Quantum and String Theories for Dummies?

Wiley Publishing Company has two books, in its Dummies series, about quantum mechanics and/or string theory:

Quantum Physics for Dummies by Steven Holzner [2009, 321 pages, $19.99, Wiley Publishing, NJ]



String Theory for Dummies by Andrew Zimmerman Jones with Daniel Robbins [2010, 366 pages, $19.99, Wiley Publishing, NJ]



Holzner’s book is, as far as we can determine, geared to college students or advanced high schoolers who are adept at mathematics of an advanced kind (Algebra, Geometry, and Calculus particularly).

Jones and Robbins provide an overview of quantum physics and string theory without a total immersion (as Holzner insists) in mathematics.

If you’re looking for a cogent assessment of string theory, which is in a category rightfully called a quantum field theory, get the Jones/Robbins book.

If you are a math genius – and we accent “genius” – Holzner’s book will satisfy. It won’t enlighten you about quantum mechanics in a philosophical way but it can lead you through the abstruse mathematics of quantum theorizing.

Holzner’s book, in our estimation, is not a Dummies book, per se. It’s a tome on rarified mathematics, which science and physicists use to remain arcane and aloof.

Jones with Robbins, on the other hand, empathize with readers who want to know more about quantum and string theory and provide a door to understanding both.

We’ll be presenting material from the Jones book upcoming.

As for the Holzner book, we’ll leave that for those who think science is furthered by use of mathematics rather than clear statements of logic and hypothesizing, in plain English.

The Mystery of Aliens

Ancient Astronaut theorists posit the idea that the messengers and gods of old were extraterrestrial visitors, which is not necessarily a faulty supposition, considering the circumstantial “evidence” presented to bolster the hypothesis.



The visitors were not gray with large, almond-shaped eyes as they are rendered today by descriptives.



In mythology and religious-oriented works, the visitors of old were manifested by an aura that bespoke something otherworldly but not grotesque.



Those visitors often mated with human beings, as recounted in the Genesis account of the Hebrew Bible [6:1]:

...The sons of God saw that the daughters of man were good, and they took themselves wives from whomever they chose. God said, ’My spirit will not continue to judge man forever, since he is nothing but flesh. His days shall be 120 years’. The Nephilim were on the earth in those days and also later. The sons of God had come to the daughters of man and had fathered them. They were the mightiest ones who ever existed, men of renown.



And they also appear in the Greek myths, as Gods, whose dalliances produced such Greek Heroes as Achilles and Heracles.



And Merlin, the great wizard of the Arthurian legends, was said to have been fathered by an Incubus. [Bulfinch]



In the 1950s, flying saucer “occupants’ – as reported by observers – were usually grotesque or small, bizarre creatures, akin to the little people folklore of the British Isles.



In the 1960s, those visitors morphed into the so-called “grays” which evolved out of the Betty and Barney Hill abduction saga.



There is a dispute, extant, about what Betty Hill really described, at first, about her “abductors” – mostly having to do with their noses. But the “creatures” she allegedly encountered eventually came into being as the ubiquitous UFO people pictured when UFO occupants are discussed:



The question posed is this…

What happened between 5,000 years ago when the Sumerians pictured their “gods” and the modern era when UFO beings are described? [Intelligent Life in the Universe, Shklovskii/Sagan, Delta, 1966]



That is, why has the intruders’ physiognomy changed?

Yes, we accept the reality behind the myths and Biblical renditions of gods (or messengers from above).

We also think that some relatively recent observations of creatures nearby, what some call, UFOs or, better, flying saucers, are true also, whether created as an illusion or actually as perceived.



(The alien abduction phenomenon, which remains controversial and not proven, has been, in one form or another, around since the beginning of oral and written history, as anyone familiar with mythology and religious texts knows.)

There is a mystery in all this, one that is connected in all its aspects by the similarities in the visitations.

The difference lies in how the “visitors” appeared, not in how they acted, but what they looked like.



Are there, or were there, two different classes of beings – some actually gods (or imagined as such) and some actually extraterrestrials (or imagined as such)?

It’s a mystery, either way…..

(And yes, we’ve covered this before, in 2007)

The Earworm

Lauren Sheil, in Canada (where sane pepole reside), ruminates on life, religion, politics, et cetera.

