Back To Egging It
Far beyond being remiss, I finally find a moment in my hectic schedule to upload this post, long overdue and probably long out of date (completed over a month ago, it feels lightyears away, somehow). From then until now I had the opportunity to be at the third iteration of the Archives of the Impossible, with the Crowd (it was all UFO/UAP this time), and then to an event only a few short weeks later, at Durham University (the second such symposium trying to bring together the SETI and UAP research communities). As I reach for the “publish” button this time, we are in the unfortunate aftermath of the predictably-bad Elizondo-led Congressional Briefing that was, I think, sponsored by something called the UAP Disclosure Fund (UAPDF)—an org spearheaded by an assorted crew last year, if my increasingly overloaded and crowded memory serves me anything nearly correctly. UAP groups seem to pop up like moults of mushrooms after a heavy downpour (and I added to that crop in Sept. of 2022, so who am I to whine?); who survives the latest debacle, especially now that we are in a decidedly different economic and political situation (one might say, not unreasonably, sh*tstorm) than we had been in the last few Congressional UAP-focused events, is anybody’s guess (and part of the problem now is that we are having to guess, just about blindly, what the hell is going on in the Black Box that is the White House). I should, inter alia, write about the Archives event, the Durham one-day symposium, and then the Eligonzo Mania holding-up-unvetted-photos-that-are-acknowledged-as-such thingy. But I will have to let it all linger a bit, somewhere in my busy mind, and hopefully find a moment or two to sit and write up my thinking. It will definitely be grumpy.
The following post, therefore, is written as if it were recent; but it is from a few months ago.
So, somehow, in my last post, I’d promised (without perhaps thinking through the matter carefully) to move to the damn “Egg” that—way back in the Dark Ages of December 2024—had seemed like this amazingly sensational thing. And that was when the Orange Warrior for Gov’t Efficiency was only a painful reminder of a snap judgement of the bamboozled American Body Politic, who know not what they doeth. With the Avian flu bearing down on the bird (and occasional bovine) population, causing a spike in actual egg prices (making that damned French toast that I had with my date last week in NYC, in a lovely bustling café in midtown, cost upwards of 25 cold, sending the bill near the 3/4 of a hunnert … jeez?!), the Egg of Jake-something-or-other was quickly dropped. It didn’t break—or so it seems.
Do we need to dwell? I’m not so sure. Even if we did, we’re in the same loop as always—I mean, is it any different than with the Grusch allegations of yesteryear? (I get the weird feeling that he’s kinda dropped from The Scene, with nary a trace … and vanished from Sol like a wil’o’the whisp. What gives?)
But wait—there’s more?!
Within the Jake-something-or-other whistleblower bombshell
(when was that?), that ended up—obscenely in my opinion (does that count for
something?), aside from the Egg (which Mick W. predictably found yet another argumentum
ad simulacrum to begin the debunking cycle … but I had to fall off my chair
laughing: it did look like a thermal of somebody drawing up an egg over
their shag carpet, LOL)—morphing in the end into this naked sales pitch for a
frekin’ company trying to (surprises!) capitalize on the UAP thing, … within that
was this “psionics” thing. What, what?!
What in the holy, royal f**k is that supposed to be
all about? I mean, is it possible to make it up? Perhaps it’s
impossible. But then, to borrow from Pilate, what is possible? (I’m left
sipping my bourbon, in wonder.)
