tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-72356110481402600442024-03-29T04:03:17.894-07:00ENTAUSNotes Towards A Ufological Science of the FutureMike Cifonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16910256379002179502noreply@blogger.comBlogger38125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7235611048140260044.post-12149370864382591882023-12-03T18:50:00.000-08:002023-12-17T12:36:48.240-08:00Zenith: Final Reflections on the Sol Foundation’s Inaugural Symposium. Part Two of Two.<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.renaissanceastrology.com/images/sun-heaven.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="282" data-original-width="287" height="340" src="https://www.renaissanceastrology.com/images/sun-heaven.jpg" width="346" /></a></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">A</span></span><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">t
the end of the day (which might not be until 4:30 am, like last night—I’m a bit
of a night owl and a morning bird, so I split the difference), I’m an
intellectual. I am in pursuit not quite of Wisdom (I’m not stupid, I’m just
post-post-modern), but of some sense of all of what nature has to offer us
before we beg for that late checkout from our motel. I want to know what’s </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">there</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">. And
here. I’ll take some hooey if it means that I get to glimpse what’s real. I
don’t despise the religious and I do think we’ve come upon the beginnings of
the end of science in a certain (classical) sense (and a philosophical sense,
too). My eyes roll equally at the dogmatism of a physicist as they do the
occultist who thinks they’ve pierced the veil of Isis and comes bearing the
knowledge by acquaintance of the gnostic. In my professional writing (such as
it is—I’m laughably under-accomplished by the standards of the great many gifted
scholars which graced Sol’s mainstage during this two-day kickoff event), I
consider myself to be a certain kind of empiricist (post-Kantian, post-Hegelian
… post most things in our European philosophical vernacular). And that means
that I take </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">experience</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> to be key. And yes, to follow up on Skafish’s
recommendations: I do think highly of the philosophy (and the genuine
philosophical </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">explorations</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">) of William James. It’s about the </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">varieties</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">
of experience. But, perhaps unlike the sociocultural anthropology of Person No.
2 at Sol, I think that human cultures, while venerably variegated throughout
the ages, and recently bulldozed-over by the arrogance of European/Western
hegemonies of one kind or another, are mostly the confused repositories of
attempts (mostly haphazard, failed and unconsciously—and therefore
stupidly—organized towards immediately practical ends) to appropriate what is
strange, uncanny, unfamiliar and downright alienating. Culture is our attempt
to find a place where none exists, as we’re </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">thrown</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> into this mess (kicking and screaming, as I’m
reminded by the baby who likes to cry just at the moment when I have my best
thought. Goddammit. That’s my personal hell.) I mean, nature is downright
terrifyingly unpleasant, when you get down to it—which is to say, when you
start doing that thing that self-aware species start to do, which is to try to
survive with that self-awareness that hey, you’re just about dead as soon as
you</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 17.3333px;">’</span><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">re born. Experience is our opening to the world just as it is. We gotta make
something of it, and that’s where culture, like the brain itself, fills in the
gaps, passing on a museum of hows and whys that pretty much mostly miss the
mark, except for providing some comfort that you can survive for a time past
your expiry date. That after you find warmth, food and the comforts of being
with others like yourself, there might be something more over the
horizon—another life, another corpse to inhabit, further realms to chill the
soul or titillate the body. </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">Those</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> questions, the ones that take us beyond the
here-and-now, push us to think outside the confines of experience—or seek to
expand them. That’s where religions, philosophies and the arts come in: they
move us up, back, beneath, and beyond, asking us to look harder, feel stronger,
examine more closely. Science is the odd one on the cultural block.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">It’s a
cultural thing, to be sure. But it got us to connect with something not
transcendent but transcendental: a kind of determinate structure of the
peculiar </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">freedom</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> characteristic of nature’s </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">own</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> ways
of being (which includes us with our cultural delights). It got hooked, though,
on trying to disclose the </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">matter</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> side of things—but what about the “mind” side?
What about that fact of </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">experience</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> itself (that experience is something we </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">have</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">)?
That’s the hard part, and trying to get at </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">that</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> structure is where the story becomes complicated
by the kaleidoscope of cultural musings, teachings, systems—attempts, all, to disclose
</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">this</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> structure of freedom which Hegel called “Spirit”.
We are, then, at the point where our science meets our subjectivity, the fact
that we’re not just objects but subjects too, with an experience that’s the
bedrock of the science which discloses the freedom characteristic of nature.
She is free, and we’re learning what the rules are. The mind part, however, is
different than the matter part, because as we mind nature’s ways we realize
that the freedom we see her display might be the kind of freedom we ourselves
possess but can’t quite master. That’s the dilemma of reflexivity, of
self-reflection—the dilemma of subjectivity. Art is the pure joy of creation
within the bounds nature sets. Philosophy is contemplation of those bounds.
Religion is the trembling in </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">fear</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> over the absolute freedom just over the horizon of
our mundane experiences. Science, however, works the middle of the three:
creation (getting stuff done that we couldn’t before we knew nature’s rules)
within the bounds, while asking after what the bounds are, and the thought that
those bounds might change—that with our knowledge we might change nature
herself, making us even closer to her than we might have thought possible. The
17<sup>th</sup> century philosopher Spinoza got it right, in my view: the final
formula is: “God or Nature”. As science edges towards the mind part, it gets
suspended because it fears its own subjectivity. Science, indeed, is in search
of a </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">self</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">. To think of itself means to embed itself and get
coiled back up into nature, when it thought it had popped up above the depths
and mastered them. The closer you bring the mind part to modern science, the
more it loses its way in a thicket of views which culture has deposited in religion,
philosophy and in art. It just doesn’t know what the hell to do with it</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">self</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">. And
so we’ve got this unfortunate split in our contemporary academic discourse that
turns on these fears and operates out of this ignorance: the sciences deal with
(as it were) the material world while the humanities deal with the mental, the
cultural, the spiritual—all that </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">other</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> stuff (the kind of freedom peculiar to </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">us</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> and
not the preserve of nature alone). Yes, we need to problematize this dichotomy
that drives the set-up to the problem I’m trying to articulate. But how do you
do it that isn’t more speculative “theory”—more talking past each other, and
resuming your corner sales?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">That’s
the crossroads we’re at today. The UFO phenomenon had landed, when it did,
right in the middle of this mess. As Brenda Denzler pointed out beautifully,
carefully, and masterfully, the study of UFOs was destined to have, therefore, “religious
valences”. Because they just don’t seem to fit anywhere as definite,
well-defined objects of study—or even worship, for that matter. What are they?
As they fly, they fly through what we think we know, scientifically, about
nature. But then the UFO </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">experience</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> had by some percipients is often so uncanny or
arresting or perturbing that it can’t help but be what the German scholar of
religion called “numinous”—so religion is reached for as a convenient,
ready-made system for making sense out of it. And then there’s the alleged
entity encounters, edging any attempt at a science of these phenomena </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">even closer</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> to the brink of madness. “As ufologists tried to
analyze the evidence with all of its mystery and oddity, they slowly began to
admit,” Denzler wrote 23 years ago, “that the reported observations of UFOs and
their occupants were not easily assimilable to the extant scientific
worldview.” She continues:<br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">“Investigators
found themselves confronted with a series of observations that seemed
incomprehensible without a new and more imaginative approach than traditional
science could muster. As one abductee observed, ‘Even when ufology does becomes
accepted as an authentic and necessary subject of study, I am afraid that
mainstream science as it currently stands does not possess the pioneer vision
to fully establish a concept encompassing the entire scope of the UFO enigma’.
Under these circumstances, the path of inquiry that seemed to hold the most
promise for illuminating the mystery of UFOs while remaining at least somewhat
in touch with the scientific world was parapsychological.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">But
that was a can of worms whose scent was just vaguely perceptible amidst the
scientific and humanistic musings of the speakers on Day One. Nobody seemed
prepared to go fully there yet, or to fully undertake a head-on confrontation
with this “numinous” aspect. What we got from the humanists was a museum tour
of the artifacts of cultural possibility, alternative (i.e., “indigenous”) ways
we </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">could</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> think about these things (Skafish), or a romp
through different “research traditions” that seemingly converge like a chemical
crystallization around multiple retellings of the Promethean myth (Pasulka).
While from the scientists we got a survey of possible physical characteristics
from the observations and from alleged materials. Nobody wanted to take up the
far </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">harder</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> question of working that other, more treacherous,
street corner: the one worked by the psi mafia, where a more practical (if not
also theoretical) convergence is attempted—that between mind and matter, the
psycho-physical.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">That’s
the problem in UFO studies today, of course: we each are planted down within a
research tradition with very thick boundaries, and we don’t know how to talk
each other’s lingo, and don’t know how to use each other’s conceptual tools to
bring about a new science that works </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">both</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> sides together, at once. That’s likely because we
have to give something up if we were to do this. Neither Skafish nor Pasulka
know the Schrödinger Equation or how to puzzle out the kinematics of UAP using
Einstein’s Field Equations. Neither Nolan nor Knuth worry much about indigenous
animism and how exactly that might help in an analysis of the physical details
of how UAP present themselves, to say nothing of what this might mean for
entity encounters. We’re each caught up in our own professional traditions,
which is where we shine and where we can be the expert. UAP cut across all of
it, it seems, as as Denzler chronicled in great scholarly detail; but nobody
wants to </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">join</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> the two—because we don’t know how the hell to do
that, or what it means, or what it would look like, exactly. And the problem,
the 1000 kg tic-tac in the room, is that it </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">might</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> have to look like parapsychology, as Denzler
suggested decades ago. It’s </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">already</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> a stretch just to get mainstream science on board
with the UAP thing, as they are now doing (in the U.S. this is thanks in part
to the independent study team NASA commissioned, which, in no uncertain terms,
fully recommended a muscular scientific research program to tackle the
issue—using the science and the equipment for doing it that we </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">already have</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">). Then to add the whole range of the strange (as
depicted on Vallée’s slides in his Friday talk) and expect it to be happily
picked up by mainstreamers? Yeah, no. So, Sol’s got to start with what
mainstream academicians do, which is to work the block they’ve been given. Yet
there’s much more to the story. Everyone knows this, of course. But then the
big question is: what do you do about it? How do you engage </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">this </span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">part
of “The Phenomenon” and not immediately purchase for yourself a ticket to
mainstream madness, the hell of quackery and unconstrained, wild speculative
abandon?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">The
First Seal has already apparently been broken by the First Angel—Sol stands
with Grusch and has put him on the High Command. For them, there </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">are</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">
crashed craft and corpses of “the others” (and in a creepy dream I recently
had, I was taken into a room where I was to be shown the bodies—and the spooks
kept shouting to me, “though they’re dead, the corpses </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">are still</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">
</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">psychically active!</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">” which woke me the hell right up in a sweat). Now,
there are three ways this could go, logically speaking. There may be crashed
craft (and/or NHI corpses) held by the gov’t (some agency or other), or by
their private-sector contractors, and a network of legacy reverse engineering
black projects trying to figure what makes the discs or tic-tacs fly. In this
case Grusch’s testimony is confirmed and Sol wins the prize for being the first
academic foundation to say it was so, for backing what is the actual, factual
truth of the matter: that they’ve had them all along. Then the hard work of
understanding it all would begin. However (and this </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">isn’t</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> a Bayesian analysis of what’s more likely than
what—so please keep your priors to yourself for now), it’s also possible that
Grusch, and the lot of other whistleblowers, for whatever reason, were misled
or are otherwise just plain </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">wrong</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">: no crashed craft, no bodies—just tall tales, counterintelligence
psi-ops, careful gov’t national security-based “signals management”, or
speculative fancy, … or some (not necessarily nefarious or immoral)
concatenation thereof. In this case, we’ve got egg on the surface of the Sol
which can’t so easily be burned away by the bright shining light of their
sincerity: if there’s not much of a </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">there</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> there, then credibility tanks, shares are down,
investors pull out, and there’s no Fed to come bail you out. The Academy will
drop you like a hot potato. You might carry on, but with whom? (I can name a
few but then there’s too many crazies running their ufological racket to choose
from.) The further problem following from this scenario, of course, is obvious
if it’s not devastatingly worrisome: that in the wake of disconfirmation, the </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">whole</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> UAP
kit-and-kaboodle is tossed out, baby and bathwater and all. NASA could politely
drop out, the Schumer legislation burned black with potassium perchlorate and
anthracene in the heraldic papal stove, and the media resume with their X-files
tracks as any more mention of UAP is received with a big ol’ LOL. Of course
this would be completely illogical, as from the fact that the Grusch allegation
proves wholly or even mostly false, nothing of much importance follows for the </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">prima facia</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> factual existence of UAP </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">themselves</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">.
There’s plenty of independent evidence to </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">still</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> provide a solid case for there being a serious,
muscular, scientific research program devoted to the phenomena. So, given this epistemological
independence, and that Sol’s decided to attach itself to a very definite belief
about testimony for which there is as yet </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">zero</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> independently-accessible evidence on which to base
a reasonable and reasonably independent judgment as to its cogency or veracity,
they’ve placed (unnecessarily in my view) a bet. They’re playing a win/lose
game they needn’t play.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">But
there is another logical possibility—one that I find actually more likely, all
things UAP considered. And that’s this. Let me explain my reasoning: We </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">do</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> have
pretty good suggestive and indicative (not definitive and conclusive) evidence,
corroborated in many very good witness cases, of kinematically and
energetically anomalous UAP, under </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">some</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> kind of intelligent control. (I mean, do we really
have to keep questioning, tediously, the visual acuity of Cmdr. Fravor, or the veracity
of the almost daily sightings of Graves’ elite pilot’s team? No, we do what the
medical field does: we take note of the anecdotes, accept the testimonial evidence
at face value, </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">and
proceed to look for the stuff ourselves using chains of evidence whose
provenance is beyond a reasonable doubt</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">—which
is the minimum we ought to be all about in the scientific study of UAP. But I
guess we’re not always satisfied with </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">minimums</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">.) Granting this, then, supposing that there is a
sufficient volume of such objects on Earth over time, it clearly follows that </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">some</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> of
these things will, well, crash-land. What is up can and often does go back </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">down</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">.
Sure, your amazing flying discs or cigars might be able to manipulate mass
and/or the gravitational field of anything, but shit happens. Even for NHI. I
can’t see how this isn’t plausible, if you grant the first premise. Now,
granting these two premises, it’s </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">also</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> plausible that a crash or two was witnessed by
someone—here in the U.S. or anywhere else (I mean, these things might love
American nukes and desolate rural environs, but we don’t have a monopoly here.
UFOs aren’t an American thing, though we’ve made ‘em Red, White and Blue with
our soft-power cultural influence, that’s for sure). And that some of the
witnesses called the authorities. And that some of the authorities, getting
spooked, called, well, the actual spooks. And if this happens a few times,
there might just be an internal system of spookery where at some point they (the
gov’t) send out recovery equipment and yes, retrieve the remains—</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">whatever</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">
they are. But what are the “remains” we’re dealing with? Well, here’s where the
story gets interesting: either there are intact remains, or shattered and
scattered bits-and-pieces, like in your run-of-the-mill catastrophic air
disaster. At the speeds these things are observed to have moved, if there’s a
fail in the propulsion system, well, then, what remains is likely to be rather
fragmentary, if even discernible </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">as</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> a definite something. So it’s possible—and this is
my third category of possibility: not nothing, but not exactly a definite
something either—that there </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">are </span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">remnants of UAP someone (in the gov’t or in the
private sector) possesses (maybe even “biologics”), but that the state of the
materials is such as to render it </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">utterly
ambiguous</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">. Maybe some biologic sludge was
found at a site, that </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">could</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> have been a body at one point, but which is just an
uninterestingly terrestrial-like something, with some collection of fragments
which have curious but no dramatically anomalous properties—like the samples
Nolan and his lab are looking at. It could just be </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">that</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">. If the inorganic Nolan samples from alleged UAP are
ambiguously interesting, it is possible that even organic samples (from alleged
UAP) are equally so (hell, maybe protein structures and the base molecules of
non-terrestrial life are all very similar to what we have down here, or just
only slightly askew but not enough to be dramatically anomalous—well, just how
would we know ET life if all we had were charred potential samples?).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Yes,
I know this is edging it a bit at the precipice of the abyss, but this,
strictly speaking, is all perfectly logically possible—and that’s all we’re
doing at this point is the pure logic, with no fancy business (i.e.,
problematizations of conceptual categories and the like). At this point, many
are wont to reach for the safety of their Bayesian priors, so we can really
dispatch—logically, reasonably, it seems—much of this stuff as yes, logically possible but not </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">really</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> likely. Sure but once you grant the strength of
the anecdotal evidence (and we’re not lol’ing here), those priors start to have
to be </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">updated</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">. That’s the whole damn point with Bayesianism: at
some point the priors are no longer, well, prior: according to Bayes</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 17.3333px;">’</span><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> Theorem, you’re given the opportunity to </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">update</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> them based on new information, which in turn
changes the calculus of the probability—the weights you now assign
possibilities with new information. And if we’ve finally crossed the Rubicon
and have to update our priors, we have to consider the scenarios I’ve
adumbrated here—for better or for worse. That’s just the rationality of the
decision tree (so don’t blame me!).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">In
any case, what I find to be most likely is that there </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">is</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">
something that’s been recovered, and maybe even under study, but it’s probably
just goo or fragmentary charred </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">junk</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> that nobody has any damn clue about, in terms of
structure </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">or</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> function (until I suppose Garry applies his new
atomic-level observational techniques, with Sol as the foundational support for
such a venture). And that it’s like the Nolan samples: alleged UAP-associated
materials, and nothing more. Of course, the </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">claim</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> on the table is that we’ve got the real
full-bodied McCoy: craft and corpses (well, hopefully they’re dead, since then
we’ve got to worry about some serious and uncomfortable ethics). But it’s
plausible that in the game of gov’t agency telephone (especially when the line
gets connected to SAPs and skunkworks and black ops, and the like), the message
got garbled and Grusch, the young sport still somewhat early in his perhaps
prematurely-aborted career, is honestly conveying what others </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">think</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> or
speculate rather than what they really “know” in a meaningful way. I don’t
doubt there’s photos of discs or HD video of hovering craft we haven’t yet seen
(from which closed-door committee viewing Burnett emerged, saying “I just
watched 45 minutes of science fiction”), to which Grusch has himself been privy
in some way. But it’s likely that what’s there is as ambiguous as what has
already been publicly witnessed or (allegedly) recovered (i.e., the Ubatuba,
Council Bluffs, etc. materials). And as such, will be neither dramatically
confirmatory nor clearly disconfirming, but something that just, well, means we
have to carry on with the science we’re trying to get going in a serious way.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Day
Two began for me groggily. I’d stayed up way too late into the night, which
easily and unfortunately became early morning—unconsciously conscious in my
addiction to my phone and the ‘net of useless info-reels (I’m especially fond
of late of the ones about nuclear criticality incidents). Dragging myself out
of bed, onto the toilet and into the shower (all painfully unautomated), I got
ready and headed over to the logjam on the 101. But—and I haven’t checked my </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">FastTrack</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">
account to see if I was fined $490-a-pop for a violation, since I haven’t yet worked
out what the rules are on the HOV thing in the Valley—I hopped into the left
fast lane, the pay-for-express side of the highway that shaves off about 15
minutes from the commute from Mountain View over to the golden Stanford campus in
Palto Alto. As I arrived, campus was a’run with already-slim & fit morning
joggers working off that Friday-night hedonistic abandon (shit, I didn’t know
hedonism could be so goddamned </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">ascetic</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> until I moved to the California Coast; I guess
they’re not all going about it for the sex-body thing.).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">To my
delight, my parking app informed me that “parking at this facility is not
allowed”—which works out in this case to be A.I. for “it’s free, stupid”. Since
I came to the party late, and had myself hedonistically abandoned the night
before, I had to work through some penances. In the parking structure, cars
filled all the decent near-the-exit spots, so I had to find one annoyingly far
in the back and up one level. Finding it, I walked hurriedly down and over to
the venue—but not before I realized I might get a nice coffee whilst I’m
already near that café I thankfully found on Day One. Oh, but it’s Saturday,
and you’re on </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">c a m p u
s</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, so that means that things are actually closed for
lack of foot-traffic (lack of demand means nobody will supply). Alas. The
second penance: no latte for me. On getting to the Upper Room in the Rotunda
thingy, I was greeted by my final penalty: standing room only, bro. So, I found
some nice wall space as I settled in (by Leslie Kean, as it happened) for the
morning’s talks that I’d managed </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">not</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> to miss (in reality, I only </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">half missed</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> one). Now I can’t take notes until I sit down
(though Leslie, being the reporter that she is, seemed to perfect </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">standing</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">
note taking, quite impressively; however this was somewhat beyond my skillset),
so I don’t have potentially contraband notes from which to work for the first
couple of talks, until I got to seat my ass somewhere decent to ride out the
rest of the gig, in relative comfort. But I can still give you some names and
some titles. So, on Day Two—<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">We
first had slated on the schedule retired Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, Ph.D. as
it turns out, and former director (or “administrator”) of none other than that </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">other</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">
agency you’ve heard of, after NASA: NOAA. The Hurricane, Blizzard and Tornado
people (and they’ve got </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">lots </span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">of useful satellites—hint, hint). Tim’s about the
oceans, however: He’s an oceanographer by training. Now, as I recall, I didn’t
actually end up missing </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">all </span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">of this first talk. Yay! Rather, this was the one
I’d walked into as it was in process. I picked it up </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">in media res</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">. It was entitled (fortunately this time eschewing
the pretenses of the philosophy of science of paradigm shifts, which was supposed
to be the theme of his SCU AAAP talk back in July, but which was anything </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">but</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> on-topic):
“How the U.S. Government’s Apparent UAP Apathy is a Case of Misplaced
Priorities”. A suitably bureaucratic, sober talk from a bureaucratic insider.
We need those. </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">Lots</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> of those to counteract the indigestion one gets
from all the gov’t conspiracy B.S. (which usually turns out to be a conspiratorial
nothingburger of ignorance compounded by incompetence or, yes, indeed: </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">apathy</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">.