He has an erudite blog, which can be found by clicking here.

The Grand Designer is God! – says (inadvertently) Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow

The 2010 Bantam Book The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Caltech physicist Leonard Mlodinow purports to show that physical laws account for life and reality, without the intervention of a prime mover, God.



But after one reads the book, with all the complex interlocking laws of quantum physics and the hypotheses of the so-called M-theory as presented by Mlodinow (mostly), one has to conclude that, indeed, a supreme mind, a thing we can call God, did indeed create the universe and life as we know it.

Physicists try to promote their god – mathematics – with abstruse theories and convoluted mathematical gyrations, but after all is said and written, the conclusion that only make rational sense is that reality is, indeed, a concoction of a sensate entity, no matter how that entity is defined.

Our belief, however, is that God existed – we think He/It died or has gone hidden, as expounded by such writers as Richard Elliott Friedman in The Hidden Face of God [Harper, 1995].



No amount of mathematical machination by physicists destroy the early thinking of philosophers such as Aristotle, or the great theologian Thomas Aquinas – that God is (or was) the designer of the Universe and life itself.

Chapter 7, The Apparent Miracle (Page 165 particularly), provides the unconscious belief in God by Mlodinow (and Hawking also?) exampled by the thoughts of Kepler, Newton, and Einstein, who themselves believed a mind (God) created the laws that govern the Universe and life.



The book can be skimmed in parts, as much of it presents the gyrations of physicists who are as flummoxed by existence as laymen are, but who pretend, like the alchemist of old, to have access to the secrets of life, presented by them as mathematical theories, obfuscated so as to feign hidden knowledge.

M-theory is a reworking of the philosophies of the early Greeks and the scientific investigations of such luminaries as Galileo, Maxwell, Newton (of course), and others. The Grand Design tries to make a case for M-theory, calling it “the unified theory that Einstein was hoping to find” (Page 181) and is, in fact, The Grand Design.

That’s an egregious stretch.

M-theory and string theories are all extrapolations of earlier thinking by Biblical writers and the Greek, Islamic, and Scholastic thinkers of the past.

The inherent quandary (about reality) of physicists is not masked by their obeisance to mathematics, which didn’t really arrive in science until Newton, and have been ballyhooed by physicists and science ever since, but not making any sense, as scientific use of math (or arithmetic) of any kind is merely an elitist ploy to make laypeople believe that science has an inside track to the truth of existence.

But as Richard Bucke shows in his masterwork, Cosmic Consciousness, reality is something so transcendental that human minds can only occasionally observe it but never truly understand it.



For Hawking and Mlodinow (and others, such as Dawkins, Smolin, et al.) to write that that they are near to resolving The Grand Design is beyond preposterous; it’s hubris of a massive kind.

Scientology, Ufology, and Psychology

The New Yorker issue for February 14/21, 2011 has a lengthy piece by Lawrence Wright [The Apostate, Page 84 ff.] about a Scientology defector.



The article presents an overview of Scientology and especially L. Ron Hubbard (its founder).



Those interested in the Navy’s connection to UFOs will find clues to that connection in the article, but they will find much more about the founder of Scientology, and it’s not a pretty picture.

Just as Christianity is marred by the machinations of its early followers and Constantine, and psychology is saddled by the permutations of Freud to make psychoanalysis viable to his colleagues [See Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s “The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory” – Ballantine Books, NY, 1984/2003], Scientology is riddled by the flaws of its founder L. Ron Hubbard.



And ufology? Where has that artful and contrived discipline gone wrong?

Ufology has no definitive founder, but the progenitors of the faux “science” were (and are) men flawed by a lack of scientific acumen and a lack of intellectual credentials.

Whereas Freud has great insights about the human mind and behavior, he muddled those profound insights by fudging truths and facts to make his (psychoanalytic) movement palatable to psychologists and the Victorian populace of his time.



L. Ron Hubbard had no profound insights, but his movement (Dianetics and then Scientology) has been promulgated by a patina of distortions and concocted legends of his acolytes, just as happened with Christianity. [See Bart D. Ehrman’s “Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible…” – Harper One, NY 2009]



In Ufology, one can’t point to a single person who led the study of UFOs astray but one can point fingers at persons such as Phil Klass (a perverse skeptic), Stanton Friedman (a biased researcher), and a host of other “ufologists” who had or have an agenda that has little or nothing to do with truth or science but is, rather, a ploy for self-aggrandizement.



