my final word on Phenomecon 2022, in which we first comment on the current state of play of ufological matters
I am in my own way attempting to shift the conversation in
ufology—away from the nonsense, the historical baggage that has attached to the
subject since the very beginning of the modern UFO age. As the eloquent and
gifted historian of science Greg Eghigian is so well demonstrating in his
current online course “Close Encounters”, despite the recent moves by Congress,
the DOD, and now NASA—we’ve been here before, haven’t we? From the earliest
days of modern UFO interest, after that fateful sighting by Kenneth Arnold in
the late 1940s, the government in various ways attached itself to the problem—the
enigma—and, through a long series of failed attempts to get to the bottom of
the mystery, only succeeded in returning us to a skeptical derision of the subject
that had perhaps been known to educated elites from the very beginning
(although as Mark O’Connell points out in his biography of Hynek, the public,
and many a conventional scientist, was in the early twentieth century rather sanguine
about the possibility of there being life—even intelligent life—in our cosmic
neighborhood. Let’s not forget the whole Mars fascination…closemindedness can
be an effect of “progress”).
The result of this failure, precipitated by the torturously narrow focus and therefore conclusion of the Condon Report, was twofold: despite closing shop with Blue Book in 1969-70, the government sill in some unofficial official capacity kept an eye on the problem (and how could you not when a statistically significant subset of the cases the Condon Report itself has pronounced on could not be explained—and not necessarily for lack of sufficient “data”), while the mainstream opinion that there’s no real there there was bolstered to the point where the taboo became iron-clad. Ergo, ufology went underground, rogue, with a doubling down on the let’s-take-matters-into-our-own-hands civilian research initiatives. Without the philosophical blessings of the establishment—government and academic alike—this consigned the pursuit of the subject to the Wild West of investigation with a corresponding inconsistency in methods and therefore investigatory results. We are still operating in the shadow of this taboo even as government slowly reawakens to the seriousness of the problem (officially official this time), and a scant few academics try to jump into the game. Loeb’s “loebism” is curious in this connection, since he and team Galilean-style tends to eschew “UAP” in favor of the “technosignature”, which term he uses to justify and organize his current ambition of recovering the potential fragments of an extra-solar-system (that is, truly interstellar) meteorite from deep at the bottom of the ocean. Could it be an ancient stellar sailing vessel from afar, tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of years old? (We are reminded that our Voyager artifacts will in about four hundred thousand years pass within 1.7 light years from the star Ross 248, and maybe someday slam into an inhabited planet.)
The Galileo Project, as
laudable as it is, is only now just publishing on their installed
instrumentation suite—a single ensemble atop a building in Cambridge, Mass. I’ll
leave it to the reader to compute the probability that a non-terrestrial “technosignature”
will be detected in that particular region of spacetime by this suite of
instruments. I suppose the law of large numbers is in some sense in their favor,
since it’s a continuously-monitoring station—but the problem is the large
numbers here are the seconds it’s up and running, and so we may have to wait a very
long time for it to get anything at all (unless the Harvard area is a hotbed
of technosignature-producing objects—besides those messy-haired ABD’s with
their perpetual-motion machines looking to refute an ensemble of fundamental
physical theories during lectures they interrupt with cranky, from-the-back-of-the-room
tirades). Hopefully Loeb et al. are aware that this sort of thing is
well known to ufology, and hopefully the team there has done their due
diligence and researched the literature for that all-important preliminary lit
review of the work that’s gone before them. If they got that memo, hopefully
they sent that along to NASA who, as I hear from an insider who attended the
recent invite-only GEIPAN/CNES conference, announced some details on what this
one-hundred-thousand dollar “initial preliminary” (to borrow from Dr. Kevin
Knuth) study will entail (not much as we expected: a team of some number
looking into the matter to see—surprise!—whether there’s any there to be
looked into.) We’ve been here before. How many times can we say that? How many
times has it been said? Let’s do some more hoping, this time that Loeb and NASA
have also read their Marx in his correction of Hegel—for history repeats itself, but first as tragedy, then as farce.
(And we leftist academics love quoting our Marxian corrections of Hegelian
nostrums.)
So, what is our estimate of the situation? That ufology,
especially as it circulates like a neurotoxin, able to cross the blood-brain
barrier, through “social” media, the old-fashioned blogosphere, and (most torturously)
throughout the YouTube lecture/podcast circuit, has completely stalled. There
is and has been zero progress on any number of fronts—except if you count the small
steps made by the USG or a scant few academics. Perhaps we simply await the analysis
of real (or at least verifiably sound) data (as with UAPx, for example). But
surely the problem isn’t only lack of data. We know the kind of data that
exists—we just don’t have access to the full range or best of it, because of
the intrusion of the national security state into ufological matters since the
whole modern affair began. So the civilian organizations are trying to make due
without the sophisticated military-grade assets that would make ufology’s job
much easier … but in point of fact, having more, better data would make the job
so much harder, because with that better and richer dataset comes the
much more fundamental task of theorizing it. Better data might give us
an insight as to what the hell may be going on (so are some of these damned
things actually warping spacetime, as many want to argue—we don’t really
know and without better and more accurate measurements we might never be able
to answer the question except as a matter of speculation). Except for more refined
and precise electromagnetic, spectrographic, thermodynamic or radiological measurements
(which might give us a clue as to the role any physical materials are playing in
the fantastic kinematics and light-shows of many UAP), in the absence of a
physical specimen of some kind, ufology is confined to observational science.
