etiology would force neurologists to establish a mental substrate that lies outside the sensate reality humans work within, or misconstrue.

Are such stories evidence of Jose Caravaca’s Distortion hypothesis or Jacque Vallee’s ethereal others explanation?

Perhaps. But that would mean something is intertwined with humanity to the exclusion of any other kind of rational reality; that is, something or some presence is fixated on inserting experiences in the minds of common folk, and to what end?

But does the idea that alien visitors are engaged in such foolery make any more sense?

What we are left with is the question of witness testimony.

Is it as it is recounted? I think it is. But I have no idea what it means, nor do I have any inkling of an explanation.

While memory over time fades and/or confabulates, these encounters were reported in situ and do not have the flaw of time to corrupt the descriptions.

What was said to have happened happened.

Now where does that take us I keep asking…

RR

Movies and TV have created the UFO phenomenon

2012-01-01T16:34:00.000-05:00

Copyright 2012, InterAmerica, Inc.

While watching The Twilight Zone marathon on the SyFy network over New Year holiday weekend, I noticed how the idea of extraterrestrial visitors suffused the series and, as I see it, impacted or influenced the unconscious minds of viewers.

As most of you know, those who’ve had UFO experiences – (somewhat) blasé encounters, abductions, and bizarre interactions (those listed by Jose Caravaca in his Distortion hypothesis) – recount those experiences in ways that mimic scenarios that one finds in movies – Invasion of the Body Snatchers, This Island Earth, et cetera – or television programs – The Outer Limits, said Twilight Zone – and some old radio shows – The Inner Sanctum, for example.

Colin McGinn’s 2007 Vintage book, The Power of Movies: How Screen and Mind Interact, provides a non-psychologically afflicted approach to the influence that one will find in UFO encounter accounts and reports.

Although Freud is mentioned, McGinn uses little or no psychobabble to present his views.

Serious visitors to this blog know (or should) that human kind is subliminally impacted by ads and media presentations, and now images and offerings on YouTube, Facebook, and the internet generally.

Vance Packard, in his 1957 best-seller, The Hidden Persuaders, presented his substantive views on how media (ads in particular) seeped into the societal mind and influenced buying and attitudes that marketing people and companies exploited.

A Columbo program from 1973 with Robert Culp delved in the how subliminal messages in film and TV ads could influence behavior.

While Columbo’s airing and Packard’s book insinuates that all classes of people, and in particular, intelligent folks could be influenced as easily as the mentally deficient (and I don’t mean those with inferior brains), those who have lower I.Q.s than the population generally.

But UFO aficionados know that those who’ve reported and report UFO encounters (Hickson and Parker, the Hills, and those noted by Jose Caravaca at his blog, et al.) are not at the top of the intellectually sophisticated file; the encountered are common folks, generally: persons prone to be influenced by social and cultural elements.

When has a MacArthur Grant person experienced a UFO landing, or a Hawking assistant, or one of Einstein’s associates come face to face with UFO occupants?

When has a Tolstoy, or Fitzgerald, or Pynchon type had a UFO encounter?

My point is that persons with lower mental abilities have UFO encounters – and that includes Ezekiel in the Hebrew texts; he was prone to believe in things and people from the skies.

I’m not taking about UFO sightings, per se, here. Many of us have had UFO sightings, but those sightings stop at the observation.

When a UFO sighting triggers an “encounter,” one has to consider the Caravaca “theory” that a kind of oneirism takes place, and this is what McGinn covers in his book (see above).

We are dealing with something a little more complex than an hallucination, arguably, but something that is palpable enough to be studied or researched by those hoping to get a handle on the meaning of UFOs – those at ground level anyway.

RR

UFOs have never impacted humanity or civilization

2011-12-30T09:33:00.001-05:00

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.

While some visitors here and even ourselves appear to be absorbed by Roswell and/or other UFO incidents (Socorro for one), and while our friend Chris Aubeck (Wonders in the Sky with Jacques Vallee) scours antiquity’s dcouments, via his Yahoo Magoniax Forum (where people submit ancient UFO accounts), we, all of us, have to realize and accept the “fact” -- and it is a fact –- that UFOs, for all our attention, have not affected humanity’s evolution, humanity’s civilizations, or any significant human enterprise.

Looking through the books below, we found not one item or footnote that referred to UFOs or anything that could be construed as a UFO; on the contrary, lots of things that prior civilizations embraced and noted (with art, writing, and action) were so removed from the UFO phenomenon that one is stunned by the attention Ancient Astronaut theorists get with their seemingly abundant litany of extraterrestrial artifacts and influences. Such artifacts and influences just do not exist, on a scale that betokens (meaningful?) alien visitations in the past.

The books listed here are only a few of the many that we (the RRRGroup and The Einstein Fellowship in Ann Arbor) perused for UFO or UFO-like references:

The Hittites by O. R. Gurney [Originally a Penguin Book, 1952, reissued by The London Folio Society, 2000]

Ancient Europe: A Survey by Stuart Piggott [Aldine Publishing Company, Chicago, 1965/1970]

The Mochica: A Culture of Peru by Elizabeth P. Benson [Praeger Publishers, NY, 1972]

Our Oriental Heritage (Part One of The Story of Civilization) by Will Durant [Simon and Schuster, NY, 1954]

We have culled from those books, the images created by the cultures examined, and present some here, noting the obsession that humanity, the peoples covered by the tomes, had with hunting, war, dress, sex, and death. (None had an obsession with visitors from the sky, except as anthropomorphic renditions of their gods, who also seemed consumed by war, dress and, especially sexuality.)

The Hittites:

Gurney [ibid]

The Mochica (an accent on sexuality and death):

Benson [ibid]

Ancient Europe:

Piggott [ibid]

Our Oriental Heritage:

Durant [ibid]

My point is that human culture (art, writing, warfare et cetera) has been noted by the ancients right up to today, with no ubiquitous insertion of UFOs or things that look like UFOs.

UFOs play no part in the modality of human evolution, mental or physical.

UFOs are a minor, peripheral phenomenal insertion in the movement from primitivism to human intellectual advancement.

That is why historians, archeologists, anthropologists, evolutionists, and science, generally, eschew UFOs; the phenomenon is essentially meaningless, like comets or meteors passing through the skies, or the aurora borealis, which is fascinating, but ephemeral in the great scheme of things.

RR

UFOs: Distortion or Mental Aberrations

2011-12-20T15:23:00.001-05:00

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.

Spanish UFO researcher Jose Antonio Caravaca proposes the hypothesis (which he is trying to develop into a theory) that UFO encounters are a mixture of a staged event by “others” and mental remnants of those having the encounter.

You can read his ideas at his blog by clicking HERE.

Mysteries of Mind, Space & Time: The Unexplained [Volume 1, H. S. Stuttman, Inc., Wetport Connecticut, 1991, Pages 56 and 57] present three incidents that fit Señor Caravaca’s suggestion:

Five creatures with webbed-feet alit from a UFO and examined chickens on a Puerto Rican farm on March 30, 1980:

Two teenagers, awakened by a dog espied the creatures from their bedroom window, and two men sleeping in a car nearby spotted the same creatures, at the same time.

The sleeping men saw a domed UFO; the teenagers didn’t see a UFO.

A house painter in Trowbridge, England, on January 5th, 1980, awoke a 5 a.m. and saw a yellowish-green figure, like a projected image, at the foot of his bed:

The figure said he came from a planet that, because of over crowding, eliminated portions of its population.

Further, he was visiting Earth to seal a crack in our planet, with cement, to keep it from splitting apart.

In October 1974, a couple, with their three sleeping children, were driving to their home at Aveley in Essex (England) when they saw that they were being paced by a blue light.

The light disappeared but they drove into a “well-defined bank of eerie green mist” which caused their radio to spark and crackle.

When they got home, they turned on their television set to see a program they had been rushing to see.

But the TV station was off the air and it was two hours later than they thought it should be.

Bothered by dreams related to the experience, they were placed under hypnosis and recalled being taken aboard a craft…

...where they were shown about the “ship” and underwent medical examinations by creatures described thusly:

None of the persons noted above tried to capitalize on their experiences, so we are left with a few possibilities:

Firstly; they each encountered extraterrestrials or alien visitors from outer space or inter-dimensions.

Secondly; they encountered a concomitant race of beings who reside alongside Earthlings – the Mac Tonnies’ crypto-terrestrial hypothesis.

Thirdly; all of them had a mental aberration that is yet to be defined exactly but falls into the category of hallucinatory hysteria.

Or, they were subject by “entities” yet unknown (or explained) who subjected them to a staged event (for reasons equally unknown), using their own mental remnants to create a scenario that’s weird but not so far from reality that the incidents can be dismissed out of hand: the Caravaca “Distortion” hypothesis.

Whatever occurred, the persons relating the encounters are not insane, in the usual sense, nor are they hoaxers (seemingly). They are normal individuals who’ve had a bizarre experience that is with parameters others find hard to accept or understand.

But note the “sleep factors” and the house painting connection in one of the events above.

What interests me -- there are several things that interest me -– but what stands out is that such occurrences don’t seem to be happening nowadays or are not being reported.

Your thoughts, as usual, are welcome…

RR

Is Technology the Indicator of an Advanced Civilization?

2011-12-10T00:00:00.001-05:00

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.

Revisiting Robert Temple’s The Sirius Mystery (about the African Dogon tribe’s alleged contact with extraterrestrials 5000 years ago), some questions came to mind.

Why would extraterrestrial visitors visit a small, primitive tribe in the isolated, at the time (and even now), heart of Africa.

Yes, the Sumerians and other cultures on the rim of the Mediterranean Sea are said by some, including Carl Sagan and I.S. Shklovskii in 1966’s Intelligent Life in the Universe, to have been contacted by extraterrestrials, that left intimations of writing, agriculture, math, and other accoutrements of civilized living.

Oannes, the being from the sea who supposedly proffered these gifts is not unlike the Dogon visitors who told those peoples about their place of origin, a planet in the Sirius star system.

Click HERE for an online precis of the Dogon story.

But extraterrestrials would have to be significantly advanced to get here from the Sirius planetary environment, and one would think that such emissaries would seek out cultures and peoples who were much more advanced than the Dogon tribe, to whom they would communicate the locale of their home planet(s).

The chatter between the Dogons and the Sirians would have had to be something beyond difficult.

Even today, the Dogons do not represent an advanced element of Earth’s global society.

Either the Sirius visitors were inept at furthering the cultural evolution of the Dogons or the Sirius visitors represent a civilization that doesn’t regard technolocial advance as a sine qua non of their existence; technology is a prosaic tool, and other considerations make up the essence of their existence.

Or the visit never occurred at all.

For the sake of rumination, I’d like to address the second option above; that is, civilizations do not need technology to be advanced.

Perhaps it’s the music, the art, or social intercourse that is the high point of “advanced” civilizations, not the attributes of the ships that transport them hither and yon.

This would explain, perhaps, why UFOs have appeared in various guises, some not so futuristic as we imagine: the airships of the 1890s for example.

This would also explain, perhaps, why flying saucers have had a propensity to crash; they are not technologically refined, nor meant to be.

They are constructed to get here from there, much as Columbus or Amerigo Vespucci did with their rudimentary, by modern standards, ships.

If visitors sought out this planet, for whatever reason, they would impart elements of culture – music, art, writing, mathematics, and the like – rather than methods with a technological bent.

Technology wasn’t and isn’t their primary incentive or objective.

The artifacts touted by Ancient Alien theorists are esthetic not technological: the pyramids of Egypt and Middle/South America, Stonehenge, the Easter Island moai, et cetera.

What the Dogon were and are mimics the alien races and beings - the alien cultures –that seem to have visited the Earth in the past and today.

UFO researchers, governments, military constructs have missed the point.

UFOs visit to impart refinement, high culture.

And that refinement or culture is so foreign to our understanding, we humans can’t grasp it, although one might find hints of it in such workings as that of the Dogons, or the Egyptians, or the Inca, the Olmecs, the Mayans.

The message of UFOs isn’t about nuts and bolts or plasmatic ships.

It’s about existence as a thing rarefied, transcendental, or, shall we say, spiritual?

RR

UFOs: Hallucinations and Delusion

2011-12-07T09:31:00.001-05:00

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.

That strange “objects” appear and have appeared, to humans, in the sky and on the ground for millennia is a given, an observable truth, as it were.

(Ufologists should abandon their defensive posture; that is, ufologists needn’t continue to try and prove UFOs exist. UFOs are a premised reality. The evidence is palpable and has been verified beyond doubt in any number of ways, and by credible witnesses.)

But what of those “insane” perceptions that Spanish UFO researcher Jose Caravaca provides at his blog, The Caravaca Files or Jacques Vallee has documented in several books and lectures?

Sẽnor Caravaca attributes the bizarre UFO events he lists as a product of witness minds, controlled and used by an alien intrusion, yet to be explicitly defined, for purposes also not explicitly defined, but suggested by sẽnor Caravaca to be an expression of a reality that the intruders wish to display, by their staged images and activities.

Sẽnor Caravaca’s hypothesis is interesting, and defended by his observation that the “mental machinations” he documents aren’t ubiquitous, as they would be if they followed the suggestions offered by some; i.e., electromagnetic effects on the mind (Persinger) and psychic projections by elements of a concomitant spiritual reality that exists with humans (Vallee).

However, one has to consider the idea that some UFO accounts that include strange beings doing equally strange activities are hallucinatory or delusional constructs brought about by an initial event that triggers the images and perceptions recounted.

Still, the initial, triggering event – a UFO sighting or landing – is yet to be explained or understood.

But the descriptive accounts, after the initial event, may be attributable to hallucinations, hallucinations caused by a number of psychological triggers as delineated in papers about how the body and mind reacts to traumatic [sic] encounters and affects:

The Interpretation of Intrusions in Psychosis: An Integrative Cognitive Approach to Hallucinations and Delusions by Anthony P. Morrison (2001)

And, importantly, Visual Hallucinations in Psychologically Normal People: Charles Bonnet’s Syndrome by Robert J. Teunisse, Johan R. Cruysberg, Willibrord H. Hoefnagels, André L. Verbeek, and Frans G. Zitman.

And:

The Charles Bonnet Syndrome (CBS) can account for the descriptive renditions that witnesses have provided over the years for what they experienced.

Such descriptions as those of Betty and Barney Hill, Father Gill in Papua (New Guinea), which represents a “mass hullucination” example, the Hickson/Parker Pascagoula incident, and others that you’re familiar with can all be attributable to the “CBS.”

Click HERE for a table of when and during what activity the Bonnet Syndrome takes place.

Applying what we know about psychopathological pathogens helps winnow many UFO events, but not all, unfortunately.

Some UFO experiences can be traced to psychological operations by various rogue constructs in governments and the military as recounted by me in Nick Redfern’s book, Contactees [Chapter 20] and actual “alien” encounters of a still unexplained kind.

(The word “alien” is used here in its psychological context.)

But looking for more exotic explanations for obvious human mental configurations is stretching human fact into contrived fiction which has, as its downside, a loss of premise stability and subsequent logic – resulting in a wayward search for what UFOs are.

Again, UFOs are real, some strange UFO encounters are actual encounters; it’s the descriptive aftermath that has thrown the topic into a disarray that dissuades science from pursuing UFOs as a topic for scrutiny.

Once the psychological parameters are outlined and clarified, science might be able to tackle the phenomenon itself.

One can only hope…

RR

A resource for UFO sightings. overlooked by aficionados of the phenomenon

2011-12-03T17:17:00.000-05:00

Intellectually scourged “academic” Immanuel Velikovsky developed a theory about how our planetary (solar) system and Earth were formed and subject to catastrophes that were recorded by humans in many histories and works, such as The Bible, (Asian) Indian hymns and stories, Greek myths, Egyptian hieroglyphic remnants, Homer, and many, many more ancient accounts.

His theory may be found in two works, Worlds in Collision [1950] and Earth in Upheaval [1955].

Science has eschewed Velikovsky’s theory, but his insights keep popping up as NASA and cosmologists scrutinize the planets in our system.

While Velikovsky insisted that cosmological events were what humans saw and recorded, one can look pass his interpretations to find what could be UFO sightings.

For instance, this…

In The City of God by Augustine it is written:

“From the book of Marcus Varro, entitled Of the Race of the Roman People, I cite word for word the following instance: ‘There occurred a remarkable celestial portent; for Castor records that in the brilliant star Venus, called Vesperugo by Plautus, and the lovely Hesperus by Homer, there occurred so strange a prodigy, that it changed its color, size, form, course, which never happened before nor since. Adrastus of Cyzicus and Dion of Naples, famous mathematicians, said this occurred in the reign of Ogyges’” [Worlds in Collision, A Delta Book, 1965, Page 158]

Velikovsky supplemented his theory in later books, Oedipus and Akhnaton [1960], Peoples of the Sea, Ages in Chaos, Ramses II and his Time, and Human Amnesia.

Astronomers made it a point to suppress Velikovsky’s views and have been rather successful.

But that’s not what we should be concerned with.

Our interest is in the cited works and accounts that seem to be sightings of UFOs.