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Part of what irks me about the UAP journalists—maybe about journalism?—is that
the sources thing kinda gets them a free pass, sorta. Like, Ross says he’s done
his homework, but then, when you try to dig into it, he’s gonna say (right?) I
hafta protect my sources—that is, if we actually wanted to follow the trail and
double- and triple-check the homework so that we’re sure not only that there’s
a there there, but that this there is, as bone fide investigative
journalist Garrett Graff pointed out in his massive inquiry into the gov’t/UAP
romance, a genuine something that would spook none other than John Brennen into
saying some really weirdly heavily qualified shit about NHI (or so it would
seem)? What we were given, was this night vision cam vid of an “egg”
tethered to a copter, that Jake wasn’t actually piloting (!), and then
this—shock!—blurry video of a blob thingy. Suggestive, in a bad way. It all
rested on the one guy’s statements, allegedly able to be corroborated by folks,
some folks, the bulk of whom, around that campfire, seemed to be part of his
business venture. Right. That’s not convincing at all. But, even if Gandhi
reincarnated and blessed it all, what really would we have at the end of the
day? We’d have what we’ve had for like 90 years: more tales for which
independently verifiable evidence ain’t forthcoming.
But ok. Let’s not worry about that. Let’s worry about
that corroborating and vouching thing. It was pretty poor of a case. And then,
to top it off in a bizarre (though unfortunately unsurprising) twist, we had
the whole psionics sequence. I mean, what? It was draw-droppingly
ridiculous…
But ok. Let’s run with it for a moment. So, after a feeble
attempt at establishing the “credibility of the witness” (to which many are
already given to balk, to entirely fairly I should add), we get hit with, “oh
yeah, this thing, this whatever it was under me that I was transporting,
connected with me, so much so that I was given some power or ability or
otherwise stricken with the capacity, or urge, to call the UAP, to
control them with my mind”. Well, I don’t remember whether he alleges that he
can control them, or call them, but it doesn’t matter, does it? Towards the
end of the Ross romp through psionia, we got an inkling that this guy’s
formed this team, and a business idea flocculated: bro-y guys doing the
VR/headset/drone-controlling-thing (something that sticks in my head form the
heady Bush-into-Obama days of young dudes controlling killer drones in faraway
places like Afghanistan, terrorizing the terrorist—or so we had to believe).
How do we go from “I saw NHI stuff” to “irradiated by an unknown in a carton
and/or from a spiritual Egg” to “psionic control of UAP, a grand
radio-controlled CE-5 thing”? I mean, I just don’t know what. in. the. royal.
f**k these people think they will accomplish for anyone (aside from trying to
get the VC’s hot and horned up to cough up the cash for long-shot investments
into the fringe/edge of the edge)? And with a kind of pre-Christmas
Kris-Kringle wink, we were promised “just you wait, you’ll see, a game changer,
I promise; trust me”.
Meanwhile, we watch as the Orange Madness unleashes toddlers, not unlike
himself, (and which includes a masterly bloviating Silicon Valley Bruh-to-crat)
onto American Institutions (Offices we used to not give a flying smelly s**t
about), to destroy that which they know not a damn thing about. (In case you
weren’t paying attention: we don’t have a Democracy currently; it’s not fascism
yet, so don’t you worry there on the Left; what we do have is
technically called competitive
authoritarianism, on the Orban or Erdoğan models,
or so was the argument recently in Foreign
Affairs). In a tone-deaf, deceptively apolitical
register, the UAP community (at least in the X Sphere) seems to be agog with
hopes (!) that this Administration (can you call a Wrecking Crew an
Administration, which undertakes a SVVC Coups, starting with a takeover of the
Federal Payments System?) is so pro-UAP that they will declassify us into
Disclosure (the Grail is yonder!). Trouble is, it’s a package deal: you might
get disclosure alright, but by that point you have imploded the FBI, CIA and
the rest of the Intelligence Community, replacing them with Orange Lackeys
rather than seeking to populate the ranks with Smart—an implosion of all the
stuff that, while we (on the Left) love to hate it, manages to keep something
like Order in place. And under those circumstances, by the acts of those
folks, what’s credible, what isn’t? Without much of government structure
intact, what can you actually trust? With the FBI under attack, for example
(agents being fired for doing their damn duty: arresting homegrown insurrectionists
who stupidly stormed the Capitol on trumped up (yes: !) allegations of election
fraud … LOL to the moon, I’ll never stop LOL’ing that on), and the Intelligence
Community in a chaos of resignation, steppings-down, then litigation over
wrongful termination … I mean, but the time we get the bodies and Burchett’s
“sci-fi” vids, who the f**k will care anymore; rather: who will care to trust
any of it? Even if it’s interesting (maybe?), we’ll have more important
tragedies to concern ourselves with. Or maybe not.
