UR DOIN IT WRONG
Newsweek’s current cover story on the “Search For Aliens” appears (only part of the article is available online) to take a look at the cutting-edge science behind the search for ET contact. The newest entry (at least in the past decade) for the search for extraterrestrial life is made possible by better techniques for searching the firmament for extrasolar planets by their signatures left by passing in front of the stars which they orbit. Measure the drop in electromagnetic radiation as the star is partially occluded by an orbiting body, and we can tell the size and orbital period of the planet. Another method uses the doppler shift “wobble” of a star to deduce the mass of an unseen object’s gravitational force
Astronomers claim that they might even have rough idea of the composition of the planets in question, and can make an educated guess as to the possibility of life on these rocky outposts. I hope that the Newsweek journalist (Andrew Romano) continues with an explanation that the planets in question may exhibit the possibility of life, given their composition and distance from the host star. Almost certainly this would be mentioned by the astronomers he interviewed for the article, who would add that this does not prove that aliens are visiting us. Perhaps the best we can say is that there is now an infinitesimal possibility, rather than not at all.
I watched Monsters Vs. Aliens a total of eleven times last week (for pay) and each viewing left me even more disillusioned with the standard pop culture message of aliens = E.T. As Nick and I (and others) have argued, there is as yet NO firm or reliable evidence that we have been visited by an extraterrestrial intelligence flying here in spaceships.
There is however, a debatable amount of evidence of something that exhibits some sort of intelligence and that has been interacting with us for some time. Whether that manifests as lights in the sky, discs in the daylight, or strange creatures grabbing people from their beds in the middle of the night is still wide open for discussion. It might also show itself as furtive unexplained animals, patterns in crops, or channeled messages. Just because we have been taught to assign UFO phenomena to aliens coming from other planets does not make it so. (Actually, it might, but that’s another ontological can of worms.)
We are stuck in a culture that needs to settle on one way to look at things, and uncomfortable with ambiguity, for the most part. Any non-human intelligence who wanted to “conquer” us, or at least make limited contact would do well to exploit this tendency, as well as our reliance on conscious sensory input to make their presence as subtle as a light breeze on our collective consciousness. No flying saucers, death rays, or even handshakes with the President needed.
When issues like these (and other non-ET theorizing) appears in the mainstream news, some of us may be able to stop whining and move on to greener pastures. Perhaps I should work on entertaining sound-bite versions of alternates to the alien hypothesis, backed up with the newest theories in astronomy and physics, but perhaps Michio Kaku does that better…and not many people listen to him anyway.
Maybe a new way of playing with the possibilities in a popular way is just waiting for a name. “Theoretical Ufology”* perhaps?
*Thanks to Micah Hanks for reminding me of the term, which was originally suggested by Mac Tonnies.
Also thanks to Mac for locating this wonderful image:
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Aug 23 2009 
August 23rd, 2009 at 6:03 pm
*Eleven* viewings of “Monsters vs. Aliens”? Good grief, man!
August 23rd, 2009 at 6:30 pm
Mac,
And I can look forward to at least 15 more next week! At least they’re in different languages. Sort of makes me wish I didn’t see it in the theater.
August 24th, 2009 at 2:24 am
You are right that there is as yet NO firm or reliable evidence that we have been visited by an extraterrestrial intelligence flying here in spaceships.
But you forget that there is NO firm or reliable evidence that we have been visited by beings from other dimension or beings from our dreams or beings from within the Earth and so on…
August 24th, 2009 at 3:59 am
Joe,
You assume that because I denigrate the ETH, other theories are correct or better.
We like to think that UFO=alien because we know quite a bit more about space and space travel than other dimensions, the ultimate nature of the unconscious, or supposed “inner Earth” denizens.
I argue here (and in many other places on this site) that other theories deserve a closer look because the ETH gets all the attention with just as much going for it as many others.
August 24th, 2009 at 11:07 am
I think you are missing the point Greg, the point being that there is no firm or reliable evidence that we are being visited by any beings of any kind whatsoever. All these “theories” circulating around used to explain where the visitors are coming from, are silly, since it is no different than someone trying to explain where all the “big ones that got away” went to, after all those fishermen all around the world lost them. All we are doing is explaining away storytales, meaning we are just using one storytale to explain away yet another storytale — and that is just plain illogical and circular. Before we start picking and choosing our favorite ET storytale (theory), let’s see if we can find something that actually needs explaining first. That has yet to be done.
August 24th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
Sage,
I am more interested in the game than any so-called “winners.”
August 25th, 2009 at 11:29 am
Greg,
How does your comment have anything to do with anything anyone said?
August 26th, 2009 at 2:24 am
People keep seeing things on Earth and
in the skies. And whether that “anecdotal evidence” indicates
anything in external reality or on not, I think its worthy of study simply from
a sociological standpoint.