The raft of persons who’ve led the study of UFOs/flying saucers astray is too vast to list here, and most readers know to whom we refer.

The point is that movements are always corrupted by followers or instigators who have self-promotion as their premise or ignorance at their foundation.

Psychiatry, Scientology says, is a crock. And Scientology may be right. Psychiatry moved away from a therapy based on the study of the mental afflictions of people to an overly of symptomatic suppression with drugs or various kinds, a move away from the methodology of Freud and his followers.

Freud may have compromised his movement by altering the truth of child seduction but his methodology for getting at unconscious truths was remarkable and unique, even helpful to those afflicted by neuroses of a sexual kind.

But the little insight by Scientology about psychiatry and drug-therapy doesn’t offset the flawed premises of L. Ron Hubbard, as you will see by the New Yorker article.



And since Jeffrey Masson exposed the flawed, dishonest Freudian account of child seduction – the root of neuroses according to psychoanalysis, and Bart Ehrman (among others) exposes the flawed, distorted beginnings of Christianity, why has no one exposed the flawed roots of ufology?

Yes, skeptics of UFOs abound, and some in the UFO community have assailed the fraudulent in the UFO/flying saucer era, but no one has made as thorough assessment of the UFO crockery as have Dr. Masson of Freud or Bart Ehrman of Christ’s early devotees.

L. Ron Hubbard has been skewered, and Freud too, along with Jesus’s early disciples. But nowhere has anyone taken on the personalities that have tried to make ufology a valid enterprise, using lies and distortions in the process.



Is that because ufology is seen, intrinsically, as the canard it basically is? Or is it because no one has the intellectual stamina to assail a thing as ridiculous as ufology?

We think it is both…

Poeta Doctus

Bryan Sentes is an instructor of things creative, poetry among them.

He also has an interest in flying saucers and the Air Ship mystery of the 1890s.

Here is his curriculum vita:

TESL teacher; creative writing instructor, Concordia University: now, literature and composition teacher, English dept., Dawson College, Montreal; chapbooks: Budapest Suites (1994), Gloze (1995), On the Phantom Air Ship Mystery (1995), Seventh Column (2001), X Ore Assays (2001), Luffere & Ōđere (2003), For a Few Golden Ears (2004), A Crow’n’ o’ Sough Noughts (2004), The Hunger of the Starlings (with artist Juan L. Gomez-Perales), Tanchaz (2005), Symposia Scholia (2006), Melathalassemia (2009), In Canis Major (2009); trade eds.: Grand Gnostic Central (DC: 1998) and Ladonian Magnitudes (DC: 2006). Readings at various venues, Spoken Word, Experimental, and Institutional, in Canada, Holland, Germany, Hungary, Portugal, & United States, performing with Piedro Pietri, Jerome Rothenberg, Raoul Schrott, and Yoko Tawada,among others; & reviewer, translator, scholar (sociology of religion, mythology, & popular culture), radio interviewer (e.g., William Gibson, Douglas Featherling, Martin Amis).

Click here for access to his brilliant, erudite blog, Poeta Doctus

Many, many Planets

Lots of planets in the Universe.

Click here for the story

Douglas R Hofstadter: Metamagical Themas...

A favorite author of ours is Douglas Hofstadter, whose Godel, Escher, Bach and Metamagical Themas (a compilation of his Scientific American columns from the 1980s).



While Mr. Hofstadter is moderate and limited about Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle – he thinks it is misinterpreted by almost everyone – and that the principle doesn’t state that an observer interferes with the observed but “rather hat a very fine grain size, the wave duality of the measuring tool becomes relevant.” [Page 464, MT].

Heisenberg’s principle may be extrapolated to include such things as how the measurement (the observation) of individuals or UFOs is affected by the observation of either.

For instance, if a group of people, at a party are intruded upon by a person with a camera, the group will alter their behavior, to accommodate the picture or video being taken, since it will record a moment by which the group and individuals will be remembered for posterity.



And there is anecdotal information that UFOs often seem to be affected by an observer, with a camera, radar, or just a visual encounter.

The measurement (observation) of things alter those things in various ways, some subtle, some not so subtle.



