The Enduring Enigma of the UFO
Here's a pdf copy of my article on UFOs as published in the current IONS Shift magazine.
"Despite significant evidence that something unusual has been going on in the skies above planet Earth, serious investigation remains taboo. The result: far more questions than answers. Like psi phenomena, the topic of UFOs provides a litmus test for what we think we know — or want to."
Comments
Excellent article. I especially liked the box with the statements from astronauts.
The subject of alien intelligences comes up occasionally in the context of mediumship and spiritual healing. One of the members of my development circle worked in a health profession and he would sneak in spiritual healing while he had his hands on the patients doing conventional treatments. His healing guides were aliens, they would come through during mediumship class occasionally.
"The Reconnection" by Dr. Eric Pearl is a book about the author's experiences as a chiropracter who became an energy healer. He had a type of mystical realignment done by an unusual mystical practitioner. Afterwards, his chiropractic patients started getting healing for conditions unrelated their ciropractic treatments. Some patients started channeling aliens during treatment.
I know of several mediums who have had psychic contacts with aliens. It isn't talked about too much with outsiders because mediums have a credibility problem among some people to begin with. The UFO pseudo-skeptics are just as malicious as the psi pseudo-skeptics. Mediums don't really need the additional personal attacks they would attract if they were more forthcoming about it.
Charles Richet, Nobel Prize winner in physiology and medicine, in the conclusion to his book "Thirty Years of Psychical Research" wrote that the evidence for spirits was more likely to be due to other forms of intelligence than the spirits of deceased humans.
He wrote, "Why should there not be intelligent and puissant beings distinct from those perceptible by our senses? By what right should we dare to affirm, on the basis of our limited senses, our defective intellect, and our scientific past as yet hardly three centuries old, that in the vast Cosmos man is the sole intelligent being, and that all mental reality always depends upon nerve-cells irrigated with oxygenated blood?"
Remote viewers have also reported contacts with aliens.
The aliens may be keeping their presence low key to prevent damaging our culture as happened when Eruopean culture spread to Africa or the Americas - the local culture was often severely altered, damaged, or destroyed by contact with it.
I suspect the US government has a very complicated policy on disclosing what it knows about UFO's. On the one hand, UFOs are a good cover story for signtings of secret airforce projects. If someone sees a secret plane or rocket they are also easily discredited through ridicule for believing in UFOs. On the other hand, if the capabilities of alien craft were known it would encourage weapons development in other countries (ie. a faster than light missile would be very destabilizing). If aliens are abducting citizens and the government can't do anything about it, they look impotent and people will get upset.
Another possibile reason the government keeps it secret is because the aliens don't use money. If it became public knowledge that an advanced civilization older and technologically superior to ours doesn't use money, it would destroy the current power structure in the world :).
I just finished watching the documentary, "The Experiencers", which features comments by John E. Mack, along with interviews of UFO witnesses. It was quite good. If you haven't seen it yet, part 1 can be found here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgUaJS-h_rY
I do think the UFO phenomenon is more widespread than is commonly reported (in varying degrees of contact). Locally, we had at least two incidents in the last year that even got some media attention. The first was in the vicinity of Langhorne, Pennsylvania and even got written up in the local paper, though strangely enough, the archive of the story mysteriously disappeared. (It was in the Bucks County Courier Times.) But the anomalous aircraft was sighted by many witnesses (it hovered over a mall and a restaurant) on more than one occasion and reportedly the sightings continued for a while even after the news coverage stopped.
And then there were the videos of something interesting hovering over suburban Philadelphia during the Springsteen concert for Obama, less than fifty miles from the earlier sightings in Langhorne, just a couple of months earlier.
Certainly this doesn't mean they are necessarily related, but having repeatedly seen some things I can't explain in the sky when I lived in that area, including things that were also observed by others, sometimes present, sometimes across town, it would be hard to dismiss this as not having some basis in reality.
