ENTAUS

I n recent days there was a minor buzz in the news, amplified for a fleeting moment on Twitter, about “mysterious lights” in the sky over San Diego, about a two-hour drive from where I live in Los Angeles. (I always get the feeling that all of the UFO action ends up being somewhere else. Oh well.) This news buzz (which I’ll get to in a moment) prompted me to reflect on a couple of things, if the reader will permit me a personal aside before we get to the main dish: First, I haven’t been as diligent with this blog as I had been for the past two or so months, primarily because I have been busy with other projects (a larger essay on the problem of high strangeness and the paranormal as it arises in connection with the UFO phenomenon). Also, because I really hate (like, really) the Google Blogger platform and so I find myself hesitant to work with it. Google Blogger is really terrible (formatting it is a nightmare if you veer from its default settings). But it’s free. Suggestions for mi

D ay Two was rather more interesting–but of course it was a full day of presentations, panels, and networking sessions. It started off with a bit of a technical problem, since the slides couldn’t get loaded properly, but we were eventually treated to a presentation by the very staid Prof. Hakan Kayal of the University of Würzburg, who discussed mostly his numerous technological projects that are (or will be) put to use for researching UAP, SETI and other space-related matters. This talk was more of a menu-style talk, presenting the various technological options Kayal and his various teams (involving many of his students at various levels) are developing to advance UAP studies, SETI, etc. There were clear synergies with the work that UAPx is doing, and this was eventually explored, with even the suggestion made of reestablishing the kind of collaborative student-exchange that had actually existed between Kevin Knuth’s university–SUNY Albany–and Kayals’. This was a bit of a happy and for

  W ell, not quite. There have of course been conferences devoted to the topic of “anomalous aerospace phenomena” before–so the topic of the conference itself is not unique or unprecedented. What  is  unprecedented perhaps is what I consider to be the centerpiece of the whole conference itself, and that was the roughly  three hour long  presentation and ensuing Q&A conducted by the  UAPx  principal scientific team. Before we engage their (absolutely crucial and scientifically significant) presentation (which we will do in the last edition of this three-part series), let’s work through some of the conference as a whole. Writing this just at the close of the conference, I can say that it was really quite a success for the  SCU  (the “Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies”– an organization of which I am a nominal or “community” member). The  SCU  is unique, being an incorporated nonprofit charitable organization largely run (in fact I believe  only  run) by unpaid volunteers who do w