Bob, why don’t you hurry up and file those UFO photos in that binder over there
marked </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">beyond ultra top secret</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> so we can forget about this shit and get over to Ben’s
Chili Bowl before they close?—20 million dollars of taxpayer’s money later.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">This
morning’s opening theme, I should mention, was curious—as if the Foundation was
announcing </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">its</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> guiding spirit, or rather the demon that will
haunt them in their scholarly-cum-scientific pursuits of discs, disclosure,
discovery and government-civic deconfliction: “Fraught Relationships: Government,
Democracy, and UAP”. The 10000kg tic-tac in the room was obvious—even to the
supposed arch-enemy of scientific uapology, Dr. Edward Condon, who himself warned
that government and science </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">don’t
and should not mix</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> (let’s not forget
that he was a—gasp!—leftist </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">socialist</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">). Whilst the contemporary governments tend to
adopt (as in the U.S.) the pretenses and trappings of “democracy” (not so
everywhere), in practice it can’t let “the people” </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">really
</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">do their thing, or to know and see and have access
to all; hence it has embedded itself within a rigged system of, what shall we
call it, “mitigated” (or “managed”) democracy. It is constrained (strangled
perhaps) by not only those practically necessary economic considerations
(themselves, however, embedded in and governed by various </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">ideologies</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">—our
current favorite being something called “Capitalism”, no less a reality because
of this) that keep a modern nation state afloat (roving from one economic
crisis to another), but also by the demands of “national security”, forcing the
State (amongst other treachery) to take action to limit and manage all
information (presumably so that no other competitor has a strategic advantage
that isn’t already anticipated by the State). You kinda can’t do the science
thing under those conditions (where someone gives a real shit about the
“national security implications” of your research; or, if you do, as with the
Manhattan Project, you need to form a tenuous, closed ecosystem of secrecy
while you depend on knowledge from anyone and everyone independent of national state affiliation
(irony, anyone?). In time, of course, this is absurd for knowledge and scientific
discovery (or breakthrough) is always only a temporary differential advantage by
any one State. For discovery isn’t had by the State itself, but by the free
play of the imagination (to borrow from Einstein) of individual human beings
contingently located within them (here the conflict between the individual and
the social collective is particularly acute: whilst of course science is
conducted within and supported by a social body which anywhere has a particular
national/political identity, the discoveries don’t and therefore can’t be
claimed as the preserve of any of social body: as soon as the knowledge is
found it is the free preserve of any human being anywhere).</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">There, then, is a kind of
incipient democratic philosophy embedded in science, which takes its knowledge
not from man but from nature (if I may be permitted a scholarly anachronism or
two). Knowledge is not the secret preserve of one individual or even a
collection of them, but is taken from Nature herself (who may have hidden it)
and opened up thereafter to all; all scientific knowledge and understanding is destined to
be the preserve of all human beings anywhere and everywhere. This concrete
universalism is the great enduring legacy of the sciences of nature, one of the
great triumphs of “modernity”, much maligned for a few decades in certain
academic circles. Science in principle is inimical, therefore, to the informational
closure of the modern national security state which subordinates all to the principle
of the preservation of “national security interests”. Inevitably there is and
always will be a tension here between the operation of the sciences
(unconditioned by political, social, or even moral requirements) and the
demands of a sociopolitical formation (i.e., government) organized around definite ends (which Nature would not seem to give much of a damn about). At </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">some</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">
point the science gets tainted by political-governmental ends. In light of
this, civil agencies not specifically tied to worries over national security
are formed as a kind of half-way house where the sciences can be funded by the
public coffers, seen from afar by the national security monitors, and allowed
to do its thing—so long as it doesn’t specifically encroach on the territories
of interest and concern for the national security state. But then there’s the
very fraught logics of </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">securitization</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">: when something (an event, a thing, </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">a phenomenon</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">) gets converted into a matter of national
security, when the government might have cause to move in and put the kibosh on
the free flow of information and the unconditioned exploration of nature by the
sciences.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">I was
very, very, very impressed, then, with the next talk by Prof. Jairo Victor
Grove (Director of the Hawai’i Research Center for Future Studies and Chair of
the Department of Political Science). Dr. Grove attempted to take up this very
fraught topic of the gov’t and its dealings with UAP/UFOs in the very touchy contemporary,
very international sociopolitical context of risk management in an “age of uncertainty”.
The latter is likely a reference to the American social-democratic economist
John Kenneth Galbraith’s book (and BBC-produced TV mini-series) of the same
name, published in 1977 (just as the so-called “neoliberal” paradigm and the
“Washington Consensus” was taking shape in the U.S.-led political-economic
order, leading to the one-term presidency of Jimmy Carter, as Carter famously lamented
the American spiritual “malaise”, getting him quickly replaced by the Morning
in America presidency of the two terms of Ronny Reagan, with the rise of
Margaret Thatcher and the Thatcherite Conservatives the pro-business answer to
Regan and Reaganomics across the pond in the U.K. Ahh, the tolerable insanity in
the good ol’ days before Trumpism.). As economists (especially the Marxist
ones) had come to realize, for all its high-flying glory, fast-paced growth,
competitive vitality, and vaunted “progress”, by virtue of its very internal
dynamics (an intricate system of dialectical relationships between material and
social forces, as Marx theorized it with masterly sophistication at the end of
the 19<sup>th</sup> century in </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">Das
Kapital</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">), it was inherently unstable,
prone to upheavals (the logics of competitive “innovation”) and never-ending
crises always threatening to bring the house of cards down. It was a system
that really thrived, paradoxically, on the contradictions between capital and
labor, exchange and production, buying and selling and the rest of the fun conflictual
divisions characteristic of the System (which is very much a “world system” as
the great pioneering Yale theorist Immanuel Wallerstein and his school
understood it). The neoclassical economists wanted to treat the crises as
somehow temporary or exogenous—alien threats to an otherwise “rational” system (alien here being very much Earth-bound).
What Marx and later theorists who accepted the basic dialectical analysis he
pioneered (of course following Hegel) realized, though, was that the
“irrational”, contradictory and conflictual was what made the system so
energetic, dynamic, and yes: </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">revolutionary</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">. Thus the late centrist economic historian Joyce
Appleby would write a book called </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">The
Relentless Revolution</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, her masterful
history of capitalism penned a decade or so before she died (in 2016) which
shows that history constituted by a series of crises precipitated by
revolutionary economic upheavals, as inefficiency is replaced by innovative
solutions, destroying the old and moving on to something new. As such, from a
meta-historical standpoint, this means that capitalism is perpetually on the
edge, systems and the governments invested in them always on the verge of
economic and therefore social collapse. Welcome to the “Age of Uncertainty”,
with neoclassical economists playing perpetual catch-up since they don’t care
to look at the system </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">political-economically</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">: that there are social (and psychical forces)
driving the economic structures and processes—which cannot be theorized,
therefore, as abstract formal systems with no </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">subjectively
engaged agency</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> constitutive of them
(what another economic theorist would call “</span><a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674027299"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Adam’s
Fallacy</span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">”—the very thing Marx sought to
overturn as he marshaled Hegelian philosophy against the lingering spiritless
mechanical philosophy of Newton that the economists of the day, and still now,
try to imitate—as if it’s all nothing but matter-in-motion + rational agents engaged in strictly economic decision-making,
or whatever).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Dr.
Grove was not so much concerned to situate the whole UAP issue within a
political economic context, as he was concerned to look at the political alone from
the standpoint of his own disciplinary matrix: International Relations. (One
academic not somehow present at Sol, or much mentioned, was Alex Wendt, who is
himself an International Relations theorist widely cited and widely recognized
around the world—though I know Alex doesn’t like to travel much, so perhaps he
just said </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">thanks but no thanks.</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">) Grove focused on UAP as a liminal, very
ambiguous kind of phenomenon which, because of its inherent epistemological
uncertainties, is a curiously difficult thing for the national security
state to effectively handle. It’s a </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">something</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> that gets mixed in with the rest of the aerial
clutter that might give the national security state the jitters, especially
when it seems to be a </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">real</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> unknown: if it’s not us, not birds or drones, is
it advanced spy tech from a hostile state actor, or </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">what</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">? How does the national security apparatus deal
with something like that? Well, logically UAP can be dealt with effectively
only if they can somehow be resolved beyond a mere unknown (which, while
troubling, does not in itself pose a national security threat—this has been the
consistent conclusion of a number of gov’t studies and reports, with </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">Condon</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">
offering the clearest example: the conclusion the Committee came to was that
there was no obvious national security concern with any of the unknowns, once
one explained the others—but from this they somehow derived the further
conclusion that </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">there’s
nothing here for science to study so please move on already</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">. Quite a ridiculous </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">non
sequitur</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> as many, like James McDonald in
the months following the report’s release, noted in spades.) So, in order to
proceed, we have to undertake an examination of the possible ways that this
epistemological resolution could go, even if UFOs remain scientifically
recalcitrant to concerted efforts to understand them (that recalcitrance would
itself be interesting all the same from a national security standpoint: kinematically
bizarre but no less real aerial </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">somethings</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> evasive and enigmatic to those who encounter them,
perpetually suggestive but never etiologically clear). It’s a fair question:
how </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">would</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> the national security state respond to the
discovery that some UAP are (as many pilots and other sound witness testimony suggests)
intelligently-controlled, highly advanced “craft” that easily outpace all human
tech? Grove works through it all, quite brilliantly, quite carefully—and above
all, </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">soberly</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">If
UAP have religious significance, that’s all fine and good. (Though you surely don’t
need UAP or their pilots for that; yet if there </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">is</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> a longstanding historical interaction going on
here, there’s a much more complicated story to tell—Däniken be damned to hell.
I mean, maybe many religions are, to some extent at least, a product of trying
to make sense of the crazy shit in the sky, as well as on the ground and in
those trippy moments when you field trip to the astral realms after you slip
into dreamland following that $200 meal you couldn’t afford in the Valley?) The
fact is that encounters with UAP or their alleged piloting occupants (or just
your run-of-the-milled contact with nonhuman “others”) haven’t universally
entailed a religious or even a “</span><a href="https://ia902901.us.archive.org/8/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.22259/2015.22259.The-Idea-Of-The-Holy.pdf"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">numinous</span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">”
experience, to borrow the term from the great German scholar of the religious
Rudolph Otto (read the book). (Hell, if I’m ever contacted or run into UAP or
the pilots, I’m expecting to be met by the “would you like some pancakes?” or
“we’re from Italy” types. Although, as I pointed out in my previous post on my
“book encounter” with occultist Mitch Mindpower Horowitz, all it takes for me
to fall on my knees is some really trippy mountains on the I-5. Seriously, they
were then and were on this trip arrestingly stunningly spiritual bumps in that
otherwise stark landscape. A whole </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">library</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> of wonder was there. But I had to stick to the
road.) Whatever else they may be for this or that experiencer, witness, or militant
atheist struck dumb in numinosity, UAP will </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">also</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> have, more importantly and more exoterically
speaking, potentially (at least) very real practical sociopolitical implications
(which nobody wants to talk about in polite company, lest ye be thought a
“believer”); such can’t be ignored, and we ought to be prepared for it (if only
theoretically). Dr. Grove’s talk—perhaps the best from any of the more
humanities-grounded scholars in attendance—was entitled “Crowded Skies:
Atmospheric and Orbital Threat Reduction in an Age of Uncertainty”. I can’t
stress how brilliant this talk was. It was a real delight to see an academic do
their thing with sensitivity and subtlety for such a fraught subject. It was an
eminently balanced, sober-minded assessment of the situation which revealed as
much about the politics of ambiguity that surrounds UAP (or </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">would</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, even
in some supposed post-disclosure world) as it did the ways governments do and
likely would deal with ambiguities that edge their way uncomfortably into the
affairs of state and national security.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Despite
the emergence of a lovely headache (well, I did only get 4.5 hours beauty
sleep, and got showered from a boiling spigot-in-the-wall—talk about
criticality incidents), </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">and</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">still</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> a bit stunned by the Encounter at Skafish, I had
to suck it up, whilst standing the penance for my sins (oversleeping,
tardiness, and maybe my petulance) and yet somehow still remain both vertical
and somewhat cognizant of you know, stuff, whilst our next speaker—bureaucrat
no. 2 from The Inside—stepped up to the mic. I seem to recall that that Dick
guy with the mic (or was it Skafish, maître d’ and master-of-ceremonies—can’t
recall since I didn’t get my damn coffee this whole time … the fourth penance) stepped
onto the stage to issue another moratorium on pics, clicks, tweets and x-rays
from the peanut gallery (I will admit to looking over to the TOE guy and Jesse
Somethings to see their reaction: mute indifference, since </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">they’d get at it like a bat out of hell once
the clock struck </span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">fin, you could bet).
Apparently, what we were about to witness was the </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">real
stuff</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, the inside scoop from the spooks.
Pure Gold. It would under no circumstances be transferred to your phones or made
into tweets! Did I say no pics?!<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">I
will admit, after that admonition, I felt like when someone shouts “don’t think
of pink elephants”—what do you do but think of those wonderful abominations? I
had multiple phantom vibrations in my pocket, coaxing and tempting me to draw
out my Max and click. But I was a good academic, compliant and respectful. I
didn’t click it. I sinned in thought but not in action.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Who
was going to speak, I wondered, now rather intrigued? Even after hearing his
name, seeing his visage, his earthly form, I still had no idea who the hell he
was. But as it turned out he was a </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">very</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> well-spoken retired colonel from the U.S. Army: one
Mr. Karl Nell, listed in our booklets as “former Deputy Chief of Staff, U.S.
Africa Command”. Seems like a big deal, the middle kind that’s still VIP enough
for us civilians. My little black notebook is, unfortunately blank so I can’t
really give you a decent overview. But I did warn the reader that this was
mostly impressionistic, so maybe some slack can be cut. In any case, I was
eyeing up the first and last talks of the last full session of the whole
symposium, the one with this fascinating “space psychologist” of extraordinary
human experience (and just </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">being</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> in space is damn extraordinary—quite an
accomplishment for the space monkeys, we have to all admit!), and the closing
talk by well-known scholar of comparative religions, Dr. Jeff Kripal (an
eloquent writer-scholar whom I’ve come to know personally over the last few
years, and with whom I’ve gotten to rather cordially and productively dialogue
this year on the related problems of mind and the paranormal—themes softened,
understandably, at the event, but important and pertinent and </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">conceptually difficult</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> all the same. I’ve variously had a go at it in
these pages. And in the book I’m doing on UFOs, I’ll try my best.).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Well,
my impression of the Nell talk was that he had everything UAP & gov’t (anything
that would be legislated into being, at least—and that means we’re talkin </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">m o n e y</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">)
very neatly organized into different bureaucratic chains of administrative evolution
if and when the subject becomes administered. And administered it would seem to
have to become, given the Schumer Legislation that’s moving to the docket, that
has everyone agog (a piece modeled on, of all damn things, the Kennedy
Assassination Files Declassification Legislation of yesteryear. Does anyone
else shudder at the ironic resonances here? I mean, let’s take one
conspiracy-laden subject and put it together with another. Optics anyone?) In
any case, the “controlled disclosure” was a curious thesis, but entirely
sensible from a government bureaucracy standpoint: let ‘em have it slow,
managed—an informational soft-landing of the UAP on the back lawn outside the
entrance of subbasement no. 5 at wing no. 3 ½, nearest Bob’s watercooler. That
is, </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">if</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> what the whistleblowers are saying (and </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">there’re sure sayin’</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">) is true—or rather, </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">if
we have a goddamned intact saucer to study</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">.
Let’s hurry up already…</span><a href="https://youtu.be/1FZNYXKHwNw?si=hOZSs4n3V-sJ55LN&t=2"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">where’s the beef</span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">?
So I suppose the Legislation is to be read not as having been crafted with
knowledge of hot’n’spicy specifics in mind, but in such a way as to be
administratively vague and all-encompassing enough in its language so as to
accommodate all possible outcomes either predictable and anticipated, or unpredicted
and unanticipated. It’s </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">legislation</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> after all, so it has to be edging on the cusp of
the vacuous, an empty vessel to house the great </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">plenum</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> of contingency with which modern law must bed
down. (I believe in cultural anthropology they call it “planning depth” and we
space monkeys are </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">really</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> good at it when it comes to the paper sort.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Well,
it’s all good to get your ducks lined up, and set up the administrative
workflows, so that the money, when there, can start flowing and the
understanding department can get its s**t together, but then there’s this </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">eminent domain </span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">thingy buried somewhere on page xxx. As a </span><a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/4097653-senators-to-offer-amendment-to-require-government-to-make-ufo-records-public/"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">July article in </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">The
Hill</span></i></a><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">casually noted: “The Schumer-Rounds amendment would
give the federal government eminent domain over any recovered technologies of
unknown origin or biological evidence of nonhuman intelligence now held by
private individuals or organizations”. Well, maybe it’ll all turn on the
meaning of “now” (as in: we maybe can like pull a </span><a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/1998/09/bill-clinton-and-the-meaning-of-is.html"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Bill Clinton and wrangle over “is”</span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">?)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">So
let’s see if we can get this straight: let’s say I have a UAP fragment like
from the Ubatuba or Council Bluffs incidents; and let’s suppose the material
evidence is clearer than it is, that these materials are both clearly
technological and of non-terrestrial origin (we’ve got consistent and
reproducible sigma 5’s and 6’s for the isotopic ratios, plus the Nolan atomic
positioning analysis that demonstrates a </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">structure</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> unambiguously indicative of some technological </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">function</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">).
Then whenever this becomes clear and present to (?) some relevant set of officials/individuals/analysts
(whomever), it immediately falls under this eminent domain clause and therefore
becomes the property of the U.S. government. Did I get that right? So, that’s a
lol and a wow moment. Nell just casually incorporated this prospective
legislative factoid in the Grand Scheme he was adumbrating (with numerous
well-designed slides that </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">begged</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> me for pic-taking), without batting an eye or
breaking a sweat. (What was that stuff about the “banality of evil” of the
bureaucrat “just doing their job”?) The ever-intrepid and forthright Jacques
Vallée, in the subsequent Q&A, with a now somewhat sheepish Col. Nell
(tail-between-legs) looking stunnedly at the spectacle of Vallée’s prolix criticism
and commentary, which broke through the otherwise congenial atmosphere like a
thunderbolt of no-shit common democratic sense, … Vallée stood up right from
where he was seated, bulldozing immediately to the front of the </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">very </span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">long questioner’s
queue that had formed fast after the last slide vanished from the screen, and proceeded
to read Col. Nell the Riot Act After the Reign of Terror. A Frenchman, who
knows his French Revolutionary History, throws it right back to the government
bureaucrat and basically says what has to be what’s on everyone’s mind: </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">eminent domain my stinking ass</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">. We can’t seriously be contemplating </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">legislating</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> that any current (“now”) UAP in possession by
anyone is </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">de facto</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> gov’t property, thank you very much and step aside
ma’am—we’ll take that now. (The Bill Clinton in me wonders: yeah, well they say
“now”, but what about </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">after</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> the legislation gets passed, if it does at all—maybe
it won’t be “now” anymore and we can keep the stuff, right? I mean, if we can
question “is”… I’m just sayin’). After this earnest soliloquy by the aging gentile
ufologist-cum-Valley VC, nobody else’s comments or questions seem to have any </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">umph</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">.
There was a good one or two, I think, but again, I have no mechanically or
digitally produced visual or audial record, and as I was </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">still</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">
standing in the back with Leslie Kean, seeing again these unbelievably breathtakingly
stunning actual factual rainbows fade sharply in over campus at the end of a
brief rain-mist shower, I can’t quite say what the hell they said. But
coffeetime was nearing—I was precognitively 100% sure of it, so I eyed the
capacious canisters and sought to take advantage of the least action principle,
so I could get that cup sooner than later. Finding the shortest path, I
cravingly did my ablutions putting sugar, cream then coffee into the cup and </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">s a v o r i n g</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> it. Only then did I suddenly wake up and realize I
was actually at the Sol Foundation’s inaugural symposium on Day 2. The closing
day, which would end in that very Zen unceremonious way that Jeff loves to end the
events he ends (and he got to end this one—hopefully not quite the “sprinkles”
on the scientific cake of UAP Studies, as he will sometimes lament the fate of
the Humanities).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">There
was to be a panel of the folks doing the “Fraught Relationships” talks, so that
meant that we had Gallaudet, Grove (via Zoom) and Nell rounded up for the
wind-up. It might as well have also included Vallée, given his essayish commentary
(much-needed pushback on the spooks). Gallaudet I think I get—he’s at heart an
ocean nerd, an academic like many of us. Grove is a young super-smart professor
of international relations—very much with it from a theory’s eye point of view.
And a consummate academician all the same. Nell was the odd man out, it seemed:
obviously talented at what he does. Super confident-seeming, a give-it-to-‘em-straight
kind of a guy, who could probably sharp shoot a </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4I75neaOIGE"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">waving
alien</span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> at 800 yards if you gave him a
chance (the Fr. Gill case, like it or not, is quite inexplicable—he should be
seeing angles of the Lord, not waving NHIs, right?). But a gov’t insider, all
about the organizational workflows, all neat and preemptive. He seems
reasonable, and fair-minded, giving sway not just to the hard sciences, but to
humanities—philosophy and the religious dimension too. It was a really
impressive, information-rich talk I hafta say. No complaints there, but when
you start diving into the </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">details</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> of what exactly this Schumer Legislation really
entails, and how open-ended or vague it turns out to potentially be (at least
in terms of the actual or theoretical scope of the many categoricals stuck in
the UAP X-mas pudding), concerns abound. Thus did Vallée rebound and recoil with
a vigor that was a bit surprising, given his composure (and possibly failing
health) otherwise.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://imagedelivery.net/9sCnq8t6WEGNay0RAQNdvQ/UUID-cl9f8frxx1142rdojregysuqk/public" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="768" data-original-width="768" height="450" src="https://imagedelivery.net/9sCnq8t6WEGNay0RAQNdvQ/UUID-cl9f8frxx1142rdojregysuqk/public" width="450" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">L</span></span><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">ook,
at the end of the day why do I try (maybe failingly and ineffectually—I’m not
an accomplished academic, but an intellectual with an academic job that pays
(most) of my bills) and push back hard and somewhat crankily? Well, I </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">love</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> the
subject. And I actually </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">love</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> the people doing it. I love The Nolans, the
Skafishes, the Vallées and Kripals, the Streibers (he was there and I shook
hands with him, although he’d totally forgotten that Kripal had virtually
introduced us a few weeks back.) I’m trying to put forth as trenchant of a
series of criticisms as I can possibly muster. I want everyone, I want the </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">field</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, to
succeed. I don’t want us to merely succeed at reproducing the discourses of our
respective professional academic disciplines—although we all gotta start there.
Like we have to worry about whether we’re going to end up learning more about
“indigenous thought” or radical pluralism and the foibles of (Western)
Modernity, or about the psychology of extraordinary experience, or funky
gravity-matter relationships that get you really flying, than we are about the
subject. After all, nobody present really asked about what the subject (which </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">might</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">
sometimes </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">be </span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">a subject) was or how we could possibly come to an
agreement on it. Yes, yes, we should problematize the “essentializing” gestures
here and all that fun theory shit. But really, lest we simply fall back on the
comforts of a recalcitrant (and all-too-easy) discursive-conceptual </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">relativism</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">,
we really hafta worry about the fact that there can be no progress, no headway
in the understanding department, unless and until we just get clear on what the
subject here really is. If it should be called (as I and my colleagues at the
Society have considered) “UAP Studies” (rather than “ufology”), then what </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">is</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">
that? Does it include the contactee thing, and what about so-called
“experiencers”—is that even relevant? If so, why and how? We face a very
practical dilemma: either “UAP Studies” will end up falling into a kaleidoscope
of interdisciplinarity with each of us simply parking ourselves well within our
</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">existing</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> disciplines, and the field<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“UAP Studies” as such is just a
Frankenstein’s monster of syncretism (hey, maybe that’s ok?), or else we are being
moved towards a </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">sui
generis</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> field—a radically </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">new</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">
field that constitutes itself out of the fragments of others. I find the latter
more interesting and </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">much</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> more challenging, both epistemologically and
methodologically (to say nothing of ontologically).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">The
formation of a new field is scary; it is troubling; it is disturbing; in
itself, it’s uncanny—even </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">untimely</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">. Think about the emergence of science itself in
the 16</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14.4444px;">th</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;"> and 17</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 14.4444px;">th</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;"> centuries: it required a scary and dissident
repudiation of an existing way of thinking (and being). It required some cuts
to be made (“mind” from “matter” being of course the most tendentious of them
all—the one we’re still living with, and which I think is the itch that needs
to be scratched as we work towards a </span><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">sui
generis</span></i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;"> field of inquiry called “UAP
Studies” … but that’s my personal take). Some positions had to be definitely
staked out at the epistemological, methodological and ontological level. And
maybe that’s what we’re </span><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">all </span></i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">afraid to do: to collapse the wave-function of
possibilities. The problem with humanities, in its “theory” modality, is that
it’s </span><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">too </span></i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">enamored with the possible, the rich landscape (a
plurality) of differences and divisions and problematizations and divides and
conflicts and so on. The danger is that it simply enshrines this constellation
as a kind of </span><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">dogma</span></i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">, such that there can be no serious </span><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">challenging</span></i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;"> of any supposed “alternative” ways of thinking (which
we immortalize and beknight with the condescension of “indigenous” or
“non-Western”) that might suggest that, well, maybe they’re wrong, stupid,
partial, incomplete, and so on, and that there might be a </span><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">better</span></i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">
way to go about things—while recognizing the partiality and incompleteness of
that which is taken to be the predominant way of thinking with which these
alternatives are contrasted. I mean, maybe everyone has got it wrong. Maybe
“UAP Studies” is a unique (academic) opportunity to leave it all behind for
something new, something not subordinate to anything in the existing
intellectual-academic firmament. This is what made science so unique, even
unprecedented in intellectual history, being a mixture of the revolutionary and
the conservative. If it was historical, it attained a level of universalism
that could not quite be articulated as such (as historical). If it was
contextual, it was also alienating such that the comforts of the human were
perturbed—even repudiated. It was decentering, a distinct challenge to, even an
overcoming (</span><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">überwindung</span></i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">) of, the anthropocentric and anthropomorphic
tendencies of thought up to that point. It subordinated all to the creative
power of </span><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">nature</span></i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">. Spinoza, the great radical (very alt)
Enlightenment thinker (shunned in his own time—being also, uncomfortably and
confusingly a </span><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">Cartesian</span></i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">) put it exactly correctly when he used the formula
</span><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">God or Nature</span></i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">, staking out a field of understanding that was
both monistic in a sense but all the more radically pluralistic all the
same—for which the philosopher Deleuze was to coin the paradoxical descriptor “pluralism = monism”. (Deleuze died by jumping out of his apartment window in the mid 1990s, a fate with which some in the UFO field can unfortunately empathize, for here there be monsters to ravish the souls of the feckless.)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">On
the science side of the problem, we have the longstanding mind/matter thing to
get over, and that science is in fear of its own position as a subject—that it
is in search of a </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">itself</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> as a subject. That at some point the very fact of
its own subjectivity and positionality </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">within</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> the objects it studies cannot itself be thematized,
on pain of becoming </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">merely </span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">subjective. It is a fear. Many of the theoretical
gestures in the humanities, post-Kant and post-Hegel, have been reminders of
this ongoing problem, this gap or blind-spot. That at some point that blind
spot becomes a plank in the eye of science, and that it constitutes science’s
immanent limit, a horizon it is incapable of recognizing and which therefore
constitutes its decisive </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">end</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">. We also have this problem, not unrelated to this
other (more fundamental and more meta-theoretically challenging) one, of
science’s own passage into </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">dogmatics</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, getting caught, as Prof. Knuth would likely well
put the point, at its comfortable local optima—forever circulating around what
has come to work and which existing experiment seems to confirm. Getting to
something new </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">always</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> entails a moment of the radical rearticulation of
the very “subjective” constitution of the sciences, as the passage from one
paradigm to another can never be a fully “rational” one: that an element of
plain, naked, free </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">imagination</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> is required to make the leap across the divide.