Why do the 'authorities' generally dismiss it? The possibility of widespread panic might be one reason, but witholding information seems the more likely reason, especially since polls indicate that a majority of people think there may be life out there and/or believe UFOs exist. "Information is power!" like the old 70s infomercial went. If the 'powers that be' deny 'aliens', not to mention psi, if they decide to put some R&D in, they'll likely be ahead of the private sector, which may ignore the subject, since it wouldn't be all that smart to invest in something with a limited marketable value (since everyone 'knows' it's not real), even if it would redefine the world as we know it...
If the existence of UFOs, and psi, for that matter, were confirmed, how would that affect people's attitude toward the current authoritative/governmental structure? I think it would weaken the hold this has on most people. Kind of hard to be the end-all authority when people know there's more out there...
Obviously the situation is much more complex than this, but I've gotten long already.
Thanks again for a great, thought provoking article. Keep 'em coming.
Christina
Does M3 have implications for the role of quantum biology as the mechanism of psi?
Telepathy, according to a quantum biological model, wouldn't require M3 to be true. Right?
But if M3 is true, and matter arises from consciousness, does that change the role of quantum mechanics, matter, and biology in psi?
I suppose it brings up the question of what consciousness without matter really is.
Is matter the primary means by which consciousness exerts itself or is matter merely a creation used for special purposes, for example, experiencing a biological existence?
Maybe this belongs on the quantum biology post, but 'anonymous's comments led me to think of the article on the GEO600 project that I read yesterday.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126911.300-our-world-may-be-a-giant-hologram.html?page=1
I know this is still in the theoretical stage, and the idea of a holgraphic universe isn't entirely new, but how do you think this dovetails with the quantum explanation of psi, if it does? It seems like there would be a connection or this theory would fill in some missing pieces, if it is correct, yes?
I'm really curious what you think...
Thanks.
Christina
http://www.edmitchellapollo14.com/naturearticle.htm
The one form that everyone giggled at was the CFAO 71-6. It was the form used for reporting UFO sightings. As much as we all thought it was very amusing, we still learned to fill out such reports. Someone somewhere (obviously not us) thought that this was an important skill for a young soldier to have.
An example of such a report can be seen here:
http://www.ufobc.ca/yukon/objectloopmile1029akhwy.htm
(www.ufocenter.org) specializes in collecting and
disseminating new UFO cases."
Question to all folks in general:
I just checked that website and it looks like they forgot to renew their domain. Are they a long-established voice? Have they recently had some problems (e.g. illness of the key member) that might prevent them from updating their site?
I've talked with a pilot about the kind of encounters you described in the article. He had had one himself and assured me this happened all the time. But it was custom not to talk about it.
I also read some papers and saw different videos from the Disclosure Project people some years ago. Some of that material seriously crosses my boggle threshold, but it is extremely exciting if it has any truth to it.
You mentioned some books in that article Dean and seem to have made a fair amount of digging on the subject.
Are there any others you'd recommended?
-Tor
New Page Books (June 1, 2008).
I read about 10 books and 40 articles, and paged through maybe 100 websites in preparing for that article.
The single most persuasive book I found that argues that something interesting is going on was written by Richard Dolan (http://keyholepublishing.com/), followed closely by anything written by Jacques Vallee.
However, I have no direct knowledge about any of this, so I hold no strong opinion one way or the other.
"By the way, I do know people(still living) that can kill cell phones and wrist watches in a pretty short period of time."
...which prompted me to search the net for some kind of lab study. I'm coming up empty - any suggestions?
Thanks.
I've heard many claims like this, but I'm not aware of any systematic lab tests to confirm them.
My guess is that some people do tend to break electronic systems more frequently than you'd expect by chance. There may be a whole host of possible explanations, from just being clumsy with equipment, to strange biofields and beyond. It would even be possible to design devices for these people to carry around, like an airline flight recorder, that would enable capturing what happened and when. But I think such failures may be infrequent enough to make it difficult to justify why funds should be spent to study these effects. Most consumer electronic devices are extremely robust.
Can you post a link to that disucssion you are referring to?