Velikovsky’s books provide sources that resonate in ways that might – might! – support Ancient Astronaut theories.

The difference is that Velikovsky’s “catastrophic” intrusions don’t interfere with or interact with humans; his events remain observational, not intercessional.

Also, many of Velikovsky’s cited events were eschewed, it seems, by the Vallee/Aubeck book, Wonders in the Sky, probably because Chris Aubeck’s resource venue (Yahoo Magonia X) for many of the sightings in his and Vallee’s book was controlled by the machinations of UFO stalwarts such as Jerry Clark, who held sightings and input hostage to his (Clark’s) view of the UFO phenomenon.

I suggest you get your hands on Velikovsky’s books. Overlook the catastrophic theory if you like – a mistake, as I see it – and cull the events that bespeak UFOs in days of old.

If UFOs were as prominent as they appear to have been, their appearance belies current hypotheses about military misidentifications, mental aberrations, or trickery by entities out to flummox modern humanity.

The brilliance and edification of Dr. Velikovsky will enlighten you, in a number of ways; that is certain.

RR

UFO Symbology and Extraterrestrial Thought

2011-11-21T01:02:00.001-05:00

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!

2011-11-14T10:30:00.008-05:00

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

2011-11-13T10:12:00.001-05:00

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

2011-11-11T13:07:00.001-05:00

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

2011-11-02T09:27:00.001-04:00

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

A Confluence of Coincidences or Something Significant?

2011-10-28T09:31:00.000-04:00

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.

We are, admittedly, smitten with the 1964 Socorro UFO sighting by Lonnie Zamora.

The reasons for our “obsession” are many, as noted here, at this blog (and others) over the past few years.

But one reason centers on the knowledge that other, similar, almost identical UFO sightings took place on the same day as Officer Zamora’s sighting [4/24/1964] or in the same time-frame.

For instance, a day after Officer Zamora’s episode, witness Orlando Gallegos saw an object, in La Madera, New Mexico [a few hundred miles north of Socorro] that was virtually identical to the Socorro craft.

And Gary Wilcox, in Newark Valley, New York, on April 24th, 1964, the same day as Officer Zamora’s sighting, reported a strange encounter with an egg-shaped craft that was accompanied by two “beings” (like those seen by Zamora), dressed in white, metallic coveralls.

Farmer Wilcox, who couldn’t have known about Lonnie Zamora’s encounter – Wilcox’s incident took place at 10 a.m. in the morning; Zamora’s incident took place about 6:50 p.m.

While Lonnie Zamora had no interaction with the two beings he spotted and Gallegos saw no beings during his sighting, Wilcox had a “conversation” with the intruders on his land; they said they were from Mars, and had “spoken to people before.”

Details of the Wilcox sighting can be read HERE and you will find our May 2011 note about the Wilcox sighting HERE

What is revelatory for me, is that it is strangely coincidental that such similar sightings took place around or on the same date, with timings that don’t allow confabulation.

Anthony Bragalia and Frank Stalter discount the Socorro sighting as a bona fide UFO incident, claiming the sighting was prompted by a raft of New Mexico Institute Technology students, out to embarrass Officer Zamora ostensibly because he “harassed” them. Bragalia also dismisses the Gallegos’ sighting as there were implications, by the police at the scene, that the smell of alcohol was present.

But how do Stalter and Bragalia explain the Wilcox sighting?

And how do we slide our Hughes lunar-lander prototype into the Wilcox scenario?

The problem with the Bragalia/Stalter conjecture – although circumstantially replete – and our Hughes Aircraft hypothesis lies in the distance between Newark Valley, New York and Socorro, New Mexico, the only concrete connection being the “New” sobriquet for the states.

(Of course, one can make a claim that the “New” in New York and New Mexico has meaning, paranormally, but that for another time.)

My point is that the prank explanation for Socorro and the Hughes testing hypothesis are tangential (and errant) when one takes into account the strange Wilcox tale, and also, somewhat, the Gallegos sighting.

Something bizarre happened in late April 1964, something that hasn’t been duplicated since.

Of course a lack of recidivism works against Socorro, La Madera, and the Newark valley incidents being relevant to the UFO phenomenon, in toto, but such similar incidents can provide a clue, as transient as hat clue may be, to what UFOs are or were.

That said (or, rather, written), the three sightings noted here allow us to downplay or even dismiss the prank theory for Socorro, along with our Hughes prototype conjecture….if we are being ufologically objective.

RR

Quirky 1947: Roswell, Rhodes, Arnold, and Solar Flares?

2011-10-22T14:03:00.001-04:00

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.

Looking for a perturbation in the “force” for 1947, I stumbled upon an internet item by The Wanderling at the site of Anna Jones that states the Roswell “crash” was caused by solar flares:

Click HERE for that site and “article.”

It seems to me that solar flares are as good of an explanation as any for the 1947 upshot in flying saucer incidents, actual and fraudulent.

But it is only one explanation for the epidemic of flying saucer sightings and hoaxes.

What I am proposing is that the electrically charged bursts from the Sun caused some persons to conflate their observations of mundane things in the sky for concrete objects of an esoteric kind.

This is what happened to Kenneth Arnold; he saw a flight of pelicans, a flight of prototypical Navy jets, or a mirage and thought it was a bevy of “saucer skipping aircraft.”

The Maury Island episode was either a product of a misperception or the creation of addled minds that were afflicted by the 1947 solar flare anomaly. I prefer the latter.

William Rhodes (or Rhoades) either saw and photographed a strange object in the sky over his Phoenix house in 1947 or he contrived a photo because he was made mentally disturbed by the influx of electrical impulses caused by the excessive solar flare activity of 1947.

Ah, you scoff, but here are two passages on the affect of sun spots and solar flares on the mental capacity of humans:

International Journal of Biometeorology
Volume 43, Number 1, 31-37, DOI: 10.1007/s004840050113
ORIGINAL ARTICLE

The effects of extra-low-frequency atmospheric pressure oscillations on human mental activity
A. A. Delyukov and L. Didyk

Slight atmospheric pressure oscillations (APO) in the extra-low-frequency range below 0.1 Hz, which frequently occur naturally, can influence human mental activity. This phenomenon has been observed in experiments with a group of 12 healthy volunteers exposed to experimentally created APO with amplitudes 30–50 Pa in the frequency band 0.011–0.17 Hz. Exposure of the subjects to APO for 15–30 min caused significant changes in attention and short-term memory functions, performance rate, and mental processing flexibility. The character of the response depended on the APO frequency and coherence. Periodic APO promoted purposeful mental activity, accompanied by an increase in breath-holding duration and a slower heart rate. On the other hand, quasi-chaotic APO, similar to the natural perturbations of atmospheric pressure, disrupted mental activity. These observations suggest that APO could be partly responsible for meteorosensitivity in humans.

Chaotic solar cycles modulate the incidence and severity of mental illness
George E Davis Jr.a, , , Walter E Lowellb, 1,

Purchase a Augusta Mental Health Institute, Hospital Street, P.O. Box 724, Augusta, ME 04332, USA
b State of Maine, Department of Behavioral and Developmental Services, Augusta, ME 04332, USA

Received 18 August 2003; Accepted 10 November 2003. Available online 21 January 2004.
------------------------------
Abstract:

This paper hypothesizes that the intensity of ultraviolet radiation (UVR) from the Sun predisposes humans to polygenic mutation fostering major mental illness (MMI) and other disorders of neurodevelopment. In addition, the variation in the intensity of this radiation acts to stress immune systems, possibly mediated by cytokines, resulting in variable clinical expressions of mental illness and autoimmune disorders. Organisms can adapt to chronic high-intensity UVR by producing melanin and by retaining various pigments. We found that 28% of 11-year solar cycles produce particularly severe solar flares during which UVR is 300% more intense and hence more damaging than normal. Out of a total of six severe cycles in the past 250 years, four have occurred in the past 55 years, possibly explaining the apparent increase in the incidence of MMI in recent decades. UVR is 10 times more mutagenic than ionizing radiation to nuclear DNA, and especially damaging to mitochondrial DNA. However, variable light as manifested by seasons stresses adaptability to UVR, possibly through an immune mechanism. We show that the region of the Earth having the most UVR, relative to the most variation in that light, is at 54±~10° (N or S) latitude. Therefore, the most potential damage from sunlight occurs between the Equator and the Poles, not at the Equator itself. The human brain, our most important organ of adaptability, must be able to survive environmental variation, with successful matching to the environment resulting in adaptation. Unsuccessful adaptation to UVR (and possibly other types of radiation) results in mutation, which can produce neuro-chemical abnormalities manifested by MMI. We postulate that the combination of intensity and variation in UVR serves as a global modulator of MMI.

Copyright © 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Medical Hypotheses
Volume 62, Issue 2, February 2004, Pages 207-214
-------------------------
As for Roswell, it seems that something happened near that town in 1947, something not other-worldly necessarily, but something concrete – a military accident of some kind – or a confluence of mental disturbances caused by solar flare activity, mental disturbances that caused some Roswellians to act out and act upon the mental constructs and aberrations that were created by solar flare activity supported by the backdrop of an almost prosaic accident of some kind.

That is, some Roswell witness, overly stimulated by solar flare activity, ended up doing things and experiencing things that were not real in any objective sense. That, along with the mass hysteria or “group hallucinatory” possibilities, can account for the extrapolation that is now known as The Roswell Incident – a mythical meme based wholly on aberrant mental configurations and disturbances, underscored by a military incident that had nothing to do with an extraterrestrial intrusion or crashed flying disk.

One can take the data of solar flare activity for 1947 and other time-frames to see if solar flares or sun-busts might account for other hallucinated UFO episodes: The Hill abduction, the Pascagoula event, or the Travis Walton kidnapping.

Also, intrusions of hoaxed materials or confabulated videos, photographs, and stories might be traced to an influx of solar flare activity during the time such contrivances are conceived.

Two recommended reports/books on solar flares and two papers on solar flares:

Click here for Paper One – a PDF

Click here for Paper Two – also a PDF

RR

The 1974 Arrubal UFO Symbols (from Jose Antonio Caravaca)

2011-10-17T11:17:00.005-04:00

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.

We think that symbols, insigniae, and/or letters and writing seen on UFOs are important clues -- perhaps leading to the source of UFOs or something else vital to an explanation of the UFO phenomenon, provided the sighting is bona fide and actual, not a hoax.

Spanish researcher Jose Caravaca provides material from his UFO blog that intrigues:

THE UFO AT ARRUBAL

In Logroño November 29, 1974 an interesting UFO episode occurred.

It happened in the town of Arrubal, about 20 Kilometros from Bilbao, when in a field near the school, a group of 10 schoolchildren, ages between 6 and 12 years were playing football.

About 6 pm, Oscar Sagasti, looked up at the sky and saw a silver, metal-like object with elongated bright orange lights.It moved in a strange way, from one side in a zig-zag motion. Suddenly, in complete silence, it stopped short before the watchful eyes of children. One of the children threw a stone at the object and despite repeated attempts, missed the object as it was too far above them.

It was about four feet long, compared to the size of a vehicle.

But what surprised them most was the existence of letters and symbols on the object.

After a few minutes of watching, the UFO rose slowly until it was lost behind a curtain of clouds.They also saw a red cloud that could belong to another object or perhaps the same from another angle.

The teacher was sure the children were telling the truth, all interviewed separately. They did not contradict their statements.

Then children drew what they saw on the whiteboard in class; some being like a letter, "M", "X" and "L".

"La Gaceta del Norte" sent an editor to cover the story, and readers know the details of the case under the headline: "El OVNI DE LOGROÑO".

This is part of his interview with the students:

It was six o'clock. We had left school. We were playing in the field together. Oscar saw it first.

We looked up in to the sky and saw it. It was quiet. It went from one place to another.

In zig zag?

Yeah, And it also stood still, not moving,[for] like half a minute.

What shape was it?, Was it round?

No, elongated and down. So ...

One of the students, close to the blackboard, drew an ellipse reversed. It was cigar-shaped.

Was it big or small?

Large. More or less like a car. It was high, high, high. Higher than the height of a house.

Did it have lights?

Si. And it had letters.

Lyrics [letters]?

Yes, yes.

And you saw?

A “M”, an “X” and who knows what else...(another student interjected, a ”D” reversed).

One of the students drew, on the blackboard, the mysterious letters, with a sure hand, followed closely by his peers. The boys drew, one by one, all the signs vertically, as seen on the UFO.

Everyone agreed: "The letters were pure (sic) and very large."

At that time, Ana Mari, the Arrubal teacher, told us:

"They also repeated what they saw next day, one by one, separately and without contradictions"

The metal plate, was it shining?

Shining with silver and orange lights. Similar to an airplane.

But it was a plane?

No, no, and not a helicopter. We already know what they are. What we saw did not make any noise.

Did you see anyone?

No.

And the lyrics [letters],were they black?

No, the color of the dish (sic). You could see that some letters were a lot (sic) big and bright. They were like little lights.

Were you scared?

No, no. We told the gentlemen [the object] to come down (then we started throwing stones.)

In total how long did you see it? Five minutes?

Not less.

How did it disappear?

It was slowly getting through the clouds, slowly to Logroño. After that we did not see it. And then,in the clouds, came a red thing. As a light.

As if there was another flying saucer?

All red.

In 1997 "UFO Group" managed to locate some of the protagonists of the story who re-affirmed, point by point, what happened during that football game. UFO Group members, themselves, were able to speak personally with several of the former students who perfectly remembered the event of their childhood.

Joseba Orraca Cardaso interviewed Jose Antonio Ascaciba:

"It was a very long, silent, the witness recalled, like a big cigar with bright reds, above our heads. I remember seeing signs or letters ... X M L ....is all I can remember. We started throwing stones throw at it and soon disappeared."

-----------------

Nota Bene -- Another UFO event happened in the same time-frame:

Curiously, the press of the time offered the testimony of a 18 year-old on 28 December, flowing through the N-111, between Viana and Logroño, near the intersection of Oyón, about 18:30 pm. The 18 year-old spotted a metal object in the sky and his vehicle was stopped in an inexplicable way. This is his narration:

"... the UFO released a kind of light rays into the engine of the car, as if to explore that part of the vehicle. Moments later, the flying object in the sky was lost The youth could not, implement without major difficulties, the car engine."

Courtesy of Jose Antonio Caravaca, edited by Rich Reynolds (from the submission)

The Parallels Between Jesus Christ and Roswell

2011-10-16T11:39:00.002-04:00

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.

Just as there were niggardly references to Jesus of Nazareth, after his death, there were niggardly references to Roswell after that 1947 incident (as noted in my post showing the 1967 LOOK issue, Flying Saucers and in a comment from Christopher Allen).

No substantive account about Jesus appeared or is extant earlier than the Gospel of Mark, about thirty years after Jesus’ death, allegedly “helped” by The Holy Spirit

No substantive account of the Roswell episode appeared earlier than the 1980 book, The Roswell Incident by Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore, covertly helped by Stanton Friedman.

Subsequent books or “gospels” about Jesus, centering on his meaning and mission, culminating in his death and resurrection, appeared later, 60 A.D. to 300 A.D., (with the sojourns of St. Paul, peripheral to Jesus life, showing up around 50 A.D).

These gospels derive from witness accounts, not first-hand information from Jesus or those in his circle.

Many books subsequent to the Berlitz/Moore work have appeared, all offering synopses of the Roswell event, culled from newspapers archives and alleged witness accounts, but no first-hand accounts of a flying disk crash.

Christianity eventually became, with the help of Roman Emperor Constantine, the prevailing religion in the West.

Roswell became, with the help of Stanton Friedman, the template for ufology’s extraterrestrial believers.

While the divinity of Jesus and his alleged miracles and resurrection have been grist for theologians, religious lay persons, and atheists (or agnostics), the supposed crash landing of a flying disk, piloted by extraterrestrial entities, in Roswell, has similarly become fodder for UFO’s ET believers and skeptics (or debunkers, as the UFO fanatics put it).

Jesus of Nazareth has generated more controversy and writings than any other religious oriented subject.

Roswell, in the UFO context, has generated more controversy and writings than any other flying saucer event.

Persons claiming to be Christians have provided a myriad of experiences related to the Jesus phenomenon.

Persons claiming to be Roswell witnesses or friends of same have provided myriad accounts tying them to the Roswell incident.

Both kinds of witnesses engage intellectual or superficial scrutiny by others, with fervant debate deciding nothing that can be substantiated by fact or empirical proof: Jesus remains an enigma for many, believers and non-believers alike; Roswell, remains an enigma, generally, for believers and skeptics too.

The Jesus story has an alleged artifact from his death/resurrection: The Shroud of Turin.

Roswell has artifacts from the alleged crash: misperceived debris.

Both Jesus and Roswell have produced a mythos, a mythology of significant proportions.

Neither is related to the other, but they do resonate as historical “fables” or historical realities.

The Jesus story appears to be transcendent but Roswell appears to be preternatural also.

Sociologists can work with the elements of both to determine the human interactions that provide the integration suggested here.

Jesus’ influence is much greater than Roswell, surely, but Roswell does mimic the vicissitudes that brought the Jesus movement to prominence, even if Roswell is a sociological canard.