August 26th, 2009 at 1:29 pm
From a sociological standpoint, there is nothing worthy of study since UFOlogy is socially relegated to the realm of “kooks” and “nutcases”, but from a psychological standpoint, UFOlogy is very worthy of study.
August 26th, 2009 at 11:41 pm
Sage,
Twenty years ago, I saw a UFO “up close,” less that 500 feet away. Since you seem believe UFO’s are a psychological enigma, how would you describe my sighting - a hallucination? BTW, I was not under the influence of any drugs. I have gone over that event hundreds of times in my head, trying to make sense of it. I’ve even doubted my own eyes, sanity, and memory.
If it were a hallucination, why did I hallucinate that one time and never (so far) again?
In other words, what is your theory about single sightings?
August 27th, 2009 at 11:09 am
“Twenty years ago, I saw a UFO “up close,” less that 500 feet away. Since you seem believe UFO’s are a psychological enigma, how would you describe my sighting - a hallucination?”
I would describe it for exactly what it is — an unverifiable, uncorroborated storytale.
“In other words, what is your theory about single sightings?”
The vast majority of them are mass delusions.
August 27th, 2009 at 9:52 pm
Sage said: “I would describe it for exactly what it is — an unverifiable, uncorroborated storytale.”
“The vast majority of them are mass delusions.”
What do you think the minority are?
Thanks for your opinion. I want to be clear on this point. Based upon the experience relayed above, you believe that I am either lying or that I am mentally ill, or perhaps both?
August 28th, 2009 at 1:24 am
Greg is emphasizing quite correctly that the UFO=Alien “meme” is being promoted with great gusto — personally I think by the CIA. Cable television is supervised by the CIA — and the history channel loves to interview Stanton Friedman who recently stated:
To claim that alien abductions are the same as visits by leprechauns is absurd.
Now Linda Howe is promoting that the triangles of Rendlesham were either aliens or time travel of our own technology via Michio Kaku or some variant in between.
I first read Kaku’s Beyond Einstein book back in the early 1990s. His cable show on the quantum revolution is promoting replacing Nature with nanobiomotors. Most of physics is actually military with this “command and control” mentality but quantum chaos is the real secret future of military science.
Order out of Chaos — Freemasonry — occult technology — mass ritual sacrifice. Plasma technology is quantum chaos is electrogravitic propulsion — “squeezed light.”
I had a VERY close encounter with a big black triangle and they’re well-documented. No hallucination but plasma balls were there as well. The area I saw the triangle had a documented UFO flap in the 1970s — with local news photos of the craft! And cattle mutilation forced a rancher out of the area as well. The local newslady who showed me her three-ring binder of the UFO craft (my mom owned the local newspaper at the time) stated that this was a
“military flight test corridor.”
Paul LaViollete’s new antigravity propulsion book argues that the military is relying on reverse-engineered alien technology from Roswell.
It’s this occult worship of technology that is the real issue — Western civilization has a linear view of time with the replacement of Nature by a new “Garden of Eden” made by machines. This goes back to Plato — combining Babylonian, Egyptian and even Vedic culture for the Greek Miracle of the irrational number and geometric magnitude. Former M.I.T. historian and Smithsonian curator, Professor David F. Noble’s book “The Religion of Technology” takes this apocalyptic technology back to the 9th C. with John Scotus Erigena, working for the Carolingian Benedictine Empire.
Even Rupert Sheldrake has promoted “Morphic Computers” — artificial intelligence using adaptive resonance technology — neural networks similar to the quantum chaos model that Bart Kosko promotes on C2C. In other words eternal time is now limited by space — the memory stored in machines enables instanteous innovation and learning through morphic resonance.
Aliens could very well be our own astral subconcious — even the reptilian brain itself — projected externally. Try taking DMT to find out the truth. haha. I did it by combining it with full-lotus qigong and 5 hours later the truth was this:
The rainbow vortex of reality connects all spacetime, sucking it back into pure consciousness which is alive — the whole universe is an interactive, reproducing instanteous holograph.
August 28th, 2009 at 10:16 am
“What do you think the minority [of UFO reportings] are?”
A hodge-podge of illusions, hallucinations, and hoaxes.
“Thanks for your opinion. I want to be clear on this point. Based upon the experience relayed above, you believe that I am either lying or that I am mentally ill, or perhaps both?”
Neither. Try another guess.
August 29th, 2009 at 12:59 am
“Neither. Try another guess.”
Why require a guess? Why not simply give
Curious your answer?
August 29th, 2009 at 3:40 am
“Why require a guess? Why not simply give Curious your answer?”