Flashing of electric lights are commonly associated with hauntings and poltergeist phenomena. I was in a spiritualist church were this happened regularly and went unremarked except by visitors and new members. I was a bit surprised when I first noticed it happening and no one else batted an eye. This space was rented from a christian church, whose members had mixed feelings about renting to spiritualists, so I think if it was an ordinary electrical malfunction it would have been fixed. There were other phenomena such as rapping going on too which support the notion that the paranormal phenomena were going on there.
If a paranormal force can modulate household current sufficiently to flash electric lights it seems reasonable that such forces could easily damage consumer electronics.
I'm not aware of anyone being able to do this at will, however I have heard several reports on internet discussion groups of mediums having problems with electrical equipment in ways that don't seem likely to be explained by coincidence or static electricity.
http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?topic=6433&post=30839&uid=6417546403#post30839
"...my computer died on me three times!!!, some how before the first time it went I sat down started to type and the groups I belong to got wiped out, then my email then the computer my I T guy couldn't work it out, I've blown up 5 electric kettles, three toasters, and a few electric clock radios and we now have a new vaccum cleaner which I'm not allowed to touch!!! obviously the last one went bang when I touched it...
"We have two electric clock radios, plus a clock on the microwave, oven and dvd player and none of them stay at the right time, no matter how many times my husband resets them they all tend to make up there own time after a couple of hours."
Uri Geller is also reported to affect clocks and watches in his proximity.
Here is another example:
http://forum.mind-energy.net/skeptiko-podcast/650-personal-experiences-post8882.html
"It started off with light bulbs going 'poof' every time I got frustrated and equipment in the lab acting strangely. We had an electrician in to check the wiring at home, but it didn't matter where I was, light bulbs and electronic equipment fell victim to my bad moods."
"This phenomenical complex bears a resemblance to experiences reported in shamanic, psychedelic, mystical, religious,
and psychic states, and to folklore, mythology, and religious lore. Perhaps these
apparently disparate phenomena may all be connected in some way."
"Most of the modern technological world was created based on M1 (Harman's Materialistic Monism) assumptions, so it carries enormous persuasive power."
It is tempting to dismiss M1 frameworks for explaining UFO and related phenomena when one sees the inclusive power of M3(Trascendental Monism) worldview.But this is not necessarily the case when we see theoretical progress in physical theories (strictily M1 squemes) for explaining cosmological observations (e.g Dark Matter) and its hypothetical consecuences at the universe's finests scales (e.g. Earth and its environment).
I am refering to hierarquical modelling of Dark Matter structures for which there are several approaches. See for example:
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0810/0810.5126v1.pdf
this (mainstream) author expresses the idea that "dark biology is not far behind. Someday perhaps we’ll be exchanging signals with the dark internet."
http://www.spiritandflesh.com/Dark_Matter_Dark_Chemistry.htm
http://noeticcenter.tripod.com/
This author tell us " Materialism to be valid must have two components: 1. Ordinary Materialism dealing with Light Matter and 2. Extra Ordinary Materialism dealing with Dark Matter or Dark Materialism."
http://cavekitty.ca/db_origin.pdf http://www.helsinki.fi/~matpitka/pdfpool/exonuclear.pdf
specially: http://www.helsinki.fi/~matpitka/articles/fermieng.pdf
This author concludes that "The hierarchy of dark matter corresponds to a hierarchy of conscious entities...", "It could also be that we are in some sense ”cells” of these higher level conscious entities and that they communicate to us all the time..."
http://ezinearticles.com/?Dark-Matter---Plasma-of-Super-Particles&id=1240357
this author "has been researching on terrestrial dark plasma (TDP) life forms, including their evolution in the dark biosphere and their habitats..."
http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/87508
this author reports that: "Citizens in the UK and United States have reported similar large, glowing objects in the sky that have been described as looking like an 'octopus,' 'jellyfish,' 'amoeba,' 'cocoon' and 'having a biological shape.' "
Perhaps what we presently call M1, M2 and M3 worldviews are all aspects of the same underlying "dark" reality, just viewed from different perspectives.
