The Paranormal Priority: UFOs?

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,

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

Click here for the PDF

Who or What?

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

UFOs & Aliens: Is There Anybody Out There?

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

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

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.

The Robert Taylor 1979 UFO Encounter

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:

The Socorro craft (and other UFOs) "explained"

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 Morpheus/Socorro Lander

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....

UFOs without culture? Why?

Anthony Lane‘s review of Werner Herzog’s “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” [New Yorker, May 2nd, 2011, Page 88 ff.] abutted, for this writer, a paper, discovered among others, entitled Speculations on the First Contact: Encyclopedia Galactica or the Music of the Spheres? by Guillermo A. Lemarchand of the Instituto Angentino de Radioastronomia [CONICET], Buenos Aires.



The movie review (by Lane) deals with how director Herzog presents his vision of the cave drawings on a wall in the Chauvet-Pont d’Arc, in the Ardèche reagion of France.







The Chauvet-Pont wall of drawings, from about thirty-five to thirty-eight thousand years ago, is more “cinematic” (says Herzog) than those at Lascaux, and should be compared with the shapes found at Swabia, four hundred miles away.









Lemarchand’s account of a Seminar on the Cultural Impact of Extraterrestrial Contact (sponsored by the Foundation for the Future) addressed the hypothesis that an extraterrestrial civilization worthy of contact would be much in advance of Earth, technologically, but that wouldn’t be the best premise for contact.

Lemarchand writes that mankind here has provided an advanced form of culture as represented by the art found in caves, such as Lascaux or Chauvet-Pont, and an alien civilization would have a similar esthetic culture, which any civilization of long-standing would have since they didn’t wipe themselves out with wars or cataclysmic accidents.

Lemarchand also thinks an alien culture/civilization would have a moral or ethical stance, not unlike that of the philosopher Immanuel Kant (but that’s not my point here).



Lemarchand’s paper dismisses the idea that the best way to contact alien civilizations is not by mathematics or technical formulae. Such abstract devices would not be as developed as would art (or music), which would, if the alien culture is extant, have evolved much in the way that Earth’s art (and music) has evolved, from the art of the cave(s) to what it is today. (Although I think that art has devolved from that of the caves, but that’s a matter for another time and discussion.)

Earthlings, writes Lemarchand (from ideas of Carl Sagan), are members of a Technologically Adolescent Society. Thus, communicating with a more advanced alien society would then be problematical, as we’d have a difficult time understanding advanced technological information, whereas understanding an artistic image of an alien culture would not be difficult.

Lemarchand points out that there are several patterns in art and nature that can be considered as universal as mathematics in interstellar communication attempts” (von Hoerner, 1974; Lemarchand and Lomberg, 1996).

And using artistic symbols would be a better mechanism for an interstellar communication than SETI’s mathematical approach, which is what Sagan was striving for with his golden disk attached to the Voyager spacecraft(s).



Lemarchand’s paper is rife with intellectual insights about alien communication, humanity, the arts, and science. (I can’t provide a link as the paper was found among others here, and has no provenance, although I imagine it was printed out from our Sage Publications account a few years ago. Interested parties might seek it out via Google.)

Now let me get to the point from which I have egregiously digressed….

And this point has been made before, earlier at this blog and elsewhere in our internet outings.

Nowhere has art or music been noted on (or from) UFOs.

Yes, there have been symbols or insigniae, as mentioned in the post preceding this one, but those have not been artistic or esthetic, as the drawings on the wall caves, or other human pictorials are.



No UFO or flying saucer reports have identified music as endemic to the sightings. And no art, aside from those militaristic or corporate-like insignia/symbols, has been registered – none like that which Lemarchand thinks would be intrinsic to an advanced extraterrestrial race.

What does this tell us about UFOs? That whatever they are, or whomever “mans” them, are either not advanced in a way that would include moral imperatives (as Lemarchand articulates) nor are they as advanced in even a small way as that of the Neanderthals or early man was, as indicated by the art in the caves of Lascaux and Chauvet-Pont d’Arc.

This means, for us, that UFOs are either created by Earthlings or are artifacts without a cultural or living species origination – a physical manifestation of some kind -- or UFOs belong to a race or races that are without moral imperatives (ethics) and refinements which would ameliorate contact between us and them as (we hate to note) some abduction accounts seem to warn.

I’ve gone far afield here, and have departed from any cogent hypothesis. But I’m hopeful that some readers might comprehend that UFOs present alternatives to thought besides the usual cavil that permeates discussions here and all over the UFO community.

And that a civilized discourse might take us into new directions, away from the classic, banal UFO cases that usurp innovative energies and keep us mired in obsequious back-and-forths which lead nowhere and have for a long time now.

We can hope….

A Socorro Confusion (that flummoxes researchers)

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

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.

Ascensions and Levitations: A UFO Connection?

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

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