But wait, the Jesus thrust has been just as fraught with fraud, falsity, or fallacious human interactions – the difference being that Roswell takes us nowhere theologically or philosophically relevant.

RR

The Socorro/Rendlesham UFO symbols deciphered?

2011-10-14T10:19:00.003-04:00

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.

The United States Air Force and Ray Stanford tried to corrupt Lonnie Zamora’s Socorro sighting of 1964 by interposing the idea that Officer Zamora’s original description and drawing of the symbol he spotted on the egg-shaped craft was a substitution for the real symbol – to snooker any other alleged UFO observer who might try to report that he or she saw a similar symbol.

That is, the Air Force is said to have created the (well-known) Zamora symbol here:

Stylized

As a substitute for the real symbol here:

However, in the earliest reports of the Socorro incident, Officer Zamora described and drew the well-known and highly publicized symbol thusly:

This from the Hynek/Blue Book notes

This from the 1967 LOOK account

We believe the Air Force suggestion, abetted by Ray Stanford, was a diversionary effort – or disinformation tactic as ufologists like to say – to prevent interested parties from discovering the real source of the Zamora craft. (See Hughes reference below.)

Anthony Bragalia insists that the Socorro incident was a prank, created and carried out by students at the New Mexico Institute of Technology, and he’s mustered considerable circumstantial evidence for his hypothesis.

Part of his conjecture states that Zamora’s UFO was a construct, partially composed of paper, used at NMIT, from The International Paper Company, whose logo is this:

An Indiana University engineer has related that he read a piece in a still unlocated – we looked for it, seriously – magazine [circa 1968] about a paper company’s publicity-oriented hot-air balloon trek that descended in Socorro and was mistaken as Lonnie Zamora’s UFO. (The engineer’s contention has been excoriated but not totally refuted by a gaggle of ufologists, mostly residing at UFO UpDates.)

Here’s the logo of a paper company that possibly sponsored a balloon trip across country in 1964:

The RRRGroup has contended that Zamora’s UFO was a Hughes Aircraft/ToolCo Moon/Mars lander prototype, manufactured and tested under the auspices of the CIA.

Leon Davidson did a creative reworking of the Zamora drawing, showing how it displayed a convoluted and tricky reworking of the CIA sobriquet. (His paper is online here, via a previous posting.)

Matthew Gilleece did an evaluation for us a while back, and provided a logo from Hughes Toolco that is strikingly similar to Zamora’s drawing:

And during our Hughes interpretations we used Henry Dreyfuss’s Symbol Sourcebook [McGraw Hill Book Company, NY, 1972] to find symbols that look like Zamora’s drawing.

We found these mathematical and computing symbols, which Hughes’ engineers might have used on their prototype design or which can be seen as part of the Air Force instigated design:

Then we come to the 1980 Rendlesham incident(s), which provided a symbol, from one of the military witnesses:

We think that the Rendlesham UFO was a military prototype, which also used mathematical symbology as part of its designated creation:

Trigonometrical Point 1st order [Dreyfuss, Pages 95/186]

(The displacement of the black circle has meaning, and a cryptography expert should have at it.)

For us, the determination of the Zamora insignia’s creation or origin and that of the Rendlesham symbol will provide the source of UFOs witnessed, Earthly in our view – or unearthly maybe, as many die-hard ET believers have it.

RR

"Roswell" noted in 1967

2011-10-12T11:25:00.003-04:00

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.

LOOK published this special edition, Flying Saucers, in 1967:

On Page 24 is this photo from the series taken in Roswell in 1947:

The blurb (enlarged here) refers to an alleged crash of balloon(s), mistaken for a flying saucer:

While Fort Worth, Texas is given as the site of the "mistaken" crash, rather than Roswell (or Corona) in New Mexico, the photo, shared with LOOK staffers, shows that someone knew about the Roswell incident in 1967, 10+ years earlier than the 1978 resurrection by Stanton Friedman.

Why the mistake in locale? Who provided the photo? Why a reference to the Navy?

Questions that Roswell researchers might follow up on...

RR

UFOs: The Wrong Psychological Aftermath

2011-10-09T12:09:00.001-04:00

A sighting of an unusual object or light in the sky provokes, or should, an emotional/psychological reaction that is not too far outside the normal parameters of
reactive behavior to a strange event.

But a reaction should be distinctly different from normal reactive states.

And the aftermath of an alleged UFO abduction has to be characterized by behavior that doesn’t belie the inherent elements of a terrifying or totally bizarre episode.

However, UFO sightings or UFO abductions do not evoke reactions, generally, that bespeak a completely unique or affective set of circumstances; that is, sighters and abductees, after their observation or alleged abduction, do not demonstrate behavior that falls within what psychology defines for the aftermath of events like an abduction (UFO related or not) or the observation of something anomalistic.

Seeing something in the sky (or on the ground) that is totally foreign to one’s normal experiences and frames of reference can evoke euphoria (depending upon the mind-set of the observer) or questioning of one’s senses, or provoke an astute querying. Sometimes fear is prominent (again, depending upon the sighter’s mind-set).

An alleged UFO abduction is another matter altogether. Such an episode, which is akin to a criminal kidnapping, should result in psychological and/or social behavior, after the fact, that mimics what is commonly referred to, currently, as post-traumatic stress disorder or post-traumatic stress syndrome.

But I know of no abduction account that provides a litany of behavior that duplicates or even approximates the post-traumatic stress etiologies.

One can find the kind of after-behavior that is missing in UFO encounters in the 9/11 event(s).

A UFO sighting is nearly, in this day and age, a prosaic event for most people; humans on this planet have seen or read about stranger things than an odd light in the night sky or a weird aircraft.

Nonetheless, the observation of either should provoke a response that is something more than ho-hum. Generally, it doesn’t, which tells me that people have become inured to UFO sightings.

Abduction accounts, not so much.

Those professing that they were taken by alien entities -- extraterrestrial or otherworldly beings – end up, afterwards, talking about their experience as if it were just an unusual occurrence during their daily routines.

Under hypnosis, recollection of their alleged sojourn often invites behavior, while “asleep,” that appears to suggest a terrible or horrifying experience.

Hypnosis, long denied as a viable mechanism for finding information from the unconscious (even among psychoanalytics), presents a number of problems which strike at the heart of the material(s) recalled by the person hypnotized; i.e., confluence and juxtaposition of things read, seen, heard, over the life-time of the hypnotic, such as Sci-FI films or stories or radio and television shows in which persons are kidnapped, by humans or alien beings.

In one of my high-school’s assemblies, during the 1950s, an hypnotist mentioned to some students he had onstage, as part of his act, while they were “under,” that they were seeing a flying saucer. Panic ensued, the students getting up from their chairs, and running, helter-skelter around and off the stage. It was a moment of seer pandemonium, which took a while to be quelled. That was a reaction to flying saucers at the outset of the modern era of sightings, and is what one should have expected then, and somewhat now.

That aside, persons who’ve seen a UFO and those who have supposedly been taken against their will by entities of a anomalistic kind, generally resume their day-to-day existence, while some go so far as to try an exploit their experience, without any hint of the vicissitudes that would normally occur after such a traumatic event as that of a kidnapping, especially one involving the particulars included in the retellings, under hypnosis or not, that are proffered.

A UFO sightings should provide a “wow factor” for the sighter. It doesn’t any more.

An abduction experience should cause the abductee to suffer a smattering of traumatic symptoms, lasting long after their alleged experience. That doesn’t happen.

This lack of psychological repercussions is what did in the so-called contactees; none showed indications of trauma – rather they displayed psychopathic delusions that were not related to their alleged contact by beings from other worlds.

Abductees today, resume their lives, as if nothing untoward or totally bizarre afflicted them.

Yes, something happened to some who recount abduction experiences, but if what they say they experienced is true, their after-behavior belies that experience. The human mind can’t repress, forever, an event as traumatizing as that of an alien abduction, as it is remembered by the abductee.

In the psychological or even the psychoanalytic literature, where sexual elements are stressed, one can find the raft of symptoms that a UFO sighter or a UFO abductee should display after their encounter.

That few show such symptoms puts a question mark over their accounts.

(And this lack of a psychological aftermath is what mars such UFO events as Roswell, where for thirty years, the alleged crash of a flying disk lay dormant, until resurrected by ufologists with a penchant for infusing apparent witnesses to the Roswell episode with details and remembrances that were not based in actual circumstances. But that for another time….)

RR

Rex Heflin's inspiration for his UFO photos?

2011-10-03T16:17:00.001-04:00

Paul Villa was an alleged flying saucer contactee, living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who provided a slew of crisp (faked) UFO photos in the 1960s:

These two photos were taken in 1963/64 by Mr. Villa, a mechanic.

Did Rex Heflin see these photos and tried to duplicate them in 1965?

RR

UFOs: Why Science Isn't Interested

2011-10-03T13:51:00.001-04:00

Scientific methodology is thwarted when it comes to the UFO phenomenon.

What can science study when it comes to UFOs?

There is nothing tangible for scientists to study. There is no evidence that can be tested or any behavior that can be replicated or pinned down in any way.

Photos of aircraft or even of evanescent phenomena (lightning for instance) can be examined, but UFO photos offer nothing specific for science to look at.

The photos of Adamski, Villa, and Billy Meier, to name a few, would offer elements for science or intelligence agencies to scrutinize, if they were authentic photos.

Photos, less detailed, and maybe real, of amorphous UFOs don’t offer worthy elements that can be studied either. Does no one take a telephoto picture of a UFO? Where are the professional snapshots?

As for trace elements in supposed UFO landings (Socorro) or debris elements (Roswell), those are so indefinite or imaginary that science really has nothing to examine. (Anthony Bragalia has discovered that Battelle has studied malleable metal, allegedly from the Roswell incident, but Bragalia’s findings are beclouded by Battelle’s “secrecy” in what they’re doing or have done.)

Scientists need specimens to study, or hypotheses based upon observation(s). Witness testimony, regardless of the support of such by some UFO buffs, is useless, for scientific purposes. Sure, a credible witness might provide a clue that helps a scientist see an avenue for study, but witness testimony, all by itself, is generally useless.

UFO sightings nowadays are even more transitory that flying saucer reports of the past, those that supposedly left indentations (Socorro again) or radiation traces (the Desvergers, Florida tale), so science is even less inclined to get involved with sightings.

Some UFO mavens keep indicating that the O’Hare sighting of a few years back is a prominent UFO sighting, but others (Lance Moody for one) ask for something tangible: where are the photos? After all, almost everyone has a camera-enabled cell phone, and so many persons relate that they saw something strange over the Chicago airport, one wonders (along with Mr. Moody) why none of them had the presence of mind to snap a photo of the alleged O’Hare UFO?

Scientists might have trouble with a photo, as noted, but at least they’d have something to scrutinize. (Of course, some UFO hobbyists insist upon the negatives or original photos for study but today’s photos are captured electronically, so there are no negatives to offer. That argument, from UFO tyros, even when applied to older photos, is just stupid, non-scientific.)

The point here, by me, is that science has nothing with which to grapple when it comes to UFOs. The phenomenon is primarily witness-induced today, or hoaxed, just as it was in the past. However, those past UFO or flying saucer incidents had a few ingredients (radar blips, movie-film captures, trace elements) that today’s sightings do not have.

Moreover, the topic is so tainted by the goofiness and circus-like atmosphere, even by those who once had some credibility and cachet when it came to UFOs, that science won’t touch the phenomenon at all, often acknowledging it as not a legitimate area for scientific scrutiny.

So, science is out. And ufology is a sham. That leaves us with what? A curiosity that is not going to be explained or understood as it stands right now.

To pursue the matter further takes a mind and/or personality that is in a state of denial about reality, and what is purposeful for life.

RR

UFOs are Mega-tachyons

2011-10-02T17:21:00.001-04:00

Kevin Randle's blog is riffing on the loss of "robust UFO sightings" that we and others have mentioned recently.

Click HERE for a paper that provides a clue as to where "robust UFOs" have gone.

RR

The La Madera Sighting (and Socorro)

2011-10-01T11:58:00.001-04:00

Jose Antonio Caravaca has been kind enough to provide us his "exegesis" of the La Madera, New Mexico sighting that took place shortly after the Lonnie Zamora/Socorro sighting (of 1964).

The La Madera sighting is important, in the context of whatever interpretation or hypothesis one might have about what Officer Zamora really saw/experienced.

Click HERE for Senor Caravaca's offering.

UFOs: The Science Fiction Effect

2011-09-29T15:05:00.001-04:00

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.

While perusing The Science Fiction Encyclopedia (Illustrated) edited by Peter Nicholls [Doubleday & Company, Garden City, NY, 1979] I was struck by how many SciFi images matched or were similar to what some notorious UFO sightings proclaimed.

More importantly, the images all antedate the sightings that have become folkloric in the UFO canon.

Witnesses of the airship phenomenon of the late 1890s and early 1900s might have been influenced by illustrations for various publications such as these:

Maybe George Adamski got the idea for his allegedly concocted flying saucer and photographs of same from something like this:

Betty Hill was remembering her contact from magazines and images like this:

Detail from clipping (above)

And Barney Hill’s recollection of what he saw came from this magazine, spotted on a newsstand perhaps:

Or maybe it was one (or both) of these clips:

(One might even posit that Reverend Gill’s sighting in New Guinea was predicated on a remembered picture he once saw, particularly like the first of the three above.)

And have those who’ve seen little men next to or inside craft gotten their "sighting" from a classic Superman segment airing on TV in 1951?

Those who’ve described flying saucers and UFOs must surely have been influenced by clips such as these or movies of the 1950s which emulated the “saucer” seen here:

And persons halted by entities shooting them with a ray gun could assuredly been interposing, by culling from their memory, such images as this:

And abductees got some of their ideas from portrayals such as this one:

Recently, UFO spotters have been indicating they’ve seen triangular craft in the skies above them, such as this:

Now either UFO witnesses are regurgitating images purloined from their memory, or UFOs and flying saucers have adopted the constructs imagined by SciFi writers and editors.

Which is it I ask?

RR

Howard Hughes: Socorro (and Roswell?)

2011-09-27T10:39:00.001-04:00

Howard Hughes’ Tool Company and Hughes Aircraft were employed by the U.S. military to devise various space craft and satellite equipment, including lunar landing modules in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s.

Both Hughes’ constructs were CIA connected and some Hughes’ operations were CIA fronts: Maheu & Associates were a CIA front in the Hughes empire. (See Age of Secrets: The Conspiracy that Toppled Richard Nixon and the Hidden Death of Howard Hughes by Gerald Bellett, 1995.)

Hughes and Raven Industries (a CIA front) worked on LEMs and tested them in the southwestern deserts of The United States in the 1960s (footnoted at the RRRGroup blog)

Howard Hughes also worked with Soviet agencies and engineering counterparts, with CIA approval, to acquire technical information about the Russian advances in space materials, especially lunar landers.

Here are three prototypical drawings of what Hughes Aircraft/Toolco derived from those internecine contacts with the Soviets.

(Note the similarity to the Socorro craft – image 1 and 2 -- spotted by Lonnie Zamora in Socorro, 1964, and the propulsive thrusters in image 3; Zamora’s rocket blast!)

Howard Hughes was for atomic disarmament, and struggled with the AEC to thwart atomic explosions in the Nevada desert in the 1950s. He was generally rebuffed. (Ibid, Age of Secrets)

Hughes also was enamored of pychics and connected with Peter Hurkos on various occasions, ostensibly about the insinuations of George Adamski, who imparted dire warnings that supposedly came from Venusian visitors about atomic testings. (Ibid, Age of Secrets et al.)

(We have also stumbled across indications of a secret Hughes Aircraft test for the Navy in 1947 that might account for the Roswell incident and debris. More on this upcoming.)

Hughes’ operations were also employed by the United States Navy. Late 1969: the CIA wanted to use the Hughes Tool Company as a front to build a high-tech "The Hughes Glomar Explorer" vessel to salvage sunken submarines. "The Jennifer Project" was to retrieve a sunken Soviet sub 750 miles northwest of Hawaii…but Hughes pulled out of the plan. (Ibid, Age of Secrets)

That UFO buffs and investigators have overlooked the Hughes connection to U.S. military testings of prototypical space vehicles, one of which we contend is what Lonnie Zamora saw in Socorro in April 1964, goes to the heart of the lacunae in “ufological” research, especially when such research tends to reference prosaic explanations for some esoteric UFO incidents, Roswell, Socorro, Shag Harbor among them.

RRR/JS/RR

Adamski's Flying Saucer and Heflin's UFO

2011-09-25T11:05:00.000-04:00

The November/December 1976 Beyond Reality (Special UFO Report) magazine had a Guest Editorial by Brad Steiger (on Page 4), in which another “identification” for George Adamski’s iconic flying saucer is provided:

To read the Editorial clearly, which says Adamski’s flying saucer photo was of a bottle cooler lid, click HERE.

The other “identifications” include a chicken brooder, a humidor, and a Christmas ornament.