I require a guess because Curious required that I choose my answer from one of only three scenarios, all of which required me to insult him. Clearly Curious wasn’t looking for an answer, but looking to set me up. And now, what about yourself? Are you going to require me to judge Curious, instead of remaining objective in my pursuit of truth? I am sorry then, but I respectfully decline. Yet you have offered me some bait, and I feel inclined to at least take a nibble…
Curious claims to have had an experience, but without evidence, it is only a claim — and a claim of a phenomena is not evidence of the phenomena being claimed. Anyone can claim anything they feel like claiming — and they do, especially when it comes to UFOs. There are over 10,000 claims of UFO sightings/encounters every year, yet not one of them is provable, logically indisputable, or leaves any trace physical evidence behind. This has been true of every year’s worth of sightings for the last 100 years. So whatever this phenomenon is, it isn’t physically real, but only exists in their minds, and the only kinds of things that only exists in people’s minds and not in actual reality are illusions, delusions, and hallucinations. That is true for everybody who has ever had a UFO sighting/encounter, including the one by Curious. It is not an insult or a judgment, it is human nature — everybody does it at one time or another.
August 29th, 2009 at 4:14 am
I can appreciate a reasonable answer.
I disagree with your final posistion,
but thats a given. Thanks.
August 29th, 2009 at 8:36 am
Sage,
Sometimes people jump to inaccurate conclusions because they do not have all the facts to consider. Some people don’t even realize they don’t have all the facts.
However, it is interesting to speculate and debate.
August 29th, 2009 at 8:39 am
Drew,
Maybe we are the machines?
August 29th, 2009 at 10:48 am
Nick Cook’s “Alien History of the Planet” documentary on the History Channel right now is actually pretty good — lots on the Nazi stuff and Cold War propaganda. He’s fixated on the U2 though….
August 29th, 2009 at 10:51 am
OK now he’s switching to Russian’s discovering our ionosphere technology — yeah that’s my “Actual Matrix Plan” expose nonduality.com/hempel.htm CIA’s Andrija Puharich — human brainwaves are in synch with ionosphere resonance and the plan is to tap the human brain for a new Matrix spacetime machine as the whole planet….
August 29th, 2009 at 3:01 pm
curious,
Sometimes people also jump to accurate conclusions.
I agree with you that it is interesting to speculate and debate.
August 31st, 2009 at 8:27 am
Sage,
If you’re unwilling to even acknowledge the numerous trace evidence reports, why do you post on a forum like this. I hate it when someone claims to know the answers but completely ignores EVIDENCE.
August 31st, 2009 at 9:13 am
The reality of alien visition (flesh and blood extraterrestrial interstellar astronauts in nuts and bolts starships) is so thoroughly established by hard evidence at this point that its hardly subject to rational debate.
1. Hundreds of physical trace cases, many with electromagnetic, radiological, chemical, and microbiological residues that have been verified by independent laboratories, all remain, without alternative prosaic explanation.
2. Hundreds of former government and contractor employees, with verified Army, Navy, Air Force, NASA, CIA, DIA, and NSA credentials (i.e. dd214 forms that check out) have come forward, and testified under oath that they have personally worked inside the coverup, seen or handled physical evidence or official documents attesting to UFO reality, and that UFOs are, in fact, definately, extraterrestrial alien spacecraft.
3. Hundreds of abductees have come forward, exhibiting either physical evidence (surgical scars, radiological burns, or implanted devices) or with third-party eyewitnesses to their abductions, missing time, and/or returns, for which no hypnographic artifacts provide an alternative explanation.
4. There is no scientific reason to believe that we are alone in the universe, or even in the galaxy, or to doubt that older and wiser civilizations may have the technological power to visit us - and to do so discretely if they so chose.
5. All ‘official’ explanations for Roswell, Rendlesham, Phoenix, and dozens of other high profile UFO cases have been conclusively debunked, leaving the alien reality the only plausible alternative.
6. While thousands of pages of government documents, both declassified and leaked, attest to official knowledge of UFOs as Alien spacecraft, there is none - as in Not One - which renders any discription of any other plausible source of such objects and observations. No evidence exists in any form whatsoever that UFOs are Psychic, Interdimensional, Imaginary, Animals or other Life Forms, Manifestations of Gods/Demons, or anything other than nuts-and-bolts transportation equipment not of human origin.
7. There is no evidence that humans are subject to “mass delusion”, or that any such phenomenon exists, as this is not observed in any context other than as proffered to explain UFO sightings by multiple witnesses. The notion that ‘Mass Delusion’ occurs at all is crank psychology with no basis in empirical scientific psychoanalytic fact.
8. Until Tangible Proof can be put forward to advance a theory for [prosaically unexplained] UFOs apart from the “Extra-Terrestrial Hypothesis”, the ETH will have to stand as - by far - the best documented explanation we have for the millions of sightings reported each year worldwide. Interdimensional Ghosts, etc. will have to wait their turn behind the flying saucers that multiple retired Colonels have ‘kicked the tires’ of, and sworn to.
