Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Is Earth an alien zoo?


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

Saturday, August 20, 2011

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


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?

aliens20.jpg

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.

jayforde.jpg
Courtesy JayForde.com

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Addictive Ufologists


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


Tuesday, August 16, 2011

UFOs: a lot of data; a lot of nothing

wonders16.jpg

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).

cave-aliens.jpg

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.

klass16.jpg

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’ĂȘtre 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.

paper16.jpg

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


Saturday, August 13, 2011

Snake in Rome


Some time ago I found this passage in a book about the Shroud of Turin by Ian Wilson.



The passage fascinated me, but I couldn't find anything more about the snake incident, searching everywhere for something more definitive.

I even had several journalists look for something thta might elucidate the episode.

Recently I submitted a query and the book excerpt to Chris Aubeck's Magonia Exchange, and got (only) this reply:


The reference from Magonia might be the incident, but the time-frame is wrong, unless Wilson's date of 846 A.D. (or CE if you prefer) is wrong.

So, I'm asking if any one of our intrepid readers knows more about the alleged panic in Rome by a snake -- any date, any place in the city?

N.B. Chris Aubeck has provided what appears to be the answer to my query above. I thank him profusely for that and offer the link HERE that clarifies.

However, a member of Chris Aubeck's Magonia Exchange provides this:

I don't think the passage above (Regulus and the snake) has any relation to the episode mentioned by the original poster, the date is way too early (3rd century BC) and I doubt such a confusion is possible.

However a quick check in all the relevant medieval chronicles I could think of, didn't bring anything either. Even though the date of 846 AD is quite eventful for Rome which suffered that year an attack by the Saracens, no chronicle mentions an incident with a snake. Should it have happened that same year, I doubt the chroniclers would have missed mentioning it, if only to put in perspective with the invasion.
Thus, unless the incident is mentioned in a single obscure source, I would tend to believe that the date mentioned by Wilson is wrong.

It might be worth mentioning though that Gregory of Tours mentions in his Historia Francorum (book X) a somewhat similar incident which happened in 589 A.D. (Source: Guadet, J. (ed.) Histoire ecclesiastique des Francs..., vol. 4, Paris, 1838, p.4):

Anno igitur quinto decimo Childeberthi regis diaconus noster ab urbe Roma sanctorum cum pigneribus veniens, sic retulit, quod anno superiore, mense nono, tanta inundatio Tiberis fluvius Romam urbem obtexerit, ut aedes antiquae deruerent, horrea etiam eclesiae subversa sint, in quibus nonnulla milia modiorum tritici periere. Multitudo etiam serpentium cum magno dracone in modo trabis validae per huius fluvii alveum in mare discendit; sed suffocatae bestiae inter salsos maris turbidi fluctus et litori eiectae sunt. Subsecuta est de vestigio cladis, quam inguinariam vocant.

In the fifteenth year of [the reign] of king Childebert [note: 590 A.D.], our deacon returning from the city Rome with relics of the saints reported that in the ninth month of the previous year the river Tiber so flooded the city of Rome that ancient buildings were destroyed and the store­houses of the church were overturned ; several thousand measures of wheat in them were lost. A multitude of snakes, and among them a great serpent [draco] like a big log, passed down into the sea carried away by the waters of the river, but these creatures, smothered among the stormy and salty waves of the sea, were rejected on the shore. Immediately after came the plague named inguinaria.

I don't know whether the two incidents are related but Gregory of Tours' story is the closest I could get to Wilson's mention. I'll keep looking though.

Best,
Y.D.

-----------
RR

UFOs and the Death of God [Redux]

god-dead13.jpg

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.

wonders13.jpg

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.

job13.jpg

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.

holo13.jpg

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.

fs13.jpg

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.]

ny13.jpg

RR

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

The Master Game by Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval


Noted authors Graham Hancock [Fingerprints of the Gods] and Robert Bauval [The Egypt Code] have written a new, 636 page book in which they “document” the influence of the Freemasons on human society, almost from time immemorial.

This reviewer is not inclined to put much stock into most theses that small groups of persons, banded together for purposes of controlling society or elements of society, are rife and accomplished.

The early Christians pulled off a kind of societal coup, with the help of a rabid psychotic, St. Paul and an emperor of Rome, Constantine. And Martin Luther, with the help of a king, Henry the Eighth created a blemish that removed the Catholic Church from its almost total domination of religious culture in Western Civilization.

But a small group of men, a sect or cult of secrecy, such as the Freemasons, ruling society, the World? The idea is fraught with incredulity.

But Hancock and Bauval make a more-than-circumstantial case for exactly that.

The Master Game is surfeited with little known facts and tidbits that enlighten, without forcing readers to adhere to the book’s primary raison d’ĂȘtre; that is, Masons and Freemasonry created cities and sites around the world as symbols of their purpose to control mankind.