There is no possible way to rationally develop one paradigm into another;
they’re just abandoned (as Borges said for writing: at some point you just
stop, and give it up). Change is exogenous here, an “externality” that can’t be
internalized, let alone “proven” from within one paradigm. How could it be? The
repudiation itself must come from somewhere else—the anomaly is always
uncannily whispering from this liminal zone of indeterminateness, both inside
and outside of the categorial tool-kit. It’s the Gödel’s Incompleteness thing
(which turns out to be as much of a spiritual problem as it is a practical and
theoretical one). Thus, science (or any other system with which we’ve grown
comfortable and gotten accustomed to) has a problem changing its tune.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">It is
out of love, then, that we seek harsh, trenchant critique everywhere and for
everything (and here I follow the 20<sup>th</sup> century philosopher Deleuze,
who offered the axiom of love as the initiating moment of authentic critique).
Yeah, and the pivot on which it turns isn’t </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">itself</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> going to be subject to this critique, for that’s
the point at which we have to make a judgment call, to make a leap, to accept a
(motivic) premise, putting the shovel down somewhere specific and concrete, and
moving on. If we </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">also</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> call this into question, we collapse back into a
relativism of the mere possible, and secure for ourselves the cushy job of mere
museum curator, putting (in radical distanciation) objects all ‘round us which
titillate and soothe (so what’s for dinner Marsha?—wow, isn’t that thing
hanging on the wall over there </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">interesting</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">? Wait, why am I yawning so much?). Truth, method
and the whole thing with intellectual (both practical and theoretical) work is
always at some point </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">engaged</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">. It’s “subjective”. That’s what many fear:
“engaging the phenomena” (which sadly is becoming this stupid cliché out in the
mediatic spheres of influencer exploitation) … a little </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">too much</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">
engagement. Really. It’s a </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">special</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> fear, I think, for academics in particular, for to
engage—what is this but a kind of </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">involvement</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> that hearkens a subjective wrapping up of oneself in
something from which we we best remain apart, detached, distant, persisting in </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">estrangement</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">? Part of what it means to be an academic (thoroughly
embedded within modernity) is to determine an </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">object</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> of study based on principles and methods one has
been trained to employ—things not wholly constituted out of one’s own concrete,
particular (peculiar and idiosyncratic) subjectivity, one’s own personality. But
one must stand apart—one cannot be so subjectively engaged as to </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">identify</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">
with that object of study </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">from its
own side</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Here,
then, is the real lesson (if only learned obliquely, from a sideways glance) of
the Encounter at Skafish: “modernity” is characterized by this odd gesture of </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">distanciation</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> or estrangement—stepping back from an “object” (this
backwards movement constituting the object as such), to look at it somewhat
from afar, as if one does not participate in it in any relevant way in one’s
capacity as </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">thinker</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">. (The philosopher Gadamer reminds us of the curious
etymology of ‘theory’, with origins in the <a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%B8%CE%B5%CF%89%CF%81%CE%AD%CF%89">ancient
Greek <i>theorein</i></a>—a stepping back, or away from. Is there a whiff of </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">fear</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">
here? Or, of safety—thanks the gods I’m not part of </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">that</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">!) As Heidegger realized as well, the gesture of
modernity is this gesture of </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">re-presentation</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, of setting up something </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">out there</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">
such that the thinker stands over and against the “object” with their thinking </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">in here</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">.
It’s the Cartesian gesture, which in many ways was the opening shot across the
bow of what would thereafter have to be called the “premodern” (the line of
demarcation between subject and object being the line in the sand constituting
the point at which modernity begins). The theme of the premodern was </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">identification</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> not </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">distanciation
</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">or </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">estrangement</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">: standing essentially with, rather than apart from.
The formula that typified this way of thinking was “as above, so below” (the
formula of ancient “Hermeticism”, a theme which has thankfully emerged in the
comments to part one of this groggy UAP romp up, like </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">Daedalus,</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> near to Sol): you, and each part of each division of the cosmos, are (is) but a microcosm.
In Foucault’s eerily beautiful imagery (which echoes the </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">Indra’s Net</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> scene in the forgotten but hugely influential Buddhist
text </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddh%C4%81vata%E1%B9%83saka_S%C5%ABtra">Avatamsaka</a></span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">), pluck on one filament of the web of the “order
of things” (the structure that changes form as modernity comes about), in
the premodern cosmos: and all things vibrate and resonate. To anthropomorphize,
then, is to draw that which is outside apart to a point very much within and
part of, to recognize that what is outside is already really an extension or
implication of what is in here (though not, of course, </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">thematized</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">
as such): the other is really the self, or rather, that like for the Homeric
cosmos, there is no sharp distinction between the two and hence no division
(self/other) as such.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Besides this (Hermetic) resonance, the all-in-all
standpoint of the premodern, </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">resemblance</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> was the order of the day—yet another standpoint
disrupted by the modern. “At the beginning of the seventeenth century,</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 17.3333px;">” writes Frederic Jameson,</span><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 17.3333px;">“</span><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Foucault [shows that] </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13pt;">during
the period that has been termed … Baroque, thought ceases to move in the element
of resemblance. Similitude is no longer no longer the form of knowledge but the
occasion of error, the danger to which one exposes oneself when one does not
examine the obscure region of confusions.” (T</span><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">he Marxist philosopher Jameson is quoting here from </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">Les
Mots et les choses</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, Foucault’s </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;"><i>Order of Things</i>, and this </span><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">in Jameson’s own illuminating study of modernity: </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">A Singular Modernity—Essay on
the Ontology of the Present</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, p. 58.)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Modernity, that is, served to </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">invert</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> and </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">reverse</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> these relationships of Hermetic resonance, resemblance
and similitude, finding (in its earliest gestures in the 16<sup>th</sup> and 17<sup>th</sup>
centuries) first a self in alienation from the rest of the order of things (if
only an alienation built on </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">doubt</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">): the gesture of Descartes, with “I think, I am,”
was to posit </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">first</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> a lonely atomic self </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">standing
apart from and before everything else</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> in
skeptical ponderance on all other things (even, paradoxically, God—although the
great Paul Tillich has a wonderfully existential reading of this that </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">almost</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">
brought me back into the fold of the religious; but that’s another story which
at some point we should. Tillich’s the guy, btw, who actually coined the
now-frequently-and-overly-used term “ontological shock,” as Jeff Kripal patiently
reminded us at the end of Sol). Or (and this was Foucault’s point of departure,
rather than his own countryman Descartes) the metaphysics of suspicion of
the imaginal—perhaps the specters populating and haunting my experience are <i>just</i>
the imagination, the all-too-human going out for a walk, tripping me up as to
what’s </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">real</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> (the human faculty for </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">imagination</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> now counterposed to the real)? Yet, if we don’t first
atomize the self or the “thinking being” as Descartes does at the point he
ushers in “modernity” (in a philosophical-scientific register), then we can see
that “animism” (but the word is a very modern invention, no doubt) is
inescapable. As Feyerabend and many others have pointed out, in the Homeric
world what we call the psychological “ego” was a very much rather permeable
thing, with no absolute boundaries. Like when you fall drunk with spirits or
strike bliss with the herb: boundaries evaporate, and a kaleidoscopic abundance
arises (in my toking I found a synesthesia of musical resonances accompanying
all things, like an audial aura that creates symphonies where there were
things, people, words and voices—was this “the world” which in my mundane life
I was too “drunk” to see? Had I with the entheogen seen the chaos that
evolutionary programming holds at bay? I wondered on that night as the ‘60s
hippies passed on masterful joints which joined me with the cosmic.) With no
metaphysics of suspicion from which to wonder whether “it’s all in the mind”
you got to wonder whether the drunkard then actually moved towards a place the
modern could consider “sane”: if the cosmos was populated everywhere with spectral
resemblances of imagination, similitudes that ambiguated self/other, then intoxication
could produce a </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">break</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> of a different sort, the “schizoid” world of
Descartes as a drunkard’s dream (“schizoid” is how the existential psychiatrist
R.D. Laing, part of the “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-psychiatry">antipsychiatry</a>”
movement, described Descartes’ world, the disorienting cosmos of modernity—though
of course for us, it is very much our orientation). From this standpoint of identification
and egoic permeability, what, then, does a “god” mean? Spirit? Life? Were the ancient
Greeks, with their pantheon of gods, anthropomorphizing? </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">That</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">
would be a falsification of the internal standpoint adopted by them (or by the </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">indigenous</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">,
for that matter)—for the very term presupposes the kind of estrangement and </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">distanciation</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> which is utterly alien (!) to their mentalité. Yet,
it is complicated since ancient figures like Euripides (with the gesture of </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">theorein</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">,
of removal and commentary in the “chorus”) or Socrates (with his counterposing </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">truth</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> or </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">logos</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> to </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">myth</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">)
laid the groundwork for modernity (one of the themes developed by Nietzsche in his kaleidoscopic philosophical-historical interventions).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Is this
not, then, the real problem the more “skeptically” minded have with some (maybe
all) “ufologists”: that they are “believers”, which means: those who so
thoroughly </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">identify</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> with their subject that they are incapacitated,
they are no longer properly “modern” in the sense that they cannot maintain a
neutralizing and objectifying </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">distance</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, keeping passionless and lacking in that “enthusiasm”
which debilitates the mind because, when “enthused,” one is subordinated,
yielding to a </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">supposed</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> reality which one now no longer has the capacity
to see from a standpoint not already presupposing its truth? But to then reach
for the “animism” (as an inescapable anthropomorphism—something we’re stuck with)
of the indigenous would be too easy, for “they” are already allowed to identify
with their subject in ways that circumvent the usual channels of the acceptably
religious for us moderns. It’s only in religion that this logic of
identification gets to persist as a valid epistemological and ontological modality
for moderns—valid in the sense that one affords to the religious </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">the freedom to believe</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, but so long as that belief doesn’t become (or
threaten to become) the basis for law or social governance for all (in our Western
liberal democratic systems, in any case). Yet, then, if we allow the religious
to believe, and practice their belief, then why not the UFO “believers”— scientists
perhaps among their ranks? Ah, there’s the problem! Can scientists </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">be </span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">in a position
of subjective belief </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">and
still be scientists</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">? Can we count scientists
among the “believers”? Hell no, because they bed down in an illicit domain of
overlap, a nether zone of illegitimate, unholy, obscene coincidence: belief (UFOs
are real and present) plus “science” (let me objectively inquire as to </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">what</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">
there is to believe before I “believe”—and then maybe not!). Suddenly, the
scientists </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">cannot</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> have a subjective engagement with that which they
study.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/6DUAAOSwuJRiJ2FN/s-l1200.webp" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="667" data-original-width="800" height="327" src="https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/6DUAAOSwuJRiJ2FN/s-l1200.webp" width="391" /></a></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">One
wonders here, however: is the gravitational theorist </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">forbidden</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">
a “belief” in gravity, lest in their study they fall into the irrational encumbrances
of enthusiasm for their subject—a belief that tarnishes their scientific productions,
their “objectivity”? Was it not precisely </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">because
of </span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">their subjective engagements with gravitation (as a
phenomenon) that the great scientists of it were </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">led</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> to their theoretical endeavors—that gravity came
to </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">interest </span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">them enough to look into it more closely? The apple
</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">falls</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, after all, and hits you where you think—and one
accepts that it does. One “believes” before one studies (to butcher St. Anselm
somewhat: </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">credo ut intelligam</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">—I believe in order to </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">under</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">stand, and therefore to know). Ahh, but isn’t “belief”
in something like gravity itself obscene—for what is there to </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">disbelieve</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">?
Isn’t it simply </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">given</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> in a way that the UAP are </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">not</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">? Or
is there an even more uncomfortable fact embedded in this torturous logic,
which in fact provides the passage from objective scientist to subjectively
engaged “believer” after all: that </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">all belief</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> is provisional, an </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">as
if</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> procedure that is allowed </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">until further notice</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">: gravity isn’t really “known” theoretically before
the phenomena, accepted on the faith of one’s own experiences of some
collection of phenomena grouped in something like a systematic fashion, are
subjected to closer analysis. After analysis, revisions and updating are possible—a
reevaluation of the original image with which one began their theoretical
endeavor to </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">know</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">. So, there is the pre-scientific “image” of things;
then there is the post-scientific determination of their structure. And when
one moves from the one to the other, there is no longer the guarantee of a
coincidence between the two: what one had </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">thought</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> to believe in, so as to study more closely (“gravity”
or “matter” or “UAP” … or whatever the f**k you want to focus on) vs. what one </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">comes to know</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> on the basis of closer analysis. But here, belief is
no longer relevant, or even particularly functional. There is a sense that
gravity is </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">still</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> unknown, perhaps more so </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">after</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> it
is studied more closely—at least in terms of what it “is”. We just have to learn
to live with some combination of hand-waving and structural (spacetime)
analysis (for gravity, that is). Whether it’s a particle like we think is the case
for the other “fundamental forces” of nature, or some kind of ontological beast
called a “field” (or whatever): there’s a sense in which we don’t really know.
Does it matter? What </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">about</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> matter? The same combo deal is in place: maybe
this, maybe that. The “scientific image” (to borrow from Wilfred Sellars for a
moment) </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">dissolves</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> the “manifest image”. From the standpoint of the
scientific image (insofar as there is one), we have to learn to stop worrying
and just love the </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">structure</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, always </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">until
further notice</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> (if we allow for
scientific change—the historical dimension, which is something the physical
sciences are still uncomfortable with and which poses yet another challenge as
we fumble around in modernity looking to go beyond it).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Wow—I’ve
forgotten where I am in my review, as I allowed (no doubt to my readers’ collective
and exasperating chagrin) this digression to run impressionistically wild
(perhaps it’s the haunting force of Bach’s organ works which I’ve set as my
music of choice as I struggle to draw my travelogical reflections to a close).
Well, finding my place on the map given to us by the Sol team (the star chart
as it were), I see that I had veered off into a </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">discursus
</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">on the valences of (pre)modernity (there’s a title
for a paper that’s probably been written a thousand times already) at the
precise point where, tired, grogging, standing for my sins, we had taken a short
break from Saturday morning’s journey through the reaches of government bureaucracy
and the ways the shit could hit the fan in the disclosure moment where all is
revealed—or not, as the considerations of Dr. Grove so wonderfully complicated
for us. After the “fraught relationships” panel, and break, we got two curious
ends of a disclosure spectrum—the one exploitative and corporate, the other an
exercise in cautious (but very eloquent) bureaucratic flourishes in puzzlement
over just what the f**k happens “if an ET presence is confirmed”.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">My
notes are somehow utterly blank here—perhaps because I drew a blank, looking on
in confused awe at what the first speaker was actually, factually saying (if I
heard him right): that he (a Jonathan Berthe, described in our missals as an “AI
Entrepreneur and Robovision Chairman”—now also board member with Sol) was
excited by the prospect of “exploiting”—his words, thankfully cutting to the
goddamned chase, already—the funny business UAP seem to be up to with inertia
(which I’ve elsewhere described as that some UAP seem to move as if their mass
was </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">kinematically irrelevant</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">). Again if I heard him correctly, he was thinking
aloud as to just what extent these inertial tricks could increase the efficiency
and productivity of the manufacturing of things like computer chips—how all
sorts of industry could be benefited quite radically by such a technology of inertial
manipulation. All I thought was, “lol—at least he’s honest about the exploitative
possibility here; I mean, someone’s gotta make some real dough out of these UAP
at some point”. What about the space brothers thing? Isn’t capitalism, and the
exploitative impulses that keep the whole thing in motion, supposed to be
undermined, dang it? Where is that old time the religion thingy, too? And then I realized that I’m
just being naïve: Weber wrote </span><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;"><i>Capitalism
and the Protestant Work Ethic </i>(the Protestants apparently showed that greed and God go <i>really</i> well together)</span></span><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, so
we can imagine a future sociologist looking on the titular religion that grew
up around all things UAP, seeing a too-easy alliance—</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">Tic-Tacs to Microchips: Post-Greed Exploitation
& The Uapological Work Ethic</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">. Or
some suitably monstrous academic title awaiting its future composition.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">I guess
what Berthe’s talk demonstrated was that it’s </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">all</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> here: capitalist exploitation meets scientific exploration
meets incipient uapological religion meets theoretical problematization of
modernity meets bureaucratic management and “controlled” disclosure meets … was
this landscape the one which Sol wishes to coordinate or organize, for which it
wishes to be the center of gravity (as it were)? So, while working the
government disclosure and “transparency” angle (which was Mellon’s
characteristic focus, in an agile and personal and probing essay he’d penned a
night or two before, after scrapping his original talk in light of the presentations
up to that point—Saturday afternoon, which saw the reappearance of these brilliant
</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">rainbows</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">); the scientific methods and instrumented
observations angle; the more speculative and theoretical angle (both humanities
and STEM); the religion and experience-of-UAP angle; … we’re also gonna get the
capitalist exploitation angle thrown in there as well. Is that for good measure?
Well, I suppose it’s just the thing you do with knowledge, right (especially
with the knowledge coming from a place like Stanford): why not capitalize? You
make companies (with innovative tech—no matter from where it’s derived: crashed
craft or Plato’s Heaven) for the benefit of human beings, for society and all
that—and maybe get to be successful and at least </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">comfortable</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> money wise? That’s a reward—a meritorious gesture baked
into the system so that we don’t all fall into a place of lazy complacency,
just learning and living for the hell of it—knowing </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">just
because</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">. There’s that whole “instrumental
reason” thing that we moderns are good at, right? (That’s thinking wrapped up
in exploitable means, which in turn governs the ends we come to care about.) It
seems like a possibly unstable, maybe even ultimately untenable admixture for a
Foundation to attempt: government & policy advocacy; academia and the free pursuit
of knowledge of things UAP; private corporate interest (very much </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">special</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">
interest) seeking an explorative inroad. The specific power structure which Sol
ultimately (or, worse, effectively) begins to work out, given by its leadership
(Boards and Councils and whatnot), could go very wrong: with academics getting
involved in the lobbying which ultimately feeds into the toxic competitive logics
of the private sector corporations taking the information or knowledge and
repurposing it. Sol, as a nonprofit, surely can’t do </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">all</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> of
this itself—but can it provide moral and material support for the whole kit-n’-kaboodle
so others can? (Is a nonprofit even legally allowed to engage all these areas
simultaneously?)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Now
of course, how much can one read off of the menu of an organization’s inaugural
event? It’s ostensibly and simply a “symposium”: a gathering of many quite
different minds. But there’s the purport of the event, and what it signals
phatically to the community: here’s what we’re all about. And it seems clear, abstracting
away from the content, what the Holy Trinity of the Sol is: (1) government and
policy wonking (which includes the transparency-with-the-intelligence-community
track); (2) academics doing their thing (which includes the hard sciences and
the softer ones, plus the humanities tracks); and (3) industry/corporations getting
a seat at the table somewhere, somehow and for some purpose (besides just
supplying needed funding and support—a practicality that can be neither
underestimated in its importance, nor exactly poo-pooed </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">too</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> much
in an age of increasing resource and bandwidth scarcity, monies and funding
being the great bandwidth expander).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Berthe’s
talk was entitled quite directly: “Unlocking the Future: Navigating UAP Disclosure
for Global Prosperity”. You gotta get the “we’re all gonna be prosperous” thing
in there so that somebody can stand up and be the prosperity prophet. (Who’s Bible
are we using?) As the talk stunned me dumb (as if I hadn’t proven to be that
already in the many places where worms have eaten </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">lacunae</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> in my notes), Chris Mellon rose to the dais with
his talk, entitled “What if an ET Presence is Confirmed? The Potential Consequences
of Disclosure”. As I suggested, it was delivered with that candor from a public
servant that makes you like them, abstractly speaking. But Chris does actually
strike one as a really likeable guy—even if he’s someone who orbits a rather different
kind of sun than your planet does. Sol’s got Chris on their board too, I think.
Or at least he seemed to be closely linked with their leadership.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Well, as if
government didn’t have enough of a presence here, in an event devoted to a
subject that’s had lots of it (indeed, “fraught” puts an understatement to it),
we were treated to a half hour or so of the inner workings of the “Chuck”
McCullough the 3<sup>rd</sup> mind, the lawyering behind Grusch. (Grusch closed the
event with a bit of a cringy, undergraduate-essay-y and therefore somewhat
overblown </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">paean</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> to transparency and the existential—ok,
ontological goddammit!—ramifications of disclosure and/or official (?) contact.
I mean, contactees have gotta be nonplussed, right? It’s earthshattering, upheavaling,
and all that. (But don’t we get that it’s all so overdetermined by not only the
densely populated Hollywood </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">imaginarium</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, but also by the never-ending drumbeat of YouTubing
interviewees </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">saying</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> it’s gonna be shattering, etc.—we’re drowned by ceaseless
expectations … and shit, I’m running out of parentheses with which to permit my
nested asides.).)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">My
notes again appear blank for what McCullough actually ended up saying during his dialogue with Skafish (it was interview-style), but it all seemed general
enough, a high-altitude tour through some of his experiences (not of course
detailed case information) from when he was an IG-IC working at an OIG on the Hill
(an “oigoth”?). I think he might have said (obligatory?) that he </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">wasn’t </span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">an
experiencer, and that maybe he cares just about the truth of what people like Grusch
have to say. And he didn’t try to make a case for or against it—just that he
supports his client and by some kind of lawyerly implication, trusts that what
he’s saying is really truthful (that the </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">there</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">’s being said are there are like <i>really there</i>). And what
else can one do if the fact remains that most if not every last utterance of
relevance for UAP </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">remains
classified</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">—but advocate for declassification?