I found this article intriguing.
http://www.spiritandflesh.com/Dark_Matter_Dark_Chemistry.htm
In my first read through of the article, it didn't make any sense, but after reading the wikipedia entry on dark matter and then another reading of the article I began to understand what he is trying to say. I can't say I'm qualified to judge the content of the article but it is interesting for several reasons.
It seems to describe the various etheric bodies such as emotional, mental, and spirtual which are said to surround the incarnated person, are cell for cell duplicates of the physical body, and are also non-material and can pass through ordinary matter. Based on the mystical traditions about what a spirit is, (a soul of pure consciousness encased in a spirit body), one can speculate that M3 may be true in terms of the origins of consciousnenss and matter but that other forms of matter such as dark matter and or dark energy may comprise the spirit body, the spirit world, and psi forces.
One thing in the article I found most intriguing is the statement that the dark matter bodies for a person will not be governed by entropy. What is interesting about this is that if you read the descriptions of the spirit world conveyed through mediums, it seems that the second law of thermodynamics (entropy always increases) does not apply there. Spirits don't have to eat. When they come out of the water after swimming, they are not wet - all the water completely runs off them and back into the lake. Plants exist there but don't grow in dirt that sticks to your shoes so soil does not get tracked into the house. Things there are created by thought and remain until another thought disperses them. This is consistent with a world created by the thoughts of a telepathic race living in a world where thoughts are "material" things. What one person imagines everyone else sees as a solid object. Maybe thoughts become things by interaction with dark matter?
If dark matter or dark energy is the material by which psi forces are exerted I have great sympathy (ha ha) for those mainstream materialist scientists trying to detect dark matter in laboratories. They may find their work mind-boggling due to unexpected experimenter effects. One might even go so far as to predict that dark matter would be difficult to detect as long as the scientists believed it to be.
I came across some vedic scriptures which mention nadis(tubules) as the seat of conciousness, are you aware of any such research? Are you aware of any research into conciousness which has taken into account texts from olden era?
What is your take (if any) on the the object seen whizzing past the second tower detonation on 911? The video was captured by a Gamma Press photographer and actually made it to the ABC Evening News, as I recall. Since then it has faded into obscurity. Has anyone bothered to analyze that digital film, or otherwise come up with some plausible explanation?
See the theories of Stuart Hameroff, regarding microtubules as the quantum seat of consciousness in the brain. There is quite a bit of technical and popular material available on his work. Here's one popular source:
http://www.dailygrail.com/node/842
> Are you aware of any research into consciousness which has taken into account texts from olden era?
Yes, some of the more recent neuroscience-oriented research on meditation is aware of the folklore and writings of ancient lineages.
I recall reading about this and other 911 anomalies that haven't been plausibly explained. But I really don't know enough about this issue to have an informed opinion.
I did find the book "The New Pearl Harbor," by David Ray Griffin, one of the best I've read on this topic.
The statement that you comment really we find in the link:
http://noeticcenter.tripod.cor
in "Taxonomy, Dark Chemistry and Consciousness" of the article "Dark Matter and Dark Chemistry" we read the following:
"Unlike the light body, the dark soma is intransient being not fully subject to the laws of entropy."
and
"[The] molecular chaos of ordinary living matter, raises the issue of unity, wholeness, and stability of consciousness and demands an extraordinary intransient substrate."
You can see from these statements that "dark matter bodies for a person will not be governed by entropy" is an ad hoc hypothesis extraneous to the insights
we may (or may not) obtain from the author based in
his 'axion' related model of his postulated 'Dark Body'. Nothing exists in the theory described by his articles that permit us to infer this consequence (a big metaphysical leap) other that the general demand of an'intransient substrate/being'.
Do not forget that this approach is only one between
several to employ M1 (Materialistic Monism) for postulating coexisting an coevolving highly complex Dark Matter structures in parallel to our
electromagnetic/particles observed ones.