The sub-title of the Hancock/Bauval book is “Unmasking the secret rulers of the world” – a sub-title that mimics previous hypotheses and theories, about such groups as the Illuminati, the Templars, the Rosicrucians, Opus Dei, and even the mafia.

Joel Levy’s “The Secret Societies Bible” [Firefly Books, Buffalo, NY, 2010] is a preamble to the Hancock/Bauval book, and covers most of the same material with as many or more illustrations as those found in The Master Game.

Yet, Hancock and Bauval provide details from ancient history and connect dots that others have missed or ignored, such as the Hermetics with the [Christian] Gnostics and later on, Giordano Bruno and Napoleon, on to the Founding Fathers of The United States of America.

The book culminates in a raft of accusations that Al Qaeda and the Arab World are primarily attacking the Freemasonry-oriented nation of Israel and Zionists, using the odious Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as the mandate for terrorism, ostensibly against Masonic-Zionism and those who adhere to the hidden Masonic practices that underlie Western governments.

The thrust of the book is this, according to the marketing materials: Iconic cities, Paris, Rome, Washington D.C., New York, London, were designed and created as giant temples with the intent of immersing residents in Masonic ideals.

Is such a thing possible, credible? You can read the book to see if the case has cachet. I remain skeptical, but have to admit that the supporting material and information make a believable case, if you are a person inclined to think that machinations by minority groups can control the bizarre vicissitudes of humankind, in toto.

The book is published by The Disinformation Company, Ltd., NY, 2011, Softcover, $24.95, and can be found at most bookstores, or online at Amazon, Powell’s, Barnes and Noble, et cetera.

RR


Monday, August 08, 2011

What on Earth? Inside the Crop Circle Mystery – A Suzanne Taylor film

cropcircles.jpg

I’m not an avid follower of the crop circle phenomenon, but I have to admit that the “constructions” have a kind of rarified, transcendental even, beauty.

The DVD we received...

crop27.jpg

is a splendid introduction to the crop circle phenomenon and some of the people who are enthralled by the constructs.

The film-maker, Suzanne Taylor, pictured here…

suzanne.jpg

has created an artful, objective documentary, about her search for the truth about crop circles.

The DVD/film is replete with images of crop circles:

crop1.jpg

crop4.jpg

crop5.jpg

It’s also replete with people who are absolutely fascinated by the things.

And Ms. Taylor takes into account the blokes who tried to say they were responsible for crop circles – making them in the dead of night. (They are loony.)

blokes.jpg

The DVD has a tribute to the late John Mack (whom I had the pleasure of communicating with by phone and e-mail a few weeks before he was killed in an automobile accident in England).

mack8.jpg

The documentary may be accessed and/or bought by going to:

http://passionriver.com/titles.php?id=539

RR

Sunday, August 07, 2011

Wonders in the Sky


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.


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.

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 agree, obviously:

The persons seeing UFOs are not cranks and weirdos. Hawking is wrong. The people who study UFOs are the cranks and weirdos.

RR

Monday, August 01, 2011

Is this a faked UFO photo?


This photo appeared as part of the January 11th, 1966 Wanaque Reservoir, New Jersey UFO sighting.

Anthony Bragalia has been researching the sighting and his initial story appeared at The Bragalia Files, and may be read by clicking HERE

Mr. Bragalia insists the photo is of an authentic UFO. I think the photo is of a faked flying saucer/UFO, similar to others offered in the time-frame:

fakeufo2.jpg

Mr. Bragalia's view stems from the "fact" that the photo was allegedly taken by local cops.

Is there a photographer in our midst who can determine (analyze) this photo, as we have it -- Mr. Bragalia is trying to obtain the original (photo or negative) -- and tell us if it is bogus or real?

RR

Thursday, July 28, 2011

The Roswell Addiction


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He just likes filler, and Roswell always provides it.

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

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

Monday, July 25, 2011

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

higgs25.jpg

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.

nasa25.jpg

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.

fermi25.jpg

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.

god25.jpg

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

Saturday, July 23, 2011

An example of UFO testimony that varies because of witness differences

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

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

japana.jpg

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

japanb.jpg

(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:

japanc.jpg

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.

insignia1.jpg

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.

Friday, July 22, 2011

The Goldbach Conjecture and literal UFO reports

goldbach22.jpg

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.

ezekiel22.jpg

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.

adamski22.jpg

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.

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Quantum UFOs

ufo19.jpg

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.

suss19.jpg

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]

jacob19.jpg

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

particle19.jpg

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:

wigner19.jpg

“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].

wave19.jpg

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:

bohr19.jpg

“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.

rb-4719.jpg

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]

schrod19.jpg

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)…..

quantum19.jpg