How or why, then, did some UFO spotters see UFOs that look like Adamski’s flying saucer:

Drawing by Spanish witness, 1977 [Beyond Reality UFO Update, Fall 1978, Page 13]

Muhammed Ali’s drawing of what he saw in 1972 [Beyond Reality, March/April 1978, Page 34]

And the same thing happened with Rex Heflin’s alleged UFO:

Warren Martin drew a craft that he and four friends saw:

Beyond Reality UFO Update [Ibid, Page 34]

Both Adamski’s photos of flying saucers and Heflin’s photos of a UFO are said to be fakes, Heflin’s photos less so than Adamski’s arguably.

Nonetheless, if such photos are, indeed, fakes, why do some credible UFO sighters see or draw objects (or craft, if you will) “things” that smack of faked UFO photos?

RR

The U.S. Air Force: Adamski/Heflin photos are fake!

2011-09-22T14:02:00.001-04:00

Ray Palmer’s Flying Saucers magazine [February 1969, Issue 62] has some interesting copies of correspondence tied to Palmer’s “editorial” about William D. Clendenon’s attempt to interest the Air Force and Hughes Aircraft in his flying saucer prototype, which he, Clendenon, hoped to patent also.

Those thrusts by Clendenon led to missives from the Air Force to members of The United States Congress, in which Adamski’s (in)famous flying saucer photograph is mentioned along with the photographs of Rex Heflin.

Click HERE to see the Adamski reference.

And click HERE to see the Adamski and Heflin references. (Another click HERE provides the signatory of this letter.)

Also, as I implicate Hughes Aircraft in the Zamora/Socorro sighting of 1964, I’m including two missives from Palmer’s publication [Ibid] that indicate Hughes Aircraft was not immune from the flying saucer phenomenon, in practical, constructive ways:

HUGHES-1

HUGHES-2

(Note that, in the Heflin letter to Congressman Meeds, the Air Force writes that it never had possession of Adamski’s photograph nor Rex Heflin’s, which may be disputative to some Heflin supporters.)

RR

How the Trent/McMinnville photos were created?

2011-09-21T00:13:00.001-04:00

This photo from The NEW Report on Flying Saucers magazine [True/Fawcett, NY, 1967] appears on Page 27 in a Lloyd Mallan article entitled “There’s More (and less) to Saucers than Meets the Eye.”

The saucer depicted consists of two paper plates glued together by Gary Buboltz, hung on a clothesline with a thin thread and photographed from fifteen (15) feet.

The photo may be found in the Project Blue Book files.

Here is the uncropped photo:

Ibid: Back Cover

It shows, as Mr. Mallan points out, how easy it is or was to fake flying saucer photos.

J. Allen Hynek authenticated this photo from 1967:

The saucer shown was a balsa-wood model, created and filmed by the Jaroslaw brothers of Michigan who hung it, by a thread, from a tree at the edge of Lake St. Clair:

Ibid: Page 31

The idea that the Trents may have strung a truck mirror from overhead wires rankles even me. The iconic photos have their supporters and defenders, such as Bruce Maccabee, and also their critics, such as Robert Sheaffer and deceased skeptic Phil Klass.

What allows me to accept the possibility [sic] of a Trent hoax is the time factors involved in the episode: the sighting by Mrs. Trent, the calling of her husband, his trip inside the house to get their camera, and the time to take two shots before the object departed.

Moreover, the object doesn’t move far enough in the sky if Bruce Maccabee’s estimate of the time between photo one and photo two taken by Mr. Trent is correct: 31 seconds.

(See a previous post here for copies of the Trent photos.)

Photos can offer proof or disproof of UFOs, as the Mallan article delineates, among other critiques of UFO photography; the advent of computer programs that can create or manipulate images exacerbates the problem of hoaxed UFO photos.

The Buboltz photo, above, emulates the Trent photos. Does it remove the “authentic” rubric given to the Trent pictures? You decide.

RR

Some UFO Stuff (being discussed in the UFO arena)

2011-09-18T19:48:00.002-04:00

This February 1977 issue of Official UFO has a rebuttal letter from Bruce Maccabee about the analysis of the Trent photos by Robert Sheaffer [Contact, Page 36 ff.] in an earlier edition of the magazine (October 1976).

Mr. Maccabee gives it his all to refute Mr. Sheaffer’s evaluation with which we generally agree.

However, what caught my eye was the mention that 31 seconds expired between Photo One and Photo Two that Mr. Trent took of the flying saucer (in 1950, over his farm).

Here are the Trent Photos:

Photo 1

Photo2

Timewatch 31 seconds.

How slow was Trent’s flying saucer traveling to only traverse the sky the short distance that his photos indicate?

You can read Mr. Sheaffer’s erudite critique by clicking HERE
----------
The magazine also has an evaluation by Robert Barrow of the Tom Towers 1956 UFO movie, Unidentified Flying Objects, which is being discussed elsewhere in the UFO community [Page 26 ff.].
----------
There is also an interview with J. Allen Hynek by The Paracast’s Gene Steinberg [Page 14 ff.]
----------
And finally there is an interview of Phil Klass by NASA sycophant James Oberg; an interview that deals with the alleged Travis Walton abduction, which Mr. Klass, unsurprisingly, thought was a hoax [Page 18 ff.]

Phil Klass has been indulged by Kevin Randle at his blog for several days now, with a protracted debate by Lance Moody, David Rudiak, and others…all of which has nothing to do with UFOs per se, but provide alternate views of Mr. Klass, which the Official UFO article supplements and maybe clarifies: Klass wasn’t a stupid man surely, although he was, by all accounts, a skeptical S.O.B.

(I would scan the magazine but the return on investment (payback) wouldn’t offset the effort, so you might try to obtain a copy, if interested, from a collector willing to sell it.)

RR

Egregious actions and blunders?

2011-09-18T10:23:00.002-04:00

UFO Report magazine [August 1976] had an interview with J. Allen Hynek by Timothy Green Beckley [Page 18 ff]. This clip is from Page 20:

Hynek’s “marsh gas” or “swamp gas” explanation was for the Ann Arbor/Dexter/Hillsdale sightings in March of 1966, not April 1967.

This kind of inattention to detail is what has undermined Hynek by any serious UFO investigator or maven.

Adrian Vance provided an article for that same UFO Report magazine [August 1976, Page 36 ff]: Vanishing UFOs: A Dimensional Dilemma.

In Vance’s piece he related that Edward U Condon destroyed all the Colorado Projects UFO materials right before his death.

And in a following paragraph, Mr. Vance tells how Hynek mislaid some UFO photos and negatives that he (Hynek) took of a UFO himself.

Click HERE to see that portion of Mr. Vance’s article.

Can anyone substantiate the Condon and/or Hynek actions?

If either actually happened, it represents behavior that is egregiously unscientific and sickening, as Mr. Vance indicates.

Condon was a security risk, who should not have had access to any materials from the Air Force or any other government agency. We went after Condon’s security status right before he was handed the Colorado Project and you can read about our efforts here in a very early posting – the second one in the archive:

Condon's Security Woes

Hynek was just scatter-brained.

Is this any way to do science?

Is this why the UFO phenomenon is a joke?

Are UFO hobbyists investing their productive lives in a topic that is so befouled by past and present stupidities that they (the hobbyists) can be maligned for wasting their lives?

I ask you…

RR

Merlin, Arthur, UFOs, and Mac Tonnies

2011-09-15T12:19:00.001-04:00

A letter to the Editor of UFO Report magazine [Summer 1975, Messages, Page 6] from a David A. Krouse of Wallingford. Pennsylvania refers to the ancient British work, The Brut, an account of English history from antiquity to the Middle Ages.

Mr. Krouse wrote that the text contains a segment for the period 900 A.D. which tells that a small boat, piloted by two women, dressed in strange garments, rose out of the sea, to take Arthur, the King, to Avalon.

Here’s the actual Brut account:

Mr. Krouse didn’t remember the story exactly as it exists in The Brut.

But his note spurred me to look into the Arthurian legend, again.

That much of the legend is immersed in, near, or within water, Arthur’s story took me to Ivan Sanderson’s thesis that UFOs may derive from bases in and under the oceans of the world, which brings me to Mac Tonnies conjecture, in Cryptoterrestrials, that a concomitant civilization to our obvious civilization has thrived for millennia and may account for UFO sightings over the years.

Mac’s hypothesis leaves much to be desired, but along with Sanderson’s ideas and legends such as that of Arthur the King, and the fish-god Oannes who came from the sea to enhance early Babylonians, one has to consider the possibility that UFOs may come from underwater bases or a civilization evolved within the waters of the Earth.

What’s interesting to me, however, is that abduction tales never have anyone taken down into waters but, rather, up into the sky.

If UFOs do come from the seas – a big IF I grant you – one would think that the beings who are allegedly abducting people would take them downward, into the watery depths instead of upwards, into the heavens.

After all Jesus ascended into the sky; he didn’t sink into the Sea of Galilee when he departed this Earthly realm.

And Mohammed went up, not down.

Nonetheless, the fact that water makes up 70% of the surface of the Earth, as Anthony Bragalia reminded me recently, the idea of an underwater world of aliens is not out of the running to explain the source of UFOs.

Yet, Vallee’s and Aubeck’s Wonders of the Sky, which contains a raft of strange UFO or UFO-like sightings, isn’t entitled Wonders of the Sea.

So, either scrutiny of the Tonnies’ crypto-world or Sanderson’s little-talked-about underwater UFO hypothesis has been remiss or there is no real cause to pursue the underwater explanation for UFOs.

But can we readily dismiss the legends that Gods and Kings came from beneath the seas so easily also?

(One aside: I know that most visitors here, maybe all, have not bought or read the Vallee/Aubeck book, or Nick Redfern’s Contactees book, and many other books referred to here, and elsewhere. That dearth of reading or effort is distressful, for it indicates a slovenly approach to the topic of UFOs and attendant ideas. To continue to ramble on and on here without a connected base of well-read individuals is a futile effort, as Paul Kimball has seen it and we, here, are starting to see also. While Wonders in the Sky is disappointing – it lacks evaluation of the sightings listed – it is an invaluable source for those who truly wish to know what UFOs are or may have been, just as legends such as that of Arthur allow hints to supplement conjecture, about UFOs and related matters.)

RR

The Carlos Alberto Diaz abduction, not unlike the Antonio Villas Boas episode

2011-09-12T19:49:00.002-04:00

Joseph Brill wrote, in Official UFO magazine [February, 1976, Page 12 ff.] about an alleged “abduction” of an Argentine man, 28 year-old Carlos Alberto Diaz, in 1975.

The picture above is a sketch, from the magazine, depicting what Senor Diaz experienced.

He was “absorbed” by a descending light [UFO?] in which he was succumbed by three entities of human form but stumps rather than arms, and faces without mouths, noses, or ears and greenish-tinted skin.

He was unceremoniously deposited in a vacant field about 200 miles from the spot where he first encountered the light. The time of his “capture” was 3:50 a.m., according to his stopped watch. When he was found, during mid-day following, he had a newspaper with him that he bought in his Naposta neighborhood of Bahia Blanca, which lies southwest of Buenos Aires by the 200 miles noted. That newspaper provided credibility for his story, Brill writes.

During his stint in a hospital, it was noticed that hair on his head and chest had been cut or taken (not by shears). He suffered no ill after-effects.

The Villas Boas case is one said to be instigated by a CIA/military psy-operation, according to DoD/CIA operative Bosco Nedelcovic, who told me the story in the late 1970s.

Nick Redfern covers the account in his book Contactees [Chapter 20].

Nedelcovic presented a scenario that’s hard to accept by some but readily accepted by those who’ve studied the machinations of the CIA and military, the so-called psychological operations.

Villas Boas was, Nedelcovic said, collected by a special unit whose purpose was to create simulated alien contact. The unit operated in South America, with the help of A.I.D. and also in Great Britain, where Nedelcovic said they were part of the infamous Scoriton contact with a man named Bryant.

My point is that the Diaz event mimics the Boas incident, but almost twenty years later.

Was Nedelcovic privy to such simulated events. It seems so. (The UFO UpDates archives has more on Nedelcovic, involving the CIA and child-nappings with a perverse sexual element.)

However, Vallee’s and Aubeck’s Wonders in the Sky is replete – and I mean replete – with similar abduction-like events: Listings 48, 108, 116, 163, 171, 233, 337, and many more.

The CIA wasn’t around then to perform such “tricks” nor were there other groups able to create, so imaginatively, such bizarre stagings.

So, was Boas really part of a CIA experiment, and Diaz too? Did both men suffer similar psychotic-induced hallucinations? Or were both men taken by entities unknown, ETs or otherwise?

Can we ever know?

RR

Why do most UFO buffs concentrate on the older sightings?

2011-09-10T12:44:00.001-04:00

The early flying saucer and UFO sightings were more exotic than those of today.

Today’s sightings are generally of amorphous lights, abstract triangles, and benign fly-overs.

The earlier sightings often involved landings, with entities, electromagnetic disruptions of car motors or house lights and electricity, and interactions of various kinds, including alleged abductions of sighters.

Also, earlier sightings were free of modern accretions: cynical skepticism, fakery and embellishment for fame, or psychosomatic stress, and media waywardness.

Yes, some contactees, Adamski, the worst of the bunch when it came to fame-seeking, and a slew of teen-agers or wannabes and never-were corrupted the study of flying saucers and UFOs but they were meticulous, pretty much, in their follies.

Today, the fakery and search for fame is cavalier, often slovenly, dismissive even, just a lark for a few minutes of attention.

And UFOs seem to perceive that human dismissiveness, appearing nonchalantly as a phenomenon nowadays, whereas back in the day(s), UFOs or flying saucers really put on some shows.

Where are the Roswell-like events today, or a Socorro, or a Rendlesham, or a Hill experience, a Travis Walton episode, or a Pascagoula?

There are none.

Just lights in the sky, orbs, or triangular craft.

No Flatwoods monsters. No Villas Boas examinations. No Aztec concoctions. Nothing sensational or exotic at all.

That’s why UFO mavens keep harking back to the old-tales, the old sightings. Those sightings and UFO events had something.

RR

UFOcus

2011-09-03T18:55:00.001-04:00

An article in UFO Report, September 1978, by Alex Evans, about two young fellows in Maine [1975] who saw a UFO, were allegedly abducted, then visited by some so-called “men-in-black” got me to thinking about how shattered the topic and study of UFOs is.

I found Mr. Evans’ piece to be very interesting, for several reasons, so I Googled the names and found a MUFON link to Bob Pratt’s web-site – Mr, Pratt died in 2005 – that has a rather thorough, bizarre, account of the Maine episode.

Click here to access the Pratt rendering

The young men, David Stephens and Glen Gray, should be contacted now to see what they can add to their totally intriguing experience.

They were inside a ship, saw alien beings, and had a total abduction experience, plus their initial UFO sighting, supplemented by a visit from strange people, that have received the sobriquet “men in black” by UFO investigators.

The problem is that there are several conjoined UFO events here, or several disparate UFO events, depending upon one’s perspective.

First there is the UFO, then there is an “abduction,” followed by a description of the inside of a UFO and the entities responsible for the UFO. Afterward, the young men and their families were ‘assaulted” by strange phenomena, as was a doctor who regressed the two fellows at the behest of UFO investigators, Shirley Fickett and Brent Raynes.

This UFO event encompasses almost everything that a UFO researcher might like to get his or her hands on: a seemingly credible account of a UFO sighting, an “abduction” (with a medical examination by alien beings using telepathic communications), and visits by men/people in black.

But what was done? Where’s the denouement?

The episode requires specialization. Someone versed in UFOs, someone versed in the abduction phenomenon, and someone versed in men-in-black accounts.

But there is more. Someone versed in psychiatric hallucinations and/or hysteria is a must, just in case the event is an hallucinosis.

Alex Evans records that Stephens, while inside the alien ship, describing a “mushroom man” (or alien), punched the “entity” (who had, large, slanted, unblinking eyes, no visible mouth, small, round nose, webbed fingers and was dressed in a flowing black robe), with no repercussion(s), accepted the futility of his situation, and laid down, letting the creatures remove his clothing (for a medical examination).

(This variegated incident is the possible psychiatric component.)

I know of no UFO researcher or investigator who has the credentials or cachet to delve into the various facets of such a UFO account as this one, which is not atypical of many UFO events.

MUFON is collecting data, the Examiner is reporting sightings (with no evaluations) and UFO buffs are arguing about minutiae that has nothing to do with UFOs, per se.

(See the current discussion about Phil Klass at Kevin Randle’s blog or the UFO UpDate brouhaha about Jeff Rense’s anti-semitism for examples of “ufology” gone astray.)

A sincere study of UFOs, as they appear today, needs focus, not abstracted, discursive dialogue about peripheral elements that besmudge or side-track the search for what UFOs are (or were) and what their relevance is for humanity, if there is any relevance.

Everything else is entertainment, and not good entertainment either….

RR

Freudian or Jungian UFOs?

2011-09-02T09:59:00.001-04:00

Matthew J. Graeber’s “article” from Magonia 52, May 1995 about UFO mother-ships or airships posits the idea that the cylindrical ships spotted since early times right up into the modern era may have a sexual psychical component.