As I keep stressing, we are at the Tycho Brahean stage of ufology when it comes
to an examination of the purely physical aspects of the problem. But when you
factor in the various alleged effects on percipients (both physical and
psychical), and the absolutely incredible feats of shape-shifting or apparent physical
differentiation some UAP display—and I must refer the reader to the second episode of
the new Unsolved Mysteries series that just dropped on Netflix: what
exactly is going on as the solid radar return splits suddenly into multiple
targets, as several witnesses also reported seeing during this 1994 event in Michigan?—we
may not even be at the Aristotelian stage of our science of the phenomena. Or
perhaps that’s exactly where we are, since we are confined to observations
of phenomena that seem to be well beyond not just “current physics” but our current
understanding of the ontological structure of reality as such (Aristotle valiantly engaged in a radical program of phenomenological description of things he really did not end up understanding beyond the mode of appearance of the things he was observing and classifying; the radical purity, simplicity and precision of the catalogue of celestial observations Brahe captured over his many decades of observation provided that needed plane of pure geometrically pristine thought that could, in the hands of Kepler later on, yield very general patterns in nature, which is to say: very general laws of the phenomena).
Which brings me back to our old friend Phenomecon 2022.
No, I didn’t forget her. She’s still with us…
After the Bard Skinwalker fest, we were treated, eventually,
to something completely different. The UAPx team was there (most of them in any
case), including new addition to the group Rich Hoffman, the well-respected
ufological investigator and co-founder of the major STEM-oriented UFO think-tank/research
group SCU. As I’ve intimated throughout my scattered chronicles of the (rather
enjoyable) time I spent navigating the paranormality fest which is Phenomencon
(I mean, everyone knows it’s kooky, right?), I spent a good bit hanging out
with Drs. Knuth and Szydagis, the UAPx prez Gary Voorhis, and Rich Hoffman. One
evening we went on a little UFO hunt in the desert, five minutes off road by
the McCoy Flats. It was a wonderful night, cool and bright, as the moon was
amazingly full and shining. Which perhaps explains our lack of UFO sightings. The
Earth and her neighbors were beckoning. And one black widow we found by an
outhouse of a restroom complex (glad our cellphone flashlights illuminated our
path…). But what if we had seen them? It would have probably been like every
other sighting: a nocturnal light, dancing before our eyes, as we look in
wonder at the “impossible” kinematical patterns traced. Or as we take sight of
the “impossible” new star that flashed before a Renaissance telescope (a supernova),
already blurred by its inherent imperfections—or those moons of Jupiter,
dismissed as artefact by the Church establishment. What are the laws of the
phenomena? What’s behind their motions? Then, five hundred years ago, we were
at pains to remove intelligence from among the “causes” of the phenomena;
now, we may be forced to bring that back into our equations. “What breaths fire
into the equations?” of our physical theories, asks the brilliant natural
philosopher Harald Atmanspacher in a paper I’m reading whilst researching my
ideas on ufological theory. It’s an old question, toyed with by the great
general relativist John Archibald Wheeler (who whisked by me as I attended his ninety-seventh
birthday party in Princeton in 2002). As the New Science banished mind from the
natural world of matter-in-motion, we are strangely wanting to reinscribe it
back into that material world. But we can’t just add it in—for, as Atmanspacher
was attempting to demonstrate, the deeper point is that it was never gone to
begin with. Matter and Mind constitute an essential relation, such that,
at the more fundamental ontological level of reality itself, there is
neither mind nor matter, things are neither mental nor physical. Or that was
one metaphysical framework Atmanspacher and his fellow mind-matter researchers
have been developing for several decades now (which is something I will be employing
for fundamental ufological purposes in my own formal work on the subject of
UAP). This is the kind of conversation we have to be having—not leaping
out of desperation towards a fuzzy “consciousness-based paradigm” or reverting
back to our comfortable (perhaps largely implicit) scientific materialism (as is
the danger in a closed group of STEM-only researchers). The final two talks I
attended—the progress report delivered by UAPx team members and the Dr. Taylor Travails—really highlight where we are right now. Indeed, these final two
provide us with the bookends of our estimate of the situation.
