Part II of my conceptual review of "Anomaly - A Scientific Exploration of the UFO Phenomenon" by Daniel Coumbe
Part Two of Anomaly: A Scientific Exploration of the UFO Phenomenon asks three “bigger picture” questions: Where Are All the UFOs? When Are All the UFOs? And finally: What Does It All Mean? The main sections of Part II are concerned with ferreting out important correlations, or at least seeing if those that are frequently claimed or discussed in ufology actually pan out. Are UFOs significantly correlated with miliary bases, bodies of water, earthquakes, the time of the year, or the release of UFO- or alien-themed movies? This would give us a sense of the where and the when. What are they and what do they want? This would give us a sense of what it all means. But what’s most valuable in this section, besides the actual analysis itself, is the primer he gives to the reader who mightn’t be familiar with the basics of prob and stat (as we said above). Let us dive in a bit more.
There’re all sorts of things we think are associated with one another, and in the UFO community there’re all sorts of beliefs or claims about this-or-that being associated with a UFO, or the UFO being associated with this-or-that other phenomenon. Science does start with correlations, but the question is not just whether x is correlated with y—the question is whether the correlation isn’t just a matter of chance, and if not, how strong of a correlation we have, and whether it’s a stable and consistent correlation. Since many things are associated with many other things, we have to precisefy this claim of there being a correlation; thus we have the concepts real vs. spurious correlations, and the all-important notion of statistical significance. Both of which concepts can be quantified based on the data of purported associations between some x and some y. The x’s and y’s of the world are more weakly or more strongly correlated with each other (if there’s a real as opposed to a spurious correlation to begin with). But the stronger it is, the more a clear pattern emerges—and it’s the consistent patterns in nature which science likes to focus on. For the statistical patterns, we want to know: what explains the correlations and their particular structure?So we have a two-step process
here. First we have to demonstrate that the purported correlation actually exists
and how strong of a correlation there is; and then we have to show that it
isn’t spurious. The first quantity is known as the r-value, which can be positive (one variable increases
with another), negative (one variable decreases as the other increases—we might call this
“anticorrelation”), or zero (no or negligible correlation). The second quantity
is the p-value and this is the probability that the correlation
isn’t purely a matter of chance—that it’s not spurious, meaning that as we
increase the sample size, the correlation (positive or negative) won’t just
evaporate (which would suggest that we just didn’t have enough data to establish
that a real correlation actually existed). It can’t be stressed how valuable
this primer is, and how important it is in every serious ufological study. Now
let’s look at how this plays out in some of this last part of Coumbe’s text.
The one most fundamental problem
in any science is data—as in, having good data from which to extract
correlations, and upon which to base analyses and subsequent conclusions. It is
a zero-level problem. Above, we talked some about the mathematics and analysis
of correlations, but the assumption is that there’s a good dataset to work with
from the get-go. Statistical analysis—to hazard a trite observation—is only as
good as its dataset. And it’s not just about having big data, either. It’s about
the methods of collecting the data in the first place (from instruments and
sensors, from people and populations, and so on). As Coumbe works out the
statistics of UFOs, we must worry about the set of data used to produce the
statistics; we can ogle all we want about spurious correlations, or statistical
significance, but if the underlying data that produces the correlations we’re ogling
over isn’t very good to begin with, well, then we’re just ogling. And in
section 6.2 “UFO Database” we have to start worrying right away, since, without
much preliminary housekeeping analysis of the dataset, Coumbe helps himself to the
massive NUFORC UFO reporting database.
So I think we’ve located the one—rather
major—flaw in the text. After many decades of UFO investigation and research by
dozens of well-qualified individuals, going all the way back to the Blue Book
years, J. Allen Hynek and even Jacques Vallée (yes, let’s not forget that, if
we’re to be honest, while Vallée is probably best understood as a ufological humanist
in the great European sense, he’s also a trained scientist and has produced
important early “nuts & bolts” ufology), we know that upwards of 95 to 98
percent of all UFO reports can be rather unproblematically
explained away using a standard repertoire of categories: birds or sky-bound
animals; natural celestial phenomena (planets, stars, meteors); human artifacts
and technology (satellites, planes, rockets, drones, glittering space debris);
natural terrestrial phenomena (rare, like “ball lightning” or piezoelectricity during
earthquakes, or common, like ordinary lightning); and so on. Consequently, over
the years many ufologists have labored to produce databases that were suitably “cleaned”
of this kind of noise, leaving what we can call the anomalous residual: between
5 to 3 percent of all UFO reports that
cannot be conventionally accounted for. But
how strong is this “cannot”—I mean, this is where we now begin to really apply
those filters. We have to estimate the reliability, credibility and overall
soundness of the report of a phenomenon which cannot be accounted for conventionally. In other
words, Coumbe’s analysis should
start here.