You can access Mr. Graeber’s thesis by clicking HERE

As readers here know, or should, we do not think UFOs are psychical projections or quantum creations, although we have conjectured that quantum mechanics seem to have a bearing on the ‘tangible” objects we designate as “flying saucers” and quantum theory may help explain UFOs, as they appear today.

(Triangular UFO craft, for us, are military prototypes, and don’t factor into our conjectural observations here and elsewhere.)

As for Mr. Graeber’s sexual symbolism for airships, the idea is not anathema to us, but it is a psychological stretch, just as Carl Jung’s hypothesis was in his book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of things Seen in the Skies [Princeton University Press, 1978].

And even though the current thrust in many UFO circles is toward the concept that UFOs are projections of the human psyche or mental impressions coming into the minds of select individuals (from extraterrestrials supposedly), for purposes as yet unknown, we think that persons who imagine UFOs or see them mentally when they don’t exist in any tangible, real form are in need therapy of a serious psychological kind.

However Mr. Graeber would disagree:

Although we might expect to make little headway towards resolving today’s UFO enigma by comparing it to past mysteries, we may, nevertheless, examine both present and past UFO events as being comprised of optically perceived images or imagery that occasionally have an extraordinary effect upon the individual(s) who either observe or come into close proximity with them.

Mr. Graeber’s views are both Freudian and Jungian.

But if UFOs or mother-ships resonate as a sublimated sexual symbol with someone, as Mr. Graeber delinates in his piece, we think that that person should hie themselves off to a psychiatrist immediately. They have serious terrestrial problems.

Nonetheless, Mr. Graeber’s views should have a hearing or reading; they are pondered sensibly and unsensationally.

He closes with this:

Perhaps we have discovered enough about the mythical, sexual, and marked psychic background of the god-ships to determine that their origin is most likely the human unconscious, and not some alien planet situated at the edge of the cosmos. For it seems highly unlikely that a visiting alien intelligence would be so human-like as to possess similar intrapsychical processes regarding the development of their technology, their exploratory aspirations, and their myth-making tendencies.

Not a view we espouse necessarily, but a cogent suggestion by Mr. Graeber.

RR

Adamski, Allingham, and UFO Propinquity

2011-08-30T00:45:00.000-04:00

George Adamski was a blatant charlatan, but one with charisma and some inventive flying saucer photographs and stories.

Flying Saucer Pictorial, Max Miller’s 1967 magazine, provided a segment of a Kodachrome 16 mm film that Adamski took, and which shows, as the magazine has it, two objects in the sky.

But the real object, that isn’t noted, is indicated at the arrow point in the reproduction here:

Then there is this shot of Adamski’s (in)famous flying saucer, which we all have seen somewhere, sometime:

What is interesting to me, is that Cedric Allingham (aka British astronomer, Patrick Moore) faked a flying saucer photo for the book Flying Saucer from Mars (which is being republished and will be reviewed by Nick Redfern), the fake saucer an almost identical replica of Adamski’s saucer:

How or why did Allingham/Moore do that? Perhaps Christopher Allen [CDA] can enlighten us, as he was one of the people who exposed Moore’s quirky hoax.

And finally, this juxtaposition of a photo by Adamski with one of the Trent/McMinnville UFO photos shows an almost identical flying disk. The Trent sighting and photo took place in 1950; while Adamski said his sighting and photo took place in 1951:

Note that Adamski’s “ship” has an engineering flaw: the craft has a slight chink in its rim, on the left side of the image. (Apparently, Mr. Adamski’s scissors slipped when he created the cut-out.)

What’s the point being made here, if there is one?

Adamski was imaginative and, as noted, inventive, to the extent that others, Allingham/Moore et al. emulated his creations.

Why Adamski’s chicken-brooder saucer became so iconic is beyond the scope of this writer, but it is interesting that Adamski’s concoctions (stories and photos) caught the imagination of the public, and still does, in some quarters.

One might conclude that Adamski was the progenitor of the ET idea that has infiltrated and consumed most followers and devotees of the UFO phenomenon, Stanton Friedman, among them.

And that’s my point: Adamski, as fraudulent as he was, created the flying saucer/UFO agenda [UFOs are ET craft] that we are stuck with to this day, at least some of us are……

Kevin Randle -- UFO researcher? Really?

2011-08-29T13:23:00.002-04:00

Here is an excerpt from a piece by Kevin D. Randle in UFO Report magazine, Spring 1975, entitled, Mysterious Clues Left Behind by Flying Saucers (Page 37):

Note the third paragraph, where Randle writes that "The military showed up in strength..."

Where's the substantiation, the citation that proves the military did, indeed, show up?

We have a number of other Randle articles, and many by Jerome Clark, which, in hindsight, indicate some sloppy reportage, and mind-sets that indicate a bias toward believability of accounts by anyone, anywhere when it comes to UFOs.

The questioning mind is absent by those fellows, at least, in their early incarnations as "ufologists."

Even Allen Hynek, who smothered the Mannor and Hillsdale flying saucer sightings in 1966 by attributing them to "swamp gas" fell for the faked 1967 Jaroslav photo seen here:

Hynek said that the "Analysis so far does not show any indication of an obvious hoax." [Flying Saucers Pictorial, 1967, Page 44].

The teenage Jaroslav brothers admitted, not long after, to making the "saucer" and faking the photograph.

Hynek was dismissed by reporters as unreliable after the 1966 "swamp gas" fiasco and he never regained credibility with news media after that episode.

He never regained credibility with us either.

We eschew the so-called noted ufologists because they've proven to be incompetent or just plain wrong, often back-tracking and making excuses for their earlier "nonsense."

One can forgive them, but one can't forget...their blunders and errant "research."

RR

UFOs: Past, Present, Future

2011-08-25T23:48:00.002-04:00

Wonders in the Sky by Jacques Vallee and Chris Aubeck have countless sightings that are replicated in modern UFO literature, with modern sightings sometimes providing photographic support.

For instance, Vallee and Aubeck provide this sighting [Number 417] on Page 306 of the paperback:

12 January 1836, Cherbourg, France – A “luminous body…two-thirds the size of the moon” was witnessed at 6:30 p.m. “Central to it there seemed to be a dark cavity.”

Here is a series of photos taken by George Stock of Passaic, New Jersey July 28th, 1952:

The UFO depicted mimics the Cherbourg sighting listed in Wonders…

(And note that the Stock UFO resembles, almost exactly, a few other UFOs photographed in the 1950s and 1960s:

One of the allegedly hoaxed Heflin photos

Anthony Bragalia thinks UFOs are shape-changers.

Wonders….has a number of sightings that indicate shape-changing; e.g., Item 371, Page 274

This photo, which I think is fake, from Anthony's Wanaque research shows a luminance that showed up in the other photos below:

The questionable 1954 Darbishire photo

A plethora of sightings listed in Wonders…also indicates luminance; e.g., Pages 55, 103, 114, 123, 195, 235, 252, 253, 266, 283, 298, 305, 330 343.

Anthony also notes UFOs that emit rays of lights, as in the (in)famous Wanaque photograph.

Wonders…also lists sightings where rays of light are emitted; e.g. Item 167 Page 141; Item 329 Page 253; Item 346 Page 261; Item 410 Page 303

Then we find a rather well-known UFO photo that emulates the vapor-trail of the alleged Aurora prototype:

Wonders…lists some old sightings that also precede, by witness observation, the Aurora residue; e. g., Item 89 Page 96

My point?

That “modern” sightings antedate very similar, almost exact sightings and peculiarities as noted by Vallee, Aubeck, and Bragalia’s interests, among others, emulate ancient or older sightings which seem to confirm that something with a pattern is at work when it comes to UFO phenomena.

What’s old is new again, apparently….

RR

Is Earth an alien zoo?

2011-08-24T12:56:00.001-04:00

A new study says that Earth is home to (approximately) 8.7 million species.

Click her for news-story

There has, almost from the beginning of the modern UFO era (1947), been a few hypothetical thrusts saying that Earth might be a zoo where species have been brought or created and dispersed for extraterrestrial purposes which remain totally hidden.

The idea may seem fanciful at first glance, but isn’t outside the realm of possibility,

The idea, along with the penal colony thesis, can be elaborated upon and made sensible when one examines the idea that an alien species from other worlds, should there be any, could very well use the Earth as a laboratory or park containing animals, plants, humans, insects, reptiles, and other elements of life.

This would explain the vast array of UFO visitations over the years, and supports the hypothesis that alien beings have taken a particular interest in the Earth as regards atomic or ecological devastation, both of which having the potential to destroy eons of lab work or eliminating an extraterrestrial “vacation venue.”

Earth could be the lab-source for species meant to be seeded throughout the galaxies or, at least, one of the lab-sources.

Wikipedia has a succinct review of the Alien zoo hypothesis ,which may be read by clicking HERE.

For me, the zoo idea is not as zany as many other hypotheses which have pummeled UFO devotees of the years.

What do you think?

RR

The statistical odds (and common sense) against UFO/ET visits

2011-08-20T11:48:00.001-04:00

Universe Today:

[There are] 200 to 400 billion stars in the Milky Way [alone]

{There are] 100 to 200 Billions galaxies in the visible or known universe with hundreds of billions of stars

An average galaxy contains between 1011 and 1012 stars. In other words, galaxies, on average have between 100 billion and 1 trillion numbers of stars

[Galaxies can be] small dwarf galaxies, with just 10 million or so stars, or they can be monstrous irregular galaxies with 10 trillion stars or more.
------------------------
NASA:

In 1999 the Hubble Space Telescope estimated that there were 125 billion galaxies in the universe, and recently with the new camera HST has observed 3,000 visible galaxies, which is twice as much as they observed before with the old camera. We're emphasizing "visible" because observations with radio telescopes, infrared cameras, x-ray cameras, etc. would detect other galaxies that are not detected by Hubble
--------------------------
Wiki Answers:

Based on current estimates, there are between 200 - 400 billion stars in our galaxy (The Milky Way).

There are possibly 100 billion galaxies in the Universe. So taking the average of our galaxy, gives approximately 3 x 1024 stars. So about 3 septillion. This has been equated to the same number of grains of sand that are on Earth.

One source (BBC) stated that there are about 1,000 stars to every grain of sand on Earth!! There are an estimated 100 to 200 billion galaxies.

So taking a conservative number of 100 billion stars per galaxy gives an approximate total of 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars. (Which is 10 sextillion)
-------------------------
Wikipedia:

Alpha Centauri is the closest star system to our Solar System. It lies about 4.37 light-years in distance, or about 41.5 trillion kilometres, 25.8 trillion miles or 277,600 AU.
------------------------------
With the information above, how can anyone, with an ounce of rationality, think that UFOs represent visitors from galaxies, far, far away, or even from the nearest star system to Earth?

The Universe, with its vast diversity and intriguing panoply of astronomical or cosmological entities (by which we mean stars, planet, moons et al., not living beings), offers any curious alien intelligence much better sources for exploration than Earth which, in the great scheme of things, is a backwater and insignificant cosmological element, no matter how hard humans try to think otherwise.

Even if an alien exploratory team stumbled upon Earth millennia ago, what would stir them to keep visiting for centuries or eons afterward?

Of course, some ET believers say Earth was seeded by alien visitors and they keep coming back to see how their humanoid garden is doing.

Or Earth is a penal colony or some sort or a zoo, and extraterrestrial aliens keep checking in or visiting as if this lonely, remote planet is an integral part of a special alien agenda.

The idea that UFOs, with their abundant sightings, represent extraterrestrial visitations in light of the statistical probabilities above which open the whole Universe to such visitations, is ludicrous on the face of it.

No wonder that UFO devotees are seen as cranks and weirdos. Their thought processes invite the opprobrium.

Addictive Ufologists

2011-08-17T07:44:00.001-04:00

What one characteristic is typical of virtually all UFO enthusiasts?

Hoarding, collecting, accumulating UFO material or sightings.

Ufologists just have to get their hands on sightings released by government agencies; that welter of UFO sightings gathered from pilots, military people, and various other members of the population, the general citizenry.

And UFO devotees have to collect the plethora of books about UFOs that show up rather regularly, along with magazines, news-clippings, and web-pages or internet items.

What do UFO mavens or ufologists do with this collection of UFO detritus? Nothing – nothing at all.

They merely hoard it, sometimes giving it a cursory view.

Only a few use the collected material for research or as a supplement to hypothetical ratiocination.

The process of gathering such materials is a kind of addiction, a pathology that is endemic to the subject matter.

It’s not like coin collecting, or stamp collecting or baseball card collecting, which have a monetary value of some kind. It’s just a need to have a pile of stuff related to the UFO phenomenon, as if having it gives the collector a kind of authority just because of the ownership.

The UFO mystery has always attracted people with maladapted personalities.

That, in itself, is a matter for study, but no one with psychiatric or sociologic bona fides gives a good goddam.

And the hoarding is essentially harmless. But there it is…..

N.B. Click here for a news-clip on addiction

UFOs: a lot of data; a lot of nothing

2011-08-16T13:18:00.001-04:00

I’m fascinated by the accounts in the Vallee/Aubeck book, Wonders in the Sky, from the earliest of times, in which “beings” (often clothed in white garments) were reported seen in the presence of strange celestial objects [Pages 35, 37, 39, 40, 46, 47, 51, 52, 54, 57, 58, 62, 63, 67, 71, 72, 75, 77, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 93, 95, 103, 105, 106, ff.]

(Remember, Zamora’s Socorro craft was accompanied by beings clothed in white, as were beings allegedly spotted outside Woomera, Australia, which some, us included, tied to the Solway Firth “spaceman” photo. And there are other sightings in which entities were garbed in shiny or white clothing or uniforms.)

And a look at cave art also raises the specter of strange beings mingling among early mankind (used by Alien Astronaut devotees for their hypothesis).

Then, of course, we all have access to hundreds, thousands actually, of UFO stories that have accumulated since 1947, and appear in books, television, and the internet.

But none of this data or information has taken us to an explanation of what flying saucers or UFOs were or are.

That dastardly skeptic Phil Klass said none of us would ever get an explanation for UFOs in our lifetime. His “prophecy” seems to be accurate, at least so far.

My point is that we have the data, lots of it, but we are nowhere near an explanation of what UFOs are or what their raison d’être might be.

And the chase has become wearying for some: Paul Kimball and a few fellows here, plus others who have dropped off the UFO merry-go-round.

Why Roswell remains an active source for UFO mavens. That incident had aspects of concretebility: recovered debris, alien bodies (supposedly), credible or near-credible witness accounts, an official Army Air Corps release, newspaper stories of a captured disk, and the status of a hardened myth.

Roswell is just as evanescent and non-determinant as the data mentioned above, but it, at least for the UFO die-hards, has elements that seem to be provable if one can just break through an alleged government/military cover-up.

However, in a final analysis, no amount of data or information with a UFO tinge is going to solve the mystery.

The phenomenon remains elusive, and Phil Klass’s assessment also remains intact.

RR

UFOs and the Death of God [Redux]

2011-08-13T11:37:00.003-04:00

Reading through Wonders in the Sky by Jacques Vallee and Chris Aubeck [Penguin Group, NY, 2009] one is struck how most of those sightings from antiquity through the Middle Ages up to the beginning of the 20th Century have a direct or tangential connection to persons or enterprises that have a religious patina.

As aficionados of UFOs know, modern sightings, mainly from 1945 on, are secular in nature; that is, UFOs or flying saucers were not attendant or dependent upon a religious overlay.

Why is that?

I conjecture that UFOs had an umbilical connection to those events and people who believed in God and practiced the Faith, no matter if what the denomination or premise what was: Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Pagan, Mayan, Christianity, et alii.

But after the Death of God – and I believe that God died, not metaphorically as Nietzsche proposed, but actually – UFOs became attracted to humankind as a symbolic phenomenon, with meaning that has yet to be discerned.

UFOs and God is Dead -- 2009

Carl Jung’s magnificently clear rumination on the nature and reality of God in Answer to Job outlines how God, in a fit of divine despair, about how humans had been treated by Him and the vicissitudes of His creation, became incarnate, as Jesus Christ to atone for His (God’s) misbehavior, and ultimately die as a personal -- shall I say suicidal? – retribution to assuage the divine guilt.

However, that atonement, by partial Deicide, was short lived, and God’s aloof, distant, or hidden nature [See Richard Friedman’s The Hidden Face of God] brought about, in modern times, one of the most horrific episodes against humanity, and a chosen element of that humanity: The Holocaust.

In that human catastrophe and its aftermath, God died -- He either did Himself in (a total act of Decide) or died of a divine heartbreak; either way, God Himself – not his surrogate (Son) but God Himself died in h mid-1940s A.D.

Thus UFOs, whatever they were or are were transmogrified by the Divine denouement, but destined to intervene in human affairs by an eternal mandate of God, had to continue the “mission” and secular sightings became the norm, and the religious connection was set aside or lost from that point on.

This doesn’t explain, admittedly, what UFOs are, their essential makeup, nor their purpose. But it may explain by Vallee’s and Aubeck’s litany of ancient UFO sightings have been replaced by a litany of secular UFO sightings.