(For the nth time please think about the objective epistemology of this situation,
as Ralph Blumenthal himself outlined very clearly in a panel discussion he did
along with the other luminary UAP journalists I’d invited to the event I
organized back in February 2023: all the relevant info is classified, so none
of it can be independently verified apart from a source saying it’s so; but if
that’s the case, then logically we do not independently </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">know</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, or
have a means of coming to know, </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">what</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> the hell is there if there’s anything at all. From
ignorance and non-access comes, well, more ignorance and no further access. Period.
We’ve got trust, yes—and Grusch probably ain’t </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">lying</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">. But we can’t verify the claims for ourselves,
with publicly—which is to say democratically—available evidence. In other
words, if there is a religion being born out of the words falling from the mouths
of those like Grusch, and other ostensible “insiders” who are anything but of
the charismatic religion-founding sort (one wonders about Elizondo, however),
it’s a kind of theologico-academic-political Gnosticism: a religion of special
access, hidden </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">gnosis</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, and initiation, and all of the lovely psychosocial
dynamics that go along with that. Science ain’t mixin’ well with all that anytime
soon—hence the internal contradictions that are possibly showing themselves within
the Sol fabric.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">After
another delightfully delicious luncheon downstairs in the reception hall area,
it was time for “Working Through the Shock: Social and Religious Perspectives”.
The first talk was this academic I’d mentioned before who does something like “space
psychology” but which is more properly or generally positioned within something
called the psychology of exceptional or extraordinary human experiences. In
space, everything would seem to be extraordinary—not least of which the mere
fact of one’s being there to begin with. A violent insertion back into the
cosmic womb, a reverse birth of sorts, getting flung closer to our precious
(but no less temperamental) Sol and the astral </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">dust</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> it attracts and produces from which we all, organic
bags of water and protein goo alike, derive. If only Nixon could go to China,
is it the case that </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">only</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> a modern could go into space (prepped for all the
silence and airless vacuity, with the necessity of the technical to get us and
keep us there—fortunately keeping us distracted as we merge not so much with the
cosmos as with that switchboard of salvation glinting like an X-mas tree Santa
has populated with what you need to just stay alive)? Yeah, seeing the Earth that
you’ve left behind, the “overview” effect is quite a jolt (we’re told). And
that would seem to be, psychologically anyway, the condition in which a UAP
experiencer is put. Hence, the two (space and saucer shock—sorry for crass alliterations
here) make a perfect pair for the psychologist of the existentially
perturbative to take a serious look at.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Prof. Iya Whitley (whom I’d thought was
related to the esteemed writer, also present and vigorously asking questions, </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">even queuing to do so with everyone else</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">!) is the “Director of Centre for Space Medicine”
at University College London (UCL). As she made reference to the many cinematic
portrayals of psychic shock on encountering the nonhuman intelligent </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">other</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, she
seemed to have herself emerged from a Tarkovsky masterwork (did he ever do
anything else?), working through her subject with that patient and quiet but no
less enthusiastic objectivity that’s the special preserve of the psychologist.
I found her talk </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">utterly</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> fascinating, even a field of insights not only
into the mind in traumatic “ontological shock” (there I said it), but also,
perhaps, into the inner nature of the phenomena—insofar as we can work backwards
from </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">effect </span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">(the psychical consequences of UAP on their
percipients) to </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">cause</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">. (Yes, that is perhaps not advisable—but either
UAP are intrinsically related to the psychical effects they bring about, or
they are, like anything else, an independent but no less motivic cause for the
activation of psychical/psychological processes to which the mind, for general
reasons not specifically having to do with UAP </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">per
se</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, is prone under the conditions of a traumatic,
perturbative </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">encounter</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">.) She looks at how and when language fails the
patient when they wish to articulate the character of their experiences—or even
just what the hell it was about. With only the shock and the phenomenology to
go on, that narrative of what it’s “about” necessarily remains subjective—without
the fact having to lead us down the (perhaps fashionable) path towards </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">worldview upsetting</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">. Before we move towards the speculative, the metaphysical,
it’s worth just examining what is happening at the psychological level. In the
trauma, as language simultaneously fails and the mind is muted, despite the whisperings
(in language) of supposed beings or entities … perhaps in this breakdown alone
lies a clearing, an opening the structure of which gives us the key to
understanding if not UAP but the nature of the relationship between UAP and
their percipients. Again, since we only have the percipients and their reported
experiences “in the lab” as it were, the uncanny remainder captured in a trauma
of (if we’re honest) unknown origin, any deduction regarding UAP remains conjectural.
We have two halves of the phenomena—the one contained in the many instrumented
observations preserved in the “grey literature”, that indicates the direction
and reasonableness of our search for harder and more definitive evidence; with
the other housed in the recesses of the mind, the consciousness of the
witnesses who happened to encounter UAP and have an “experience” that seems to
rise above a simple sighting of an otherwise mute aerial apparition. To </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">join</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> these
data systematically requires not only the kind of probative depths of the psychologist
of the experientially extraordinary, but also the deeper grasp of the physical
presentation of these enigmatic becomings (and let’s not forget the structural
portrait that was begun in Knuth’s presentation—surely not the first, but a
recent reminder of how the physical sciences ought to be approaching the subject).
Yes, if there is a more obscure </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">psycho-physical</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> character to these phenomena—and the many gathered
at Sol danced and circled ‘round this gravitational attractor, to be sure, with
the religious dimension or the necessity of reexamining the structure of indigenous
thought reached for in, I must admit, an honest searching for ways beyond the epistemological
dilemmas (the blinding strictures) of modernity (I do essentially agree with
the necessity to critique modernity, the technoscientific, and seek out viable
theoretical-conceptual alternatives—here I am completely on the side of Dr. Skafish,
despite my specific critique, perhaps only preliminary, of the position he adopted
during the symposium) … if there be this more obscure psycho-physical character
to these phenomena, then we have at least the </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">start</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> (surely no more than that) of a way forward for grasping
what this (perhaps more fundamental) relation could be. But given the
complexities of each side to the problem (the mind and the matter sides, as it
were), and given that not only this dichotomy itself is problematic, but that
the mind side alone, quite apart from the complications introduced (ostensible
to be sure) by UAP-human encounters (whether showing “high strangeness” or not),
is </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">already</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> theoretically and practically challenging to a
science that comes anywhere near human consciousness and the rich experience of
qualities (“qualia” in a more technical register) which are anterior to any scientific,
political, social, economic act. We are first human, and conscious, before we
are any of those things—and the very fact alone of our consciousness (something
so intimate </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">yet so
analytically alien to our sciences</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">)
perplexes the sciences because of this anteriority—the fulcrum around which our
knowledge and understanding turns but which cannot itself be brought under its categories.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Looking
at my notes (such as they are—they seemed to increase in detail in proportion as
my grogginess abated and as I settled into an actual seat in the main hall),
Dr. Whitley concerned herself with at least two more subjects beyond a
consideration of the event of language’s failure during extraordinary experiences
(like the ones that crop up during time in space): the phenomenon of intention,
and how this can be shockingly important for human perceptual awareness (of one’s
surroundings—being so powerful that, if distracted, major and anomalous elements
can be missed entirely, as the “gorilla” experiences seem to demonstrate); and
proprioceptive perception, where we must take into account the larger totality of
human sensation, the whole-body sensory field: that beyond visual there are the
other human senses, ramified throughout the </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">body</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, that constitute an important perceptive </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">field</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> of
awareness (the limit of which is, we should note, philosophically and theoretically
contested: how far beyond the confines of the biological organism does perception
extend?). Here she referred back to Nolan’s injunction to “sample the ecosystem”
(here, meaning the </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">entire</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> proprioceptive field of awareness—the PFA), lest
one fall victim to a kind of theoretician’s or analyst’s </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">inattentional blindness</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, the equivalent of failing to see the gorilla in
the room because one’s attention is elsewhere. Though this blindness is a first-order
psychological fact under these conditions of attentional distraction (that
attentional shifts induce perceptual blindness to otherwise obviously anomalous
and shocking elements of the perceptual field), it is no less important to worry
about it occurring at second-order as well. In any case, what I found intriguing
was the implicit suggestion that the human-UAP encounter could be approached by
looking at this more general PFA, looking at the encounters from a variety of non-visual
sensory modalities, and indeed by examining the role proprioception could play
during a human-UAP encounter. (Though we should pause to note that in contemporary
neuroscience, ‘proprioception’ as a technical concept is often given a circumspect
gloss; for example: “Proprioception, or kinesthesia,” writes J. L. Taylor in
the </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;"><a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/proprioception">Encyclopedia
of Neuroscience</a> </span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">in 2009, “is the sense
that lets us perceive the location, movement, and action of parts of the body.
It encompasses a complex of sensations, including perception of joint position
and movement, muscle force, and effort. These sensations arise from signals of <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/sensory-receptor" title="Learn more about sensory receptors from ScienceDirect's AI-generated Topic Pages">sensory
receptors</a> in the muscle, skin, and joints, and from central signals
related to motor output. Proprioception enables us to judge limb movements and
positions, force, heaviness, stiffness, and viscosity. It combines with other
senses to locate external objects relative to the body and contributes to <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/body-image" title="Learn more about body image from ScienceDirect's AI-generated Topic Pages">body
image</a>. Proprioception is closely tied to the control of movement.”).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">We
very much live in a world (in civilizations) dominated by visuality (much
Western philosophy is so dominated—sometimes explicitly, as with the philosophy
of Plato, though at its apex visuality, along with its concomitant in the word,
seems to fail in a kind of mystical finale). But what about the ear? About
touch? Smell? Taste … the </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">entire range</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> of proprioception that has its root in our whole
body (the somatic totality, if you will)? From this perspective, the whole body
is the </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">sensorium</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, as it were: an extended sensory field of
awareness. It’s this proprioceptive dimension to our sensory awareness that
allows us to be oriented in the world as we are, to coordinate, and move, and
navigate around. Is there something important to be discovered about how UAP
might interact with the human at this whole-body level? Are there cases where proprioception
is involved in interesting ways?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Finally,
there was a third subject which Dr. Whitley broached, related to her work on attention,
perception, and proprioception—and that was the problem of </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">communication</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">. This is of course more speculative, since it must
proceed on the assumption of there being some intelligence to communicate with,
but as a theoretical matter it is surely germane: the evidence such as it is
(and despite its incompleteness) does fairly clearly suggest the operation of
some form of intelligence behind (maybe identical with) UAP in some of the best
cases, and so it’s reasonable to query how communication might work—what complicates
it. Here she points to Tarkovsky’s masterful retelling of the Stanislav Lem
story </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">Solaris</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, ostensibly a love story, but in fact a story
about the uncanny, elusive and evasive interactions between a human scientist
and some form of nonhuman intelligence (perhaps even a planetary one—certainly
one that evades the ontological-methodological <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/methodological-individualism/">individualism</a>
that pervades the epistemology of scientific and even humanistic scholarship,
certainly affecting its categories and concepts). It is perhaps one of the best
essays (insofar as it has rich conceptual content to read) on the subject—far surpassing
the overly explicative and conceptual film </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">Arrival</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> (IMHO), which deals more with the speculations of
time travel and the psycholinguistics of a species which has a relativistic
experience of time and space (the language of the octopus-like NHI portrayed
in the film is—and this is a brilliant aspect of the story we should
acknowledge—itself temporal, changing </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">in
time</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> in ways that our language of frozen letters or
symbols does not, which adds a richer depth-dimension of meaning and syntax not
possible with literally static linguistic structures like sounds, words, and
sentences. Yes, our languages change over (great periods) of time, but the
temporal modulations are not </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">themselves
</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">constitutive of the meanings in the ways this NHI species’
language seemed to require). Perhaps it’s time to learn UAP (referring to Sagan’s
famous observation, Dr. Whitley reminded the audience that some dolphins
learned human, but no humans learned dolphin—perhaps trite, but important to
keep in mind all the same).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">I
will allow (no, </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">force</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">) my review to fast-forward and pass quickly beyond
Prof. Paul Thigpen’s musings on whether (in some sought-after “post-disclosure”
world) the discovery that there are more (and perhaps “smarter”—at least in Avi’s
estimation) “kids on the block” than the human will perturb, significantly and
decisively, the Christian religion (theologically or otherwise). The very, very,
very, very (…, very) predictable answer, one overwhelmingly overdetermined by
the dogmatic presuppositions of any religionist whatsoever (I mean, who is
going to get up there and </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">ever</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> countenance the total end to one’s dogmas? To one’s
religion? It’s a stupid idea. Ain’t gonna happen—that’s why its </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">religion</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">,
right? It has </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">immunity</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> from such speculative upheavals … which is why it
was from no surprising, earth-shattering discovery from Nature that Nietzsche
recognized the </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">death of
God</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> as an </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">immanent</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> happening, not an event brought about in the
comfortably neutralizing boardroom of theological-philosophical disputations) …
the answer was—surprise!—a resounding </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">NO</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">! They are all God’s children, too. </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">We</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> are
all God’s children. Right. If only it were that easy. In any case, it was a
tedious and pretty much useless exercise in dogmatics. I suddenly felt like I
was back in (Catholic) grade school, mindlessly mouthing catechistic formulæ. I
mean, it was all pretty much predictable once you know the dogmatic axioms
(which is probably why the Medieval Schoolmen were so enamored of Aristotelian
logics: it kind of made your expositions neatly compactified, so that you could
browbeat the unlearned and unbelieving into theological submission, allowing
them to evade the deathly peace of </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">The Rack</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> with only this mere conceptual acceptation). In
any case, I almost disappeared in that soothing realm of astral travel that had
left me wanting more when I awoke groggy and complaining of lack of sleep that
morning, as the rainbows prepared their joyful apparition for the symposium-goers
(though only Minister Maguire and I, whilst we stood for the first few talks—I for
my recent sins—were the only ones who seemed to take much notice, this as Gallaudet
</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">et al.</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> took the stage and awed). At some point the theological
tedium was over (having been entitled “They Are All God’s Children: Insights [(!)]
from Catholic Theology on UAP and Nonhuman Intelligence”—for the record, there
were </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">no</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> insights that were not already predetermined by
theological presuppositions), and we found ourselves traversing richer, more
comparative scholarly shores—freed from the trappings of Christian dogma to
think about, perhaps, trappings of a more varietal sort.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">We come,
finally, to Prof. Jeff Kripal’s closing talk, characteristically toned with a
bit of conceptual provocation: “‘To Shoot Down Souls’: Some Paradoxical Thoughts
on the UFO Phenomenon from a Historian of Religions” (though in the talk he described
himself as a scholar of comparative religion—both seem apt). The talk, the last
in the Sol Foundation’s inaugural lineup, closed the event, but not before a
final word from a “Special Guest Speaker” (unlisted, but rumored—correctly as
it was to turn out—to be David Grusch himself). Jeff’s talk was appropriate as
the closing lecture, pondering, as he does, over the entire range of what the UFO
phenomenon has manifested in its fraught history (or rather, not in </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">its</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">
history, but in the fraught history of </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">our</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> dealings with UFOs—which is how the historian of
the phenomenon Dr. Eghigian accurately describes the history here).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">In Kripal’s
estimation, there is a distinct reason why the UFO phenomenon has manifested in
such a fraught history of human dealings with it (or “them” as the case may be).
Not unrelated to Dr. Skafish’s position, which takes “modernity” as its point
of departure (reaching—in my view too quickly—for the thought-worlds of indigenous
peoples to aid us in our faltering attempts to understand the what or why), he
takes it that what’s missing today is an adequate </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">theory
of the imagination</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">. In the history of “modernity”
such is indeed a point of contention, debate … even a term of derision or
condemnation. What is ‘imagination’, where is it located, and what is its
signification—metaphysical, moral, theological, practical, political? Today perhaps
the default assumption is that it’s from whence </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">art</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">—mere artworks—derive, being the locus of a power
of creativity neither metaphysical nor theological but practical and
constructive (even if creative): taking from what is given to human beings in
their experience, taking the </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">aethesis</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> of our sense-experience (what we see, hear, … what
we </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">feel</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> and sense) and producing something out of preexisting
materials. A very mundane act that nevertheless, in some merely aesthetic-conceptual
sense, acts to elevate, inspire, move and arrest in beauty. But to imagine is </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">just</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> to
think by other means: to work from the material and the process of the mind. For
Kripal, however, the </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">imagination</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> has yet further valences that would exceed the comforts
of modernity’s presupposition of individualism: to wit, that whatever else the
imagination is, it’s wholly contained by and derivative from one’s separate
mind, local and located—the Cartesian reservoir of thought and our other
cognitive powers. Yet Kripal would deny this methodological individualism that
would keep imagination local and all-too-human. If already the human (the “self”)
is non-Cartesian, nonlocal—somehow far larger than what modernity (and in
particular, what the technoscientific paradigm) would care to accept—then the
imagination is something more than mere aesthetic play of human creativity. It,
perhaps, </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">is</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> creation, creativity being ontological or
cosmological, not (merely) personal and micro-logical (as it were). What if we </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">flip</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> (a
term he favored in a recent text) the ontology of modernity, Jeff seems to be
suggesting (here and elsewhere in his </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">oeuvre</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">), and take imagination</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">
as fundamental</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, rather than first either
matter or mind (the twin ontologies of current and past philosophies)? If the
cosmology (and perhaps cosmogony) of the universe is imaginational, then the
UFO phenomenon is but one of its many faces—“valence” here being a literal
operation of the mechanics of the imaginational cosmos Jeff is suggesting. I
understand that Jeff is hard at work on another text in his “Impossible” series,
and this new edition would suggest an alignment with the metaphysical visions
of a philosopher whom I consider (personally) to be the greatest of the Enlightenment:
Spinoza. The cosmos Spinoza thinks is one grounded in neither mind nor matter,
but, like as what Jeff is proposing (at least this is my preliminary </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">gloss</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">), an
“infinite substance”—the formula for which Spinoza gives in Latin as </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">Deus sive Natura</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> (God, or Nature). This infinite substance is infinitely
creative, containing within itself an infinite number of modes of expression (Spinoza says “attributes”) of itself—only two of which we know: “mind” and “matter” (one might therefore
say that modernity has simply become trapped in an unreasonably constrained corner
of Nature’s imaginarium, although Spinoza himself somewhat mysteriously thought
that the categories of matter and mind were the </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">only</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> expressive modes to which we, human beings, have access).
In this infinitely creative play (a kind of madness we might call </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">deus ludens</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">—the playing god, not unlike a certain Hindu term, “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lila_(Hinduism)">lila</a>”), a Nature ever
surprising, we find indeed an unsurpassable creative volume of </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">imagination</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c3/Radha_and_Krishna_in_Discussion_1.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="469" data-original-width="680" height="272" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c3/Radha_and_Krishna_in_Discussion_1.jpg" width="395" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">What is objectionable and jarring to the ear of us
technoscientific moderns is that this seems to lead us to mere anarchy, existential
chaos—play, after all, seems to slide into lawlessness, caprice … the very </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">opposite</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">
of what it was and is that science, after all, has discovered. We are not gods;
our imagination creates not worlds but sandboxes of no consequence (or of
consequence only for our collective sandbox: science </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">is</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> rather
ontologically consequential, even if we put aside this Spinozist philosophy of
imagination I’m attributing to Jeff). Not so, of course. Whilst Nature (or God,
if you prefer—Spinoza was neutral: either was acceptable) is indeed infinitely
creative, in its productions order emerges. It might be a changing order (with
no </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">fixed</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> rules), but rules there are—perhaps “habits” are
better for Spinoza’s own philosophical lexicon, as the text where he undertook its
detailed exposition is called </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">Ethics</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, which stems from a word Aristotle fancied meant “habit”—all
the same. The paradox, perhaps, is that being embedded in such an imaginational
matrix, the human (the very local) participates in this madness, playing along
with the </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">deus ludens</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">. With this gesture towards the imagination, and
along with the Spinozist foundation guiding the way, Jeff seems to open us up </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">back</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> onto
a kind of world we’d thanked (the previous) lord we’d left behind: a magical
world, a world shimmering with resemblances, resonances … the cosmic web linking
the local and the global, the micro with the macro. It is, perhaps, a synthetic
philosophical vision, grasping both ancient Hermeticism and the radical Enlightenment
philosophy (underappreciated, under-studied and mostly ignored) of Spinoza.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">But
Jeff did not assume his lectern that evening to preach a new philosophy; he is
not a philosopher in the professional sense of that term. He was there to remind
us that whilst UAP or UFOs do </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">have</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> an undeniable physicality, a matter of measurement,
meter, mass, and spectroscopy, there is this </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">other</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> dimension (an </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">otherness</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> in many senses) too which we ignore at our
epistemological (and intellectual) peril. What to </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">do</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> with it—with the strangeness (both high and low)?
The para-physical or paranormal aspects that academics only can whisper to each
other about in hidden circles, if they want to take it “seriously” at all? It’s
why Jeff called the UFO a kind of “hyperpresence”—his three or four themes by
which we should attempt a more serious interpretive undertaking for UFOs. Though
I have myself pushed back in different ways against Jeff’s readings of the UFO
phenomenon (my particular issue is with the incipient </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">gnostic</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">
elements of the cult of the UFO that Pasulka wants to document as an emergent </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">religion</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">;
Jeff thinks of himself as a kind of modern gnostic, but I think that a bad thing),
what is brilliant in Kripal is not necessarily systematic but in the clear
suggestions, the many valences (some more ambiguous than others) he affords the
UFO. And his patient (he is a very patient thinker, I believe) refusal of the clichés
of academic scholarship: “religion”—well, maybe but don’t forget the stupidities
of religion and its falsifications; “science”—well, there is that, too, but don’t
forget it operates in an unreasonably constrained quarter of Nature’s
imaginarium; and so on. Each are partial, each inadequate in very specific (and
historically locatable) ways. Each falsifies as it reveals. If there is a “paradigm
shift” required in order to gain a better understanding of UFOs, then, as with
all such shifts, part of what we have to be prepared for is that the very
phenomena themselves—and the concepts we’ve tried out on them—</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">change as well</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">. In other words, if it sometimes seems that Jeff
isn’t quite talking about the UFO, then that’s because in this passage from the
old to the new, the phenomena themselves alter, fracture, change, and metamorphose.
</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">That</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> is something hard to accept: for the religionist,
the scientist, and the ufologist alike. Maybe not for the philosopher. Here, in
this radical gesture of </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">difference</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, searching for a better form of understanding, I
stand entirely with Jeff. I’m ready to cross that Rubicon. And it means alienating
many.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">But, I
still have a foot on the other side, the left bank. We are still faced with the
multiple challenges the UFO presents to each of our existing academic
disciplines. From a certain point of view, the “UFO” </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">per se</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">
may dissolve, a class of phenomena that fractured the landscape of modes of
scientific, religious, political, social, and historical analysis. “UFOs surely
continue to confound us,” writes Garrett Graff in his <a href="https://www.garrettgraff.com/" target="_blank">recent book</a>, “in part because
we know so little about the world around us. As much as we now know … it’s
worth remembering how new (and still evolving) much of that knowledge truly is.”
But what is harder to countenance is that we are not guaranteed a recognizable
historical continuity from one way of understanding to another. There’s no
straightforward accumulation of knowledge here. Concepts and the phenomena they
grasp may change beyond recognition or acceptance by later generations. Yet, we
cannot skip the history, the long hard work that’s needed to do on the problem.