The affable Rich Hoffman (a deeply genuine and consummately human
human being) opened with a short personal history of
his involvement with UFO investigations—this after a rather emotional opener by
the president of UAPx, former Navy officer Gary Voorhis (known to us as an officer in charge of radar systems on the USS Princeton those fateful days during the Nimitz encounters in November of 2004). Rich’s excitement is
untarnished after decades of enthusiastic first-hand field work investigating UFO
encounters and alleged landings. One evening a day earlier, as Drs. Knuth,
Szydagis and I were discussing the empirical issues involved in trying to apply
the framework of general relativity to the problem of UAP motions, we all got
talking about what empirical parameters could possibly be fixed by the evidence
we’ve amassed in numerous credible UFO cases. Rich jumped in at a crucial
moment in the conversation and told us all about the Delphos, Kansas landing
case. Rich told us he was himself right out there in the cornfields in the immediate
aftermath, and saw for himself the circular impression in the ground allegedly
caused by the landed object, and told us of the bizarre fact that that they encountered: the wheat on the stalks surrounding the alleged landing site had
been mysteriously puffed right in a circle, towards the tops of the
wheat stalks. I’d heard of the Delphos
case (it’s where soil samples revealed a strange hydrophobic substance that
also seemed to deaden the nerve-endings of those who touched it), but not of
the puffed wheat finding there. This is how science begins: with something of
an enigma, a puzzle in the observed phenomena. UAPx isn’t, however, like MUFON
(which is the ufological investigative group Rich worked for); they don’t have
(at least not yet) a go-team to do immediate investigations of alleged sightings
or landings. They are, rather, a group focused (by design) on data-gathering
expeditions using a suite of (portable) instruments that can be taken to
locations that may be promising observation posts for UAP. As we looked at in
my more extensive review of UAPx’s presentation at this years’s SCU summer
conference, the team did in fact pick up something seemingly anomalous—in only
one week of data-collection. But the point with this and UAPx’s previous talks
was really best appreciated as a meta-point: a methodological point
about the nature of actual scientific research—quite in contrast to the kind of
thing that goes on at SWR (as we will see in a moment when we convert to the
Taylor chronicles).
However, it is impossible to remain absolutely detached; no
observation as such (as an act of an intelligent, minded being) can be “detached”.
That is, at some point, every datum must be meaningfully interpreted by
someone, somewhere, with respect to some set of implicit or explicit
interpretive concepts (a framework). Even if, as UAPx has done, that
data gets filtered through any number of software/AI layers, not only are those
software layers already the manifestation of some human intelligence
(and therefore already a form of interpretation), the results of that
filtration must mean something and so they have to be interpreted. This
is where the hard work really begins (to bring us back to where we started in
this post itself), for here is where there is (fortunately and unfortunately)
absolute latitude. No interpretation is fixed (although an interpretation might
impose itself upon you, unwittingly—which is yet again, where a philosophical
scrutiny of one’s presuppositions is indispensable, as Einstein became
acutely aware when thinking through the results of the attempt to discern different
speeds of light under different circumstances). This is why data alone is
insufficient; not even theory can help you. You must think, which means:
you cannot take much for granted, and you must carefully dredge up those
presuppositions which might be working against you as background assumptions in
the interpretation of your data. Sometimes—indeed, during what Kuhn called “normal”
science, most times—such a meta-theoretical scrutiny of philosophical-interpretive
presuppositions are irrelevant and don’t impact your data. But in just about
every instance of a major scientific breakthrough of great magnitude
(say, in the transition from one paradigm to another), this is exactly what
is happening: the background is breaking down, and must be meta-theoretically clarified,
and surpassed. This is simultaneously a philosophical as much as a theoretical
scientific operation; it is the operation of thinking as such. (Heidegger once
famously “quipped”—he doesn’t really quip—that “science does not think”, and
arguably this is what he means: typically, it doesn’t think its own
presuppositions … that’s left to philosophy as such. At least, that’s what
I claim.)
Thus, whatever happens during an expedition, no matter how apparently
bizarre or even mundane, is meaningless until it is situated properly within
the existing framework of understanding—if there’s something truly new going
on, then either the phenomena will present the existing framework with a
problem that can be solved, or it will present a true anomaly. However,
getting to the point where we have discovered—for it truly is a discovery, and
of the first order—a true anomaly means that we have found something in nature
(and whatever else is going on, even with “consciousness”, the UFO is and
always will be a part of nature) that, when accommodated by the standard
set of scientific concepts, leads to a determinate inconsistency or contradiction
in some (conventional) theory. We have very clear models for how this
happens, especially in the physical sciences. However, the problem with the UFO
may be in fact much deeper than this—and again, this brings us to the larger
question being explored in this blog as a whole, and that is the question as to
whether, finally, our physical scientific concepts are enough on their own to
explain the phenomena. We do not know the answer to this question because no
theoretical model has yet to be produced for the seemingly “impossible” motions
UAP are observed to engage in. We only have as yet much speculation. Therefore
what UAPx and other similar organizations are doing is attempting to capture in
some definite and unquestionable way the kind of strange kinematical anomalies
observed of many UAP, in addition to any other effects detectable in connection
with a UAP event. Once they have this data—and it will take a long time even to
get to the point where they can say, yes, we have observations and data that
aren’t immediately explainable—then the harder work of trying to produce an explanation
begins. But they will begin by attempting to apply known physical theory to the
observations and data—that is: they will first try a conventional application
of conventional physical theory. Next, we will try unconventional applications
of conventional (known) physics—and this might in fact lead to insights into
the theories we thought we knew (and so we mustn’t think that even this
homework problem of applying known physics will be either straightforward or uninteresting).