Mr. Hofstadter, in writing about electromagnetic waves, points out that “as a black body heats up, it begins to glow: first dull red, then bright red, then orange, eventually white, and then, surprisingly enough, bluish!” [Page 458 MT].



Isn’t that what UFO observers often report?



Mr. Hofstadter makes it a major point to support the cautions of physicists who tell laypersons that quantum microcosm can’t be extended to explain the macrocosmic events.

We think that is an error in judgment and theoretical hypothesizing, and have addressed the issue here at this blog and the RRRGroup blog, early on.

Applying quantum thinking to the UFO phenomenon provides an interesting patina to the UFO mystery, almost explaining some behavior and sightings.

Bruce Duensing deals with such things, rather more brilliantly than we, at his blog, Intangible Materiality, which can be accessed by clicking here:

Intangible Materiality

Also, Mr. Hofstadter is not inimical to mathematics as the lingua franca of science, which we think is detrimental to human thought, and a contrivance that is unreal, a concoction that gives scientists a mantle of authority that it doesn’t really deserve.

Math is bogus, and used by science to make hypothetical thinking obscure to laypersons and to create a priest-like order for science that co-opts religion, philosophy, and thought in general.

So, while it seems that we think that Mr. Hofstadter is off the mark on the items listed above, why do we find him so fascinating, and intelligent?

That goes to his views about how we think or should and is addressed in his Metamagical Themas chapters, World Views in Collision (which deals with the Skeptical Inquirer – he likes it) and On Number Numbness (about how people don’t comprehend the reality of numbers that affect their lives).

And in Section VII, Sanity and Survival, Hofstadter tackles irrationality itself, which is rampant in the UFO community and “ufology” particularly.

We don’t expect visitors to this blog to read or understand the bulk of Metamagical Themas, but we’d hope they might give it a try.

Moreover, since most of the UFO crowd are hobbyists, who work on the UFO mystery when it is convenient and not during their weekend down-time, we are not holding our collective breaths for any to try and enlighten themselves beyond their myopic attention to the UFO phenomenon, Bruce Duensing as the stand-out exception.

Adventures of an Earthling

Noted documentary filmmaker Mishara Canino-Hussung and her equally noted filmmaker husband Bill Hussung have produced “Adventures of an Earthling” – an investigation and film about some strange sightings that occurred in the Hudson Valley area by residents there in the early 1990s, one of whom is Bill Hussing’s mother.

Skeptical Bill Hussung, while wary of the encounters delineated by his mother and others, including a sighting of a giant space ship, does what any respectful son would do: treat the stories as authentic. After all, why would his mother, a smart, successful woman in her own right, make up such a story. And, he asks, why would she seem so terrified when she recounted the sighting(s)?

To read more about this intriguing tale and other UFO encounters and to get a DVD of Ms. Canino-Hussung’s quite wonderful “documentary,” visit the Boom Potato Films web-site:

http://boompotatofilms.com

From what we’ve seen, the encounters that Bill Hussung’s mother recounts can’t be dismissed out of hand. We’ll be checking further into the sightings.

Roswell: The Great Pan is dead!

In Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay on Myth and the Frame of Time by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend [Gambit Inc., Boston, 1969], the authors, in Chapter XXI (Page 275 ff.), recount the famous tale from Plutarch about how, on board a ship with many passengers, sailing near the Echinades Islands, Epitherses (son of Aemilianus) tells that Thamus, the Egyptian pilot, heard a voice, while near the island of Paxi, calling his name.

Thamus, at first did not reply, but after a third time he responded to the voice, which said, “When you come opposite to Palodes, announce that Great Pan is dead.”

Thamus, Epittherses, and the passengers were astounded and reasoned among themselves whether to carry out the order or not.

Thamus, however, while approaching Palodes said the words, “Great Pan is dead.”

A great cry of woe, by many on the land, went up, and eventually spread to Rome, where Tiberius Caesar called for an investigation as to the truth of the profound rumor.

Plutarch, himself, did not accept the acclimation and suggested that the shouts from Paxi were misunderstood by Thamus and the story became embroidered by the masses, encouraged by the fact that Tiberius had called for an official investigation, apparently giving some credence to the tale.