Try this other view attacking the same problem based on Topological Geometro-Dynamics (TGD):
Please google:
"Ufos, Aliens, and the New Physics"
Specifically page 33:'Dark matter hierarchy as a solution of Fermi paradox?'. This is one of the links that I gave in my first post. I am sorry that
one of the versions of this particular link did not work.
Yours,
Synthesis
President
Willis Harman discussed three basic ways
of looking at the world."
There are far more than these three basic ways of looking at the world. One can cite Bohm's views, the triadic "materialism" of the ancient Samkhya, etc.
Regarding crop circles: I was following the research by Talbott and Levengood at BLT Research for a while. In essence, they convinced me that soil abnormalities at genuine crop circles indicated some kind of electromagnetic effect, and stem weaving indicated something other than mechanical crushing.
Here's their site:
http://www.bltresearch.com
Here's a sample relevant page:
http://www.bltresearch.com/published/mit.html
Apparently last year's sightings did not end in the summer and no less than 71 reports of odd things in the sky have been made since then. No telling how many were seen and not reported. (Or ended up becoming Identified Flying or Non-flying Objects either)
Bucks is fairly rural (though it's been growing McMansions lately) and is generally an educated and affluent area. As a result of the many sightings, Pa's chapter of MUFON will be holding a conference there this weekend. I've never been to one of these things, so I've no idea what to expect, but it should be interesting.
TV news broadcast here (complete with the usual newscaster derision):
http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/?rn=4226712&cl=11656351&src=news
Better print coverage from a local paper here:
http://www.philly.com/community/pa/bucks/Mufon_conference_focuses_on_Bucks_UFO_sightings.html
I doubt the possible physics of the phenomena will be discussed in any detail, but you never know...
I think material things are manifestations of probabilities and
consciousness is capable of affecting those probabilities. Thus without consciousness you have a "billiard-ball world" of action-reaction but add the special ingredient of Life and you get a special kind of interaction that causes the type of changes in the world that would otherwise be impossible.
Yes. The panpsychist point of view is a respectable stance in the philosophy of mind. It suggests that what we enjoy as conscious awareness is a tiny speck of a "larger" form of consciousness that pervades the fabric of reality. A variation on this idea was proposed by physicist John Wheeler, in his concept of the "participatory universe." This states that the universe is the way we see it because our ideas and observations retroactively created it to be that way.
Yes, this sounds as peculiar as many other aspects of QM, but Wheeler also proposed the delayed choice experiment and that has been experimentally confirmed. So retrocausal effects (semantic problems with that term acknowledged) are not just theoretical possibilities, they are facts.
M1 surely is dangerous in economy, in history in humanity..materia is no end
If a person from a stone age culture saw a airplane, he might think it was a large bird. If he saw an army tank firing explosive shells, he might think it was a dragon. Maybe when we witness clairvoyance we are not seeing a natural phenomena but a technological one. Why shouldn't the civilization of spirits from which we may temporarily incarnate into the physical world have a fast "internet" which spirits normally have a mental link into and which as physical beings we may also, on rare occasions, be able to access?
People like to explain anomolous cognition using a holographic paradigm. Maybe that holographic principle is not a natural aspect of the universe but is an artifact of a type holographic memory technology used by the computers in the "universal library"?
It seems to me that as the evidence for M3 accumulates the argument for studying the question of intelligent design becomes more and more compelling. Intelligent design in this sense is the science of determining how to recognize artifacts of intelligent action in the design of the "natural" universe. We can distinguish a flit arrow head from a bit of gravel created in an avalanche, but will we be able to tell the difference between the natural capabilities of mind and spirit technology?
civilizations] when we try to understand certain aspects of psi maybe we should consider that they
are a result of [their] advanced technology rather than a natural phenomena."
This statement could be true even for the M1 framework if these 'aspects of psi' could be
reproduced entirely inside refined M1 methodology
(eg holographic/entanglement approaches) but this is not really important as is the observation that psi could be 'technological'(whatever its
underlying framework) instead that 'natural'.