But it turns out that there aren’t many such (cleaned) databases to work with. Some, like a MUFON database that apparently exists, as Mark Rodeghier kindly pointed out to me in email correspondence, aren’t even publicly available; others, like the database produced by Larry Hatch, and mostly rescued from both obscurity and deletion, are mostly out-of-date (according to Rodeghier). So one would have to do a good deal of serious legwork to find and utilize—or to just outright create—the right sort of database in order to run the kind of analysis Coumbe ran with the noisy NUFORC set.
Those four cases examined in Part
I should have been indicative for Coumbe: they’re truly anomalous—part of this 5 to 3 percent residuum,
the recalcitrant cases. Using these four, and others that are, epistemically at
least, in the same league, would establish the threshold of admissibility for
this residual category of true unidentifieds—that is: the genuine
unidentified aerial phenomena. Our dataset should be constituted by these cases,
and supposing our dataset were to include only cases from this genuinely anomalous residuum, we
could say that we’re starting with good, clean data. If we were to find correlations
of real importance or interest, it would have to be using this kind
of a dataset. Consequently, our confidence that Coumbe has managed to produce a
sound statistical analysis in his Part II is rather diminished. Bad (i.e., noisy) data in,
bad conclusions out.
Indeed, given the noise of the
data, we’re forced to look at Coumbe’s analysis as not really dealing with the phenomenon
(UAPs) a ufologist is actually interested in; rather it deals only with
reports (or even the reporting) of UAP—something much less interesting to the ufologist
per se. It’s certainly interesting for someone, but if we
want to know about how the phenomenon itself is correlated with other events or
locations of interest, and try to draw conclusions from this about UAP themselves,
then we don’t want to know about reports of UAP—we want to treat the report as
indicative of an actual UFO! If we haven’t filtered the dataset down to that recalcitrant residuum, that’s all we actually
have: mere reports of people saying they saw strange things in the sky; we don’t
yet have descriptions of the thing itself—the genuine UFO. As Mark Rodeghier said in that email, we have here a “category error”: Coumbe wants
to draw conclusions about the statistical correlations between UFOs and other things
(military bases or nuclear facilities, bodies of water, and so on … the typical
menu of things ufologists are interested in knowing), but he ends up with the
wrong category of thing in his correlational analysis: UFO reports, rather than
genuinely anomalous aerospace phenomena having been witnessed in association with
the places or events of interest. So the best we can say about all of what we
find in Part II, therefore, is that the results obtained are just plain
inconclusive: maybe they have something to do with actual UFOs, maybe not. Even
so, we should in the least lay out what’s going on in this second and final section
of Coumbe’s important first book.
Part II is divided into three
subsections: the first asks where
are all the UFOs? (that’s chapter 6);
the second asks when are
all the UFOs? (that’s chapter 7); and
the third asks what it all means (chapter 8). In chapter 6, Coumbe attempts to determine
whether statistical correlations of significance exist between sightings of or
encounters with UFOs (but now we know it’s just UFO
reports) and: miliary activity (sightings
near bases, nuclear test sites, and so on); bodies of water (fresh as opposed
to seawater, even coastline length); environmental factors (are UFOs visiting
us because we’re damaging the planet’s environment?); earthquakes; and even
blood type (there is a correlation of significance!)—which is a rather odd discovery
he makes (though now that we understand we’re looking at the correlation
between UFO reporting and these other factors, the strangeness might be
somewhat diminished).