Talking about “psionic” (I want to burst out laughing at the
term, though it’s accurate I suppose) control of anything (UAP or otherwise) is
just talk about a particular sort of psycho-physical interaction that appears
to be causal, but which is more accurately described as a correlation
rather than an interaction (which suggests that we have access to a deeper
level of understanding than we, in fact, actually do). But in the Jake
guys’ case, the claim was at least twofold: (a) that someone on the ground (a
human being) can control a UAP (but we don’t have any understanding, nor was
there any attempt—at least not in what Jake guy was saying—to more exactly say
what the UAP is or was that was under the alleged control of the human beings …
piloting them?); (b) that it is the mind of the human that interacts
with (something about the) UAP in order to control it; and (c) that the UAP can
be summoned prior to and as a preliminary condition of the “psionics” (where
humans on the ground assume control). That’s quite a lot of shit piled in here.
Let’s distinguish it all out, and just play the strictly empiricist game (you
know I’m an empiricist, right? As my bourbon wears off, and I dust my
copy of Hume’s Enquiry, I actually reach for James and Deleuze reading
Hume … but that’s gotta wait for elsewhere, as I’m out of Kentucky Straight for
the moment). We need to isolate the (alleged) observed facts, from the extras—the
imputed interpretations of what was actually (again, allegedly) witnessed, no
matter what these kids think they’re doing or seeing…
Now, it’s 7 April 2025 as I try, struggle, labor, to
bring this text to something of a completion regarding the Egg(s) of Barber
(which I might not get round to talking about per se). I have just come
home from the Archives of the Impossible conference at Rice University
that was focused strictly on UFOs (not necessarily UAP!) and adjacent phenomena,
where, at the invitation of organizers Dr Jeff Kripal and Karin Austin, I was a
guest at “fireside chat” (for which I supplied the fire via my iPad—very
amusing, genuinely), along with remote-viewing thinker and practitioner Paul H.
Smith (who kindly sent me a signed copy of his text on the subject of RV—more
anon, elsewhere). Directly after this post, I need to provide a kind of
high-level view of what all went down there (lots and lots of things to
talk about; and thankfully I believe my family has supplied me with the
elements of a lot of Old Fashioneds), which was by turns fun, troubling,
confusing, and amusing or baffling. But we need to talk about this whole Skywatcher,
Jake Barber & Co., CE-5, contact-in the-desert-of-psionics thing that now
seemingly has the imprimatur of none other than celebrity Stanford Prof.
Garry Nolan (who gave something of a keynote at this “AOTI” event at Rice,
which I’ll get to in my caffeine-crazed automatic-writing review shortly, in
the next post). I mean, what all’s going on here?
A recent (4 April) Coulthart Sales pitch/PR event (aka a news
interview) by Barber & the Skywatcher Corp’s PR guy gave us the
down-and-dirty. So…
They lay the claims on thick and propose to offer, in their “Second
Episode” (I’ve yet to see the first…), the actual beef: the evidence, in some
shape or form. Indeed, they say they have observational evidence of none other
than the (Corbellian) Jellyfish! Or at least something phenomenologically
equivalent. And besides that, they are alleging—please pay attention—that in 100
percent of cases where they turn their UAP magnet on (“electromechanical”
something or other), UAP show up—or, as Barber himself actually says, “we get
results” (and yes, we wonder just exactly what those “results” are or will be,
for today’s the day the vid with the goods drops).