The authors write this, “One is still allowed to wonder why such a fuss was made at the time about [the] exclamations…and why…that most learned of mythologists, the Emperor Tiberius himself, thought the matter worth following up.” [Page 276]

The significance of the tale is many. Firstly Pan was considered a major God, and equatable, in some quarters, with Jesus who was crucified during the reign of Tiberius.

Secondly, the tale strikes at the heart of the prevailing belief system of the time, Paganism.

Thirdly, the tale continues to be remunerated upon to this day (by scholars and mythologists, mostly).

And finally, Great Pan is dead was retold in many configurations over the years, such as it was Tammuz-Adonis, the grain god who died, the yoke-bearer, Giki-Gaki is dead on the Hurgergorn, and the Fanggen, a kind of “Little People” (or giants!?) disappeared in the Tyrol.

How does this tale relate to Roswell?

The Chapter (and book, in toto) elaborates on how history and events are muddled by belief systems, what people wish to hear, and Chapter IV (History, Myth and Reality) examples instances where events are confabulated or twisted, often inadvertently, by a jumping to conclusions inspired by entrenched beliefs and/or stories heard, many times, over the years.

Hamlet’s Mill treats great myths and tales that affect or have affected humanity in significant ways, over the millennia.

Roswell is not significant, nor worthy of a Myth status, Gilles Fernandez notwithstanding, but it has developed the status of mythos, in the sociological sense.

(Mythos -- the complex of beliefs, values, attitudes, etc, characteristic of a specific group or society)

What was decried by Thamus may be seen as similar to what was decried at Roswell: The Army Air Force has captured a Flying Saucer.



The “heard refrain” at Roswell has been elaborated upon and added to, much like that which happened when “The Great Pan is dead” was taken as a profound truth by those hearing about the announcement and taking it to varying interpretations, far and wide, subjecting it to the vicissitudes of many locales and peoples.

The original story – the original announcement – has been taken apart by “researchers” and recast by those same “researchers” into many guises, all adumbrated to enhance whatever belief system held in the mind of a particular “researcher” – some preferring the extraterrestrial cast, some preferring a secret military cast, and others eschewing any cast at all, debunking the tale, altogether, as Euhemeros, the first debunker, did with myth.



Roswell is a story, with a core truth at its center. What that core truth may be has been lost to time, and the ineptitude of those who gathered the remnants of the original tale twwnty years after the “event” allegedly took place.

Can the story be cleansed of the accretions? Not easily, if at all.

The Roswell tale has been concretized into a myth (or, better, mythos) as CDA and Gilles Fernandez continue to decry.

It can’t be scrubbed clean, that’s a certainty, which Nick Redfern and this writer (among others) think is the case.

But others, David Rudiak, Stanton Friedman, Kevin Randle, et al., will continue to promote the mythology, because, for them, mythos is more important than truth.

Nick Redfern's The NASA Conspiracies

Nick Redfern’s latest effort at deriving truth from within the corridors of government and other bureaucratic constructs involved the National Aeronautics and Space Administration: NASA.

His book, The NASA Conspiracies: The Truth Behind the Moon Landings, Censored Photos, and the Face on Mars, [New Page Books, Pompton Plains, NJ], is replete with information readers will think they are familiar with but will find out they are not.

Mr. Redfern’s forte isn’t just ferreting news from FOIA documents. He actually has accumulated first-hand information, via face-to-face interviews with persons privy to the inner workings of NASA, the military, and other relevant agencies – insiders.

He has done this again for his NASA book, with a fellow named John, from Bloomington, Minnesota about Area 51 (page 57 ff.), Nick Pope, former U.K. Minister of Defense staffer about contactees, et cetera (Page 97 ff.), Matthew Williams, an investigator with the U.K.’s Customs & Excise Agency about crashed UFOs in the Britain (Page 125 ff.), and a NASA employee with NASA’s Public Affairs office about the Gary McKinnon affair (Page 199 ff.).

Mr. Redfern also presents incredible stories about alleged alien abductions (Sharon, Page 146 ff.) and persons who have experienced mothman-like creatures in and around NASA facilities (Hilda Walker and Frank Shaw, Chapter 13, The Monsters of NASA, Page 153 ff.).