In chapter 7, he’s interested in seeing
if UFO sightings are periodic (whether they cluster, say, based on the time of
year); whether they are encountered more frequently during certain events of (potentially
world-historical) importance (as to why he picks up on this specifically, well, that’s an
interesting tale I’ll relate in a moment); and, perhaps more mundanely, whether
UFOs are seen more frequently when a big sci-fi flick drops and people are
keyed into the idea of ETs, advanced/unconventional craft, and so on—or maybe
there’s an uptick when there’s a predictable meteor shower. All interesting
questions—but we know it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with UFOs per se,
just the reporting on UFOs that gets done (and sent into NUFORC, in particular).
A more interesting figure to obtain would be whether reports of genuine
UFOs (those that score higher on Coumbe’s own credence scale) are correlated
with any of this; indeed, we might ask what happens as the credence score goes
up: does that make it more or less likely that a UFO will be reported at all?
Or, as the score goes up, does this predict for time of year, sci-fi film
releases, or any of the other variables Coumbe takes a look at (or vice versa,
of course: does time of year or sci-fi film release predict for the credence measure
of a given UFO report)?
Before I move to a quick
discussion of Coumbe’s wrap-up chapter 8, I must engage in a bit of (and is
this now to be expected from me?) crankiness. So, his chapter on “when are all the UFOs?”
starts off—at least in my view—very oddly. It starts off by recounting the Travis
Walton abduction story. Though he admits that “it is not known whether this
account is true”—and of course the problem is what it would mean to know whether
it was true, apart from a single person reporting on a rather extraordinary encounter—what
is known is that Walton was actually missing for several days, and that a number
of people that went looking for him (firefighters, friends, and police officers—dozens)
couldn’t find him. He turns up, dazed and confused, one night days later at a phone booth
phoning friends and family to come get him, in a location some thirty miles
from where he’d allegedly been abducted. Famously, Walton was able to give a
very detailed description of what his alleged abductors looked like, and they
weren’t very human—rather, humanoid. And that’s what Coumbe wants to kick off his time
chapter with: a description of what the alleged beings looked like so that we
might get a sense of who they might be, and where they might be from—or rather, when. Welcome
back to the Masters’ thesis: from the Walton descriptions, and the many other
descriptions of the so-called “greys”, we get the catalyst for Michael Masters’
thesis that maybe, just maybe, these entities (supposedly abducting unwitting
human beings) are us—from
the future.
Why am I cranky? Well, I’ve already
tried to explain that in a previous post, but I just think the whole idea is rather,
well, silly: it is a speculation built on top of conjecture, balanced on
scantly-tested hypotheses from evolutionary biology.
I mean, yes, we can fully well grant the point that, perhaps, in the distant future, if we become space-faring beings, our morphology would evolve to become the squishy, diminutive, pallid, large-eyed kind of grey alien thing. But (not dismissing this whole thing out of hand) that assumes the entities spend lots of time in space, whereas the kinematical evidence of UAP (considered as craft) would suggest otherwise: if the UAP (like the JAL 1628 object) we’ve observed can sustain the speeds with which we’ve measured them to move, you can hop from here to another star system, even to another galaxy altogether, in an arbitrarily short amount of onboard ship time. And that’s just according to special relativity, let alone what’s being said about pulling off great feats of interstellar travel using general relativistic effects from things like warp drives or on-demand wormholes. So, ok, let’s just help ourselves to that posit with little evidence to go on. Next, we do some projective modeling from evolutionary biology. Fine. That’s within Masters’ area of specialization, and I won’t try to barge in on his turf.