To augment my bizarre thesis, I suggest readers here check out an article in the current New Yorker: Is That All There Is? by James Woods, about Secularism [August 15/22 issue, Page 87 ff.]

RR

Wonders in the Sky (and nonsense in the book)

2011-08-07T11:15:00.001-04:00

David J. Hufford, Professor Emeritus of Humanities and Psychiatry, Penn State College of Medicine and Adjunct Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania provides the forward to Jacques Vallee’s and Chris Aubeck’s book (pictured above).

Professor Hufford is erudite and insightful.

Here are some examples from his Foreward:

I [Hufford] was pursuing the heretical idea that folk belief traditions might actually incorporate accurate observations…

[Vallee in his books, Anatomy of a Phenomenon and Passport to Magonia] recognized the difference between the core phenomenology of [UFO] reports and the local language and interpretations that clothed that core in traditional accounts.

Criticizing conventional UFO investigators for “confusing appearance and reality” [Vallee] said that “The phenomenon has stable, invariant features….But we have also had to note carefully the chameleonlike character of the secondary attributes of the sightings.

The willingness of [Vallee and Aubeck] to cast a very wide net, andn ot to allow the particular cultural interpretations of events to limit their view, offers us a remarkable opportunity to seek patterns that may lead to new understandings.

Those with a view of these matters narrowly focused on a particular interpretation, especially the extraterrestrial idea, may be annoyed by the mixing of the aerial and the religious, the political and the mystical and more.

The problem with “spaceship” is not that it is anomalous; it is that it is an interpetation rather than an observation.

But Vallee and Aubeck undercut these judicious remarks by Professor Hufford by making these comments in their Introduction:

We will show that unidentified flying objects have had a major [sic] impact not only on popular culture but on our history, on our religion…

…the fact would remain that an unexplained phenomenon has played and continues to play a fantastically important role in shaping our belief systems, the way we view our history and the role of science.

…their [UFOs] impact has shaped human civilization in important ways.

Vallee’s and Aubeck’s hubris astounds.

UFOs have never had a “major” impact on humanity or civilization or history or religion.

The phenomenon has always been a remote and peripheral aspect of societal life, of human existence.

UFOs, today, are as inconsequential to humanity and society as a whole as they have always been, despite Vallee’s insistence that UFOs have been and are integral to life on Earth.

Vallee’s view is egocentric, megalomanic almost.

His view typifies that of those, generally, who are absorbed by the pheonomenon.

Irritated by Stephen Hawking’s postion vis a vis UFOs – “I am discounting reports of UFOs. Why would they appear only to cranks and weirdos?” – Vallee and Aubeck don’t get it:

The persons seeing UFOs are not cranks and weirdos. Hawking is wrong. The people who study UFOs are the cranks and weirdos – Vallee and Aubeck among them.

RR

The Roswell Addiction

2011-07-28T12:15:00.001-04:00

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

2011-07-25T11:58:00.001-04:00

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

2011-07-23T14:54:00.001-04:00

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

2011-07-22T09:40:00.001-04:00

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

2011-07-19T16:42:00.004-04:00

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)

2011-07-19T16:42:00.001-04:00

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

Quantum UFOs

2011-07-19T11:01:00.001-04:00

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

2011-07-18T13:54:00.000-04:00

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

2011-07-18T10:11:00.001-04:00

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

2011-07-17T12:29:00.004-04:00

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

2011-07-17T08:39:00.001-04:00

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

2011-07-16T16:20:00.004-04:00

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

2011-07-16T16:07:00.001-04:00

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

2011-07-10T11:53:00.001-04:00

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

2011-07-08T09:46:00.003-04:00

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.

What has happened to the phenomenon? Why the alterations in appearance and behavior?

UFO Conspiracies

2011-07-07T08:31:00.001-04:00

A paper on the [UFO] conspiracy mind-set -- a PDF

A New Ufology?

2011-07-06T19:28:00.001-04:00

Click here for an interesting take on a movement to create a new ufology

Magnetic-fields of UFOs, including Paul Kimball's favorite sighting: the RB-47 event of 1957

2011-07-05T11:10:00.002-04:00

Click here for abstract

The Paranormal Priority: UFOs?

2011-06-20T16:03:00.001-04:00

For those bewildered by or obsessed with things at the fringe of reality, do such things as Sasquatch/Bigfoot/Yeti matter, or Nessie and Champ, or chupacabras, or ghosts?

Why do UFOs have more import, in our estimation, than those other “entities” listed above?

UFOs have a longevity that the listed items do not have.

What UFOs are or may be seem to have more importance in the great scheme of things.

UFOs have paranormal cachet that Bigfoot doesn’t, and certainly more than chupacabras have.

Even “ghosts” don’t impact observers in the same way that UFOs do.

And the Loch Ness monster or Lake Champlain’s Champ don’t provide any great ripples in the paranormal panoply.

UFOs have a cosmological underpinning or a metaphysical ambiance of some kind, deservedly or not.

If UFOs are extraterrestrial in origination, that is very important, for all the obvious reasons: what’s the ET culture? The intelligence? The theology? Et cetera.

If UFOs are an example of someone or something playing with the evolution or mind of mankind, that too is very important. (Need we tell you why?)

If UFOs are merely the fallout of secret military aircraft testings, that isn’t too important but it would quell the ongoing mystery assuredly.

UFOs may be observational trickery or real substantive craft, which is what we believe them to be.

Either way, they present a phenomenon that ranks up there with some of the best mysteries of history and time, like who really parted the Red Sea, or did Jesus really rise up after his crucifixion (and if so, why), or what caused Hitler’s megalomania, or does the Universe have a edge, or can we travel back or forward in time.

As a matter of fancy, UFOs may have something to do with time-travel, whereas Bigfoot doesn’t, nor Nessie, nor those other elements of the imagination.

UFOs get a priority because at the heart of the phenomenon lies a meaningful essence, it seems to us.

Time spent on the other paranormal or Fortean elements is just a waste of time, thought, and effort.

UFOs go to the top of our list of mysteries but do not replace more important issues, such as man’s inhumanity to man, or is God truly dead?

The pursuit of UFOs is, after all, only a hobby of sorts……

How Should We Really Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence? by Dr. Colin Ridyard,

2011-06-19T10:39:00.001-04:00

An interesting, intelligent paper, with analyses of some UFO sightings.

Click here for the PDF

Who or What?

2011-06-19T10:09:00.001-04:00

Underlying the whole discussion about UFOs lies the question of who or what promulgates the phenomenon.

A premise needs to be established, and a paper entitled Who or What Built the Universe? provides a premise that leads, or could, to a premise that should be created to address the UFO phenomenon.

Click here for a WORD document of the paper

Click here for a web-page version of the paper

A Rand Paper from 1968, reviewing the UFO status

2011-06-16T23:34:00.001-04:00

This paper, released in 2000 for DTIC staffers, is a RAND report from 1968 reviewing the UFO phenomenon to that date [1968].

It's an overview of what was going on inside government agencies about UFO sightings.

Click here for the PDF

Those Mysterious Airships of the 1890s

2011-06-15T13:18:00.005-04:00

A wonderful article about the phantom airships of the 1890s by Rudolph Umland appeared in The Prairie Schooner [Winter 1966/1967, Page 302 ff.]

You can access a WORD document of the article by clicking HERE

Or you can access the article as a web-page (using any browser) by clicking HERE

UFO Abductions: The Explanations

2011-06-12T09:43:00.004-04:00

Gerald Eberlein's paper on the UFO abduction phenomenon presents an academic take on alleged "kidnappings" by extraterrestrials.

Click here for the PDF

UFOs & Aliens: Is There Anybody Out There?

2011-06-10T09:55:00.004-04:00

This book, edited by Michael Pye and Kirsten Dalley, from New Page Books [A Division of The Career Press, NJ], didn’t inspire me to read it when I saw it advertised at the Anomalist web-site.

But I’m sure glad I did get a copy. It’s full of pleasant surprises, about UFOs, Roswell, and other UFO episodes.

Some of ufology’s BIG names appear in the contents: Stanton Friedman, Nick Pope, Erich von Daniken, Micah Hanks, Don Schmitt, and Nick Redfern among them.

I’d usually skip over Stan Friedman’s ruminations on UFOs – he’s too ET oriented for my taste in UFOs – and essays in this book are about the U.S. government’s UFO secrecy, A Cosmic Watergate, as you know, but he also addresses Star Travel [Page 157 ff.], for which the epithet “expert” applies. Friedman presents an overview of stellar travel, which is insightful.

Don Schmitt’s essay, Roswell in Perspective: The Human Response to an Extraordinary Event, will spook skeptics, if they only note Roswell in the essay’s title, but Mr. Schmitt’s overview is full of intriguing detail, even for Roswell cognoscenti, and one element made a point with me: that residents of Corona and Roswell kept caches of Brazel’s debris, hidden in all kinds of nooks and crannies. (I still think, that if there’s some truth to the Roswell story, someone must have kept photos or pieces of tangible artifacts secreted away. Someone must have had the presence of mind to squirrel away things that the military was allegedly gathering to maintain its cover-up, if there was a cover-up. Mr. Schmitt touches on the idea.)

Nick Redfern provides an essay on the Kingman crash, which has been resurrected lately in the UFO discussion arena. But Nick, as is his wont, provides an interesting element involving a contactee, Truman Bethurum. And Nick also gives a précis of the story that contains material that most UFO aficionados don’t know.

John White presents The UFO Problem: Toward a Theory of Everything, which is a cogent categorization of what UFOs may or may not be.

Nick Pope does his X-Files metaphor, while Kathleen Marden touches on Alien Abduction.

Micah Hanks deals with UFOs and Invisibility, and others write about doubt [Gordon Chism] , alien intervention [Jim Moroney], the military’s effort to kill the Roswell story [Tom Carey], and what UFOs might be, other than ET craft [Marie Jones and Larry Flaxman]. Erich von Daniken does his ancient alien thing with a nod to hybridization. (I’m a von Daniken fan.)

The book turned out to be enlightening to me, and will to you also, even if you think you’re a well-read UFO maven.

The book can be bought at booksellers, like Amazon, Powells, Anomalist, and at these web-sites too: careerpress.com and newpagebooks,com

Get a copy for your UFO library. You’ll not be disappointed, even if you’re a hardened skeptic.

RR

A book you must find, buy, and read!

2011-06-09T09:35:00.001-04:00

This book is so full of important, interesting material, mostly from the period of 1947-1950, that it is essential for the serious UFO researcher.

Click here for the back cover, which recounts what's inside the book

The photos, news-clippings, and some hitherto unknown flying saucer information make this an exemplary source for UFO aficionados who want to establish a premise for UFO sightings today.

We recommend the book highly. (It's from our collection and not a review-sent copy.)

Life, death, life and UFOs: The witness failure(s)

2011-06-02T18:20:00.001-04:00

The book, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience by Pim van Lommel, M.D. provides extensive data and information about the so-called near death phenomenon or the NDE (near-death experience).

The author covers virtually everything about NDEs, including an extensive account of Quantum Mechanics in relation to the experience.

Most of you have read or heard the accounts of persons who died and “came back.”

What I want to zero in on are a few of the descriptions that the dying or dead witnesses provide; namely, the beautiful music and beautiful flowers they experience, and how this relates to UFO reports, as they has been presented by persons who’ve experienced that phenomenon, also.

Every NDE account that Dr. Lommel provides from the literature and his own accumulated reports, from his practice or that of colleagues, tells of the dead/dying person’s hearing “beautiful music” [sic] and seeing “beautiful flowers” [sic] on their way to a blissful landscape after transitioning that tunnel with a light at the end of it.

But no one, and I mean no one, has reported exactly what kind of music or what kind of flowers they experienced.

Were the flowers gladiolas, petunias, roses, dandelions?

Was the music classical, operatic, chorale, jazz, rock, even hip-hop?

No one has ever provided a definitive account or identification of the music or flowers.

Did no musicologist, opera buff, composer, or musician have a NDE?

Did no horticulturist, avid gardener, or flower enthusiast ever have a NDE?

That is, why does no one provide an exact, precise descriptive of the music or flowers, if the experience is a real one and not a metaphor of the mind?

Now, this also applies to those who witness UFOs, in the sky or up close and personal.

Has ever an aeronautical engineer seen a UFO and can provide a description of the design that corresponds to his or her expertise as an engineer of aircraft?

Has ever a chemical engineer or metallurgist provided a description of the smell or patina of a UFO that has appeared near them?

Has a pilot ever – really – provided an actual account of what a UFO did in the context of its flight; that is, has anyone with flying acumen given an account that explains or shows the proclivities of flight by a UFO, in ways that indicate they actually took in the experience in a way that was or is real – Kenneth Arnold, Gorman, or Lt. Coyne, notwithstanding?

No UFO report by a witness of a UFO has ever provided a forensic description of what was seen or experienced; the details come after the fact by UFO investigators and/or “researchers.”

No UFO report has ever been definitive, in portraying what a UFO or flying saucer was constructed of in essence.

Yes, Scully gives details that resonate in his account of the Aztec crashed flying disks, but that’s second or third-hand information, and concocted as most UFO mavens think.

But no UFO witness, with credentials that count – engineering, chemical, aeronautical – has given a report that provides actuality – no one.

This means, on the face of it, that either NDE’s and UFOs are chimeras, or that witnesses to either are incompetent or without credentials that allow them to be professional in their reportage.

UFO Review

2011-06-02T09:24:00.003-04:00

Esteemed British publisher Stuart Miller produced some of the finest compilations of UFO material found anywhere.

His UFO Review was a fount of interesting, insightful takes on the UFO phenomenon and its mavens.

While Mr. Miller has gone subliminal since the failure of his exemplary Alien Worlds magazine, we still think of him fondly.

Click here for a PDF of a UFO Review issue with items by and about Nick Redfern (Saucer Spies), The Scully/Aztec "hoax" (we believe the story), and a plethora of other things that you'll find worth your browsing time (cartoons, UFO people, and other fascinating stories.

Enjoy....

The Flying Saucer from Mars and CDA

2011-05-30T21:47:00.001-04:00

Back in the day I thought that this book by “Cedric Allingham” corroborated the Adamski alien contacts and story:

Here are the Adamski-like photos that Allingham purportedly took of a flying saucer that allegedly came fro Mars:

But the story was a hoax, concocted, for some bizarre reason, by respected and credentialed British astronomer, Patrick Moore:

And who was the journalist who unmasked the hoaxer and the exposed the hoax? Our favorite skeptical thinker, Christopher Allen, known here and in the UFO community as CDA.

Click here for the story

CDA has cachet with us and with those who like clear thought, gentlemanly argumentation, and skepticism in its revered and best sense.

So when you read his comments here and elsewhere, take a moment to appreciate his bent of mind and research acumen.

Nick Redfern's New Book: The REAL Men in Black

2011-05-26T10:20:00.001-04:00

Nick Redfern's new book, The REAL Men in Black, is about to appear on internet and store book shelves....get it when it does.

Nick has provided a publicity-offered page from the book. Click HERE for that page.

(Image from UFO Era)

A Socorro-like Sighting (in the same time-frame/locale)

2011-05-26T09:37:00.001-04:00

Artist's (wrong) rendition of the La Madera sighting

26 April 1964 12:30 La Madera, New Mexico, USA

A bright, metallic, egg-shaped object was seen on the ground.

At 12:30 p.m. Orlando Gallegos observed a bright, metallic, egg-shaped object about 70 meters away, on the ground, north of La Madera, New Mexico . Blue flames appeared to circle the base of the machine, which was silent and about the length of a telephone pole. Scorch marks and four imprints were found, according to Police Capt. Martin Vigil.

Also on the same day, a thirty-foot wide silver, inverted bathtup-shaped UFO was sighted near Truth of Consequences, New Mexico by a Mr. Mitropolis. It was seen a quarter of a mile to the east, flew up over a mountain, then down out of sight near the Caballo Reservoir. Orlando Gallegos observed a bright, metallic, egg-shaped object about 70 meters away, on the ground, north of La Madera. Blue flames appeared to circle the base of the machine, which was silent and about the length of a telephone pole.

Scorch marks and four imprints were found, according to Police Capt. Martin Vigil. An object was observed. Occupants of the craft were seen. Ground traces were found. Animal reactions to the object were reported.

One blue-metallic ball, about 20 feet across, around 300 feet away, was observed by one male 35-year-old witness at a ranch for over one minute (Gallegos). No sound was heard.

Source

N.B. This sighting either confirms the lunar-landing hypothesis -- the lander being tested in other New Mexico locales (a bit far-fetched) or Zamora's craft made other appearances or landings, indicating something more than a lander was involved.

Socorro Recap

2011-05-26T08:20:00.000-04:00

A site that most of you may be familiar with but should re-visit is the Dave Thomas site, which provides a cogent recap of the explanations for Lonnie Zamora's Socorro UFO sighting of 1964.

Mr. Thomas writes that Zamora saw a lunar-landing test. (We agree)

But check out Dave Thomas' reasoning by clicking HERE

For us, the Socorro insignia/symbol that Zamora drew, which has been flummoxed by Stanford's intrusion into the episode, is the "smoking gun" which will explain who or what is responsible for the Socorro sighting.