Mr. Redfern also offers a kind of paean to Sci-Fi writer and UFO maven Mac Tonnies, who died recently but left a legacy of hypothetical thought that is unique and provocative, about the so-called Face on Mars (Chapter 9, Page 101 ff.) and cryptoterrestrials, a concomitant, hidden Earthian civilization that interacts with human beings who share this planet with “them.”

Mr. Redfern also provides illuminating minutiae about Roswell, the Moon landing, and the Frank Scully Aztec story.

His ruminations about the Space Shuttle and NASA’s astronauts, some of whom who are believers in extraterrestrial visitation, offer grist to those who believe that the UFO phenomenon is ET oriented.

But most of all, Mr. Redfern confirms for the rational observer that NASA and other U.S. agencies (such as the CIA and FBI) harbor secrets that would be explosive if revealed.

The NASA Conspiracies is a must-read for those who would like a heads-up on the agency that is at the fore-front of our Space exploration and efforts, including the next trips to the Moon and Mars (and beyond).

What does NASA know now, and how would that “secret” information, if made public, impact humanity, and human civilization? Mr. Redfern gives readers some insightful clues.

Mr. Redfern’s book may be had via Amazon.com or from Career Press, Inc., 220 West Parkway, Unit 12, Pompton Plains, NJ 07444 (careerpress.com or newpagebooks.com).

UFO Truth? Not so fast....

The December 13th, 2010 Issue of The New Yorker has an article that all UFO mavens would do well to absorb.

It’s “The Truth Wears Off” by Jonah Lehrer [Page 52 ff.].

Lehrer recounts how science (and researchers) get snookered by “The Decline Effect” –the measurable drop off of one-time observations and data that, when first obtained, seemed invincible as proof of various phenomenon, but end up on second (or third) observations to be considerably less that originally measured.

Rhine’s studies, at Duke, of ESP are mentioned, as are pharmacological, ecological, psychological, biological studies.



The gist of the article is that studies are intrinsically flawed but why is still open to question.

Some relevant quotes from the piece, which UFO debaters should heed, include:

“Most of the time, scientists know what results they want and that can influence the results they get.” [Page 52]

“Asking people to put their perceptions into words led to dramatic decreases in performance.” [Page 53]

(Re: Rhine’s studies/experiments) “What he wanted to know was whether the images [from Zener card experiments] that got a second showing were more likely to have been identified the first time around. Could subsequent exposure have somehow influenced the initial results? Could the effect be the cause?” [Page 54]



“The extrasensory powers of…subjects didn’t decline – they were simply an illusion that vanished over time.” [Page 54]

“…the ‘decline effect’ deserves more attention: its ubiquity seems to violate the laws of statistics.” [Page 54]

“…[an] author might publish several critical papers, which distort his analysis.” [Page 54]

“…some – perhaps many – cherished generalities are at best exaggerated in their…significance and at worst a collective illusion nurtured by strong a-priori beliefs [are] often repeated.” [Page 55]

“…the problem seems to be one of subtle omissions and unconscious misperceptions, as researchers struggle to make sense of their results.” [Page 55]

“…act[s] of measurement [are] going to be vulnerable to all sorts of perception biases.” [Page 56]

“The problem of selective reporting is rooted in a fundamental cognitive flaw, which is that we like proving ourselves right an hate being wrong.” [Page 56]

“…after a claim has been systematically disproven…you still see some stubborn researchers citing the first few studies that show a strong effect. They really want to believe that it’s true.” [Page 56]

“Every researcher should have to spell out, in advance, how many subjects they’re going to use, and what exactly they’re testing, and what constitutes a sufficient level of proof. We have the tools to be much more transparent about our experiments.” [Page 56]

“Although…reforms would mitigate the dangers of publication bias and selective reporting, they still wouldn’t erase the decline effect. This is largely because scientific research will always be shadowed by a force that can’t be curbed, only contained: sheer randomness.” [Page 56]

“…a lot of extraordinary scientific data are nothing but noise.” [Page 57]

“…dramatic findings are also the most likely to get published in prestigious journals…” [Page 57]

“…the decline effect is actually a decline of illusion.” [Page 57]

“While Karl Popper imagined falsification occurring with a single, definitive experiment – Galileo refuted Aristotelian mechanics in an afternoon – the process turns out to be much messier than that. Many scientific theories continue to be considered true even after failing numerous experimental tests.” [Page 57]