Finally, as we begin to apply known physics (or in general known science) to
the specifics of the problem (by which I mean: scientific theory applied to a suitably
empirically rich and detailed set of justifiably related phenomena),
we look for inconsistencies or contradictions with what we would expect from
existing theory. Nature is never inconsistent with itself (aside from the
philosophical complications of Hegelian thought, to which we ought to be sensitive
if we’re to be intellectually honest); empirical observations are always “true”
in themselves as pure phenomena—manifestations—of nature. Nature is one, whole.
We learn from nature as much as we contribute to nature’s own process of
ongoing development (and here is where the Hegelian line of thinking begins to
take shape). When an empirical observation isn’t sensible to us, or is strange
or confusing, it is so always relative to a set of background assumptions
about how nature ought to be. And this ‘ought’ is given to us by our framework—for
physical observations it’s given to us by our expectations from fundamental
theory and its underlying conceptual foundations (more abstract structuring principles
like symmetry principles and their logical implications, like conservation laws;
if you don’t know Noether’s
Theorem, you should learn something about it as it’s absolutely of fundamental
importance in all of physics).
The classic case here has to be the study of the electron
in the years leading up to the discovery and ensuing development of the quantum
theory of matter. Once the atom and its elementary structure itself was
discovered—and in particular once the electron was discovered—its properties,
if described by way of classical theories of motion (rooted in Newtonian
principles), lead to an impossible situation. Or at least to a situation that
was surely not born out by observation: on classical premises, the electrons in
“orbit” around the nucleus of an atom (posited as the central core where most
of the mass of an atom resides) should bleed away (electromagnetic) energy as
they rotate, and eventually spiral into the nucleus itself; atoms would
therefore be radically unstable. But they are clearly not. This is not a problem
of empirical observation per se, but rather of a fundamental inconsistency
between observation and the predictions of a theory: the classical theory
requires a situation to obtain (radically unstable atoms everywhere throughout
the universe, in all matter) that clearly does not obtain. But how to we account
for this inconsistency? There are always at least two options: perhaps our observations
aren’t exact enough, and the theoretical implications are, in fact correct; or
(as with the case of the breakdown of the Rutherford classical model of the
atom) we must introduce new assumptions into our theory in order to account for
the observed stability of the atom (assuming those observations are right). Bohr
of course was the one who did this, and the resulting theory of the atom—the Bohr
model—required the condition that the electron can only inhabit certain
definite orbital locations around its atom. Classically, the orbits should be able
to vary along a continuum of possibilities—why not? Bohr’s theory stipulated
that this is not true, and asserted that there must only be a discrete
number of possible orbital locations an electron can have around its atom. How
can we justify this stipulation on principled grounds? There really is no
answer to this question, because such a stipulation itself implies a new fundamental theory which introduced discreteness as a basic, irreducible feature of nature itself. The discreteness is a brute fact of nature, and the
theory we write down must posit it. Trying to further explain this feature of
nature, of course, leads us right into the heart of the mystery (supposed) of the
quantum theory itself, and there are any number of meta-theoretical interpretive
moves one can make to try and make sense of this (and other) quantum mechanical
facts of nature. But the resulting theory, written down by Schrödinger (in
wave-mechanical terms) and again by Heisenberg (in matrix-mechanical form),
turned out to be the most precise theory humankind has ever written down,
confirmed out to many decimal places. Given that this new theory not only predicts
with extreme accuracy the properties of matter (at a sufficient scale of observation),
but it is also a beautifully self-consistent mathematical theory in itself
(despite its many conceptual-interpretive difficulties—which led the great
American physicist Richard Feynman to remark that nobody understands quantum
theory, though we can use it well), we simply and decisively abandoned the old
theories in the main, and re-wrote them such that the old ones (which are accurate
up to a point) follow logically from the quantum theory in the appropriate
limits. (The same is true by the way for relativity theory, which challenged Newtonian
theory just around the same time as the quantum theory of matter did: it, too,
yields plain old Newtonian mechanics in the limit as c®¥.)
Something like the above scenario is what we might be able to
come upon with UAP observations: perhaps they will force us to introduce a
seemingly arbitrary assumption (like Bohr did when he simply stipulated
the discreteness of atomic electron orbits), that turns out to enable us to
account for the observed phenomena better or more accurately than does our
existing toolkit of fundamental theory—which assumption turns out to be a
necessary posit, a brute fact, in an entirely new theory of nature.
But then there’s the question of consciousness—and then there’s
Dr. Travis T., the sci-fi writer of salacious persuasions, speculating at
the tail-end of an already kooky Phenomecon about “quantum consciousness”
and how that’s got to play into the whole “phenomenon” allegedly afoot at
Skinwalker. We’ve just muddied the waters with the wooly-headed monster-beast
(perhaps a wolfman), but muddy them we must, for this is where Dr. T ended up
taking us one hot dry afternoon towards the close of the comicon, I mean conference.