Now we have the time travel bit. Again: purely speculative. Sure, it’s perfectly legal in physics for there to be some form of time travel—but the only time travel we have anything like evidence for is future-directed time travel, not time travel to the past: particles showering down from the cosmos experience extended lifetimes, hitting ground-based detectors on Earth when they should have long since expired, proving relativistic time-dilation (the expansion or contraction of time-keeping relative to another frame of reference). In special relativity, it is a comparatively easy thing to move rather quickly into the future: you just have to move fast enough relative to a well-chosen frame of reference. (If you want to go into Earth’s future, you just have to move really fast relative to everyone on Earth, and in a short amount of time for you, the traveler, you can return with history having advanced many centuries or millennia.) Going back in time to the past requires far curvier distortions of our spacetime, and that means it will require much more exotic states of matter-energy to pull the trick off—exotica we have scant evidence even exists, or exists in anything like the right quantities (I mean except for blackholes, but then again, when things get that exotic, we technically don’t even know what’s going on inside, since it’s singular inside: Einstein’s GR blows up into a mathematical singularity and we can’t really say for sure how things are behaving within the singularity itself). Backwards time travel is, to repeat, totally legal and permissible according to relativity (and even according to some versions of quantum mechanics, we should note: there is something called the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics first put forward by theorist J. Cramer in the 1980s, which has backwardly-causal, time-reflected quantum influences). But it’s not entirely clear whether there would have to be serious physical constraints in place highly limiting what one can actually do (like making it so that you can’t kill your own grandfather), or how far back in time one can go (for example as Matt Szydagis recently pointed out to me at a post-Thanksgiving brunch: you won’t be able to go further back in time than when the machine itself, used for the travel, was created—maybe that’s a no-duh kind of moment we should have here…). We just don’t know much here (besides the theory), and certainly not enough to base a whole ufological thesis on, and then expect to be taken very seriously. But yet that’s how Masters’ thesis is taken—and by Coumbe. I respectfully demur…
In chapter 8, finally, Coumbe
tries to tie everything together: so what does it all mean—are we dealing with
advanced nonhuman craft, or what? Well, he inches towards a conclusion like
this step-by-step. Let’s see where we end up.
To begin with, what the evidence
shows so far is sufficient to answer much skepticism about the so-called “reality”
of the phenomenon itself. Referencing Carl Sagan’s The
Demon-Haunted World, many skeptics, Coumbe suggests, have
to wonder whether there’s a there there to UFOs. Sagan:
Now
what’s the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who
spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there’s no way to disprove my
contention [that such a dragon exists], no conceivable experiment that would
count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? (p. 154)
In the scheme of things, this is a
pretty low bar to meet, but UFOs as evidenced in Coumbe’s text (and in countless
other texts over the decades) definitely pass muster on at least the existence
question: there’re there, and there is a there to study. That’s what the whole point of Part I of
his text was: it was meant to establish that there is a real phenomenon to be studied, and it was meant to answer any remaining skepticism about that basic reality (rationally, we must hasten to add). Coumbe (and we quote him at length, p. 154):
A
claim is made that UFOs exist in our skies. And so, we play the part of the
skeptical rational-minded friend and try to test this claim. The first question
we might ask is: can we
see them? This corresponds to our
eyewitness testimony category of the evidence. Quickly followed by: can our instruments see them? This equates to our evaluation of single and
multiple sensor data. To eliminate the possibility of some kind of optical
illusion, we also ask: do they leave behind physical evidence? This equates to
the physical evidence category. Can we prove or disprove the contention that
UFOs exist in our skies? If they do exist, what are they? do any of their
characteristics imply a nonhuman origin? We must carefully review all the
evidence we have collected over the course of part one of this book and try to
reach a rational and balanced conclusion.
Based on the evidence adduced for
each of the four cases Coumbe examined in Part I, “the only objective and balanced
conclusion is that UFOs probably are real physical objects.” Not a stunning conclusion,
and certainly not new, for even “the Pentagon admitted the same thing,” Coumbe
reminds us, “in its June 2021 document entitled ‘Preliminary Assessment:
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena’” (p. 155). This only leaves “the real question,”
which “is, What are they?”. Here is where Coumbe is rather unsurprisingly (and
mundanely) honest—for it’s perfectly possible in some
wide sense that the objects, as documented in his text and in many other places
for decades, displaying all manner of anomalous flight characteristics and capabilities, are simply human-made but highly advanced
(and highly secret) craft in possession by some one or more governmental agencies
of some nation(s) on the planet Earth. It is, in all fairness, possible. Coumbe
again:
Based
on [the evidence examined in Part I], it is very tempting to conclude that
these objects are not made by any government or private enterprise on Earth.
However, I cannot conclusively exclude the possibility that these objects are
highly advanced unmanned aircraft of some kind manufactured here on Earth.