9. The ENTIRE theoretical opposition to ETH rests on the [now discredited] notion of 20th Century physics that “Nothing - not even Information - can travel faster than the Speed of Light”. In the 21st Century, we know that this primitive niave dictum was drivel. Beethoven has been transmitted at speeds of 300x “c”, Quantum Entanglement has telecommunicated data instantaneously over 15 km., Molecules of hundreds of atoms have been ‘teleported’ with zero delay, and NASA’s own Breakthrough Physics program has invested in new physics approaches to hyperluminal propulsion. Morover, “C” has been shown, in a dozen different laboratories, to be variable and not a true ‘Constant’; cosmology now admits that it has also changed over time. Light Barrier? BUNK!
10. Which is more likely, that millions of witnesses, thousands of abductees/contactees, hundreds of ex government spooks, and dozens of lab reports are all ‘imagined’, or that UFOs are exactly what everybody says they are?
Lets move on, to the far more important question: What are they doing here in the first place, and what is so important that it must be kept secret at ANY cost (its surely not their mere presence)???
September 1st, 2009 at 12:45 pm
And now for the rest of the story…
1a. All of the hundreds of (alleged) physical trace cases have never actually provided samples of that (alleged) evidence for others to see. It has always been mere reports of physical trace evidence and never evidence of the thing reported.
1b. Not one laboratory has ever provided *scientifically peer reviewed* evidence that that aliens have visited us. Most references to laboratories in UFO literature has been of the second-hand variety, i.e. — a UFO “researcher” submitted a sample of something to a laboratory that in turn said they couldn’t identify it, which is not at all the same thing as identifying it as being of alien origin.
2. Hundreds of people have all come forward to swear under oath that the moon landings were faked or that they have seen Elvis alive, but guess what? They are all wrong! So you see, your argument of one hundred Frenchmen can’t be wrong, is wrong. One hundred Frenchmen can be wrong. It doesn’t matter how many make a claim or who makes the claim, all that matters are there any facts to back up the claim. Don’t make the mistake of confusing the report of something being a “fact” as evidence that the thing reported actually is a fact. Hundreds of THOUSANDS of people all used to claim that the world was flat, including many very respected and high profile individuals. Numerous testimonies and observations were made to verify this fact and guess where all those people are now? Extinct! Why? Because anyone can claim anything that they feel like claiming, but a claim is not a fact, it is a blind faith assertion — unless they can put their money where their mouth is and provide physically demonstrable evidence for all to actually see, smell, taste, hear, and touch for themselves.
3. Unexplained scars and secondhand storytales of being abduction is not proof of alien abductions. Disproving that the make believe explanation that the only source of mysterious scars is from alien abductions is silly, since there is nothing to disprove where nothing has been proven in the first place.
4. You are correct that there is no scientific reason to believe we are alone in the Universe or our galaxy, but there is every scientific reason to disbelieve that any interstellar civilizations have or are visiting us.
5. Every single high profile UFO case, including Roswell, Rendlesham, and The Phoenix Lights, has ever been proven to taken place as claimed — and there is nothing to explain where nothing has been proven to happen in the first place.
6. Even if in real life there were such a thing as a government document attesting to the official knowledge of UFOs as alien spacecraft (there isn’t), governments are not known for their scientific competency or objective observation capabilities. If you want to know reality as it is instead of what you wish it were like, you don’t consult a government agency you consult a scientific one. And if you take a closer look at those thousands of pages of government documents, the vast majority of them attest to the official ignorance of the UFO phenomenon. In fact, that is the exact reason why, in the last few years, three countries have come forward and released all of they government documents on UFOs — because they don’t know anything either.
7. There is ample evidence that humans are subject to mass delusions, all throughout history. For example, there is 80 MB of mass delusions documented throughout history at http://www.archive.org/details/extraordinarypop014178mbp. The current UFO fad comfortably fits right in-between all those 784 pages.
8. There is no compelling reason for anyone to accept the extra-terrestrial hypothesis unless somehow, after all those billions of abductions and sightings and cover-ups, someone can tell us why no one can agree on what an ET looks or acts like, much less show us one that exists outside of their imagination.
9. Just because an advanced civilization could visit us, doesn’t prove that they would or have visited us. The possibility is high, but the probability is low.
10. UFOs are exactly what everybody says they are…objects flying through the air that cannot be identified as anything, including being identified as an alien spacecraft. It is simple logic: if you can identify a flying objects as an alien spacecraft, then it isn’t unidentified anymore.
A more important question is, why do so many people have such a difficult time distinguishing the difference between reality and fantasy?