Nick Redfern still seethes....

2011-05-25T15:00:00.000-04:00

Nick Redfern is still brooding over that Jacobsen farce -- Area 51.

Here he presents an old view of his and a book that he likes.

Confining our blogs....

2011-05-25T10:50:00.000-04:00

Today, Wednesday, May 25th, 2011, comments to this blog were not automatically sent to us for moderation. I had to go into our e-mail service and retrieve them, which allowed me to scrutinize responses more judiciously than usual, and without them being sampled by other here.

I continue to be distressed by the slovenly thought-processes that are exampled by what purports to be critical thinking about our postings.

In dialogue with other bloggers and friends, I’ve decided that we shall confine comments here to those that reflect intellectual, open-minded rumination, and not knee-jerk response to things written by us and others, which torment an ingrained belief-system or narrow-minded, non-objective cogitation.

There are several (many, actually) commenters we look forward to hearing from but a few that irk us with their bigoted, snotty, unthinking commentary.

From this point on, more so than our usual fascistic deletion of comments that we don’t like, we’ll not be approving comments from some who visit here.

We have a respect for some of you -- your intellectual proclivities, your open-minded objectivity, even-handed skepticism, and your genteel approach to our oblique and beleaguered postings, some of which I agree are over the top.

Your comments will continue to be registered here.

But if you send us a comment that doesn’t appear, and it’s not the fault of our blogging service, you know where you stand with us.

So don’t go away angry…just go away…..

RR

The Kingman UFO Case

2011-05-23T12:49:00.000-04:00

Nick Redfern indulges himself in the notorious Kingman UFO "crash."

Read what Nick has to say about the event by clicking HERE

The Robert Taylor 1979 UFO Encounter

2011-05-23T11:36:00.002-04:00

On November 9th, 1979, Robert Taylor, a forester in Scotland, had a weird encounter with a strange “craft” in Dechmont Woods near Livingston, Scotland.

The incident is often referred to as the Livingston Incident or the Dechmont Woods Encounter and can be read about at UFO Casebook:

UFO Casebook

Or at Wikipedia:

Wikipedia

And here is a link to a YouTube video about the incident:

YouTube

What interests us, besides the nature of the alleged encounter, is that the described “craft” is highly reminiscent of a Hughes prototype for a lunar or Mars capsule to house astronauts:

And here is a graphic of another UFO sighting in Scotland:

And a representation of a Scotland event in 1964 (around the time of the Lonnie Zamora/Socorro sighting, which we think was a sighting of a Hughes lunar-landing prototype):

A CIA operative, Bosco Nedlelcovic, who communicated with us in the 1970s, told us that the CIA was engaged in staged flying saucer events – The Villas Boas case (as outlined in Nick Redfern’s book, Contactees, Chapter 20) and the infamous Scoriton incident in England (covered here in an earlier blog post).

We conjecture that the Robert Taylor episode was a CIA-staged event, using the Hughes prototypical craft, which was ensconced and tested in the British Isles in the 1960s/1970s time-frame.

Fate magazine’s account in 1980 outlines the event in a way that corroborates, we think, our Hughes/CIA view:

An intriguing, subliminal UFO incident (from 1968)

2011-05-18T23:39:00.001-04:00

A 1968 NASA sponsored flight to the Artic to film and study the Aurora Borealis ended up providing an obscure, on-the-ground UFO sighting.

A reporter, Sally Remaley, with the expedition spotted what seemed to be a line of flying saucers on the ground.

Here is an excerpt of her account, taken from the FATE magazine piece, as provided by UFO BC, a superb site for obscure UFO sightings, past and present:

“But when I glanced out of the window I quickly forgot about being cold. Far below on the icy surface were three round glowing lights arranged in a straight line. Each light was huge; all were the same size and perfectly round, they were luminous, glowing with an inner white light completely different from any other thing we had seen in the Arctic.

These lights were so different, in fact, that at first I just stared, fascinated, trying to memorize everything about them before they disappeared behind us.

They were not at all like lights of any settlement or village I've seen from the air and I have flown a lot. Settlement and village lights are bright like stars; these were softly luminous and glowing. They were not like lights on a boat, ship or any familiar flying craft. They looked like flying saucers landed on the ice. And if that's what they were they were huge ones.”

Here is her drawing of what she saw:

The ground saucers seemed to form an arrow, pointing to what?

Click here for the full account by Ms. Remaley

For us, it’s this kind of low-profile UFO sighting, unsmudged by UFO mavens, that might provide clues to what the phenomenon is.

The Need for Metaphysics and Common Sense (in ufology)

2011-05-15T18:15:00.001-04:00

In the preliminary stages of change in the study of UFOs, sparked by Paul Kimball, Nick Redfern, and us (among a few others: Moody, CDA, Gilles Fernandez, et al.) there has to be some quiding principles of and for thought.

Mr. Kimball, at his blog -- The Other Side of Truth -- is addressing some of the issues for the new ufology.

And, for our part, we keep the ball rolling with a paper by James Williams that provides an exegesis of Alfred North Whitehead's thoughts on common sense in Process and Realty.

The paper, for those with intellectual stamina, outlines how metaphysics and life can be enhanced by proper thinking and observation.

Click here for Willams' paper (a PDF)

Ufology, a term we hate and hope to see discarded in future, and the study of UFOs need a cataclysmic paradigm shift.

Kimball, Redfern, and the skeptics, Moody, Christopher Allen, Fernandez, along with our small part are at the forefront, we hope, of a major change in how UFOs are discussed, studied, commented on, and viewed by media, academe, science, and the public.

This posting is a small step in that direction.

The Socorro craft (and other UFOs) "explained"

2011-05-09T16:24:00.001-04:00

Click here for a (technical) paper that references the Socorro craft and other UFOs, with an explanation of their propulsion et cetera.

This is a pro-UFO paper for those who desire something scientific and/or technical to bolster their views, about UFOs, including the "mysterious" Socorro craft reportedly seen by Officer Lonnie Zamora in 1964.

The Men In Black!

2011-05-09T11:22:00.000-04:00

Nick Redfern's book about those mysterious men in black is about to appear (in June).

Click here for some pre-arrival information

The Morpheus/Socorro Lander

2011-05-06T09:34:00.001-04:00

This insignia is an evolved symbol, just as the Morpheus Lander is an evolved Lunar Lander, derived from the initial Hughes Aircraft designed lander that accounts for, in our estimation, the Zamora sighting in Socorro in 1964.

Morpehus is on Facebook -- click here

The "official web-site may be found by clicking here

We'll have much more about this upcoming....

The Socorro Lander/UFO?

2011-05-05T15:04:00.001-04:00

Jeff Ritzmann of Paratopia found this image at boingboing.net.

It reminded him, and now me, of Zamora's UFO.

Note the insignia on the left, back side....

A Socorro Confusion (that flummoxes researchers)

2011-05-01T10:39:00.001-04:00

This symbol is ostensibly the “insignia” that Lonnie Zamora saw and drew (for the public) which was on the UFO craft he reportedly observed in Socorro, New Mexico in 1964:

This is the “actual” symbol seen by Zamora, according to Allen Hynek, Ray Sanford, and Air Force files – it has been duplicated by an observer of a later UFO sighting, as outlined below the image (here):

We’ve added the horizontal lines, to approximate what officer Zamora saw and drew, but which was kept secret, supposedly to prevent hoaxers from using it for mischief.

The symbol/insignia that Zamora provided, and seen in 1973 by Gary Chopic on a triangular UFO, was an insignia used to identify a U.S. military prototype we believe, and confirms, for us, that Zamora’s UFO was a test vehicle of Earth manufacture in 1964.

Keeping Zamora’s original, true drawing sub rosa has prevented UFO researchers from reaching the same conclusion, and has allowed the false assumption by UFO mavens (Jerry Clark, for example) that Socorro is one of the best UFO sightings on record.

This subterfuge is part and parcel of the UFO story: persons and agencies holding back information and details that could clarify and even explain, perhaps, what UFO are.

Why does the government becloud UFO sightings and information? One can guess.

Why do UFO researchers becloud UFO material? To adopt a façade of illuminated secrecy and alchemical-like mystery. But that practice has only made the study of UFOs more daunting and difficult for those who would like to use scientific-like methodology and/or forensics to get at the UFO enigma.

For us this means that older, classic UFO sightings have to be re-examined or scrapped, and new sightings pursued without all the convoluted clutter and devious detritus that has accreted to UFO sightings of the past (by flawed “ufologists”).

We hope you agree….

Quantum Computing and UFOs

2011-04-28T08:58:00.001-04:00

The New Yorker magazine has an article in its May 2nd, 2011 issue that may be applicable to the study of UFOs: Dream Machine by Rivka Galchen, Page 34 ff.

David Deutsch, who wrote The Fabric of Reality and The Beginning of Infinity, may not be interested in UFOs per se, but he does provide insights about quantum mechanics, computing, physics and science, generally, which could be used by serious UFO researchers to address that ongoing enigma.

Deutsch is the major contributor to the idea of quantum computing, which he suggests can address the Multiple Worlds/Universes hypothesis, while providing clarification of quantum’s theories of superposition and entanglement, that provide a UFO connection perhaps.

If some of you are inclined to conjecture, intellectually, about the UFO mystery, you would do well to read the New Yorker piece. It will provide grist for imaginative ruminations.

Frankenstein's Monster and Roswell

2011-04-20T10:19:00.001-04:00

Christopher Allen [CDA], a Roswell skeptic and the story’s most intellectual debunker, often points out that Roswell was dead almost immediately after it came to light in 1947.

And he’s right, of course.

The headline(s), touting a captured flying disk, moved from the front pages of newspapers to those newspapers’ morgues, within hours of the original outing.

Roswell’s flying saucer incident remained moribund for thirty years, until it was resurrected by a few opportunistic writers and UFO “researchers” – including Stanton Friedman, Charles Berlitz, William Moore, Kevin Randle, and a few others.

The story was dead until those mad men raised it from the grave in the late 1970s.

And ever since, the original story has been accreted or enhanced by a slew of UFO mavens, among them David Rudiak, a full-blown Roswell extraterrestrial supporter/believer.

Christopher Allen’s scenario of a dead story brought to life by men with an agenda to “prove” extraterrestrial visitors crashed near Roswell reminds this writer of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s gothic tale Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus.

In the Shelley story, as you know, a body is created by Dr. Frankenstein putting together a creature from dead body parts, some human, some not.

Frankenstein comes to loathe his creation, just as some UFO investigators [Kevin Randle?] have come to loathe their initial Roswell ET support.

But the creature – Roswell – lives on imbued with a life that isn’t easily snuffed out, no matter how hard intelligent people like CDA try to kill it.

The Roswell creature is composed of all kinds of mouldering additions, each with a history and one-time life, but none salient as a living, true experience, only alive now because of their creative addition to a form that was dead but is now alive by alchemical-like machinations.

Killing Roswell is as daunting as it is in the original story and every film or story that has followed Ms. Shelley’s 1818 tale.

Real Contactees?

2011-04-19T11:42:00.002-04:00

A man, Wilbur J Wilkinson, provided this script, claiming it was from a race using the moon as a way-station for its people from the planet Maser.:

Here’s the almost unknown story as recounted by Jerome Clark in one of his books:

Hunrath and Wilkinson account

In the script above, nothing registers, except the word Enlil, which represents, in Sumerian “theology” the Lord of the Air and Lord of the Command (whose mother was Ki).

Yes, the story is goofy on the face of it, but the disappearance of the two men, like the mysterious disappearance of pilot Fredrick Valentich, is intriguing.

Valentich YouTube video

The contactee stories, while mostly fictional, should not be dismissed out of hand.

There may be a truth or a reality inside them, somewhere….

Crashed Roswell Flying Saucer(s)? Not so fast...

2011-04-16T11:15:00.001-04:00

Paul Kimball has addressed the “crashed flying saucer” scenario of Roswell several times, most recently during a Kevin Smith radio show (Wednesday, 4/15/11) and at his blog, The Other Side of Truth.

Mr. Kimball’s thesis, if we understand him correctly, is that it seems unlikely that hypothetical extraterrestrial beings, able to traverse vast reaches of the Universe, time, or other dimensions would end up crashed on Earth (near Roswell) because of a mishap.

Kimball’s view makes sense, and counters the idea posed by Anthony Bragalia (here at this blog, just below) and ourselves (also here and elsewhere) that an unfortunate confluence of events brought down a flying disk that was recovered, perhaps, at or near Roswell.

Indeed, how could an interstellar ship escape all the dynamic vicissitudes of the Universe and then end up on the desert ground of New Mexico?

Mr. Bragalia presents a well-reasoned explanation in his blog posting (below), but his conjecture flies in the face of Mr. Kimball’s contrary assessment.

One can suggest that extraterrestrial beings may have come from a planet or world where such things as lightning, radar, or meteorological maelstroms do not exist and they encountered an environment that was totally foreign to them.

(This begs the question, of course, about their reconnoitering acumen or preliminary evaluation of Earth.)

Time travelers would know about Earth’s weather patterns or its radar facilities.

Inter-dimensional travelers, on the other hand, would not, and may come from a dimensional existence that has physics totally different from ours.

Visitors from galaxies far, far away would hardly make such frequent stops at Earth, letting all the other wonders of the Universe go unvisited, as we’ve argued elsewhere.

And if they should make Earth a continual stopping point, would they do so in craft so flimsy that crashes are an inevitability?

Mr. Kimball adopts the reasonable view, but does accept the possibility of a (Mac Tonnies) crypto-terrestrial crash.

We accept that something unusual happened near Roswell in 1947, something possibly extraterrestrial or, more reasonably (for us), something involving Earth’s military arm, such as a test flight gone wrong or a missile/balloon mishap that has become configured by a contrived extraterrestrial mythology, engineered by the likes of guys named Schmitt, Moore, Friedman, Randle, Berlitz, et al.

Either way, Paul Kimball’s assessment that a crash of an advanced extraterrestrial craft seems highly improbable, and unlikely goes to common sense which is in short supply amongst UFO aficionados

UFO and abduction antecedents: The Betty Hill account

2011-04-08T14:02:00.000-04:00

That there are precedents for flying saucers and alien abduction-medical procedures is a given.

Here are three, from just before the 1940s onslaught of UFO events:

From 1908

From 1935

From the 1930s

How memory clasps on to such images is covered in the psychological literature as you know. For instance, items seen or experienced, as those above, reside in memory and are recalled when associative material is suggested. The problem in retrieval is that a confluence of memory alters or distorts the attempted retrieval item, and it is remembered with all the (similar) accoutrements that have surrounded it over the years. [Psychology Today, CRM Books, Del Mar, California, 1970, Page 347 ff.]

...memory seems to evolve over time. Items [are] not lost or recovered at random. Rather, material that was more foreign to the subject, or lacked sequence, or was
stated in unfamiliar terms, [is] more likely to be lost or changed substantially in both syntax and meaning. [The hippocampus and declarative memory: cognitive mechanisms and neural codes by Howard Eichenbaum, 2001]

and is never accurate:

According to much of the recent psychological literature on memory, Bartlett
should be credited with the insight that remembering can never be accurate
but is, instead, more or less of a distortion. [MISREMEMBERING BARTLETT: A STUDY IN SERIAL REPRODUCTION by James Ost and Alan Costall]

For example, here’s how we conjectured, early on at this blog (in the archived postings) Betty Hill’s “star map.”

We suggested that she recalled, under hypnosis, a map that hung in her place of employment. This is that map:

When she was hypnotized, she recalled and drew this now (infamous?) map:

Betty Hill grasped from her Long Term Memory, an image that meshed with the story she was endeavoring to relate.

Why the map at all? We surmise that Betty Hill has an associative attachment to the map, for some emotional reason, and brought it forward to assuage her feelings about what it represented.

Was Barney Hill in the service during WWII, or one of Betty Hill’s relatives? A father, a brother, an uncle, anyone with an emotional connection to Ms. Hill?

(We also suggest that Betty Hill saw the alien medical scenario above, which appeared in materials that she was said to read.)

This is all hypothetical cogitation on our part, but it is the kind of rumination that needs to be applied, more judiciously of course, to all UFO events, Roswell in particular.

This posting is an attempt to push (younger) bona fide researchers into a modus that gets the study of UFOs out of its laughable rut.

We can only hope that some will pursue the topic accordingly….

Ascensions and Levitations: A UFO Connection?

2011-04-06T12:59:00.001-04:00

Outside the alien abduction scenario there is a history of “ascensions” (brought to the fore by the impending Easter season and the alleged ascension of Jesus after his resurrection).

Ascension means to ascend -- to go up, to heaven or somewhere above.

This has been a staple of religious and mythological storytelling since the beginning of history, and is part and parcel of many UFO reports (which we’ll cite below).

Some Biblical accounts:

Enoch was said to have been taken by God [Genesis 5:24] and Elias (Elijah) “went up by a whirlwind into heaven” via a fiery chariot and fiery horses [4 Kings 2:11].

Ezechiel (Ezekiel) was lifted up [Ezechiel 11:1] and Jesus “was taken up into heaven” [Mark 16:19], and “was carried up into heaven” [Luke 24:51].