Let’s insert ourselves into the headspace of former UAP TaskForce something-or-other
(senior something—you dear reader can be more precise than I am willing to be
on this point).
Dr. T just strikes you as someone who is on T, red-faced,
charged-up, aggressive … a kind of science jock (as opposed to the stereotypical
science nerd—though these days, the categories tend to get rather scrambled,
which is a good thing in my view). He seems always vigilant, prepared for a fight.
He’s the kind of guy I tended to avoid as a kid, that I looked on in bafflement—like
does everything have to be an aggressive display of go-get-‘em-ism? In any
case, Dr. T. T. is in many ways the all-American backyard experimentalist who
stumbles upon some cool shit now and again. He’s the “let’s get it done!” guy
you want around to move things along. Not much room in there for the contemplative
withdraw of a mind searching for the foundations of things, for deep insight.
More “just shut up and calculate!” (as Richard Feynman was said to have quipped
to his students on occasion) than “let’s take some time away from the process
and think long and hard about what we’re doing and how it ought to be done, and
what it means to do the things we want to do”. He’s more fruits, not roots as
my grad school friend Will Kallfelz liked to say. (Will’s an actual
Renaissance figure, somehow come crashing into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries:
a philosopher, a theologian, a mathematician, a foundational thinker in
physics, a philosopher of physics, a consummate artist—a painter and keyboardist
with a taste for William Byrd—an art film and music buff, an historian of ideas
… I could go on; Will is destined in my book to be remembered one day, by
future historians of our era, as one of the great souls of our troubled times,
knowing himself the power and reality of true suffering intellectual,
spiritual, moral and existential.)
Well, for Dr. T’s moment to shine: it was again one of these
closed-to-insiders events in the upper rooms of the conference venue (just
ironically one floor immediately above the hockers and mongers of strange wares
of all sorts—surely the subtheme of the whole event). He first wows the
audience with his “knowledge” of “science”—shamefully, physics, or what amounted
to a concatenation of speculative theoretical gestures (with the now-popular “warp
drive” theory being painfully referenced, to effect) and descriptions of bogus “experiments”
that are supposed to produce “data”. I say bogus precisely because not a
damn thing is really detailed for us to think about, nor does it appear to be
particularly rigorous (amounting to nothing more than high-school level backyard
rocketry), and certainly none of it has yet been offered to the actual
scientific community for consideration (review, analysis, critique, etc. etc.).
None of it. It’s entirely the purview of any number of Taylor’s dubious
flirtations with mass media and the entertainment industry. He currently
represents, that is, what’s really wrong in ufology: the unholy mixture of
science and mass entertainment.
But there’s a very practical reason why this has gone on and
is going on: there’s little to no funding for real science done for phenomena
that may well prove to disclose truly “new empirical observations” as J. Allen
Hynek liked to put it in reference to the UFO phenomenon. Into this void has
entered the entertainment industry which is willing to fund all manner
of kooky “experiments” and “research” (irrespective of the quality). Their
primary motivation isn’t knowledge but profit and pleasure (if I might strike a
moralistic tone for a moment). Not that real science isn’t about any of those things—it
most certainly is, if the pharmaceutical industry is any indication just how
far one is willing to sell their soul—but ultimately these things are at odds.
Knowledge, and the pursuit of it, is neither inherently entertaining, nor
profitable, nor even particularly pleasurable either (though that’s
subjective, as they say). And yet, we who pursue these things do find
the activity profitable, entertaining and frequently pleasurable—but the
measure is more spiritual than material, more inward than outward. More
intangible than immediately fungible. As the UAPx team demonstrated in their presentation
and talk, and as they were painfully made aware of themselves after having had
a brief flirtation with the entertainment industry: the latter simply gets in
the way of what needs to be done, not for the sake of the camera but for the
sake of coming to some kind of true understanding of a phenomenon that has its
own rhythm and its own way of being in the world (which is what we’re trying to
isolate). It is already difficult enough that science must employ a definite
intellectual and material apparatus (methods, means, instruments, persons) in
order to capture the effect of a phenomenon having disclosed itself to us,
however briefly or fleetingly. And then to propose to encumber this delicate
and subtle process with another apparatus governed by incompatible aims, ends,
and ideals … well this is a recipe not for those delicious morning pancakes
that we love here in the US of A, but, rather, disaster. And what is
public consciousness filled with when it comes to “The Phenomenon”? It’s snowed
in under an ever-increasing mountain of media silliness crowding out the
genuine character of the problem which, to put it succinctly, is a profound
enigma with physical and psychical aspects related in as-yet unknown ways.