I won’t continue much further with this excavation of the
excess, since in fairness we must await any sort of review and “disclosure” of
their work to the larger community—not only to the UAP community of researchers
(the serious ones, to be sure). As I have invited (to no avail, of course) the
Skinwalker Ranch crew to submit their work for independent review and
potentially analysis by the Society for UAP Studies, and its journal Limina,
such a thing would certainly be welcomed from this team. We need to have a
“disclosure” (are you getting my hints?) here not of gov’t info, but info these
essentially Citizen Science teams claim to have gathered, so that we can form
something like a reasonable judgement about what’s being claimed. This raises a
broader question, however, and it’s this question that will both end this post,
and set us up for the next one, anon…
There is a real sense that this burgeoning UAP Science thing
is again a kind of Wild Wild West of groups, individuals, organizations, … all
with agendas, positions, and (more inconsistently) real budgets with real
money. It’s starting to get serious, since 2021. But, like the pre-2021 era,
there is a real danger that a lack of cross-organizational coordination, and
generally accepted data and analytical frameworks will simply trap the groups
into the “fringes” of science. We must break out of this tendency to hunker
down with the likeminded, and start having the harder discussion about
methodological and conceptual foundations for the Science—something that is my
broken-record track for years at this blog. Before we dip out into the cosmic,
we gotta do the homework—that boring s**t that doesn’t sell on a Rogan podcast
but which is the necessary foundational work that establishes disciplinary
legibility and of course which helps stabilize its legitimacy. But what is
‘legitimacy’, after all? I submit that it’s simple: it’s the following of a set
of rules and principles, the initial methodological and conceptual conditions
that all the sciences can, minimally, agree on, something they can all agree to
abide by—even if, in the working out of the substantial content the many
research programs organized therein, the programs and researchers fail, fumble,
and otherwise wander astray. We cannot guarantee conclusions, or ensure the
absolute fidelity to method; but if we can the ground rules established, we can
assess the extent to which a person or project departs from them, and then can
seek to understand why, that is: whether a departure from baseline is
justified, or at least justifiable. Sometimes the nature of the problem being
undertaken requires a departure; but it ought to be explicable, and some
measure of justification supplied so that that departure is systematic,
regulated, principled. This holds especially true for UAP Studies broadly, and
the empirical engagement with the subject specifically. We begin with the
standards of evidence and of the sciences, even if the subject calls us to critique,
question, or catapult into a different direction. In all this, evidence—and
before that, data—must be central to the discussion. And we can agree on what
it ought to be, how it ought to be gotten, and how to evaluate its integrity,
cogency, and validity—even if, in the end, the conclusion to which we each come
may differ. Reasonable people will and can reasonably disagree, on the same
data. But we have to have some sense that the data here could reasonably
form a coherent set, that, that, is, there is a reasonably coherent set
of data from which conclusions might be drawn. What is the nature of this data
landscape for UAP Studies, and for the new science thereof? What is the
structure? And how do the various datasets interact—do they merge, conflict,
what? And finally, what are the gaps, the problems, the unresolved issues that
the UAP problem will necessarily inherent already, because of the outstanding
problems at the heart of the modern scientific enterprise (insofar as that
is a reasonably coherent thing to begin with—there is something called
‘pluralism’ after all: and it applied to the sciences as to any other tradition
of study). I am talking about the outstanding problems in the fundamental
quarters of each of the domains of the science—the problem of quantum gravity,
for fundamental physics; the problem of the origins of life for bio/chemistry;
the problem of consciousness (the “hard problem” as scholars label it) in
cognitive and neuroscience; and the myriad of the special problems found herein
that may relate to the more foundational problems in each of these areas of
empirical research (like the cosmological constant and the galactic velocities
problem).