“Even the law of gravity hasn’t been perfect at predicting real-world phenomena. In one test, physicists measuring gravity…in the Nevada desert found a two-and-a-half-per-cent
discrepancy between the theoretical predictions and the actual data. Despite these findings…The law of gravity remains the same.” [Page 57]

“Such anomalies demonstrate the slipperiness of empiricism.” [Page 57]

“Although many scientific ideas generate conflicting results and suffer from falling effect sizes, they continue to get cited in textbooks…Why? Because these ideas seem true. Because they make sense. Because we can’t bear to let them go. And this is why the decline effect is so troubling. Not because it reveals the human fallibility of science, in which data are tweaked and beliefs shape perceptions…And not because it reveals that many of our most exciting theories are fleeting fads and soon will be rejected.” [Page 57]

The decline effect is troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything. We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that is often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. An just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true.” [Page 57]

“When he experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.” [End of article]

Scientists and (some) “ufologists” like to think they have a lock on truth. But as Mr. Lehrer’s New Yorker article shows, truth is as elusive as ever, and nothing is certain.

UFO Peer Review? You gotta be kidding….

The UFO mystery continues as a mystery, unabated.

Although some so-called researchers have spent their life-times studying the phenomenon, these “researchers” have come nowhere close to resolving any aspect of the UFO phenomenon.

Not an iota of understanding or tangible hypothesis has evolved over the sixty years plus of UFO study by a small group of UFO die-hards, who like to pretend research credibility by labeling their hobby “ufology.”

The resident hang-out for this moldering group of UFO devotees is UFO UpDates, called “The List” by habitués of the shop-worn web-site.

A visit to The List will show you that the left-over and left-out members of “ufology” try to one-up other members with attempts at faux-expertise; that is, members strive mightily to show that they have some expertise about something: aircraft, chemistry, photography, et cetera – all things that have little or nothing to do with the intrinsic UFO riddle.

Elder statesmen of the concocted “science of ufology” hope to create a legacy of some kind for the futile and fruitless endeavors over the years.

Jerome Clark, for instance, hangs his hat on the rubric “UFO Historian” – a sad commentary for one’s career or life.

Stanton Friedman, a well-known UFO spokesperson has been relegated to defending his obtuse views about UFOs and various elements of the foolish study called ufology.

Bruce Maccabee, a Naval insider, uses The List to showcase his knowledge – limited knowledge we note – of UFO photography that has shown up over the years.

Don Ledger is a pilot, who likes to correct Listers when they wax eloquently but incorrectly about airfoils and things that fly in the sky.

When a topic arrives at UFO UpDates, it’s never ignored, but always flailed by someone who uses the topic to back-bite others or to showcase a pretense at scholarship about something.

No topic is ever debated on its merits, or efficacy. The List is all about ego and self-promotion.

What’s even sadder is that the small contingent of UFO mavens who still use UpDates for a presence in the UFO community have no idea how ridiculous their ramblings are to outsiders who look at UFOs in the context of wider realities or surrealities.

Over the years, The List has accumulated more UFO rot than any other UFO site in existence.

The surfeit of blather is astounding, for its faux seriousness and ludicrous patina, as academics and true scientists see the thing.

We continue to refer to the group that maintains a presence at UFO UpDates, The List, as UFO Geezers: a group of has-beens or never-weres who represent nothing worthwhile within the legitimate study of UFOs.

This group of pathetic UFO hobbyists are in the final stages of life, thankfully, whose passings will leave open the door of UFO study for real peer review by persons who are less inclined to defend their smarmy, egotistical wasted lives and pursue a mystery that evokes true awe in the human mind.

Jenny Randle's segment about the Cumberland Spaceman and Woomera sighting of 1964 on BBC-TV's "Secrets of the Paranormal"

Jenny Randles is one the few bona fide UFO researchers in the world. Here is her investigation of the Templeton Solway Firth (Cumberland) "spaceman" photo and concomitant Woomera (Australia) sighting of a similar being.

(Nick Pope is interviewed also.)


Disclose.tv - the cumberland spaceman 1964 Video

Nick Redfern notices a new book

Nick Redfern will be reviewing Man-Made Monsters upcoming.

Meanwhile, click here to see what Mr. Redfern has to say now about the book