So, while in a philosophical register (which even Garrett seems pointed towards) we
might look towards a future where the problem resolves (or more likely, </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">dissolves</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">),
more practically: there’s lots of work to do. We’re just not there yet.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">But
just </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">where</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> are we, with Grusch? Well, we’re always stuck at
the bus stop, awaiting the arrival of our coach, the one which never seems to
come, as we look, impatiently, down at our iWatches. For him, the fallen angles
are all around us, stowed away from public view, worked on to discover, from thing
to theory and process, how their wings work. We wait. Can we please have the
goddamned evidence, already? Yes, yes—but don’t you remember: “trust but verify,”
the earnest formula of one of your numbers?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">“David”
as his friends call him was indeed our “special guest speaker”. But he landed
not on the solid material floor of the upper event hall of the Engineering
Rotunda where we were all gathered. No, he landed on the screen. A simple Zoom call
would bring the event to a close. Perhaps thankfully, Grusch’s actual talk was
a statement, one written in undergraduate-y overblown terms (“since the beginning
of time itself, man has pondered the meaning of…” kind of a thing; as an arrogant
asshole Ph.D. holder, I winced—but it was a quite </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">sincere</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> piece of writing, all the same, I recognized—in penitent
absolution for the sin of my arrogance). Nothing much, then, was said. It was
all a pass—to the audience, who predictably queued up to have a chance (fleetingly
rare) to query the Primary Whistleblower (I almost wrote “witness”—but as
Leslie Kean herself has corrected on many occasions since she, with Blumenthal,
broke the story last summer, Grusch is a whistleblower </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">not a witness</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">). The questions were all, it seemed to me,
predictable in that they edged towards what he has said, over and f***ing over,
</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">cannot be disclosed</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">. Not especially to </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">you</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, puny civilian unclassified mortals—not even if
you brought your own SCIF with you down from your Napa Valley ‘shroom commune (“shroomune”).
Please. Just. Shut. Up. And. Wait. No unclassified information is available
publicly that would confirm (or contradict) the testimony; </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">all of it is classified</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">. How many times do we have to repeat what exactly
this means for you and me, who’re very much on the outside of this whole messy,
governmental insider affair? Piles of Roswell files and books on this or that “crash
retrieval” program and the witnesses thereto will not change the fact that this
particular testimony is publicly undecidable, </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">and
unfortunately may remain so</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">. In a previous
post, I’ve worked out the basic logic. It ain’t changin.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">But what
will change is my tune, for now we have—finally—come to the end of my impressionistic
reflections on the Sol Foundation’s Inaugural Symposium 2023. I hope I haven’t
been glib. Well, if I was, hopefully it managed to titillate you in ways a fancy
bathroom might not be able to. In any case, all chiding and kidding aside: as
with almost every academic conference/event I’ve ever attended (including the ones
I’ve myself organized), we had a mixed bag. Great talks; bad talks. And everything
in between. Worrying is the admixture we had circulating about—it wasn’t
strictly academic, and neither, too, seems to be Sol itself: government and
intelligence was one quarter; academia another (ostensibly the bent of the
thing); venture capitalism & the corporate (tech) world yet another. Can
all three be housed under one big happy Foundation? And not just for </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">any</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> run-of-the-mill
issue: it’s UAP—UFOs—fir chrissakes, fraught, epistemologically and
ontologically liminal, metaphysical and material, a story, at the end of the long,
long day involving “genuinely mysterious events that always remain somehow just
beyond solution while becoming impossibly tangled in a web of wacky human
failings and yearnings” (that’s Garrett again, quoting ufologist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_W._Moseley">James Mosely</a>). Do you
wanna put all that shit together, shake it up a bit, throw in some decent funding,
give some opportunities here and there, and see what the hell happens? On </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">K</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> street?
On the </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">Hill</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">? While I </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">fully
and unapologetically</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> support the academic
scholarship and the science side of things at Sol, I fear this other stuff: the
excess (in my view): the almost designed-to-get-entangled political side (sure,
“policy” writing is all good, but you have to have </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">advocacy</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> for it, and get somebody to pay attention—and that
means you gotta do </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">influencing</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">); and the corporate side, with its penchant for
the exploitative (I mean Berthe was just honest: what’s in all this for corporate
benefit? You gotta gimme </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">something</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> more than conceptual pyrotechnics and “experiencers”
here.).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Ultimately,
it’ll all depend on management, on organizational structure so that the center
can hold. But what </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">is</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> that center, finally? If Sol is the gravitational
center, what are the planets? Or will its gravity be as indifferent to objects
as is our own sun—whatever is gravitationally receptive will be pulled into its
orbit, unified just because rotationally bound? (Money, power and politics are
certainly powerful attractors, to be sure—and selectors.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">It
began to rain softly that evening. Reading my manuscript closely, I found the
schedule had listed a “second reception” at 6:00 pm—just after closing time at
the Symposium. I was excited. Another basement party! I milled around some,
finding some colleagues and friends whom I might join down there for the reception.
There’d be wine, cheese, dips, … all the accoutrement of the modern reception. Enthused,
I didn’t expect it to </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">be</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> dinner, so my friends and I also planned for a follow-up
dinner after the reception. Great. Sounds like a plan.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Gathering
my things, I went down, via the stairs, to see if I could find a nice lonely
spot that would again fill up with the throngs as thirsty as I was for some
post-event analysis. Well, dear reader, the “reception” still remains an utter mystery.
Only empty chaffing dishes were piled onto likewise empty tables, in the
entirely empty bowels of this Engineering Rotunda. Maybe the reception was
upstairs, in a room that (I fabled in my imagination) existed but which was
hidden from view. Not even finding that, I had to signal the others that we had
to move to Plan B: food elsewhere. But maybe there’s a reception back at the
Hotel?! Seems reasonable, I thought, so back I drove a few of us, after walking
back in the soft rain to my (free!) parking spot somewhere in the back of the
lot.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">It
was a star trek: roads blocked just where we needed to turn, we had to
navigate down, ‘round and through various parts of campus just to go around the
sports thing that was going on that evening. Getting to a decent parking spot,
after letting everyone off at the Nobu, I soon discovered that, neither here
too was there going to be a reception. No reception! Maybe it was a speakers-only
affair—again at an undisclosed location, as with their dinner the night before?
Well, even so, it was time to get that dinner underway. Scouts were sent ahead
to find </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">something</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> that was neither crowded nor closing anytime soon.
Success was found at a southeast Asian place (I think it was food from Myanmar—can’t
quite recall). We ordered, ate, and chatted to the point where we’d all had
quite enough for the evening. Saying our goodbyes—always that bittersweet sorrow—I
walked, feeling somewhat lonely, back to my parked car under a now-clear and
moonlit sky. I felt the alien hum of things around me—including my fellow man. This
young kid had skidded on his skateboard to avoid me, and seemed to have spilled
his drink some, which he then proceeded to blame me for, requesting a
replacement. I lol’ed onward, half expecting to be stabbed or something—before realizing
he was reeking of the weed, which tends to subdue more than agitate (well, at
least that was my working theory as I pressed the “unlock” button, rather than
PANIC on my car clicker fob thingy.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Again
falling asleep to flickering Netflix, or radioactive reels, I found myself on
Sunday morning awake too early—but with passably enough sleep. I was supposed
to get lunch with people from the Symposium (a vague plan, to be sure), but I
felt this odd </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">something</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> developing in my upper chest and had the intuition
that I should just get the hell on the road and go home. I had a five-and-a-half
hour drive ahead of me, so if there was gonna be any funny business healthwise,
I’d better be home.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">So home
the wagons went, through some arrestingly beautiful back roads near lakes and
reservoirs, mountains and hills showing themselves off in that lovely
Californian landscape sort of way. A stubborn cough developed, which was noticeably
unproductive. When I got home, it seemed to become more persistent. Uh-oh.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">By
Monday, it was clear: I was sick. A friend texted: Covid. Yep. By the next day,
the fevers started. I fumbled through junky drawers to locate those at-home Covid
tests. Yeah: I was Covid-y too. Which makes Part II for me. Fun.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Well,
from the printed words you’re reading here, and the time frame from then until now,
you can surmise that I recovered fairly well (though I’m always hesitant to
make such confident declarations—my last Covid bout had me, two months later,
hospitalized with pericarditis). Well enough to record my wild (at least in my
mind) and extravagant and ebullient and all that kind of a romp through all
things ufology, UAP, techy, political, academic, and Ivy League (no wolfmen, I
can say—however, except the entity that was emergent from my coughing fits).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">So,
with this, let me finally sign off.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Thanks for reading.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">Pax Vobiscum.<o:p></o:p></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1e/Adam_Elsheimer_-_Die_Flucht_nach_%C3%84gypten_(Alte_Pinakothek).jpg/1480px-Adam_Elsheimer_-_Die_Flucht_nach_%C3%84gypten_(Alte_Pinakothek).jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="584" data-original-width="800" height="431" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1e/Adam_Elsheimer_-_Die_Flucht_nach_%C3%84gypten_(Alte_Pinakothek).jpg/1480px-Adam_Elsheimer_-_Die_Flucht_nach_%C3%84gypten_(Alte_Pinakothek).jpg" width="591" /></a></i></div><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><br /><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></i><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>Mike Cifonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16910256379002179502noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7235611048140260044.post-73393762036841070682023-11-26T01:29:00.000-08:002023-11-28T00:04:54.658-08:00 Rising Sun In The UFO Firmament: Reflections on the Sol Foundation’s Inaugural Symposium. Part One of Two.<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://external-preview.redd.it/xLmWGl5-2BA_sdsrsymGgCbRImRJbvS61Wip9kiihek.jpg?auto=webp&s=0bb878a884a7287a309c370b2e06f53dd2a0aef6" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="584" data-original-width="800" height="295" src="https://external-preview.redd.it/xLmWGl5-2BA_sdsrsymGgCbRImRJbvS61Wip9kiihek.jpg?auto=webp&s=0bb878a884a7287a309c370b2e06f53dd2a0aef6" width="405" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">C</span></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13pt;">elebrity and showcase usually
don’t mix well with knowledge and the pursuit of truth. When you throw into the
mix both money (a lot of it) and power (in this case, of the Silicon Valley
sort) you’ve ordered up for yourself a potent brew both seductive and intoxicating.</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">The following paragraphs are
written in the wake of my experiences—my encounter, if you will—at the new
Nolan-inspired “Sol Foundation” inaugural symposium. It must surely be the new
talk-of-the-town, exploding on Twitter/X and everywhere else on the blogo/vlogosphere,
which I personally tend to shun. What I am about to recount is only impressionistic.
Why it is so (at least for me) is in itself worth remarking upon. Let’s begin
the story, which is surely an excellent set-up for a science fiction plot.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">For a few days leading up to the
event, which was to take place in Silicon Valley, at none other than Stanford
University, over two days in mid November (a Friday and a Saturday, the 17<sup>th</sup>
and the 18<sup>th</sup>), weather forecasters were predicting something of a
rainstorm at the California coast, from LA up to San Francisco. Not exactly
wanting to drive into the mountains in such conditions, I opted to leave a few
days early so as to avoid the travel treachery. Because of an annoying mix-up
with a terrible online travel accommodations clearinghouse (Agoda, which should
be avoided like the plague—more on plague later), I had to get one night at one
motel (yes, nothing fancy—whatever was a bargain), and then begin my stay of 4
more days at another. Ironically I ended up nearer to the venue at my <i>first</i> motel in Palo
Alto (which happened to be right across the street from this exquisite hotel/restaurant,
“Delilah’s”, or something like that); at the second, which happened to be
literally behind NASA Ames Research Center (ground-zero for the U.S.’s
mainstream space science program, of course), I was about 20 minutes away (in
good traffic) from the spot on the beautiful campus of Stanford University
where the Sol Foundation’s kick-off gig was to be held.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">Well, it turns out that the weather
in Palo Alto/Silicon Valley was exceptionally beautiful, with just brief and
more-or-less inconsequential bouts of rain here-and-there. Down in LA was
another story, so I probably did the right thing—except that on night #1, being
right across the street from such culinary delights (“Delilah” indeed), I succumbed
to the Temptations of the Valley: a $200 dinner (at personal expense), preempted
with a smoking bourbon drink (which included a cinnamon stick alight, which
almost burned my nose the more I imbibed), followed by a NY strip, lobster rice
thingy, and a glass of Valley wine. What was I thinking? (I’d intended to do $30
or $40 at an Indian or Mexican place, maybe with a nice house margarita. If the
road to Hell is paved with good intentions, what the hell is the Road to
Silicon Valley paved with, one wonders?) In any case, I got to chat with two
businessmen, talk some about the event with them, and recount my own foray
into the world of academic seriousness regarding UAP. (As many of you may know,
I’m the founder and current president of the <i>Society for UAP Studies</i>, a
kind of professional association for the advancement of serious scholarship on the
subject—which makes this review somewhat awkward to write, for obvious reasons,
I think.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">For Day One of my trip, I headed
over to Motel #2 (the one behind NASA Ames) but not before I got some coffee at
“Clocktower”, where I was able to do some work. There amongst the morning
coffee crowd was UAP-interested journalist (formerly of Politico) Bryan Bender,
awaiting (as it turned out) a visit from someone he wanted to interview (I
think it was Tim Gallaudet—the guy whom you might recall from my
still-incomplete SCU AAAP conference review gave a particularly bad talk—but I
didn’t get a clear view, so I can’t be sure; and, I’m not on a spy mission, so
I really didn’t care all that much who it was).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">Checking on the location of this
coffee house (in the typical American strip mall, oddly dank and
architecturally or aesthetically uninteresting as they usually all are), I
realized I was smack-dab right in the heart of tech country (no shit, of course—but
<i>really</i> smack-dab in the middle here), not only with NASA Ames nearby but
all the giants: Google, Microsoft, you name it. The heart of the American
soft-power techno-economic Empire, the New Worlders blazing those happy trails
into technoscientific oblivion, while the planet writhes and bakes, nations continue
to war and colonialize, while America The Beautiful treads along, eyes-wide-open,
with its foresworn pledge of allegiance to powerful regional actors hell-bent (now
evermore) on genocidal mania.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">Later whilst we listened to famed
scholar of ufological religion Dr. Diane Pasulka (whose name has apparently
changed—I guess a new marriage?), who mused on the ancient Greek myth of
Prometheus (rather ambiguous of a musing, as it turns out—more on that later),
and its many retellings (and multiple valences), one couldn’t help but get a
sense that the UFO phenomenon really was, for the many gathered at this symposium,
a soteriological event of world-historical importance, a kind of millenarianism
(quite overdetermined) that could bring to humanity humanity’s much-needed self-abnegation:
renouncing the stupidities of its money-monkey ways, teaching us of the wonders
of free energy, and rapid travel, of morphological transformations of matter
and mind, reminding us of an animism which we technoscientific moderns had
stupidly forgotten or erased or eradicated as we (and I suppose that means “Westerns”)
colonized and crushed the indigenous whose thought-systems we’d do well to
recall as the UFO befuddles modernity: our intellectual categories and the
sciences and technologies configured with them. Were we ultimately being asked
to stop worrying and embrace the religious, perhaps archaic pre-modern or
anti-modern, dimensions of the UFO phenomenon?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">Back to the story…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">I had my coffee (a rather tasty
vanilla latte), did my work, packed up and headed over to Motel #2, where I’d
remain until I left (a day early—fortuitous I guess, which I’ll explain later).
Later that evening I was to have dinner with one of the speakers, which I did,
and we talked about various things in anticipation of the event. It was then
that I got a sense of the great expense of the whole thing. Speakers (and maybe
some others) got their expenses covered, in grand style, as befitting an
event sponsored by one of the Valley’s most celebrated academic scientist-entrepreneurs,
Garry Nolan. Sponsored, as the flyer tells us, by the “Garry Nolan Laboratory”,
speakers were treated to accommodations at the exquisite Japanese-styled <a href="https://paloalto.nobuhotels.com/">Hotel Nobu</a>, which, as its website
writes, “blend[s] modern cool luxury and minimal Japanese tradition into the
concept of a lifestyle hotel.” It continues, confirming your assumption that it’s
a $500-$1000 per night affair:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">Nobu
Hotels, Restaurants, and Residences interact together to provide Nobu products
and services that share the common characteristics of unique Nobu food
experiences. Each provides a local experience with a modern design and stunning
spaces. Helming from world-renowned Chef Nobu Matsuhisa, Robert De Niro, and
Meir Teper, the Nobu Hotel concept is a curated experience where every property
is different.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">Well, I suppose that says it
all. Indeed, how apropos of a hotel choice, given the Sol Foundation’s sun-suggestive logo
(and one can only imagine that this location was itself intentionally symbolic,
given the co-director’s formal sociocultural anthropological academic background): they’re setting themselves up to be the “rising sun” (as in the Japanese national iconography) of the academic
UAP research world. And for Sol, it seemed to be (as many of my European
colleagues pointed out to me) a world very much that <i>must</i> be centered in
the U.S.—as if to say that, while it’s open to the “rest” of the UAP research continuum (i.e.,
Europe), the sun very much circles around America the Beautiful, where the
whole modern UFO craze began (well, “began”—as it’s indeed a world
phenomenon with origins well beyond the 1947 Arnold case). (I mean, one can run
wild with the symbolic overtones here…)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">I don’t mean to dwell too much
on form (we should really move to the content), but we can’t overlook the
manner in which the Sol Foundation presented itself to its invitees—and this
was supposed to be an invite-only affair—as the form was supposed to communicate
something to the rest of “the community”. That this isn’t your typical UFO
Congress of yesteryear: a half-brained mixture of amateur and academic which reaches for
the fringe before it settles on demonstrable fact. But that’s the rub: fact, as
in: publicly-accessible information on which one can form an <i>independent</i>
assessment, and then render a reasonable judgment. Money and prestige and power and so on can set you up well, as can a solid inaugural event, but then what happens the day <i>after</i> the party? Substance is determined in and with time, who eventually shows you the truth.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">One potential problem for the
Sol Foundation that was immediately clear to me was its throwing itself whole-hog behind
David Grusch (apparently pronounced “Groosh”, but I’ll stick to “Gruh-shh”) and
the other whistleblowers and insiders (like Hal Puthoff, one of the many UFO celebrities
in attendance, or Eric Davis, who was slated to give a talk but who couldn’t—leading to Kevin Knuth’s), whose testimony seems impervious to independent assessment—necessarily,
since it’s mostly classified. They call themselves a “Foundation”, and so it
might be worth thinking about <i>foundations</i> for a moment.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">Given the reliability of a
number of eyewitness accounts and other corroborating data on UAP, it seems fairly
clear that we’ve crossed a kind of Rubicon: UAP are “real” phenomena, and many
UAP encounters suggest the operation of some kind of intelligence controlling
some kind of technology (yes, we might want to problematize the concept ‘technology’—more <i>anon</i>)
which easily outperforms any human tech (on a number of metrics, not the least
being <i>flight kinematics</i>). The evidence, it must be admitted, largely derives
from what the <i>Galileo Project</i> has called the “grey literature”. And let’s
get over its fraught nature: that lit is not determinative; it’s indicative. That
is: it shows us what we need to look for, and how we might want to look for it.
Like the venerable tradition in medicine of taking seriously <i>claims</i> of
the existence of this-or-that medical ailment, we put our confidence in the
best grey lit cases to indicate where and how to look for evidence (or “proof”)
of the anomalies this lit suggests UAP manifest. We set up the relevant
research program (the equipment, etc.) and we go about trying to generate the
body of data which might establish beyond reasonable doubt that UAP are indeed anomalous (not just “real”) in precisely the ways that have been suggested that they are (we can use the “five
observables” as a good list to start with). That’s all fairly reasonable, and increasingly
more people in academia and in the mainstream scientific community (which now ostensibly
includes NASA) accept as much: accept that these phenomena are “real”, that
they deserve careful scientific investigation and research, that UAP research programs
ought to be both well-funded and trans-generational (like any good academic research
is: passed on from one generation to the next—something Jeff Kripal brilliantly
reminded the audience of in his talk, which closed the event on Saturday afternoon). If only just that were to have been established, we should be celebrating. (But wait, there’s more!, as the late night TV ads like to shout to your bobble head drifting off in bed in a cheap motel in Paradise.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">This is, I trust, the foundation
of the Sol Foundation: solid epistemological street cred. It’s something the wider scholarly and scientific
community can accept, and can be helped to accept as Sol, with its twin aims of professionalization and legitimation, both proudly and boldly announced at the very
commencement of the event on Day 1, parks itself within the heart of mainstream
American Ivy League Academia, at no less an institution as Stanford University (one with its
own interesting history of flirtation with the subject of UFOs—let’s not forget
where the great Sturrock was based). </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 17.3333px;">But wait, there’s more! </span><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">Sol goes further than these laudable sociological and methodological aims, placing
its full, unconditioned confidence and trust behind a number of individuals (destined of course to become if not already high-profile public personalities) who
claim either first or second-hand knowledge of the actual existence of material, high-performance UAP in possession by the U.S. government, agents and agencies of which are, they claim, engaged in clandestine “reverse engineering” black projects (or worse, government non-projects outsourced to private-sector contractors and thus troublingly beyond the pale scrutinizing light of government oversight—hence the whistleblowing).</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">For a number of reasons, its
attachment to such individuals is not only risky and dubious (and though I have
critiqued his overall argument, I must accept here Ben Burgis’ <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/08/ufos-aliens-government-secrets-whistleblowers-transparency" target="_blank">thesis on gov’t </a></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13pt;"><a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/08/ufos-aliens-government-secrets-whistleblowers-transparency" target="_blank">trust</a> in a recent <i>Jacobin</i> article); such
an attachment and backing by an ostensibly serious and academic research and policy Foundation
threatens to reproduce the same old fraught logics of credulity, intrigue and conspiracy
which has beleaguered modern UFO studies since the Arnold “saucer” days. Add to this the draw from the Valley (high-net-worth individuals, HNWI, who are looking to exploit ideas and maybe alien tech if it exists) and this is a recipe for a descent into past UFO madness. Depending on the nature of this supposed evidence Grusch has spilled to the relevant OIGs, this could all go very, very badly. So far reputations are intact, but the Loeb Sagas (with which the talks formally began, ironically enough) are perhaps a cautionary tale...</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13pt;">We
should, then, spend some time unpacking all of what went down at this Sol Foundation kick-off event. And let us take up the story from the very beginning of my personal encounter (having had the undeserved honor of being invited personally by the Sol team).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">Day 1 started off oddly. I arrived
somewhat early, hoping to catch a cup of coffee and mingle some whilst securing
my badge and finding a seat. On arrival, I was greeted by a $36 all-day parking
lot (fine I thought, just park me nearest the event). After a short trek from
the parking structure, I found the event venue (details all conveniently linked for us in the email program we received days before): an engineering building smack in
the middle of campus (quite a beautiful campus I hafta say). We were to be on
the 3<sup>rd</sup> floor. Seeing people milling around, I thought it wasn’t
opened, but, as cattle like to congregate unknowingly, even if such
congregation means their death, I followed the herd only to discover that the
doors were open and we could mosey on in. Which I did. Getting to the third floor
I was greeted by a bit of a crowd who, as it turns out, were <i>queuing </i>up
for entry. Queuing—at an academic conference (or rather, “symposium”)? I
thought, <i>how annoying</i>. Ignoring what looked to eventually be the throngs,
I sought out my badge on the registration/sign-in table, only to find that they
weren’t quite ready. “Eight-thirty, sir, we’ll be ready at half past eight”.
OK, but I was interested in just getting a coffee, so did they have some. You can
guess the reply; so, I, along with a few others, asked after the nearest café on
campus to acquire the drugs. That was at the opposite end to the courtyard
where the venue was located, so I, along with a few others, made my way over to
the place. I got everyone coffee, and we returned—to find, as expected, that
the <i>throng </i>had indeed flocculated into a line as more and more waited
for entry. I was <i>super</i> annoyed. After being repulsed twice more for wanting
to retrieve my badge, I finally found it—only to discover that neither my
academic degree nor my institutional affiliations were listed thereon. Did I
mention I was annoyed? I’d already cut into the line, thinking that it started
at a point that, apparently, it didn’t. Now, I got a badge with just my little
ol’ name. But who are all these people, I thought—some have affiliations and
degrees listed, others (who I knew to be academics) didn’t. Confused, I just
gathered the badge, complained, and said “uh-huh” and went to find a seat. They
were quickly filling up. Further annoyance. I wondered if they’d put enough seats
for the actual invitees, or what the meaning of my personal (I thought) invitation
was, when apparently you could submit a <i>request</i> to be given a spot (at
no charge, thankfully) and, if deemed ok or worthy or whatever, granted entry. I mean, were
the seats for whomever?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">At some point, a guy with what I
think was an Australian accent (can’t quite recall now), stepped up with a
roving wireless mic and took the role of the MC. He was a particularly dickish
guy—exactly the right type you want to be “working the crowd”. We were duly
informed that there was an overflow room where you could watch the event, livestreamed, should you fail in your endeavor to score one of the unreserved seats.