Subtlety, however, was not on offer in the ‘roided out cogitations
of Dr. T. T. It seemed fairly clear that, whatever bona fides he might have, he
hasn’t conducted actual scientific research in some time (I mean, he’s been
busy with SWR and Ancient Aliens, right?), and that his grasp of fundamental
theory is now consequently about at the level of a third or fourth year grad student
grappling with their homework problems. He “knows physics” but is not, in my opinion,
the kind of mind you want handling this sort of evanescence. But what the hell
do I know…
Taylor seems to be a con who believes his own con, and is
thus unaware of its existence or extent. I mean, he thinks he’s doing
right by science and all that; but, with nothing credible to his name in terms
of fundamental research in this area (I mean, not even a good paper in a journal
of paranormal studies), it’s hard to take much of anything seriously. Maybe this
will change (I certainly hope it will), but then again, the allure of stardom,
and the showers of green rain pouring forth from the bounteous gardens of the
Industry could be too hard to pass up. Perhaps, on another level, Taylor’s science
fictional engagements have begun to give him a false sense of knowingness, of
competence or sincerity which he does not have (but perhaps desires to
have—a very dangerous dilemma to have to negotiate in one’s soul).
I will admit that my ironical musings on the phenomenon which
is Dr. T. were prompted by righteous indignation, by moral outrage even. Let me
explain to you what exactly went down during Taylor’s part of this “insider’s”
event that late afternoon (after which I had had quite enough—wishing for more more
or less innocuous Bigfootalia).
Taylor dropped the quantum consciousness bomb on us poor
unwitting insiders. And that’s a bomb that’s exploded near me many a
time, at many an academic conference where I’ve struggled to remain
awake, cogent and engaged. So it happened like this. Taylor had “designed” this
“experiment” which turns out to be a kind of gimmicky marketing event to get
community engagement going (or something like that) for this burgeoning online
empire that’s being created around the “phenomenon” supposedly occurring somewhere,
sometime at the Ranch. (It’s gotta be doomed, though, right? “Lucy the Orb”,
for which they’ve created merch, can only be lucrative for so long before people
just yawn and return to the roid-man of all things macho, the sensitive doyen
of talk Joe Rogan, to have a good laugh at the whole affair—ain’t that
the public for ya, always movin’ on to somethin else?) What was that experiment?
Think of a number—maybe it was 41 or 42—it was forty-something (and that had
some connection to something science fictional that interests Taylor, he tells
us). And well, maybe this will create a quantum mechanical coherent state of
superposition of all the minds thinking the same thing! And maybe we can get
data on this! Well, something interesting did happen—as we are told (and
we’re always told something or other and implicitly asked to just take
their word for it). The various instruments that were set a’humming, collecting
their “data” seemed to avoid, like a hot potato, quantities around the singled-out
40s. Like there were gaps in the data right around the number we (the
insiders) were told to think of during the experiment! (The SWR media co. is
really earning my 10 clean per month…)
You know, as I consulted my notes, I got the number wrong: I
have it clearly marked down as “33”, and this is apparently a reference to those
movie alien abductions that occur at around 3:33am. Erik Bard designated this
the “33 experiment”. Catchy. In the data, we are being coaxed by the SWR team
on stage into believing that we have our “WOW!” signal from the Ranch.
OK, so an examination of his LinkedIn profile,
advertising of his own design, makes it clear that he’s a PhD-holder in engineering
sciences. Without a CV referenced (a document I could not immediately find
on the web, and which I don’t care enough nor have the time to sleuthingly unearth
for you), we don’t know much about the actual bona fides Taylor touts. But let’s
get one thing clear: he is not an “astrophysicist”—a label that gets tossed
around so frustratingly often in the UFO world that I’m quite frankly sick of
hearing it. Is Vallée for example, an “astrophysicist” or just a computer
scientist with training and an interest in astronomy or “astrophysics”? Do people
know what “astrophysics” actually is? (So it turns out that Vallée has a masters
degree in “astrophysics” but his PhD is in computer science, where he has
made important early contributions in terms of infrastructure design; in
particular, in the design of the forerunner to the Internet itself.)
Engineering, let’s be absolutely clear, is most definitely not
theoretical physics. Most of the UFO world’s scientific minds are not
theoretical physicists in any meaningful sense. As scientists, engineers design practically workable things based on a solid knowledge of scientific
theory; they do not meaningfully contribute to the development of that theory
(though that is, of course always possible—the distinction is by no means
absolute). An “astrophysicist”, continuing with this label analysis, is not a
“theoretical” physicist either, unless their work is describable as “theoretical
astrophysics”—which is a definite thing. The great relativist Kip Thorne is a
theoretical astrophysicist; Stephen Hawking can also be so described.
Astrophysicists are busy solving concrete problems in the description and
modeling of astrophysical phenomena for which we have significant and rich data—modeling
the phenomena with known theory. They are attempting to apply what we
know to phenomena in the larger observable universe in order to more precisely
understand how it is that those phenomena exist as the phenomena they are. They
are trying to advance our understanding of astrophysical phenomena by proposing
explanations for their observational data (and it is a purely observational
science, let’s not forget: you can’t exactly recreate supernovae, pulsars, black
holes or stellar formation in the lab.) They’re not trying to make fundamental
contributions to the development of theory itself (although this will
happen sometimes as a matter of course; observational anomalies do creep up
which cannot be easily accommodated by the theory being employed—and this may
indicate a deeper problem with theory itself … in which case the astrophysicist
is now dealing with a theoretical physics problem). A “theoretical physicist” works
mainly to develop a deeper understanding of the structure and conceptual
foundations of the fundamental theories which are used in achieving an explanation
and understanding of the various phenomena of the world, astrophysical or
terrestrial. The scope of their thought is therefore, within physics, the widest.