However, if this is the case, these advanced craft would represent a quantum
leap in technology and material science, the magnitude of which is without
precedent. It would also imply an unparalleled catastrophic failure in US
National Security that would surpass the intelligence failures surrounding 9/11
by several orders of magnitude.
Possible, yes. Likely: well, much less so. Perhaps we can argue that the possibility is vanishingly small: I mean, if we have reports going back many decades—think of what McDonald recounts in his famous lecture—of objects with the kinds of flight characteristics as what Coumbe documents for the more recent UFO encounters he examines, like the Japan Airlines case of 1986, then this means there have been human-made craft capable of pulling thousands of g’s, doing speeds in excess of Mach 30, since the 1950s?! Does not really sound all that plausible.
This, then, leaves one other category of prosaic explanation to be examined—natural phenomena.
Nature is vast, our knowledge vanishingly uninteresting in comparison (at least from Nature’s point of view). But we do know something about Nature and her workings—at least enough to know (if only intuitively) when we’re likely dealing with something that, as it were, acts without the kind of specific, deliberate intelligence with which we (as beings or creatures of Nature) act. That is, even if only intuitively, we can tell when a phenomenon is “natural” or when it’s deliberate, intentional, intelligent. But we must, for the sake of absolute fidelity to the depth of the ideas involved, note that this very dichotomy is interpretation-dependent: I mean, perhaps one takes the view that all of Nature is in some sense intelligent, so that it’s possible we’re dealing with a spectrum—gradations of intelligent behavior where the luminous orbs or discs sometimes accounted as UFOs are in some sense the manifestation not of a simple technological craft manufactured (in the sense familiar to us) by some nonhuman intelligence, but itself a new form of intelligent life … for completeness we mustn’t completely ignore this possibility. However, Coumbe isn’t interested in a potential nuance here; rather, he wants to insist on a simple, rather ordinary dichotomy—which is fine as far as it goes: a “purely natural phenomenon” is one that is decidedly not under “intelligent control”. And we can test for this, too, Coumbe thinks:
for
example, you might encounter a river that flows between two almost perfectly straight
banks for several kilometers before making a series of sharp thirty degree
turns on its way toward a city. Such a river would imply its flow was under intelligent
control since the river has a clear purpose and direction. Natural rivers are
not perfect … Nature abhors straight lines.
And so on. Except that it’s clear
for those phenomena thoroughly within what phenomenologists in philosophy would
call our “lifeworld”. But the UFO presents to us (continuing the philosophical jargon)
a kind of radical alterity—an “otherness” that often violates our expectations
or the familiar categories of how things are supposed to behave in our estimation, relative to our (admittedly
limited) set of experiences with Nature.
Just take the Aguadilla object Coumbe examined in Part I. He sees that there is
enough evidence in terms of its observed behavior to license his doubting that
the UFO in this case “can be explained via natural phenomena alone,” since it seems
to “display at least some degree of intelligent control”—after which he then
mentions the more well-known “tic-tac” encounter Cmdr. David Fravor had, where
the object was observed to have moved into position at a precise location in
space designated as the pilots’ “CAP” rendezvous point. But the possibility—indeed,
rather unconventional and perhaps too fringy even for Coumbe—that’s being overlooked
is that some of these objects, like the Aguadilla spheroid—might simply be an
intelligent form of life manifesting as structured objects. Yes it’s crazy to
suggest it, but especially in the Aguadilla case, we didn’t get a very clear
image in the optical range to be able to get a sense of its morphology, so we have
to go on the thermal imagery. And what that shows in the end is something
remarkable: the object splitting, which Coumbe likens to cellular mitosis. So, maybe
in this case, we have reason to either nuance or collapse the dichotomy between
natural vs. made. Nature is perhaps a good deal stranger than we might like to
think—or allow ourselves to think.
We must gesture again to the
brilliant film Nope. Maybe what we’re dealing with—at least in some cases,
for we can’t lump all UFOs together—is a “natural” form of life, an “object”,
capable of manipulating its own atomic and nuclear structure in such a way that
incredible feats of kinematic maneuverability are possible. If the animals, fish
and insects of our planet can work with the air and water in the beautiful and
often incredible ways that they do, then why not with matter itself—even spacetime?