"Why shouldn't [them] normally have a mental [networking] into which as physical beings we may
also, on rare occasions, be able to access?"
The problem of reproducibility of psy phenomena seems better understood under this assumption.
"Maybe [anomalous cognition] is a type [of] holographic memory technology used by the computers in the "universal library"?"
Again we have that anomalous cognition [eg the given in NDEs] is uneven in its production under
apparently similar circumstances.
This is traslated in a fascinating characteristic of NDEs: its uneven distribution in the population
experiencing it (from little under 10 per cent to little over 30 per cent depending of the results of a variety of polls used in these studies for over nearly three decades).
A simple but irreverent interpretation of this disproportion besides the typical mainstream attribution to a host of psychological variables
is that NDEs are authentic but are not manifestations of an universal, omnipotent deity
and/or an universal, all encompassing law taking care of everyone of us without exception.
if these experiences can be interpreted as transient awakenings (to the next level of
simulations) of particularly sophisticated holographic VR versions of our world then this
would be a tentative hypothesis for explaining the apparently capricious (ungodly?) distribution of these experiences in the population: the 'uneveness' found would be the result of the statistical distribution of players in games (eg, virtual reality games) of 'lesser gods' typical of the philosophy of Transhumanism.
If we follow Jaron Lanier's pseudo-statistical arguments about the likely spectrum of runners of
simulations of our reality:
http://discovermagazine.com/2007/nov/are-we-trapped-in-god.s-video-game
they give us a taste of the permissible range of 'minor gods' that some of us would likely to
confront in NDEs (10 to 30 percent).
Please notice that in this case the "holographic memory technology used by the computers in the
'universal library'" for creating psy could be used by a)Transhumans living in a relatively near future after a M1, M2 or M3'Technological
Post-Singularity(TPS)', b)Aliens using their own TPS on us (whatever its M1/M2/M3 framework) and c) Both in a kind of darwinian competition for the better 'intelligent designed' native ancestor simulation.
"As the evidence for M3 accumulates the argument for studying the question of intelligent design becomes more and more compelling. Intelligent
design in this sense is the science of determining how to recognize artifacts of intelligent action in the design of the "natural" universe."
As in the case of technologically produced psy,'intelligent design' as distint of 'natural design' could be technology based in either M1, M2 or M3 worldviews not exclusively a M3 framework.
In important ways could express several 'designs' from different 'interveners' at differents levels of the cosmogenic and biogenic software.
An interesting corollary for these 'design technologies' in analogy to natural ones would be
that each 'design' at a given level would act as an evolutive unit of selection at that level
providing a strict darwinian flavor to these 'designs' in open opposition to views that paint
them as 'divinely' inspired. They are not divine at all in the sense of a monotheistic, omnipotent and omniscient deity. We are the mere result of the fighting of 'minor' gods.
Perhaps all we can do is aspire to grow out of kindergarten by cleaning up our own backyard as it were, stop killing each other and consuming and polluting our planet. Then maybe we might get a bit of an inkling about UFOs and the higher intelligence driving them.
True, but not always 'extraterrestrial intelligences' or 'superior beings' but 'terrestrial intelligences' and
morally bankrupt imperial 'eartly elitists beings' will try to keep this appropiate 'enigmatic' appearances of being above 'primitive paradigms of reality'
John Jennings: 'Perhaps all we can do is aspire to grow...and stop killing each other and consuming and polluting our planet. Then maybe we might get a bit of an inkling about UFOs and the higher intelligence driving them'
True. but then we might get a bit of an inkling not about outside 'higher intelligences' that may or may not use these 'above paradigm' psicological imperial techniques against us but get the inkling about our extremely corrupt military and corporate 'intelligences' that may use these means against we the people for imposing economic and sanguinary control on the majority of us here and abroad. The use of sophisticate propaganda for
obtaining this is not strange in our planet history.
Could it be that our government works with living flesh and blood extraterrestrials? Or is this just a massive hoax?
Give it a read, believe it or not, you’ll definitely get chills.
http://www.blue-planet-project.com/