Watch it livestreamed on cc TV!? Um, but I was invited, I thought, so what if I
was unlucky and moral, and I had actually stood with the rest of the n-number
of folks at the back of the line (academics and non, all), I’d not have gotten
a seat, which would have consigned me to the flames—sending me to the back room with
the rabble? Wow, I thought. What the hell is going on? Is this an academic
symposium or a circus (not that I’m suggesting there’s a sharp distinction
between the two)? Media seemed to be all ‘round me, especially those high-pull, high-follower,
high-views, pleasant-on-the-eyes YouTube types (like the Theories of Everything guy and Jesse something or other, who seems to know everyone, hobnobs with the rich and
famous, and gets Grusch to spill all the non-classified beans he’s always
spilled everywhere else for everyone and anyone else—I think I shook hands with
Jesse the night before at the swanky reception at the Nobu, whose details I
leave tantalizingly absent; but I can’t recall clearly. I suppose I’m not
phased much by these people. God I love to hate on media.).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">In any case, back to the Dick
and Mic show: after letting us know, smilingly and smarmily, that we had a cozy
padded room awaiting us if we were without seats in the banquet hall, where the
VIPs will be holding court, we were seated and the event began. Mr. Mic then
proceeds to let us know our Miranda Rights, and what rights we’d yielded upon
entry to the event. Was this, finally, our Faustian bargain? I began to shudder,
with fear and trembling as the sun began to rise: no filming or recording of <i>any
kind</i> (LOL for all the media, I thought—so why the hell invite them if you
clip their little mediatic wings?). And especially no clicking pics of the
slides anyone presents—there goes my note-taking and good record for my blogger’s
audience of 3, I thought. Great, so I have to take actual <i>notes</i>? Is even <i>that</i>
allowed? (I mean, technically it’s a kind of recording, and if I sketch well
enough using my own eyes, it’s kind of like a camera recording, right? Oh, but
they let sketch artists into closed courtrooms, so surely this is allowed as
there’s plenty of precedent in our democracy to protect me if we litigate.) And absolutely 100% <i>don’t</i>
post anything to Twitter about anything going on here (not until it’s over)!!
That was Garry’s particular pet peeve, as one can easily detect by his
frequently vitriolic responses to most of those who attempt snarky pot-shots at
the man and his ufological tweets (or X-rays, as we might have to denominate
them now; but X-rays are weaker than gamma rays, so go figure on the next
social media name rivalry).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">But those required and commanded
abnegations were nothing compared to what would follow, once the suavely
academic Dr. Peter Skafish took the center stage as co-host and co-director of the
rising Sol in the new firmament of UAP legitimacy: <i>there will be no classified
information shared during this symposium, and no one should share any
classified information with anyone at this event</i>. What a wholly bizarre and
overly-dramatic announcement to make before you get into the Sol thing itself,
I thought. Why the hell and on this good Earth would one think that they’d have
to actually <i>say</i> something like that? I mean, if you <i>had</i> actual
factual classified information then if you were a responsible agent of the government
(or whatever organization gave it to you), you’d both be fully aware that
you shouldn’t do such a thing, and that if you did, bad things might happen. I
looked to the left and to the right and everyone with whom I locked eyes had
the same expression: WTF was that all about?! As that oddity lingered in the air like an uncomfortable fart,
things finally got underway.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">It was about legitimation, about
serious research, about writing policy recommendations—doing the work that
needs to get done for UAP to not only be taken seriously, but for there to be
real headway in the understanding department. But then there was the Grusch
thing: that he’d risked all to go public as a whistleblower, and that there were
to be and in fact are others so bold, brave and intrepid; those who (will and do)
stand with David. And David was on their Board (I think). I already knew this
alignment going in; but now it’s whole-hog and official. You can’t uncross the
Rubicon. Julius, from this point, will be Caesar. The Republic is over. And so welcome to the desert of the Real…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">Or of the myth, the mystery and some
kind of a reality of the UAP which has yet to actually be settled on the basis
of un-classified, publicly available evidence and information, and on which an independent
assessment can be founded. None of which can be said for the Grusch stuff. But
here it is, and here we are: at a Symposium to inaugurate an ostensibly
well-funded Foundation, backed by the wealth and power of Silicon Valley types
and their friends (but let’s not dis or dismiss the importance of patronship,
which supported lots of things we value which find little state or private
backing: the arts, and even science in its very inception during the Renaissance
… the risky, frilly stuff that, at the time, seems like <i>um, whatever, pass
me my bedpan, and what’s for lunch tomorrow?</i>).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">Let’s quickly run through the
lineup of talks and panels so we don’t loose our focus on, well, the <i>evental</i>
nature of the event (to borrow a horrifying term from academic philosophy).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">Working from my arguably contraband
notes, on Day One—<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">We found the inimitable Prof.
Avi Loeb once again reviewing for the n-th audience his dealings with UAP,
technosignatures and ostensibly interstellar exploding bolides (which apparently
are supposed to somehow be made of really anomalously tough iron that still needs
to explode a little bit), depositing their possibly alien-manufactured remnants
into the ocean, for later magnetic dredging. The trouble with the whole presentation,
as I saw it, was that he was heavy on the complaining and poo-pooing of his
(many) critics (while simultaneously trying to put himself on a par with a
Galileo—to which I lol’ed … but hell, who knows?), while very light on the
analysis of the best arguments his critics have offered against his claims. As in, <i>not a single
critical argument of his rather stretched hypotheses and theories was presented
for the audience to make their own assessment of the cogency of his claims.</i>
But maybe we’re not intelligent or educated enough, so we’ve been spared. Uh-hmm.
The talk was entitled “The New Frontier of Interstellar Objects”. On to the
next one…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">Loeb was (fortunately) followed
by a scientist of a rather different stripe: the careful, cheerful, rigorous,
and original observational astrophysicist Dr. Beatriz Villarroel, whose “VASCO”
project uncovered rather intriguing UAP on very old astronomical plates dating
back to before there was <i>any</i> anthropogenic flotsam in orbit. Instead of
looking deep into interstellar space, or under the oceans for dredgeable ejecta,
Dr. Villarroel takes a middle ground, hunting for anomalously
vanishing-and-appearing reflective sources that might be ET probes of some
kind. Why not? Whilst SETI looks afar (stuck on EM signatures), and ufology looks
anear (fixated, with justification, on impossibly-moving radar targets and
other suggestive manifestations on Earth), Beatriz just looks around the
neighborhood, not too far and not too close. In ancient terms, she’s scouring
the reaches between the outermost heavenly spheres and the lunar and sublunar
domains. And doing so by using the reflectivity of a potential ET structure (a “probe”—one
can only guess). The talk was entitled “Multiple Transients and the Search for
ET Probes”.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">On the schedule, which at this
point I don’t recall whether we stuck exactly to it, we were slated to have a
coffee break. Which I took, and quickly got myself seated for a talk, besides
the previous one, I was looking forward to hearing. Rather excitedly by Garry
Nolan, Dr. Kevin Knuth was introduced as someone working on the physical
science of UAP—the physics of “UFOs” (which is Kevin’s favorite term). Before
turning the mic to Kevin, Nolan lamented that a few brilliant turns-of-phrase
by Kevin weren’t <i>his own</i>. Hmm, I thought, a curious way to introduce someone
you seem to admire (a curiously inverted and ambiguous phatic signal of
admiration, I must say; but that’s an academic—a rather impressively successful
one—for you. I do the same shit.). What was profoundly interesting about Dr.
Knuth’s talk (a former NASA research scientist who worked for some years at NASA
Ames, where my motel, synchronistically enough, was located) was that the clarity
with which he presented the physical observations and measured (well, estimated)
characteristics of UAP suddenly made it made sense: that there <i>was</i>,
indeed, a certain, only now barely discernible but <i>definite structure</i> to
the empirical data—the observations—which suggests that, with further more
precise measurements and observations, a kind of theory could be offered. The
kind of theory that, while stuck at the phenomenological level, is no less
fundamental in its significance. After all, that’s how <i>all </i>physics
begins: with phenomenological descriptions of the law-like regularities of a
certain class of observations and measurements. Indeed, what I saw in a flash
was the makings of the basis for writing down <i>basic empirical relationships</i>—empirical
equations relating various observables—which would in turn be the basis for the
discovery of the more fundamental laws of phenomena, laws that systematically <i>link</i>
the seemingly disconnected observations together. We have kinematic data. We
have luminosity estimates (thanks to Vallee, who was, of course, present in the
audience and whom Nolan considers a close personal friend—well, there’s that
venture capitalist, Silicon Valley thing after all). We have power estimates
(Knuth’s seminal 2019 paper shows that something like 1 terawatt of power is on
demand for the famous “tic-tac” objects to do their thing—but where does the energy
<i>go?</i>, he asked, if not in a radically explosive irruption upon stopping just
above the ocean). We have a thermodynamic signature (usually very cold rather
than very hot, as one might expect from conventional propulsion). We have
indifference to trans-medium movement. We have no sonic atmospheric shock. We
have what look like Faraday rings around UAP observed with diffraction grating.
And so on and so forth in the “grey” literature (which, to remind us, as Watters
<i>et al.</i> did in <i>their </i>seminal 2023 paper, is not determinative or
definitive but only suggestive and indicative).</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">In other words, we have a cluster
of phenomenological characteristics that suggest we look for a systematic
relationship at a more fundamental level of analysis. Indeed, it’s likely due
to the particular means of propulsion or movement in spacetime employed by some object-like UAP. But with neither
craft/object nor precise measurements and observations, we’re confined to
guessing. But at least we can start there. And that’s precisely what one rather
perceptive comment (by a Stanford professor of energy science) suggested. Take
the “tic-tac” calculations (rather elementary, as Knuth admitted—so elementary
that his critics, like Adam Frank, failed to undertake them): we’re looking at about
a terawatt of energy that has to go somewhere. Since it didn’t rupture or
otherwise annihilate the object itself, this suggests that there is an unknown
variable—an unaccounted for parameter let’s call “x”—which we must introduce
into our basic kinematical equations which somehow modifies the basic Newtonian
schema. By adjusting this parameter, one can bleed away (turn off? negate? redirect?
convert?) vast amounts of kinetic energy that would otherwise pulverize objects
moving with such extreme kinematical properties. Perhaps this x-factor is related to
the Higgs field, this ubiquitous thing that’s supposed to be where all mass comes from. If
so, it’s looking like whatever these objects are doing, they are engineered
with a knowledge of the physics of the relationships between kinematic (i.e.,
spacetime) and atomic or subatomic goings-on about which we have very little
understanding. Indeed, this seems to be coming from exactly where we are most
uncertain about the physics of the material world: the quantum gravity regime,
where gravity, spacetime and matter are all supposed to be grandly related in a
unifying theory of some sort. We don’t have that theory, and very little inkling
about what it would even be (since there are interpretive hurdles, like for
quantum theory itself, that seem to interfere with coming to good conclusions
about even the very <i>form</i> of the theory here—let alone its specific content).
In any case, all’s it will take is something like what Dr. Knuth is doing, and
hopefully what other scientists like this Stanford professor in energy science
can help Kevin do, so that we can begin to proffer realistic possibilities that
could help steer future researchers. A little observation, a little
experimentation, and a little theory. Rinse and repeat and that’s the physics.
Trial and lots of error. There’s no other way—even if we did have actual
crashed UAP materials. There’s no getting around the science, which is always
(even on a good day) fraught and underdetermined and ambiguous and tenuous and
searching and uncertain and all that good stuff they don’t give you the details
of in the many hagiographies of science on the market. (Just take a real
history and philosophy of science course to find out the nitty-gritty of what
real science is like.) The talk was entitled “The Physics of UAP, with Some
Clues about Their Detection, Monitoring, and Engineering”. Oh, and we were
treated to a brief announcement of his colleague’s patent pending on a clever
new hand-held nuclear power plant, using lithium as fuel. If there’s anything
to the studies (by SCU recently, for example) demonstrating a link between
nuclear facilities and UAP sightings, then here’s a way to test that—which would
have the added advantage of being a kind of fly trap (or fly attractor) for UFOs:
the device would be a source of <i>neutrinos</i>, which is probably what piques
the UAP’s interest. So, while providing some power for the other observational instruments,
you’d have a UAP attractor as well! Interesting suggestion…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">Following this we had our “morning
speakers panel” which is essentially a chance for the audience to ask their
questions. (That’s when we got the really brilliant question from this Standford
professor—and it’s for exactly these moments that’s worth the cost of entry, in
my opinion.) Then lunch: moderately good sandwiches and chips, with some
cookies and the usual dessert spread that acts to spread the waist. (Thanksgiving
being around the corner, I got two rather than one cookie. What the hell, right?
If you don’t live once, you at least ditch the mortal coil for a new one—hats off
to Kripal’s final lecture which we’ll get to below.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">Before we got to the part of the
conference that was supposed to be where I ought to pipe up intelligently (and
I did, sort of—I remained mostly silent until then, when I opened my mouth and
removed all doubt), the “Humanities at the Limit: Nonhuman Intelligence”
lineup, we got the centerpiece talks for the day: the one—“The UFO Phenomenon:
A Genuine Scientific Problem”—by the grand doyen of ufology, the honorable Dr. J.
Vallee (it’s “Vallée” goddammit—the program got it right, finally!); the other—“The
Material Science of UAP”—by distinguished Standford Prof. Dr. of Immunology
(and soon-to-be prof of ufology, if not already effectively so) Garry Nolan
(and goddammit there’s two r’s already). But Garry went first, with Jacques,
introduced rather tearingly emotionally by Nolan (himself outed not too long
ago as an “experiencer”), following him. (Given the apparent health troubles
Vallée is going through, having variously had to cancel a number of in-person
gigs, the choked-back tears from Garry were understandable.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">Nolan’s talk was <i>really</i>
admirable, if a bit ambiguous or lacking in some basics. The purport of the
talk was simple: to simply demonstrate what exactly a materials science of UAP ought
to look like, and to provide his own foray into this realm as a case-in-point.
A couple of years ago he published the results of his own testing of some alleged
UAP samples. (Oh and we found out that there’s a <i>physical</i> sample from
the legendary Socorro/Zamora incident! At least, if there was a physical sample
allegedly left behind by the craft, which I think might have been the suggestion
in the talk, I had no idea. And I didn’t know ufologists knew this, either, if
they did.). And while curious, none showed, as he himself pointed out, definite
nonhuman or even non-terrestrial origins of any kind (at least in terms of isotopic ratios). What <i>was
</i>intriguing, however, was the structure of some of the materials he looked
at: both the inhomogeneity and the layering of the materials was interesting.
And at the purity levels of some of it, quite bizarre for the time in which it recovered
(again, from alleged UAP): purity is expensive, and so why would such pure
materials be dumped where they were found, and for no obvious reason? Just for
fun? For a hoax? Seems unlikely. But then there’s the atomic-level analysis of
the actual positioning of the atoms. Nobody could really examine the stuff at
this level of detail, because the instrumentation wasn’t really around. Until
now: Nolan has pioneered once again techniques of materials analysis that
provide unprecedented levels of fine-grained probing of how stuff is structured.
And, following the axiom in the bio sciences that says you can read <i>function</i>
(i.e., purpose) from (physical) form (i.e., <i>structure</i>), if we can now
see the structure, we now have a way to work to an understanding of the <i>function</i>,
the purpose, of the materials we’ve retrieved. (But we should note that function should not necessarily be read in terms of purpose.)</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">What wasn’t so clear, however,
was what the hell we were looking at when Garry put up his cleverly-made slides
disclosing the specific atomic structure of some alleged UAP materials (which
his handsome grad student assistant actually did the night before, we were
told). Garry seems to want to argue that there’s something interesting about
the layering or the positioning of the materials at the atomic level; but, as
this observational technique is new and innovative, we don’t have much in the
way of a reference class (an observational control, as it were) against which
we can compare the present observations in order to gauge just how interesting (or
odd or unusual) the materials are at this atomic scale. But the work is
brilliant, important, and indeed fundamental. Conceptually, we might wonder
just how well we can deduce (and how justified we’d be in that deduction of) function
from form, since with biological structures on the Earth we have an <i>evolutionary
context</i> within which to make the function-form relationships meaningful
(indeed, this would be a required presupposition of any such deduction). With
something that is decidedly <i>not</i> biological but is (as Garry himself asserted)
apparently manufactured (which is to say <i>technological</i>) we have the
added complication that the structure is an artefact presumably embedded in a symbolic
system about which we haven’t a clue as to its nature or origins, to say
nothing of comprehending <i>those</i> symbolical relationships which contribute
to the meaning of the structures and how and why it was put together. The
thought perhaps is that there will be some physically basic (nonbiological) purpose
(or function) deducible from the form. Perhaps; but if you stop and think about
how Newton might try to reason with an Apple iPhone that happens to bounce onto
his head, you might have second thoughts: Newton might, after some labor (and
perhaps out of desperation in consultation with his alchemical compadres in the
dark of the night) figure that the purpose of the iPhone is to light the way in
the darkness; but he’d probably never reach the conclusion that it’s ultimate purpose
is telecommunications. Until, that is, his own technoscientific context reached
a point of similarity such that the “alien” object could be inscribed within <i>his
own</i> field of understanding. And yet, he’d never really be sure, since the
coincidence of this object with his own symbolic field would forever be, well,
coincidental, which is to say: a contingent matter, always ambiguous. In any case,
these more philosophical-conceptual matters aside, the talk was a real high point
for the day. He is indeed a luminary in his field, and is admirably attempting
to translate that to physical UAP studies. We need much more of this kind of hard,
careful and intelligent—and sincere—work (don’t forget Garry will tell you when
something isn’t working out in the evidence to be that alien stuff you wanted
it to be).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">Well, after a kind of review of
his decades-long work, which went over the various levels of UFO strangeness,
and their characteristic sociology of reporting (there’s a drop off as they get
more weird, with most cases falling in the middle of the strangeness scale—yes,
that word has to be, and was, defined), Vallée, as he’s wont to do, reminds us
that our smart tech and algorithms won’t save us from the hard work of manually
examining cases that pass some reasonable criteria of UFO authenticity—drilling
down to the recalcitrant residuum, you gotta have the humans come in and look
more closely. It’s not a particularly original point, since he made it himself
time and again in the past, but it’s worth being reminded of given all the hype
over A.I. and friends. Of course, the irony wasn’t lost on anyone in the crowd,
coming from the Valley: he himself was an early A.I. creator and user, so it’s
been with us for quite some time—just get over it and do the hard work of human
cogitation. Don’t be lazy, I guess. Fair enough.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">Now the pre-lunch panel (Nolan
and Vallée), questions, then lunch. I was <i>hungry</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">Following this we were treated
to another ufological luminary (though I’m hesitant to put her in this
category): Dr. Diane Pasulka. It was time for the religion thing, and time
for her new book, hot off the presses: <i>Encounters</i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">. It’s a mélange of them, with “nonhuman others” (I think) being the
unifying contact presence. Aliens are in there, ostensibly. The theme, which I
thought was clever enough, was Prometheus, the ancient (Greek) tale of how fire
was stolen from the gods and the price paid for that theft. She wants to </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">rewrite</i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> that myth—or point out how current circumstances are conspiring to rewrite
it for us (which it would be our scholarly duty to record and report, it would
seem). But I couldn’t quite figure the thesis itself towards which the talk was
aimed, using this myth as the theme. Perhaps there were a couple of ways of
going, and that she was exploring them. The multiple valences and corresponding
interpretations that go along with them. After all, she did point out that
there were </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">multiple </i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">retellings. And so this is perhaps what we
need to keep in mind. In any case, the more general story she wanted to tell was
on the convergence between “four research traditions”. As I took somewhat
scattered notes; am a shitty note taker when I’m stuck at the beginning of a talk,
trying to get the first slides and primary thesis; and was prevented by decree (on
pain of administrative banning from all future Sol events—Nolan announced a ban
on some unfortunate X-Twit who couldn’t keep their fingers from their phone and
eeked out a photo—but then this seemed to be a misunderstanding, since this
person came late to the party, after Dr. Dick had requested rights be given up)
from taking any photos of the slides; … well, I don’t recall all the research
traditions. They seemed to me to be somewhat arbitrary or messy. I can’t recall
at all the first one. The second had to do with </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">public</i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> institutional
scholarship of UAP. Then there was the academic research traditions, where she
wanted to put both Mack and Steven Dick. But I thought: what the hell do either
of them have to do with </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">UAP</i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">? I mean, Mack cared about contactees and
abductees, not all of whom are talking about UAP associated with their experiences.
Dick doesn’t really dwell much on classical UAP/UFOs, so much as he’s concerned
with chronicling our interest in ET life. Again, what’s that have to do with
UFOs—aside from the ET hypothesis about what they are and where they come from?