Yes, very crazy; yes, very speculative, but we are most likely at the very
earliest “Aristotelian” stage of our science of the UFO phenomenon, where we
are confined to pure observation and must deduce our categories of existential-ontological
description purely
from the manner in which the phenomena present themselves to us, relative to what we think we already know about
the ontological structure of Nature (which isn’t much, and is likely already very rough
and naïve).
Well, so much for the meaty
question “what are they?”—Coumbe’s analysis here suffers because it’s
so strictly within the realm of the physics and the statistics, and not enough grounded
in a richer humanistic tradition capable of handling the subtleties of the nature/manufacture,
nature/human divide. Not that philosophers or your run-of-the-mill humanist would
fare terribly much better. What we need is some kind of systematic analysis of
how various UFOs present themselves to us, sufficient to be able to produce an
accurate and detailed descriptive taxonomy and nomenclature (and I would argue for
marshalling the resources of the rich tradition of philosophical phenomenology
for this purpose). Maybe we are, in some cases, dealing quite directly with a new form of life that can work with matter itself
like a fish can work with (and within) water. I can already control the matter of my
body by just having certain intentions; how far can this ability go? And in general
what is the nature of this psychophysical relation (which is also a very tight correlation!), and can we extend this analysis to encompass
the UFO phenomenon in some sense? Perhaps as life evolves, the psychophysical (co)relation
(that between “body” and “mind”) we’re already rather intimately familiar with expands
and deepens; maybe the Aguadilla object discloses what is possible here. Or
maybe not: maybe these objects, if they’re not human-made advanced craft, are a kind of probe—as many
have speculated—built with a knowledge of nature we don’t quite yet have
ourselves. Who knows. The fundamental problem is that we don’t interact with
these phenomena very directly or very frequently; they are just not part of our
lifeworld. They are therefore incapable of teaching us very much about the ontological
structure of reality. But that’s not to say we can’t learn something
here. Surely we can. But we have to eek out a framework, just like Aristotle
did. And get a lot of stuff wrong…
So Coumbe’s text closes with these
“bigger” questions, but, as the evidence is slim to begin with, we can’t expect
much in the way of big answers to these bigger questions. We have to perhaps settle
for much smaller questions and correspondingly smaller answers to them. We can’t
really much answer the question “what do they want?” or come to some grand answer
to the question “now what?”. In all honesty we must simply continue to build the right
(civilian) research assets and deploy them smartly; gather good data with that
well-built instrumentation; study the observations and eyewitness testimony in
the context of our developing and evolving ecosystem of research and instrumentation;
and ponder the “meaning of it all” dialogically, where the sciences work with (and
maybe sometimes against—it’s ok!) the humanities. It’s an all-hands-on-deck
kind of a thing. But we need sound, clear, consistent, and honest work of the sort
Coumbe is trying to do. His work—and I will repeat myself—stands before us in
UAP studies as a model of how to write and how to think through the issues,
despite the various shortcomings we’ve observed in the course of our conceptual
review of his book. If we can improve upon Coumbe’s impressive first crack at the enigma,
we will have gone pretty far to improve on UAP studies itself (if only stylistically, and in terms of our exposition of the various problems we must or wish to address). Now we have a
kind of standard by which to measure ufological work going forward. And now we
hopefully have a better sense of what we need and what we have to do in order
to make the work better. One. Book. And. One. Paper. At. A. Time.
The remarks about the content of Coumbe’s chapter “When are All the Ufos” made me curious enough to seek the chapter via google books since it appeared to touch on topics I have looked into like the effect of films on ufo numbers, seasonal cycles, and the look of Walton’s aliens. I was disappointed for different reasons than yourself, since I have low expectations that eliminating ifos would actually lead to insightful correlations and the subject of the reporting of ifos has its own puzzles needing solutions. His effort to find seasonal effects in Australia and Brazil and failing is not surprising to me. When I tried find a down-under effect a few years ago, I rather soon realized that Australia had a patchwork of climate zones that didn’t bode well for finding the effect since there was an issue that people would be inside because of monsoons instead of cold. Brazil, being situated in the Tropics, was similarly a less than an ideal test case. I looked at other places in the southern hemisphere like New Zealand and South Africa and they look consistent with the a down-under seasonal effect but the small populations had noisy fluctuations and socially-triggered waves which made them pedagogically unusable. Coumbe probably never saw the study, given that he does not reference it.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.academia.edu/15395045/A_Search_for_Seasonal_UFO_Cycles_and_Fireworks_Skywatch_Effects
Nor does he cite my study that suggests that ufo films do not cause ufo flaps which would have had some value in deciding if his correlation suggesting ufo numbers are significantly correlated to the number of extraterrestrial films per year had quite the implications he asked about.