In mythology, Heracles (Hercules), upon his death, a cloud passed over his body and bore it away, to Olympus.

Aeneas, a hero of Troy, after setting up a new home for the Trojans, was killed in battle, and was lifted up to heaven.

Diomedes, king of Argos, and one of the Epigoni -- the sons of the Seven against Thebes – was murdered by King Daunus, and divinely spirited away.

In Catholic legend, Mary, the mother of Jesus, was lifted, body and soul, upon her death to heaven.

The Roman Catholic Church recognizes many ascensions or levitations, ascribing them to acts of God.

Here is a list of some of the saints and persons so elevated:

St. Edmund, then Archbishop of Canterbury circa 1242.

St. Teresa of Avila in Madrid during 1680.

Sister Mary an Arabian Carmelite nun in Bethlehem circa 1700.

St. Adolphus Liguori in Foggia during 1777.

Father Suarez at Santa Cruz in Southern Argentina in1911.

But what spurred this posting, aside from the upcoming Ascension Holy Day, are two accounts that I stumbled across, which most of you may be familiar with…

The David Lang and Oliver Larch disappearances (from Wikipedia):

According to the stories surrounding him, on 23 September 1880, Lang, of Gallatin, Tennessee, was walking across the grounds of his farm to meet Judge August Peck who was approaching his farm in a horse and buggy, when Lang vanished mid-step and in full view of the judge, his wife Chanel and his two children, and the judge's brother-in-law. The ground around where Lang had been walking was searched in case he had fallen into a concealed hole, but no trace was found. The story further states that Lang's children later called out to him, and heard a disembodied voice calling as if from a great distance.

The story of David Lang was published in Fate magazine by journalist Stuart Palmer, who claimed that he had been told the story by Lang's daughter. However, no trace of David Lang nor his family (including his apparent daughter) was ever found in any records of that period, and the entire article was later determined to be a hoax likely inspired by the short story "The Difficulties of Crossing a Field" by Ambrose Bierce (1909), collected in his book Can Such Things Be? In 1999, the modern composer David Lang based an opera on Bierce's story. (The story has also become a popular urban legend).

The story of Oliver Larch (Sometime known as Lerch or Thomas) follows a similar pattern to that of David Lang. According to the narrative, Larch was on his way to collect water from a well one winter when he vanished, leaving nothing behind but a trail of footprints in the snow which terminated abruptly, and a series of terrible cries for help such as "Help, they've got me!" that appeared to come from above. Larch's story was later found to be a variation on "Charles Ashmore's Trail", published in 1893 by Ambrose Bierce. In some versions, Larch's story is set in late 19th century Indiana, in others, it is set in North Wales. One particular recurring variation was an Oliver Thomas of Rhayader, Radnorshire, mid-Wales with the date given as 1909.

For a skeptical clarification and implied hoax explanation, click here

In UFO lore, there are many UFO stories based upon ascending, all usually gathered within the abduction category, but not correctly, I think.

Betty And Barney Hill (1961)

Hickson/Parker (1973)

Carl Higdon (1974)

Travis Walton (1975)

Kelly Cahill (1993)

While UFOs do not factor in to most of these accounts, in the stories where they do, however, the descriptives of the ascensions, levitations, and upliftings to the crafts come close to that provided in the stories noted above.

Is there an interdimensional aspect to these events, theorized by M-Theory (string theory)?

Or are physical laws just suspended in some circumstances?

And are UFOs merely omens of dimensional shifts or some other physical quirk?

In Bruce Duensing’s ruminations at his blogs, there is an interconnectedness of all these things.

UFOs may only be one (tangential?) aspect of a reality that is intertwined with elements paranormal, prosaic, and transcendental – a reality too bizarre and complex to explain, no matter how hard we humans try.

Perhaps….

N.B. John Mack’s study of “abductees” indicated that “out-of-body” experiences were prominent in the accounts he monitored.

In the Lang and Larch stories, family members heard voices from above the spot where the men allegedly disappeared.

(In ancient times, sailors approaching an island near the mouth of the Ister River claimed to have heard the voice of Achilles, who had been slain much earlier.)

Thomas Aquinas, who had a transcendental experience that caused him to stop writing – what he saw made his efforts as so much straw in the wind – was said, by G. K. Chesterton, in a work on Aquinas, to have been seen to levitate while saying mass, near the end of his life.

UFOs: The Computer Model

2011-04-03T14:06:00.001-04:00

UFOs, the truly unexplainable objects, may be computer rendered models or computers themselves.

A current New Yorker piece by Adam Gopnik [New Yorker, Get Smart, April 4th, 2011, Page 70 ff.] deals with the question, “How smart are computers, really?”

But Mr. Gopnik’s piece deals with prosaic computers that are extant.

A better source for the idea that computers can be real in themselves, and create realities that are, for all intents and purposes, actual is:

Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments - Premier issue, Volume 1 Issue 1, Winter 1992, Editors: Thomas B. Sheridan Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge and Thomas A. Furness, III Univ. of Washington, Seattle, Published in: Journal Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, MIT Press Cambridge, MA,

Let us assume that what are seen in the skies, sometimes – not the mistaken Earthly aircraft or misperceived meteorological manifestations – may be images produced by computers, or computers themselves.

In the Bosco Nedelcovic revelations about the CIA/DoD contrived Villas Boas event, covered here, in this blog, in a very early posting and also in Nick Redfern’s Contactees, (Chapter 20), Nedelcovoc a CIA-AID operative relates that the military used holographic imagery to produce an alien ambiance in tests related to extraterrestrial encounter experimentation, of which the Boas case was one of several.

(Another CIA contrived event, according to Nedelcovic, was the Scoriton incident, also covered here in the archived postings.)

That the United States military used, allegedly, holographic imaging is not the point of this posting.

The reference is to indicate that computer generated imaging can be foisted upon the public or military, in airplanes (such as the B-29 or RB47 sightings mentioned here recently), and that such imagery manipulation may account for some sightings which have an inherent intangibility.

The argument that radar returns wouldn’t be affected by holography can be set aside as radar manipulation would be a concomitant ruse, either by the military or government agency, or by an advanced alien species, if you wish.

But then there is the proposition that what is seen in the skies and sometimes on the ground are actual computers, programmed to interact with humans or Hastings’ nuclear military installations, for instance, duplicating a physical presence without the actual probability of an interaction that would cause problems of an unexplainable kind, something less explainable than a sighting of an amorphous, disappearing UFO.

The Rendlesham incident would be such a contrivance.

But by whom or what exactly?

The UFOs are computers of a virtual kind, without mechanical substance, machines that “think” and act just as virtuality thinks and acts in computer gaming today, and early on in computer simulations created during World War II.

(Alan Turing is the progenitor of such computer modeling and programming.)

A source for what can be done with such virtuality can be found in Marvin Minsky’s
The Society of Mind [Simon and Schuster, NY, 1985/1986] and more pertinently in his Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines or Perceptrons.

What we’re proposing here is that some UFO sightings may be virtual realities and some may actually involve computers (machines) of a quasi-tangible nature programmed to intersect and interact with humans.

The idea is not as farfetched as one might expect, if they see the gist of Gopnik’s piece in The New Yorker, or if they read the MIT papers we’ve loaded at our UFO web-site.

More will follow on this “hypothetical” thrust, you may be sure….but, meanwhile, for a truly brilliant exegesis of what computers may be capable of CLICK HERE

Folie à beaucoup: The Roswell Psychosis

2011-04-01T10:11:00.000-04:00

Folie à beaucoup – communicated insanity, induced insanity…suggestibility plays a part…It happens that paranoid or paranoiac and rarely hypomanic patients not only can make those with whom they [associate] believe in the delusions, but they so infect them that [those contacted] continue to build on the delusions. [The Psychiatric Dictionary, Fourth Edition, Leland E. Hinsie, M.D. and Robert J. Campbell, M.D., Oxford University Press, London, 1970]

Roswell is an example of how a group of normal individuals can act in psychotic collusion, spurred by a bizarre incident that was instigated by one person, acting on a possible mercenary whim.

(The Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme is a current example of the rampant psychology underlying what we see as the prime motivator for the Roswell incident.)

Mac Brazel is reported to have sought the way to gather a reward for discovering a flying disk, which was generated by his findings of some somewhat strange debris on the farm where he was foreman, debris from a balloon or some other aerial mishap.

The debris is a sidebar here. Whatever Mac Brazel found is irrelevant to our point. His “debris” caused him, perhaps, to try to obtain some needed money – he was a poor man by 1947 standards, as were many who farmed in the New Mexico area in which Roswell and Corona are located – from an offer of $3000 to anyone who could produce fragments of a flying disk.

(The source of that offer is not clear, and really has little to do with our hypothesis here. Brazel may have only wanted attention, or got caught up in a mild hysterical episode that afflicted the Proctor family with whom he was commiserating about the “stuff” he had found.)

Brazel’s foray into Roswell generated an interest by the Army base there, and Walter Haut, Jesse Marcel, Sr., and others were infected by the “flying disk” suggestion of Brazel or the media frenzy caused by the prior Arnold sighting and other flying saucer stories that were prevalent at the time.

Once the story was tamped down by saner voices (the Army’s Ramey and Blanchard) and news media lost interest, the people who were initially involved with the inadvertent scam went back to their humdrum lives; that is until Moore, Friedman, Berlitz, et al. resurrected the “incident” and cause an unrepression of the folie à beaucoup.

Once the floodgates of the original flying disk scam were reopened, coupled with suggestibilities by the UFO “researchers,” the Roswell myth was born and has spread as folies do to others who came into contact with the original Roswell witnesses or who come into contact with those – the UFO researchers -- who’ve met with the original participants in Brazel’s ultimately unproductive scam.

Dee Proctor has been a prime participant in the original Brazel instigated brouhaha, dissembling the story in a post 1947 folie à deux. And other alleged Roswell witnesses have engaged in the folie or started a new folie for reasons of nefarious kind.

Our point is that Mac Brazel started, for whatever reason(s), inadvertent or otherwise, a cascading series of events that developed (and continues) under the psychiatric sobriquet of a folie à beaucoup.

Roswell may only be that, a psychotic episode that resonates with persons today as psychologically significant as it did back in 1947.

The Braxton/Flatwoods Monster

2011-04-01T07:16:00.002-04:00

Kevin Randle has been torturing visitors to his blog with a protracted take on his involvement with the so-called Braxton/Flatwoods "monster" incident from 1952.

Click here for a WORD document (from our archives) of Matt Mullins' succinct account of the story.

A List of Best UFO Sightings?

2011-03-31T12:06:00.001-04:00

While we’ve ragged on Paul Kimball for his filmed list of the best UFO sightings ever, we came across a list by former flying saucer “expert” William Spaulding, who provided his take on some top UFO sightings and events for The People’s Almanac’s The Book of Lists #2 by author Irving Wallace and family [William Morrow and Company, NY, 1980, Page 417 ff.].

His first offering was the McMinnville/Trent photos which we deem as bogus.

His next sighting was the 1952 Nash-Fortenberry Pan-Am encounter, over Norfolk, Virginia.

The third listing was the 1952 Washington D.C. incidents.

The fourth episode was the Ralph Mayher [sic] film of 1952.

Fifth was (another) 1952 radar/visual sighting of a USAF B-29 training crew over the Gulf of Mexico

Six on Spaulding’s list was the Kimball/Sparks B-47 incident, so there is some consensus that the sighting was and is significant.

Seventh in Spaulding list of eight is a November 1957 on the outskirts of Levelland, Texas where witnesses had encounters with a large UFO.

And eighth on Spaulding’s list was the 1976 Iranian encounter.

We won’t elaborate on Spaulding’s list, as we see lists as entertainment rather than edifying information.

But we note that Kimball and Sparks are not the only UFO aficionados to see the RB-47 event as a significant UFO encounter.

Again, the RB-47 sighting is interesting, but so are dozens of other sightings, including the B-29 sighting (number five, above) which has as many or more technical accoutrements as the RB-47 incident.

UFO hobbyists, each, have their favorite UFO sightings or stories – mine include the 1966 Ann Arbor/Dexter/Hillsdale sightings; the infamous “swamp gas” sightings.

But have any of these classic sightings given us a clue to the UFO enigma? Nope. So listing them is a futile, silly endeavor, that passes for research for some “ufologists” but they are fun to read, right?

UFO MATRIX MAGAZINE Presents 50 Years of Close Encounters

2011-03-30T13:47:00.003-04:00

October 15th & 16th, 2011. King’s Croft Hotel, Pontefract, West Yorkshire, England

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Betty and Barney Hill alien abduction account, UFO MATRIX is staging a two-day conference. The conference will have a line-up of UFO researchers and experiencers plus new books signings and other unique UFO items for sale.

The full line-up of speakers is:

Travis Walton (USA).:

Abductee whose experience was made into the l993 Paramount movie ‘Fire in the Sky’, and author of the book of the same name.

Kathleen Marden (USA):

The niece of Betty Hill and co-author of ‘CAPTURED – The Betty & Barney Hill UFO Experience.’

Nick Pope & Bridget Grant (A joint researcher/experiencer presentation).

Mike Hallowell.

Philip Mantle & Rosalind Reynolds (A joint researcher/experiencer presentation).

Robbie Graham.

Malcolm Robinson & Garry Wood (A joint researcher/experiencers presentation).

John Hanson.

Dave Hodrien.

This will be Kathleen Marden’s first ever presentation in the UK and Travis Walton has not lectured here since the release of his movie in 1993.

Kathleen will be speaking on both days and each presentation will be different.

All speakers subject o change.

Ticket Prices:

Single day £30.00 per person

Saturday & Sunday ticket: £50.00 per person.

Full details and conference online ticket ordering at: www.healingsofatlantis.com

TICKETS NOW ON SALE

UFOs, String Theory, Quantum Gravity

2011-03-30T12:03:00.001-04:00

Physics has become as discombobulated and goofy as “ufology.”

String Theory for Dummies by Andrew Zimmerman Jones and Daniel Robbins [Wiley Publishing, Indianapolis, 2010] presents a pithy overview of string theory and quantum physics; an overview that shows just how crazy the study of physics has become, and how physicists have resorted to mathematics as a kind of abracadabra to help them find an answer to the mysteries of the Universe that discombobulate them.

Ufology, that faux research sobriquet use by UFO hobbyists to provide cachet for their irrational attempts to uncover the nature of UFOs, is loopier than string theory, but is also encumbered by overt pathological participants whereas physicists keep their pathology suppressed, masking it with calculus and other mathematical formulae.

Physicists are trying to discover the reality of the Universe.

Ufologists once tried to uncover the mystery of flying saucers and then generic UFOs, but have since devolved into a babbling clique of pseudo-researchers who are so flummoxed by the enigma they once hoped to explain that they are now babblers of nonsense that borders on total insanity.

The UFO phenomenon is not amenable to mathematics, it seems – but who has tried to use math to provide a theoretical paradigm?

Moreover, UFOs have attracted crazies of all types, while physics (quantum, string, and classical) attracts brilliant loonies who see beyond the prosaic and mundane to theoretical models of the Universe that may provide profound truths of our existence.

The study of UFOs takes us nowhere and thus far has only provided babbling of a pathological kind. (See Alfred Lehmberg’s ditherings for example.)

One holds out hope for a rational denouement in the realm of physics (string theory notwithstanding).

But in the realm of UFOs? One should keep their distance, remaining aloof and disconnected, if only to remain compos mentis.

UFO Regurgitation: A Warning!

2011-03-29T10:06:00.001-04:00

One of the problems when UFOs are the subject matter is the propensity for bloggers and UFO aficionados to pad the discussion with a redundant recap of hoary UFO stories: Roswell for instance, and others like the L.A. battle of 1942, Socorro, the Betty/Barney Hill “abduction” among many others.

The RB47 incident, noted here, and regularly by Paul Kimball at his blog, The Other Side of Truth, is also an example of a UFO sighting that gets an extended work over.

We try to avoid presenting hackneyed flying saucer tales at our blogs, only posting such referential stories when and if there is new light to be shed upon them, as is the case when Anthony Bragalia delves into the Roswell event with his memory metal angle.

But, some who visit our blogs can’t help themselves and often regurgitate known and banal details from the classic UFO sightings. It’s a matter of showing off their accumulated knowledge about UFOs we think, or a disregard for the sensibilities of those who are trying to find new, unique insights to the UFO enigma.

Let us assure you that we won’t go down that trail of insipid rehashing, as is the pattern at such blogs as Kevin Randle’s A Different Perspective.

That is, we shall try to limit our postings and comments here to views that are truly unique or new.

Fleshed out theories of what UFOs may be shall be the grist for content here, not purloined hypothesizing or regurgitated material, taken wholesale from other blogs/sites or books and archives that true UFO hobbyists are well acquainted with.

We’ll try to be inventive in our thinking and conjectures. And we’ll try to curtail grandstanding by those who need to display their assumed acumen when it comes to an almost profound mystery: UFOs.

Therefore, if you are a regular here, know that an onslaught of UFO drivel, acquired from sources not your own, will be ignored and not posted.

That’s our caveat for the time being…..