In any case, I suppose it’s all good, and that I’m just being cranky—setting me
up for a very unfortunate encounter with Person #2 of the whole event (which I’ll
get to momentarily). Finally, she talked about an “emergent” tradition. What
that was she couldn’t quite say, since, well, it’s emergent and we have to wait
and see. Maybe it’ll be some combo deal where the others get put together in a Frankenstein’s
monster of a tradition. We’ll wait and see.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Oh—and now I remember: I think the
first tradition was the invisible one. I guess it’s all making sense. So, in
each case, what’s going on is something (I guess) Promethean. Or maybe not. If
what each tradition concerned itself with was contact or relating or some
connection with ET, and if (it’s a decent ‘if’) they’re more “advanced” then it’s
like the stealing fire from the gods thing. And it’s also like the Plato’s Cave
thing, which she’s all about of late (having listened to about half an episode
of the </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Engaging The Phenomenon</i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> podcast where she chatted with a host whose
enthusiasm for his subject somehow makes the show less interesting—at least for
me). You got Socrates escaping the chains, having been confined to shadows, climbing
out of the darkness of the cave to see the Light outside (it’s the sun—our Sol),
only to go back and try to tell the others, the permanent spelunkers—who want only
to either imprison or kill him (they did both, of course). Contactees (or their
scholarly analysts?) are like Socrates: they (at least for them) want to tell
of a transformative truth, but nobody wants to hear it, and even less accept it (except for
Socrates there’s this whole </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">reason</i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, the “giving of accounts” thing that kinda
makes it a downer for the traditional religious—but that’s another story that
really wasn’t ever touched upon: the epistemology of belief and rationality of
Socratic-Platonic argumentation, the logos v. mythos dichotomy that Socrates
and Plato each inaugurated with their then innovative dialectical philosophy—and
we note that dialectics of a much later philosophic epoch would come back to
bite me during my unfortunate encounter with Skafish—and that’s coming up).</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">In
any case, I can see the point: in many cases the contactees or abductees seem
to come back with this knowledge, a “gnostic” knowledge that’s like a cookie
eaten rather than merely </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">conceived</i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> (I think that was Pasulka’s analogy, which
she uses with her students when trying to teach them about “Gnosticism” and “gnosis”—hopefully
they get food for their reward). And they want to tell it, but they’re
considered crazy or mistaken or whatever. So this creates the set up for a kind
of gnostic experience, for a kind of religion around “the phenomenon”. The “others”
are like the gods, then, that were poeticized in the ancient myths. Except that
maybe these sky-bound “gods” are, just maybe, somehow ontologically, or effectively,
</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the same</i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> as the supposed nonhuman “others” piloting or
managing or controlling “UAP” (at least those that seem vehicular—a kind of interpretation,
the technoscientific one that’s the predominate interpretive assumption going
in much ufology, scholars like Knuth included, that will be curiously
problematized by the anthropological-cum-philosophic talk that was upcoming
from Sol Person No. 2). That’s why a scholar of religions can work on UAP. There’s
a distinct family resemblance going on here. The talk was entitled “Rewriting the
Myth of Prometheus” (though in the event booklet we received it was supposed to
be a typical colonated title, with an entirely differently theme: “Transcending Timeliness: Uniting Science, the Humanities
and Intelligence in UAP Scholarship”), delivered by a scholar who seemed to me,
when I was introduced, a bit stunned, as if caught in wonderment or bewilderment
over just how they got into this whole mess in the first place. Probably the
mess found them, as it did me…<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">And I
would end up in a bit of a mess when I made the utterly foolish mistake (hey,
some mistakes aren’t) of stepping up to the mic and directing my personal first
(and decidedly last public) question (characteristically somewhat cranky,
admittedly) to the man, the mystery, the new (and quite
accomplished) mainstream humanities scholar-on-the-UAP-block, Dr. Peter Skafish,
whom Nolan has designated his Person No. 2 at Sol. Skafish is someone with whom
I’d had some pre-symposium professional/personal interaction (always amicable) over
the past couple of months, so his reaction (which I thought rather crass—only the
kid from the blue collar family, namely me, is allowed to be that crass) took
me utterly by surprise (some of the audience, as I later learned, were equally aghast).</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">But first the talk.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">It was a fairly typical talk in the style of your
run-of-the-mill academician in the humanities: a typed-out affair (I, too,
value the security of the prepared text—though I always end up extemporizing as
I do the tell-them-what-you’re-gonna-tell-them thing that philosophers
especially love to do, and perhaps this out of unconscious belief in Plato’s thesis
of the </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">soullessness</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> of written text, found in his famous Seventh Letter). In
a section of Day One of the Symposium entitled “The Humanities at the Limit:
Nonhuman Intelligence”, wherein we found Pasulka and Skafish working two corners of the same street, we were poised, I thought, for some preliminary
epistemological exercises in examining just </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">what</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> those limits were, how they themselves emerged,
and perhaps what it would mean to traverse or overcome (etc.) them. Perhaps
this precisely was the intention (partially, maybe) of Skafish’s talk, but as
his discourse is embedded in this interesting confluence of philosophy (or “theory”
as they like to say, eschewing the classical descriptors) and “sociocultural
anthropology” (the latter of which I only have a dim sense of what it involves,
aside from the anthropology bit—and even then I’m afraid to ask, as it seems to
be a descendant of the theoretical post-mortem of “postmodernity” and all that kaleidoscopic
expressionistic inquiry), the best I could tell was that the thought behind the
thesis was very much about radical engagement with what for so-called “modernity”
(something I’ll get to in a moment) is its uncomfortable other: “indigenous” thought—or
what in days past was designated “primitive” (the new term perhaps not fully discarding
the condescension of the earlier). (Here I’m reminded of famed Marxist
philosopher Slavoj Zizek’s provocative gestures against the “radical” leftist
intellectuals who want to use the “appropriate” PC terms when talking about those
who, even in their radical (and celebratory) discourse, </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">remain distantly other</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> even for them the woke. No, the Slovenian
philosopher Zizek says (and I paraphrase his comedy): my Native American friends
tell me that they </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">prefer</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> the old, stupid term “Indians”, since it lets everyone
see that the Europeans fucked it all up and confused us for another people altogether!
I’m not sure how many conference goers realized this, but the No. 1 Man of the
whole event at one point actually </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">said </span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">“Indians” (!), when referring to who Skafish more
properly called “indigenous people”. It was an interesting, deeply ironic, juxtaposition—especially
given the theme of Skafish’s own talk.)</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">What Skafish wanted to do was to
problematize the predominate technological (or technoscientific) gloss on all
things UAP: as if they simply </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">had</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> to be technological machines, or inert plasmas, …
the usual suspects in the ontological firmament of “modernity”.
Indeed, it is “modernity” itself that’s challenged by phenomena so
elusive and liminal as UAP. But that’s only an optical illusion (as it were)—an effect
of inadequate figuration by conceptually limited categories (so yes, even the
real UAP </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">are</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> illusory in a certain technical sense!). Failure
to perceive the immanent limits of the dichotomous categories of modernity (living
v. machinic; technological v. natural; animate v. inanimate; intelligent,
animated life v. unthinking, inert matter) we are doomed to force the UAP into Procrustes’
Bed, missing its truly radical valences, a moment of radical </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">critique</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">
for the cage (perhaps the clichés) of modernity itself. While it is often
lamented that our categories tend to anthropomorphize, especially when the phenomena
are quite beyond the categorial pale, as the genuine UAP are, (we reach for
anthropomorphism where we don’t understand, projecting rather than simply
resting in unknowing—although there is that strange mystical text, </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">The Cloud of Unknowing</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, which might be read as a kind of paean to </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">just that</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">
sort of intolerable epistemic suspension), Skafish admits: well, that’s just tough
teats, for what options do we have for escaping </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">ourselves</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, for overcoming the </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">anthropos</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> of our intellectual categorial matrix? Here it
seemed as if Skafish was just doubling down on the human-centric here,
ironically, as we query this horizon of nonhuman intelligence (“NHI” in current
parlance).</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">And that’s what caught me totally off guard: usually humanists want
to complain of anthropomorphisms. But Skafish seems to say, just live with it—but
there are better and worse forms. Or at least, advantages and disadvantages,
respective merits and demerits, of different anthropomorphisms. Perhaps
modernity’s are exhausted and by now quite </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">overdetermined</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> (by a few generations of science fiction, and
other art reproducing the cliché of the technological, the inert-inanimate machinic
world of manufacture, steel, and industry). But there are other anthropomorphic
interpretative fields—like those of indigenous peoples, whose “animism” (his
terms) is of a world filled with living souls and entities at every turn (a
veritable plenum of </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">spirit</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">)—to which we might do well to turn, as we struggle
to understand what UAP </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">are</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> (I’d say: to grasp their </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">haecceity</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">—their
not-so-primitive </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">thisness</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, to borrow and slightly corrupt the technical term
from medieval Western philosophy). And saying what they are puts us squarely into
the theoretical territory of “ontology”: the theory of being—in this case, of
the being of the UAP. Or was that what we were talking about? Here again the
slide between UAP and some kind of intelligence </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">behind</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> them was dancing about, distracting me as I tried
to get the point, which I suppose is that if we reach for the “animism” of indigenous
peoples (admittedly but inescapably anthropomorphic), we need not think in such
dichotomous terms as the machine vs. the intelligence controlling it. Maybe whenever
UAP display seemingly intelligent behavior (like when the “tic-tacs” dashed off
to Cmdr. Fravor’s </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">classified</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> rendezvous point during the <i>Nimitz</i> encounters), the ontological dichotomy between
UAP and the controlling intelligence (a staple distinction in modernity), would collapse.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Well, as sympathetic to this problematization of “modernity” here as I am (a
thesis which of course isn’t original in ufology: most recently my brilliant
interlocutor Bryan Sentes has made essentially the same point quite eloquently
in a number of his blog posts at </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">Skunkworks</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, going back to at least 2019), I found a number of
things problematic about it, not the least of which was the lack of the attempt
to actually </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">demonstrate</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> the thesis in and for specific cases. Perhaps this
is a penchant for the abstractions of “theory” which has overtaken these forms
of humanities, but it was clear that theory came before the details of any one
UAP case—so I was struggling to work through the question as to whether this “theory”
works to aid one in puzzling one out of the interpretive quagmires that,
presumably, persist for those who haven’ yet reached the proper level of
self-critique of one’s embeddedness in “modernity”. That’s the one difficulty I
saw. The other was with the very dichotomy between “modernity” and the “indigenous”
presupposed by Skafish’s entire talk. As I pointed out in my unfortunate public
question (posed amidst a room full of former and perhaps current spooks, YouTubers
and podcasters and journalists, and some academics), </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">internal to modernity itself</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> one can easily find such kinds of attempt at categorial
nuance. Along with “modernity” (which I can’t recall whether it was very
clearly defined, because we were banned from recording anything audially or
visually—and we have no text from which to work, so I’m working with my swiss-cheese
ADHD-ridden memory), there were always counter traditions—ways of thinking and
being that ran counter to but still within modernity. (For all its problems, which I reviewed in the blog post before this one, just read Mitch Horowitz on Occultism.) “Alternative” (especially <i>animistic</i>) traditions abound. The nineteenth century is particularly riddled with them, both here and in Europe. In other words, one need not immediately reach for something called “indigenous” thought before one
looks internal to modernity itself for a </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">repudiation</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> of what was in any case a somewhat late development:
the so-called “disenchantment” of the world Weber tried to theorize in the late
19<sup>th</sup> and early 20<sup>th</sup> centuries (in sociology, but it was
widely influential intellectually in Europe more generally). We might </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">define</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">
“modernity” as what resulted from the confrontation between the “New Scientists”
and the ancient Aristotelian-cum-Christian ontology of the Middle Ages, and between
that and the persistence of a kind of “animistic” and “magical” view of things practiced
by, say, the Renaissance alchemists (who generally accepted a Hermetic worldview) during the same period. In other words, the
conflict (such as it is) is not between modernity and indigenous animism, but between
modernity and mechanism—internal to the discourse of modernity itself. Animism
never died in the West; it just went rogue, underground, and indeed was more-or-less
repressed. That’s how I would nuance the analysis, and eschew this hagiographical
embrace of indigenous peoples. The question </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">there</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> should have been: not what can they teach us about
UAP; but rather, how is it that they themselves receive these phenomena and make
sense of them.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">I personally don’t think we can “learn” much there, for I claim </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">there’s no going back to animism or any “premodern”
standpoint</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">. Rather, the point seems to be to
overcome modernity, to overcome the animism v. mechanism dichotomy by showing
the insufficiency of either one. Indeed, I’d turn the point round backwards: mechanism
taught the ultimate form of spiritual and ontological </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">alienation</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">,
and so therefore was already the secret logic of immanent upheaval, the
preparation for inhabiting an alien world where we don’t have the old comforts
of the gods or the spirits—the human all-too-human comforts of being at home in
a world of animistic vitality, or mechanical efficiency and clarity. In other
words, the problem is that perhaps we haven’t learned the true depths of the </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">alienation</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">
which technoscience, in its increasingly remote explorations into unfathomable
depths of nature, still yet proposes as we attach ourselves to our machines and
off-load our spiritual life to them. No, we needn’t abandon
modernity or seek alternatives; there are </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">no</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> such alternatives realistically speaking. The only
way around is through the unfinished score of modernity itself. Science, I claim,
was precisely this process of radical alienation, mechanism (the mechanical philosophy
unsophisticatedly modeled on the cliché of the clock) only its first naïve articulation.
Science decenters the human—the Copernican Revolution only one moment in a
series of such “humiliations” (as Freud was to put it centuries later). I fail,
therefore, to see why it is not possible to escape the anthropomorphic—unless maths
be nothing but. If there is something nature is teaching us (and Garry Nolan
cautioned us, rightly, to </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">listen
to nature</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">), it’s in the utter silence of
the UAP—not in the whispers of supposed nonhuman intelligence, but in the mute
uncanniness of the experience. The greatest essays on the destabilizing
inhumanity of these phenomena (which reconfigure the human so that we become
alien to ourselves, in the end—the theme taken up in that brilliant text </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">Kant in the Land of the Extraterrestrials</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">), are cinematic: Kubrick’s </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">2001: A Space Odessey</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">; Tarkovsky’s </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">Solaris</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">; and Peele’s </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">Nope</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">. These texts (and they are readable) show an
alterity in its refusal to be appropriated, to conform. And in that refusal we’re
changed. The thesis that we are stuck with different anthropomorphisms seems,
then, to be a trap, a theoretical seduction that sees variety and celebrates
plurality and diversity, but which is in fact swallowed up by the monolithic cliché
of a preordained ecosystem of human cultures, just as they are. Science—not entirely
an invention of “modern Europeans”—perturbs this comfortable narrative. In its
apparent repudiation of animism, it rendered human beings both free and
de-spirited (dispirited, yes), cut loose from the world and free to remake it
(an irony perhaps best theorized by Hegel—against whom, it seems, Skafish has
real professional animosity, as he made obvious in his rebuttal to my public
question). In doing so, human beings both alienated themselves and are alienated.
It’s a double gesture. And yet, what have we done with UAP but to attempt to reinscribe
them into the cliches of both modernity or animism, the categories of science
or religion or indigenous peoples or whatever. Both are stupid—and this Jeff Kripal very beautifully pointed out.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">In
any case, when I stepped up to the mic following the Skafish talk, to comment (that
(i) it seems like spinning wheels to move from one anthropomorphism to another—though
I mistakenly said “anthropocentrism”, which Skafish was quick to make a point
of, suggesting that I didn’t know the difference, LOL—and that (ii) one needn’t
reach for the logics of “indigenous peoples” before one appreciates the
rearticulation of “animism” </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">within
modernity itself</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> … to paraphrase the
Dalai Lama: don’t reach for alternatives before you give your </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">own</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> traditions
a chance!), well, things pretty quickly went downhill, I thought. Aside from
the condescending remarks about the differences between “anthropocentrism” and “anthropomorphism”
(though to be tedious, and Socratic: surely the former concept </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">contains the latter</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> as it is the more general and inclusive), which seemed
meant to just cut me down, he had an objectively bizarre reply to my mention of
the whole Hegelian tradition (or German Idealism), which was a
massive attempt to reject the stupid mechanism of Newtonianism and reinfuse the
world with “spirit” (or “mind”)—to say nothing of the whole Romantic tradition
more generally, both of which were </span><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;"><i>constitutive
of modernity. </i>This </span></span><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">was my attempt at
demonstrating that the “animism” Skafish seeks in the indigenous </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">is already part of the dialectic of
modernity</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, to which he wished to oppose the
indigenous. When I mentioned Hegel, it was as if a nerve was smashed: I was
informed (did anyone else in the audience find it condescending?) that “nobody
here is going to care about Hegel” and so it would be pointless to have
included a consideration of that philosopher; besides, Skafish continued (bafflingly),
Hegel is the arch-enemy of pluralism—and I should do well to make mention of James
on that point (to which I said, “well, I like James”). I’m not sure what Person
No. 2 was thinking, but clearly not about the point I was making. I mean, was I
saying anything about pluralism? In any case, it seemed to go badly, which is sad
since I thought this is what a “symposium” was about: to have some good old
debating.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">This
brings me to a much more general observation about this event, and others like it
on the increasingly packed UAP events calendar: nobody seems to want to countenance
any real challenges to their positions; and nobody wants to stand up and ask harder
questions, possibly uncomfortable ones. Or to comment in ways that are critical
and which offer alternatives that may not accord with what one’s assumptions
have been (maybe ones around which a career has been comfortably established). It’s a weird and unfamiliar and alienating atmosphere of non-debate,
always-friendly questioning. Off camera, as it were, at least half a dozen
attendees came up to me and applauded my effort to challenge—and half of them
didn’t agree with </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">me, </span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">and challenged my take (without necessarily defending
the Skafish line)! The point is not that I was correct because I challenged;
but that there can only be truth </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">in challenge,
in opposition</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">. And, perhaps for
interesting sociological reasons, groups friendly to or outright “believing” in
the reality of human-NHI contact (and </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">plenty</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> just take it for granted with little analysis) are
really sensitive to argumentation. But more generally, I get the feeling that
it’s seen as hostile even just to attempt to offer an opposite view, or just to
point out a flaw in someone’s reasoning. I guess we’re so informationally stressed
out, we can’t take a bit of push-back. Maybe. But my own philosophical
training, in the “analytic” school, was somewhat brutal: we didn’t hesitate to try
to overturn someone’s point of view, or reveal a fairly serious flaw in
one’s reasoning—and the whole point is that we sought to unearth the <i>reasoning</i>, or if unclear to charitably reconstruct it before offering as trenchant a critique as possible.
I witnessed plenty of intellectual bloodbaths in my time—not all of which were particularly
friendly, though in many cases the opponents would get a drink together, and continue
the beating in more jovial circumstances, with libations flowing. I still
operate with this framework, and expect to continue to hash and duke it out,
ideally with a few drinks in hand. I was hoping, therefore, to do just that.
But, alas, such was not to be…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Well,
Day One concluded with a “Roundtable on Science, Politics and UAP” (which ended
up being in reality two soliloquies) featuring Hal Puthoff (who needs no
intros) and Larry Maguire, who is currently a member of the Canadian parliament
(as many in the UAP world know). We were supposed to be treated to a dose of
Lue Elizondo, but he was </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">in
absentia</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">. The thing was moderated by famed
UAP journalist Leslie Kean (I believe that’s how it went, but I have no audial
record so can’t confirm offhand). After the Encounter at Skafish, I was still
rather stunned, with a sour taste in my mouth, so as fascinating as Maguire
might have been, and as much of a luminary as Puthoff is supposed to be (I’m utterly
nonplussed and unimpressed by him—he’s in that zone between quackery and genius
that requires a more refined knowledge of Einstein’s Field Equations and
Quantum Chromodynamics than I have for me to make a final determination on the
matter), I’ll admit to having tuned things out, hoping to move quickly to the
Day One reception in the bowels of the Engineering Rotunda thingy in which the UAP
throngs had gathered to do a bit of sun worship. (Well, at the least we were
paying tribute to the pursuit of scholarly and scientific truth in matters UAP—very
much a worshiping that the </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">Freemasons</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> could jibe with, being all up on </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">Reason</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">,
Apollo, Light of Truth … we surely don’t need UAP up there as an aerial swirl
on high, flying close to our own earthly Sol, magnate of the </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">gods</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, to
get all cozy with the religious; even Kant had a touch of religious enthusiasm
in his rationalism—and offered “religion within the limits of reason”. One
wonders what it really takes to escape, finally, the religious dimension
altogether. Can it be done? Or is it like philosophy itself—always sticking
around, </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">even when you repudiate
it</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">.)</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">I looked on, as real, actual, factual rainbows took
shape through the dissipating mists of late-afternoon Northern Californian rain/sun
showers, arching over the golden campus that is the Crown Jewel of the Golden State
and the Land of the (Tax) Free Silicon Valley tech moguls, who always love a
good script—especially if it promises high reward for that oh-so-easy risk (you
only gotta buy in to the pitch of a few new credible people in high places with
seemingly incredible tales of crash and craft and corpses—but when </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">didn’t </span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">some
in the Valley succumb to a good cash-prone long sell? Only the ones you don’t
remember.). Maguire seems eminently reasonable, a stable, staid statesman
working for a relatively sane Nation State up North. And he brings an equally
staid, reasonable, above-board concern for UAP to the Canadian political table.
Puthoff, of remote viewing and “zero-point” energy fame (the former of which I’m
more keen to accept as factual than the latter—just because I’ve been unhappily
ensconced in many a distractingly speculative physics talk), rambled a bit around
his personal history combating the stupidities of government and academic
dissemblance and deflection of the issue that now has come to matter so much to
so many. It is even, as one fellow symposium-goer confided, up to become a </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">major</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">
political issue </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">in the
next election cycle</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> (which we’re fast
approaching in the U.S. Yikes.) Hard to believe and far harder to accept that
this even </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">could </span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">be a thing. But, in 2023 (and definitely in 2024) it
is plausible </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">that it
could be</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">. Quite a shocking statement.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">As
soon as I could, I high-tailed it out of the Upper Room, and found my way over to
the Chafing Dishes of Bliss. And quite a spread awaited us downstairs folks:
delicious Middle Eastern cuisine, prepared by nameless folks somewhere in the
Valley of Every Flowing Joy. Filling up a plate or two, getting a bottle of
sparkling, accompanied by a Napa white (in plastic, of course—go Team U.S.A.!),
I planted down, like a scared nerd, in the thicket of tables farthest away from
anyone. A fool’s errand, of course, as like a Noble Gas, all of us filled
every possible space rather quickly. As we equilibrated, I found the forces of
affinity kicking in, and saw some compatriots—Wes Watters, one of the stable
foundational core members of Loeb’s </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">Galileo
Project</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, huddled with some of his GP
colleagues. I was flagged over, and, happily and enthusiastically, I was introduced
to an assortment of team members—including the delightfully authentically eccentric
inventor/creator of the SkyWatch unit that’s fundamental to their optical
observational array. We all had quite a blast chatting. In fact, I chatted it
up so much that later in the evening, as I tried to get some sleep, I found my
voice had evaporated into a seasoned </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">rasp</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">. I was ready for late-night AM radio. (C2CAM
anyone? George, I’m ready to do the voiceovers…)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Night
drew on. I ended up back at the ranch, nestled in bed in my spacious room. The
light of the motel TV flickered whilst I distracted myself with YouTube reels
on criticality incidents and radiation sickness, or watched streamers game on,
or checked emails, or did some writing. I wondered how the speakers’ dinner was
(held at an undisclosed location), and how, later on, their sleek Japanese toilets
would titillate and sooth, a perfectly automated bliss in the bathroom. I
chewed my fiber gummies, eyeing my own American-installed Chinese-made bathroom
accoutrement—in my room my sink was not far from the bed, with toilet and tub fortunately
secluded in another room. Somehow, consciousness left, and I exited the mortal
coil for a field trip through astral dreamland, finding a satisfying indigenous experience
of my own. As Laozi once wrote, you needn’t travel 10,000 </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">li</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> to go
a vast distance. You don’t need ‘shrooms to have a trip. All you need is your
own mind just as it is. And that’s what I had. And all the bliss I could ever
want came to me as I slipped into that dreamless sleep which Socrates found to
be so deathlike but so restful all the same.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">But
that only lasted about 4.5 hours, so I awoke dreamless and groggy, having
whiled away my time online doing this-or-that. </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">You
know, I need some more sleep</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, I said—so
I slept in a bit. Which didn’t really work as intended, just causing me to miss
at least one talk as I moseyed on over only to find there to be no seats. For
my sins, standing room only…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">We
ought to call </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">timeout</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> here, so that I can get this published as Part One
of Two, which I will now do.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Unlike
my still-pending SCU review, I </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%;">will</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> publish Part Two anon.</span><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://images.saatchiart.com/saatchi/762670/art/2520347/1590298-NCFONFJI-7.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="577" data-original-width="770" height="371" src="https://images.saatchiart.com/saatchi/762670/art/2520347/1590298-NCFONFJI-7.jpg" width="495" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><br /></span><p></p>Mike Cifonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16910256379002179502noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7235611048140260044.post-36779298777022377602023-10-16T18:35:00.017-07:002023-10-17T20:19:45.866-07:00Lighting Up The Darkness: An Encounter with a Chronicler of the Occult<p></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/0*YYvdi-9F7mttyFNG." style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="547" data-original-width="640" height="373" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/0*YYvdi-9F7mttyFNG." width="438" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">I</span></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"> had occasion to comment, elsewhere on the little “social
media” I use, on my initial encounter with the rather erudite and thoughtful
writer on matters occult and esoteric, Mitch Horowitz, who maintains a <a href="https://mitch-horowitz-nyc.medium.com/" target="_blank">lively Medium blog</a> which I follow. As I study what he’s written on the subject –
something that I have variously engaged here in these pages, and which
currently occupies my mind in relation to the UFO experience, to which this
blog as a whole is devoted – I wanted to record my initial impressions and
thoughts about Horowitz’s work. On the science side of the question, I think
there’s a lot to say – that is, regarding the facticity of those phenomena around
which the Occult and Esoteric traditions (perhaps arguable) orbit. (There’s a
thesis here that needs to be defended in more detail, viz., that these traditions
of “hidden” knowledge have been motivated or inspired by an awareness of, and
focused engagement with, a certain range of phenomena within the purview of
human experience which involve what we might call “mind-matter” or psychophysical
interactions of one sort or another – or which, in more general terms, involve
experiences of, at least from our contemporary point of view, what might be
called an extraordinary or anomalous sort: things like the paranormal, entity
encounters, and other “psi” or psi-related phenomena. Whether this is in fact related
to the subject of UFOs (and I think to be fair we have to concede that it <i>is</i>),
how exactly it is related, what the evidence for this relationship is, and how
the subject can be studied more formally both conceptually and empirically …
all of this occupies me now, and will therefore be an increasing focus of our concerns
here.)</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">I reproduce my social-media reflections below, only slightly
edited.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> ***</o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81huQslqFcL._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="534" height="496" src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81huQslqFcL._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_.jpg" width="331" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">I</span></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">’ve just returned from a four-day trip up north, to the
Elysian fields of Napa/Sonoma Valley, where I attended a private workshop
which, in a delightful afternoon, attempted to form a bridge between two
communities who don’t typically talk to each other (and which are sometimes
acrimoniously opposed): the SETI and UAP communities. I gave a talk that was
somewhat of a struggle to write (which I will chronicle on my blog sometime
soon). But on the way up I happened upon an episode of “Engaging The Phenomenon”,
a podcast allegedly about UAP/UFOs but which naturally enough ranges over many
a topic. The particular episode I hit “play” on for my northward journey (of 6.5
hours) had the host interview one Mitch Horowitz, who spoke rather eloquently
(as is his seemingly well-practiced style) on his new book <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Modern-Occultism-History-Theory-Practice/dp/1722506261" target="_blank">Modern Occultism</a></i>.