A related field, which not many people even know exists, is “foundations of physics”
which is something that I have had contact with as a graduate student. My own
PhD advisor, a student of the great theoretical quantum physicist David Bohm,
is a practitioner of this little-known field of inquiry we call “foundations of
physics”. It is distinguished from theoretical physics only in the emphasis it
places on conceptual-philosophical analysis of the very meaning, and presuppositions
of, the essential concepts with which any theoretical physicist thinks.
For example, the theoretical physicist, when they think in
terms of Einstein’s relativity theory, speaks about “spacetime”. But what is
that? In Einstein’s general relativity, for example, we speak about the “warping”
of spacetime—but does that mean that spacetime is an ontological something besides
the objects and processes that make up the physical world? Is spacetime a kind
of “thing-in-itself”, having its own properties independently of the matter
fields and processes “in” it (supposedly)? Is spacetime a kind of container of
things, with its own inherent, measurable properties? Newton seemed to think
this way, but, famously, Leibnitz opposed it, as did the great nineteenth
century scientist and philosopher Ernst Mach (who directly influenced Einstein):
space and time are simply given by the relations between things or processes.
On this view, “spacetime” and the structure of relations among the material
processes and things of reality are one and the same. Spacetime just is
the relations between things, not something in itself apart from the things and
processes. General relativity seems to argue for more of the Newtonian “substantivalist”
reading of spacetime as a thing in itself, as it seems to make sense to talk
about so-called “vacuum solutions” to Einstein’s field equations, where you
have a spacetime “empty” of matter fields but where it still makes sense to
talk about gravitational energy—of the spacetime itself, presumably. (I
personally favor the “relationalist” view, given my Machian persuasions, but
that’s a story for a later blog post which I’m sure some among the UFO
community will find, to their intellectual detriment, irrelevantly tangential.)
In any case, the point I’m making is that there is a layered
hierarchy of theoretical activity within physics, and it is more or less philosophically
concerned, more or less concerned with application and problem-solving, more or
less oriented towards experiment. Engineers fall outside this system, but are parallel
to it. Whatever else Taylor is, to return to the main thread, he ain’t a
theorist by any stretch of the imagination, and it’s not entirely clear to me
that he’s anything like a true experimental physicist, which is a whole other
rich discipline we haven’t yet discussed.
Circling back to Dr. T. T.’s participatory “experiment” that
the Bard dubbed “the 33 experiment”. So, what was the theory being tested here?
Ah, this is the important question. Quantum consciousness! (You knew that would
come back at some point, right?!). This is the point where I began to fume, and
where my righteous indignation kicked in seriously (and at which point Gary Voorhis
had to very politely usher me out of the room before I made an utter fool of
myself). Let me explain.
Look, my dear reader, being a philosopher (merely), I am
sanguine about topics like the nature of human consciousness and all that. I just happen to think that most of what people in general talk about when they start
talking about “consciousness” is hopelessly mired in preconceptions, unexamined
presuppositions, and just generally poorly conceived notions that are more
intuitive than cognitive. And that’s fine, as far as it goes. We have to start somewhere
to get anywhere. That’s what philosophy does: it starts with the material of
our intuition, our feeling, and then attempts a refinement. Not that it
achieves a final or definite result; rather, what tends to happen is that these
philosophic explorations separate out into their own bona fide disciplines of
inquiry into the subject matter of the intuition (and what it consequently evolves
into). Philosophy is really the wellspring of each and every empirical science,
from anatomy and astronomy to biology, chemistry—and psychology and the “mind”
sciences of late. There are persons studying very carefully what we call “consciousness”
and the concept continues to be relevant in philosophical discussion surrounding
the human “mind” and our experience of the world. The literature here is vast,
complex and rich. And there is a certain subset of this literature on human
consciousness that attempts to link it to quantum theory. I’ve encountered this
literature; I’ve engaged with it. I know researchers concerned with this
question. I can have a relatively informed discussion about it (and I can
prepare a lecture on it, though I’m not an expert in the field per se).
It is rather a subtle question, however, that requires care and conceptual discernment
of the highest sort to be able to speak substantively and meaningfully on the
topic. I do not claim to be of that caliber to handle the issue as well as it
needs to be handled. What bothers me are those who feel that they can, when
they clearly can’t. Those who want to mash together the concepts ‘consciousness’
and ‘quantum’ and end up confusing both.
What was morally and intellectually outrageous about Dr. T.