What is needed is an appreciation of the fairly significant
difference and divide between professional scientific research programs and
personnel, v. the (no less important) citizen science ecosystem that has,
historically, led the UAP investigations effort (if not the effort to gather
what data can be obtained from as elusive a phenomenon as the UFO typically
is). There aren’t many of the former (for largely, as we know, sociological
reasons), and far more of the latter. But to what extent are the latter doing
the work properly? When the Skywatcher team brings in Dr Garry Nolan as a kind
of scientific consultant, it signals to us in the academic world that this
group, a non-professional-science or citizen science outfit (of some kind,
operating under propriety restrictions, given that, as the Coulthart Barber
whistleblower interview weirdly showcased, it’s an LLC it seems), needs
credibility but doesn’t quite appreciate that it must come from the relevant
scientific experts; thei reaching for Nolan says they want to reach for just anyone
with the right credentialed feel who can give an air of credibility. But that’s
optics; and academics can see it for what it is. Nolan is a brilliant
biochemist, cancer researcher and enterprising lab technologist with numerous
patents to his name; but he’s neither an atmospheric physicist, nor an
astronomer or astrophysicist (not even close)—the two adjacent sciences on
which the team must seek expert consultation. He can perhaps offer sagely
council on scientific method, but then he can’t evaluate the content of the relevant
sciences, nor can he be expected to have the level of understanding about the
instrumentalities need (number 1) or deployed (number 2), and how they ought to
be systematically integrated with the data-evidence-conclusions workflow that
must be worked out (except in general—which is fine, as far as it goes … but
does it go fat enough?). But then, it seems that none of the well-designed
equipment that an actual professional scientific research group doing actual UAP
work—the Galileo Project—were sought out, nor were any of the GP
scientists consulted (I am happy to be wrong here). It’s bizarre that a group (Skywatcher,
with Nolan taking up the rear) emerges from the unknown wastelands of UAP
curiosity and proceeds like there aren’t at least three other professional
science groups (among them IFEX at Würzburg, Germany, or UAPx here in the
U.S.A. or the aforementioned Harvard-affiliated Galileo Project) already
in operation for some years.
This raises more questions: to what extent are citizen science outfits
responsible for coordination and strategic alignment with their professional science
counterparts (I’d argue that, from an information sciences perspective, and a
science communications standpoint, the answer is: they are most definitely
responsible to coordinate and attempt to align on a number of levels, unless
they can establish independent authority using the mechanisms of scientific
legitimation that we already accept—for example, publishing peer-reviewed
work in reputable journals to establish your baseline credibility vis-a-vie
your (i) methods, and (ii) your instruments, and (iii) how (ii) are
systematically deployed to facilitate (i), in reference to (iv) a set of
reasonable guiding research questions that (i) and (ii) can possibly answer).
I am not pronouncing final judgment here, by no means. I
think there’s room for improvement and cause to push, more importantly, for
some means or mechanisms to facilitate and sustain strategic alignment and
coordination, and a framework for understanding the place citizen science
groups like Skywatcher or Nightcrawler, or Skinwalker Ranch have in a broader
scientific ecosystem, and how the field work of these groups can and should be
integrated into the professional science research already underway, which
perhaps leads to other such virtuous and functional systems of citizen/science
interplay. There’s lots of boring but necessary administrative and strategic
planning work that needs to be done; my own organization, the Society for
UAP Studies, is building the infrastructure for something like this, with
an emphasis on academic science projects (but we are aggressively interested in
brining in the Citizen Science component as well, in a structured and
systematically integrated way, and have made progress in this direction in our
annual conference in August of 2024).
So, as grumpy as I always seem to be in these pages, my grump
is driven by care, and love for the subject—that it gets done right, with
proper positioning, proper foregrounding, and a proper decoupling of the work
and discourse from the things that tend to bog down the research. Properly
parsed, and parceled out—divide we must in order to conquer the problems—we can
do it all. But we can’t do it all at once, which is what I see lots of folks
trying to do. They want their solids and have their psi as well. You just
can’t. Patience, my friends.
Now, on to the impossible…
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