http://www.users.waitrose.com/~magonia/ms57.htm
It is similarly disappointing he did not avail himself of prior reviews of the flap problem which might have spared him some re-inventing of the wheel.
https://www.academia.edu/12960819/UFO_Flaps
The use of the Walton case as a data point in suggesting ufonauts are time travelers is naïve from multiple perspectives. Walton’s alien bears a significant resemblance to Hal Crawford’s stereotypical humanoid which had play in the National Enquirer as early as 1971 and other ufo media.
https://www.facebook.com/la.wan.3538/posts/2949917071917204
The imagery of aliens being a form of homo futuris exists as early as H.G. Wells and was commonplace in the pulp literature and comics long before they were seen in flying saucers. The specific nature of this stereotype was informed by an evolutionary theory called orthogenesis which was eventually supplanted by advances in evolutionary theory. The scientific justification that humans will evolve to the form of the grays is in fact void from a scientific standpoint, but the memo failed to reach Coumbe.
Thanks for your really well-received and insightful remarks. I have to second everything you're saying. I didn't want to argue specifically against the arguments Masters makes from evo.bio as I'm not yet schooled in the theory deeply enough to be able to comment authoritatively -- but my suspicion was that it is a *really* dubious inference (I hinted at this in an earlier post). Again, thanks. I highly recommend you attend the conference I've organized where we've invited Coumbe to lay out the arguments of his text. Here's our website with more information: https://www.societyforuapstudies.org/limina-inaugural-symposium-2023
Delete
ReplyDeleteThis is Michael E. Zimmerman. Could not successfully register my name.
Mike, you have written such a good review, both parts. Part Two lays out so well the methodological challenges facing the scientific study of UFOs. The need for previously parsed data, so that presumably strong cases form much of the data base to be analyzed for various correlations. Uh, this has really never been done? Surely….
I love it what Coumb says about a leading view about UFOs: If UFOs are advanced terrestrial craft made by a sovereign power other than the USA, “It would also imply an unparalleled catastrophic failure in US National Security that would surpass the intelligence failures surrounding 9/11 by several orders of magnitude.” Now, this is science talk for “Get outta my face.”
You offer an insightful and well-crafted assessment of our current human understanding of the UFOs: “[W]e are most likely at the very earliest “Aristotelian” stage of our science of the UFO phenomenon, where we are confined to pure observation and must deduce our categories of existential-ontological description purely from the manner in which the phenomena present themselves to us, relative to what we think we already know about the ontological structure of Nature (which isn’t much, and is likely already very rough and naïve).”
Here, I would add that we do have a lot of compelling first-person testimony about how some “aliens” and often their craft present themselves—as abductors of many credible people, who report having experienced abduction by non-human beings. This massive experiential content has long been regarded as even more taboo by various fiefdoms in official Establishment an UFO studies in general, and that’s saying something. John Mack’s book, Passport to the Cosmos, shares his efforts to understand the abduction experience. This is a beautifully written, profound, and ultimately questioning book, an example of the “humanistic” way into one aspect of the UFO phenomenon.
Finally, in addition to having learned a lot from your review, I also learned from Martin Kottmeyer’s thoughtful remarks about matters raised in your paper. I will continue to mull over these matters, which are as remarkably elusive as they are fascinating.
Over the years, I have told people (including philosophy colleagues willing to that the whole UFO field is an ontological/epistemological and cultural studies gold mine for those willing to work in it. Even after 2017, members of some academic neighborhoods still regard UFO studies as outré. Tenure does offer the opportunity to look into such matters while keeping one’s position. Long-term efforts to stigmatize interest in the UFO were largely successful, and still are in many ways despite the legacy of 2017.