T.’s “quantum consciousness” excursus was that it was radically uninformed,
if we use the existing literature on the subject as a standard. In a room full
of people who likely know neither the literature on the empirical study of
human consciousness, nor the philosophical literature on quantum theory (or
even the basics of the theory), and who most especially don’t know anything
about that niche literature that tries to deal with the question of how quantum
theory is relevant to understanding the phenomenon of consciousness … in a room
filled with people who do not have the knowledge or training to appreciate
what’s on offer, and who cannot form a sound opinion one way or another—we have
Taylor mouthing off about “quantum consciousness”, wowing his audience with his
truthy science technobabble (which is all that it is to the uninformed). To the
informed, like me, it’s plain nonsense, for Taylor himself doesn’t know what he’s
talking about as he’s neither a theoretical physicist (and so has no
particularly deep or interesting knowledge of quantum theory—he has some
general familiarity with it), nor is he a researcher of consciousness … meaning
he’s not knowledgeable about “quantum consciousness” either. But yes, one needn’t
be an expert here to conduct a decent discussion on the subject; but you
have to have done your damn homework. As an intellectual, you’re
responsible for saying something about the existing tradition. And that’s
the thing. Taylor’s this odd breed of scientist who isn’t particularly “intellectual”
or terribly reflective. His is more a somatic world, rooted more in body than
mind (not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course). But there’s this
thing that Socrates perhaps was the first to realize, which is that as you
concern yourself more and more with truth, and with wisdom, you’re effectively
turned away from the concerns and the habits of the body, of the “material”
world, and enter another world altogether, the world of spirit, of freedom. You
don’t stand in front of a crowd and wow them with a knowledge neither you nor
your audience actually possesses. Socrates was a foe of sophistry, and
continually admitted he knew nothing, but was brave enough to challenge others
to educate him in what they thought they knew (usually ending in embarrassment
for the would-be teacher of Socrates, for which he was put to death at the age
of seventy—I mean, why did it take the Athenians that long to swat this fly?).
And I’m sorry to say it, but what was on display was a very contemporary
version of sophistry. Taylor is, like so many in the UFO or paranormal or
Bigfoot scene, a sophist. Plain and simple. They think they care about truth,
but they are not actually concerned with it, which point is demonstrated not in
what they say, but in how they perform what they think. This is what was so
hard to understand about Socrates’ own philosophical interventions: they were
existential, performative demonstrations of the insufficiency of his interlocutors’
alleged knowledge, for knowledge requires first an emptying of one’s convictions
to know, something we get filled with as we leave university with our “degrees”.
The true thinker knows first their radical ignorance, and consequently possesses
an open mind, aware of their ignorance and of the fragility and irrelevancy of
much human “knowledge” (Socrates concluded that the Oracle at Delphi, who said
to his inquiring friend that there was no one in Athens wiser than he, meant to
say that human “wisdom” is mostly worthless). Taylor may hold such views,
notionally. But we don’t find an inquiring, humble mind patiently exploring the
difficulties involved in the pursuit of authentic truth. We find a fast-and-loose
mind, firing from the hips, seeing what sticks. Maybe something does. And maybe
it just slides off the wall, leaving a troubling stain of unknowing sophistical
conceit behind.
I am now really tired talking about the whole Phenomecon
fantasmagoria of paranormality and other gobbledygook. It hurts the mind. But I
did enjoy my stay in Utah, and I did enjoy getting to engage this stuff, and getting
to meet such wonderful human beings and true curious intellectuals (such as Drs.
Knuth and Szydagis), and serious UFO investigators like Rich Hoffman (a veritable
encyclopedia of the most fascinating UFO cases there are).
But I did promise a bit of insider information from the heart
of the Beast which is SWR. Well, my big reveal is that it’s as bad an many of you,
dear readers, have come to expect from just watching the show itself. Some on
the inside report that, in fact, much
of what you see there is real B.S., made up for the show—or, slightly less nefariously, is elaborated from the thinnest of filaments of ambiguities, masquerading as truly
puzzling anomalies. Some of the core cast themselves don’t even believe
half the crap that’s being said—they admit much of it is nonsense.
Nevertheless, some say there is something puzzling going on in
some of the data they actually do have. But it’s just not as dramatic as bending
lasers in the sky or the portals, or wolfmen and shadowy figures haunting those
returning from their SWR excursions. (I am willing to believe that some
of these phenomena have been experienced; but I am less willing to believe we
know what’s going on with it—we just don’t know. And I am much less convinced it
has anything to do with the UFO phenomenon per se, though I will grant,
perhaps to the consternation of my more level-headed ufological correspondents—I
am not yet their colleague—that it is an open question, one awaiting a thorough
articulation, and philosophically perspicacious examination, of a conceptual framework
that might be able to position the so-called “paranormal” alongside ufological
matters sensibly and justifiably.)
And here is where I will leave the matter of Phenomecon 2022.
I do plan on returning next year. Perhaps I will then encounter the Creature of
Skinwalker Ranch. Or “the phenomenon”. Or something other than the black widow
spider Gary Voorhis, Dr. Knuth and I stumbled upon that wondrous moon-bright
night under the starry Utah desert sky.
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