Listening to it, I was rather moved – and my interest piqued. I had learned a
certain appreciation of the value of “thought-traditions” (Horowitz’s term)
called “Occult” or “Esoteric” from an author who was, personally for me,
intellectually transformative: Morris Berman. So, learning about Mr. Horowitz
and his new book was exciting; I really didn’t know the writer at all, and
after listening to the interview, a sweeping 2 or 3 hour odyssey covering centuries
of the “hidden” traditions that claim lineages stemming from the ancient Egyptian
and ancient Mesopotamian worlds (among many others), I was impressed and inspired
to get the book (<i>Modern Occultism</i>), which promised an equally sweeping history
of the subject. So, on my way back home, I got the audio version, narrated by
the author himself, and got through about 3 full chapters (“10” on the audio
version), listening to nothing else on the voyage from the Napa valley, through
the Bay Area, into the fertile belt and into the Angeles Forest, up through to
four-thousand feet mountains, and then down again into Los Angeles. Now, trying
to learn about the author more, I am becoming </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">very</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> skeptical – not of
the scholarship </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">per se</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">, but its one-sidedness. As I learn that Horowitz
is also a chronicler of the “Positive Thinking” movement, attempting to situate
it in his historical understanding of occultism and esoterica, I am beginning
to see what the problem is – and it’s fairly simple: as he acknowledges to be
an “interested party” in the subject he chronicles as an historian, his
exposition slides inevitably into the hagiographical, a thinly-critical, almost
celebratory, unfolding of the story of movements people, ideas and practices
(many of which he himself is a practitioner). At the same time, he claims
familiarity with a vast literature demonstrating (allegedly) how “iron clad” and
“bullet-proof” the evidence is for a range of “psi” phenomena (ESP, etc.),
which then provides an apparent empirical ground for things like the power of
positive thinking – the effectiveness of which he hedges by taking note of its
state of immaturity (it’s too new). I have yet to work through the book I indeed
intend to finish, but I’m already dubious…</span><p></p>
<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">For example, while extoling some aspects of Plato, and painting
a picture of antiquity as this wellspring of Hermeticism, we don</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">’</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">t seem to get
a picture of those who, even then, rejected aspects of these “thought-movements”
or sought out rational alternatives (he barely mentions Aristotle, except to
blithely critique the supposed binarity of his logic which ends up being
crucial to the development of science and the empirical traditions centuries
later, traditions that make zero appearance in his account, except as an annoying
but unexamined counterpoint, a distraction from the author</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">’s ultimate purpose </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">– the book seems aimed at a revival, or revivification of the Occult</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;"> </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">). Or what about Socrates’ ambivalent relationship
to his own religious tradition as we find in the Platonic dialogues? What about
Socrates’ (or rather Plato’s) famous rejection of “mythos” in favor of “logos”
(the latter we only find as a character in Horowitz’s hagiographical story of Gnosticism)?
Socrates was clearly pursuing a kind of “rational”
inquiry into traditional religious beliefs and practices, dominated by a class
of supposed “experts” (in possession of hidden or obscure truths), and wants to
know what knowledge consists in here, and whether it can be communicated and
taught freely, openly and </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">democratically</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">. No fan of political democracy (he
famously critiques is as being next to the </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">worst</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> form of government),
the irony is that Socrates ends up advocating for a kind of democracy of access
to knowledge, to truth. Without rejecting the supposed truths taught by the
traditional experts (the prophets, poets and priests of the time), Socrates
famously finds that they don’t “know” anything more than he does – which is, as
it turns out, very little. (I of course suspect that the same can be said for
the Occult and Esoteric traditions, whether past or present: there might be
something “real” to the phenomena alleged to be in operation (and it’s surely a
part of nature as anything else is – perhaps operating on the basis of
principles not yet discernible by the sciences, on account of the difficulties the
sciences have in handling </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">anything</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> of a more “psychical” nature); but
the extent to which anyone “knows” anything about it is going to be rather debatable,
and complex. Beyond, that is, some surface-level knowledge </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">that</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> the
phenomena (of one kind or another) exist. But that’s a much longer discussion
for later.)</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">The mark of a true historian – even one who attempts a
sweeping overview of a complex subject for a non-specialist audience – is to
present a true dialectical unfolding of the historical process, where there are
reasonable (and not-so-reasonable) detractors and critics to your preferred “thought-movements”.
In other words, what it seems we have in Horowitz is the classic “vulgar”
history which is painfully one-sided, because they are embedded in practices
and beliefs which subtly rob them of true criticism – the scholar’s pathos of
distance. My sense is that with him we have “superficial erudition”: someone buried
in his texts, very learned in them, and very capable of expounding on their
topics, but hermeneutically crippled by the very thing he loves. In any
case, this is my initial impression.</span></div><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">The counterpoint to the story, then, is the rise of a
rationalism, and later an empiricism (and of course the “New Science” of the
late Renaissance) that (eventually) challenged if not the core doctrines, then
their supposed facticity and the episteme that surrounded the teachings and
their transmission. A more subtle analysis of this dialectic of opposition might
reveal the various misunderstandings and failures and distortions involved
(from each side); but his narrative of suppression or repression of the “Occult”
and Hermetic traditions by the incipient technoscientific narrative (now
dominant) – or the elimination of pre-Abrahamic religious beliefs and practices
by Judaism, Christianity and later Islam is itself ultimately one-sided, and
thus unconvincing intellectually. There are very good reasons why the
Enlightenment thinkers rejected some or all of these traditions, and feared
them as forces of regression – a falling back to a world of prophets and
priests with special access to a world you’ve not been properly “initiated” into,
so trust them, they have the secrets, they have the truth. (One might lob the
same criticism against science, but at the end of the day, a good deal of its
discoveries and results can be learned and reproduced by anyone willing to do
the work.) Surely the politics of secret-ism and the logic of esoteric groups
organized around “hidden knowledge” presents profound challenges socially and
politically (complexities that could, for example, be analyzed on Freudian and
Marxist grounds), especially for those democratic societies we have come to
celebrate (the darker side of many of these Occult traditions is that they are conceptually
if not overtly inimical to actual democracy). Some of these more obvious s</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">ocio-political (and arguably practical) complexities are
addressed in one chapter far in the middle of the book (Chapter 9) </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">– though from the podcast/interview, it was not obvious the author would tackle such issues (I am glad to see that he does)</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">. In any case, despite some of these complexities being addressed*, we have a persistent, vulgar idealism of
historical analysis, a hagiography, that fails to offer a true accounting of
the picture of the Occult (and by “true”, I hope it’s clear, I mean
dialectical: multi-sided).</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">This, of course, does not address the more challenging
question of the reality or facticity of some of its more specific (and central)
claims (generally involving the efficacy of mind over matter – issues that are
given no philosophically interesting analysis); and the socio political
complications I’ve suggested play only a rather muted role in his text surely don’t count as arguments
<i>against</i> the truth (whatever it might be) of the system of reality on
offer. But again, in a real historical account that provides an appropriately
complex exposition, both sides must be addressed: both proponents (of which he
is one) and detractors (the more rationalist critics of these movements) must
be given equal voice. Thus, it isn’t really a reliable history after all,
despite the eloquence, care and apparent erudition of the text. (I’m not personally
susceptible to fear and trembling before his apparent towering erudition, and I
care only to look at the ideas, naked and shorn of that erudition, which frequently
can be used as a shield for lack of actual critical depth.</span>)<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">What impressed me about Morris Berman was his honesty in his
magisterial “Consciousness” Trilogy: by book 3 (<i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Wandering-God-Study-Nomadic-Spirituality/dp/0791444422">Wandering
God: A Study in Nomadic Spirituality</a></i>), he had reassessed his earlier
treatment of the Occult and Esoteric (which in <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Our-Senses-Morris-Berman/dp/1626542910/ref=pd_lpo_sccl_2/136-5210956-6329055?pd_rd_w=qPutt&content-id=amzn1.sym.116f529c-aa4d-4763-b2b6-4d614ec7dc00&pf_rd_p=116f529c-aa4d-4763-b2b6-4d614ec7dc00&pf_rd_r=VB65GA0KGYC0183Q0KME&pd_rd_wg=5PfiI&pd_rd_r=50346a88-3413-4abf-8b2f-14fc4a97efcd&pd_rd_i=1626542910&psc=1">Book
2</a> included a dive into Jung’s thinking as well, which had, towards the end
of his life, gotten caught up in the Occult), and proceeded to offer a
self-criticism (almost as Nietzsche had done for his own youthful embrace of
Schopenhauer – a philosopher, unsurprisingly, Horowitz writes approvingly of),
cautioning his readers not to go so far down the rabbit hole as to get lost in
endless mazes of mind-power and secret doctrines and the promise of spiritual
or material mastery. It’s ultimately a trap, even if there’s something extraordinary
and para-scientific or para-physical to the mind/matter relation on which the
Occult system seems to depend (though one ought to revisit that dichotomy carefully)
– something I myself am, as I’ve said, rather intrigued by.</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">And then I find that, perhaps unsurprisingly, Mr. Horowitz is
quite wealthy. And has titles out such as “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Think-Grow-Rich-Dimensions/dp/1722502231#:~:text=In%20The%20Secret%20of%20Think,of%20sex%20transmutation%2C%20a%20tremendously" target="_blank">The Secret of Think and Grow Rich: The Inner Dimensions of the Greatest Success Program of All Time</a>” which I
almost don</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">’</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">t want to believe is a title he published. But there it seems to be.
And I’m sure “Mitch” would tell me to read the book before I judge.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">But do I need to read it? I wonder… </span>
<o:p></o:p></p><i>*An earlier version of this post had stated, incorrectly, that the political side of things was not addressed at all; in fact is it, as noted above: in Chapter 9, devoted to <span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">“</span>Politics and the Occult<span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">”</span>. But I should perhaps articulate my basic thesis of the political incompatibility between the Occult or Esoteric traditions, and Democracy (at least in terms of its inner Idea). To some extent, the degree to which the two are incompatible will depend on the specific philosophical foundation (the metaphysical standpoint) adopted by Occult or Esoteric traditions; but they are both predicated on some notion of a hidden truth which has been (perhaps willfully or maliciously) obscured and suppressed by the forces of the uninitiated, the ignorant. What Democracy has done, joined as well philosophically by Science (speaking of both as containing a certain Idea which perhaps still yet struggles for expression), is institutionalize disagreement, allowing for a neutral space of juridical or legislative decision-making that is attached to no special theory of Nature or of Spirit (rather allowing a free inquiry into either, or none). This is the essence of the Secular, which governs the Public space in which the decision-making occurs. There is in principle no special access to a Truth that is not already public: neither Science nor Democracy knows (and indeed seeks to overcome) what is hidden, obscure, or otherwise the preserve of the few, the initiated. If there is a universalism (and there is), it is expressed as a collective determination of humanity that is first deliberative, public, practical and secular, before it can be the foundation for the settled, the private, the theoretical or the sacred (which, in the freedom determined thereby, are the universal but open and indeterminate values defended, politically, as the right of all humankind to enjoy). From this standpoint we see that Platonism and its variants, as well as the Hermetic, Esoteric and Occult traditions (which are sometimes joined) are politically incompatible with Democracy and Science (which two are united in principle). Yet, as well, we see that within the sphere of the Secular, which is the sphere of Freedom, each has its place as the preserve of the private exploration of man and her nature and place in the world, and as the free exercise of her mind, to edify and perhaps indeed satisfy the longings of the spirit (which can inform, specifically, no political configuration for the Public). (Note added 17 October 2023.)</i><p></p>Mike Cifonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16910256379002179502noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7235611048140260044.post-2700951736057056102023-10-04T11:46:00.005-07:002023-10-04T17:22:02.257-07:00Two Dogmas of Empiricism: Beyond Institutional Skepticism of UFOs<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2F524412a/MediaObjects/41586_2015_Article_BF524412a_Figa_HTML.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="549" data-original-width="800" height="239" src="https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2F524412a/MediaObjects/41586_2015_Article_BF524412a_Figa_HTML.jpg" width="348" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">S</span></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">o, it’s been a minute as they say: I’ve finally landed
back home after having been abroad for about four months, from Europe to the
Middle East, and then back again. I realize that I still owe my readers my
concluding review of the SCU’s July online conference, which I will indeed be
posting soon, but I thought that, in the interim, I really owe interested
readers (and now I think I’ve gained one more, bringing the total to four)
something to chew on. So, here is that something…</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">About a month or so ago I wrote up a response to this piece
that appeared in the ostensibly radical rag, </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Jacobin</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">. I thought the article
(to which I am responding, below) rather well written but poorly reasoned—but not
for lack of trying. My estimation of it is that it draws on the well-entrenched
institutional prejudices that are still, well, rather entrenched. UFOs (and
even UAP) are still a “hard sell”, it would seem, to many academics—that there’s
a real something to UFOs, quite </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">despite</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> the Grusch allegations and
ensuing media firestorm we found in the wake of those hearings and that </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Debrief
</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">article, and the Coulthart interview (and then the recent </span><a href="https://youtu.be/kRO5jOa06Qw?si=r2EUApYI0RXtGN6u" style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Jesse Michaels</a><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
thing, which I’ll admit to turning off after about 30 or 40 minutes—it just smells
of the same old sensationalism and edutainment profiteering that is best
avoided like an alien plague; I just can’t </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">stand</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> this crap). But then
NASA has finally released its report (about which I am much more enthusiastic
than some of the more seasoned ufological commentators out there, like Mr. Randle,
chronicler of the real stuff of the Roswell Crash, whose “</span><a href="http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2023/09/the-nasa-report-personal-commentary.html" style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">commentary</a><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">”
on the NASA UAP-IST Report wasn’t really a commentary in any sense that this
term is used in the venerable tradition of systematic commentaries you find in
standard scholarship going back a few thousand years; but then again, the standards
I’m looking for are not yet common for the ufologist…).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">The NASA study—and let’s remember that the panel that was
commissioned by NASA to do the study </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">isn’t NASA</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">, but an independent
working group whose now-published Report constitutes a strategic recommendation
</span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">to</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> NASA—is really significant, as it now makes it clear that UAP, UFOs,
UAV … whatever the hell you want to call them, ought to be taken seriously,
studied seriously, and (by implication) given serious funding to do this (well,
at least I hope that this latter point is in fact the implication of this panel’s
Final Report). While it turns out that, upon reflection on the history of UFOs
and government attention to them, this is actually nothing new (I mean calls
for government to take the issue seriously and for NASA to get going doing some
or all of the research here, has quite a history), <i>something</i> is new here—and that is the recommendation
that this study is in-scope for NASA as an agency charged with an open-ended
exploration of, well, the cosmos (not to put the point too melodramatically).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">In any case, hopefully, as some kind of institutionalized
system for UAP research gets underway, academia will adjust to the fact that there
needs to be serious attention to the issue, and that the scholarly community
has a mandate to engage UAP not merely according to the category of its “meaning”
for human beings and their societies (surely an important topic), but also according
to the much more challenging category of the “being” of UAP: the what, the
nature, … the </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">things themselves</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">. Though we do have to tackle this
question of “high strangeness” (something that the more philosophical disciplines
can help us with), science (not much interested in the uncanny) is particularly
good at getting involved with the “being”—or what we should call the “ontology”—of
the world. Not, surely, in the more fundamental sense (say, the sense that these
terms mean for philosophers in the phenomenological tradition), but in enough
of a fundamental sense that we can get the show started. For while science is
an entry into the “being” of the world, it by no means closes off the issue.
Indeed, we are at a kind of crossroads in science, technology and thought more
generally, as </span><a href="https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/decline-scientific-innovation" style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">innovation
seems to wane</a><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">, research programs cling to funding for funding’s sake and
ossify (despite </span><a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/2392771-theory-of-consciousness-branded-pseudoscience-by-neuroscientists/" style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">dubious
“theories” promulgated as explanatory</a><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">), and the nagging philosophical
questions about completeness, unity and meaning continue to bother the
sciences. A forgotten scholar of UFOs, Brenda Denzler, reminded readers way
back in 2001 of the significance here of UFOs and the various communities
devoted to their study. “If I can be accused of having a personal agenda,” she wrote
in her sensitive treatment of UFOs and the UFO movement in the U.S., called </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Lure
of the Edge – Scientific Passions, Religious Beliefs and the Pursuit of UFOs</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">,
“it is in wanting the reader to come away with a sense of the conflicting and
paradoxical dimensions—and, I feel, the importance—of UFOs and the UFO movement
in American society.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0in 0in 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0in 0in 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Whatever historians
of the far-distant future are able to say about the reality of UFOs in the twentieth
century [she continues], I feel sure that they will look upon ufology as one of
the more interesting fields of inquiry in our era. Why? Because I believe that
Western thought is now at a crossroads, and part of the drama of the crossroads
<i>zeitgeist </i>is being played out in the UFO community. (p. xvi)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Denzler goes on to point out the conflicts and paradoxes of
science itself, as a product of a particular “Enlightenment” tradition that in
fact promises its own form of salvation for humanity—shaded with the irony, as
we now well understand in the twenty-first century, that it, too, has a rather dark
side, as the smoke of wildfires rises and blots out the afternoon sun for many,
or sudden deluges submerge others, daily reminding us of the reality of
anthropogenic climate change. What ufology embraces, or has embraced, contains
a portion of what science rejects, so ufology stands before the ostensibly “rational”
sciences as a kind of dark mirror, ambiguous to be sure, but realer all the
same because of it, reflecting back to science something it is frightened to take
up as object of inquiry. In many ways ufology has dabbled in the zone of the
forbidden, but as we know from Freud, Lacan and even Hegel before them, that forbidden
core is already something repressed in the very heart of science itself—something
the sciences, for ideological reasons, cannot name, cannot own, cannot accommodate,
cannot, finally, integrate. Thus the passage from ufology to a <i>science</i>
of UAP, as what is being proposed for NASA, is a road both treacherous and
potentially rejuvenating—an opportunity to reconsider the very meaning of “science”
in the face of a multi-dimensional phenomenon that exceeds the strict divisions
of scholarship in the twenty-first century (and didn’t you laugh as well, or at
least chuckle a bit, when NASA paused to emphasize that “multi-dimensional”
doesn’t mean <i>multiple dimensions</i>).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">So I attempted, futilely as it turns out, to submit a somewhat
patient rejoinder to the <i>Jacobin </i>piece I’d read. It was apparently not
the kind of thing they’re looking for. Or I am not really the kind of writer
they’re looking for (and how can one tell?). So, I thought it might be a good
idea to publish a version of it here, before I consider sending it along elsewhere.
(Blogs are good—and therefore dangerous—for the impatient.)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">I now include the piece I submitted, unaltered, below…</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://64.media.tumblr.com/3f173638d3c308fcbff7cd1d3de8ae82/tumblr_inline_osqjcaErtY1ra3vyb_1280.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="612" data-original-width="800" height="537" src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/3f173638d3c308fcbff7cd1d3de8ae82/tumblr_inline_osqjcaErtY1ra3vyb_1280.jpg" width="702" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: x-large;">U</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">FOs have recently taken the media – and apparently the
government – by storm. Yet, most of what we see in the press, and even in more
philosophically perspicacious magazine journals like </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Jacobin</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">, hovers in
the region of an apparently balanced skepticism that offers readers a force
field against the fakery of </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">pseudoscience</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">, which the study of or serious
concern with UFOs would otherwise suggest. I’d like to intervene here – and
approach UFOs from an entirely different standpoint, which I call
“transcendental skepticism”. It is, I propose, a better standpoint to adopt
than the mainstream skepticism of the typical UFO piece one encounters in the
mainstream press, because, quite simply, it thematizes the tacit </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">ideological</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
dimensions of this “skepticism” – found even in these pages.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">My point of departure, then, is a recent article that
appeared </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/08/ufos-aliens-government-secrets-whistleblowers-transparency"><span style="color: #1155cc; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">here</span></a></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> in the <i>Jacobin</i>, penned by philosopher Ben Burgis.
The piece attempts (yet another) critique of the recent, and quite frankly
shocking, congressional oversight hearing where a seemingly credible former
intelligence official, David Grusch, </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/07/27/1190390376/ufo-hearing-non-human-biologics-uaps"><span style="color: #1155cc; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">made apparently incredible
claims</span></a></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> of government cover-ups
allegedly involving: crashed UFO retrievals; recovered “nonhuman biologics”
piloting them; and covert UFO “reverse engineering” programs. Wild stuff.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">All but missing from Burgus’ article, of course, was the </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">X-Files</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
theme music playing in the background: the usual– and cheap–way to discredit
anything UFO that typically accompanies supposedly “rational” responses to the
UFO stuff. While Burgis wants to “step back” and take a breather with
empiricist philosopher David Hume, I want to step back from Burgis, and other
defenders of rationalism, and take a look at the unexamined and institutionally
overdetermined “skepticism” (along with some kind of implicit empiricism) that
provides a rhetorical cushion for Burgis’ apparently rational critique, and
many others like it that have blossomed in the wake of these recent –
admittedly astonishing – UFO stories.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">First we should get clear on what Burgis gets right in the
piece, written in a crisp style that manages to pull out the critical thinking
101 stops to good effect. Beyond the special effects, though, we ask: what of
substance is really going on here?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Burgis is correct in pointing out that Grusch’s allegations
are accompanied by, as he says, “no public evidence that should make us take”
these claims seriously – neither in the </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="https://thedebrief.org/intelligence-officials-say-u-s-has-retrieved-non-human-craft/"><span style="color: #1155cc; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">original <i>Debrief </i>article</span></a></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> that first broke the story, nor in the </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="https://oversight.house.gov/hearing/unidentified-anomalous-phenomena-implications-on-national-security-public-safety-and-government-transparency/"><span style="color: #1155cc; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">subsequent congressional
hearing</span></a></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> that has everyone in a
twist. And he is correct in pointing out that all we got in that July hearing
was a kind of appeal to (Grusch’s) authority: it’s the “trust me” tactic,
Burgis observes, from an insider allegedly privy to the classified information
on which the claims testified to are based.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">So this is where Burgis’ critique really begins, and quite
rightly: in the absence of publicly accessible evidence, </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">all we have</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> are
claims by an official of supposed credibility </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">that there is evidence
demonstrating a wide array of UFO-related U.S. government dealings</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">.
Evidence which the public can’t access. Period.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Where does this leave us? What should our rational
response to these allegations really be? That’s the basic question of the
article, in the end.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">For Burgis, what’s at stake here is precisely </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">trust</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
in our public institutions – something that, it would seem, is already under
attack in American political life these days (and has been for some time). As
Burgis’ article’s title says: “UFO crashes almost certainly aren’t real. But
the government itself is responsible for public distrust”. Presumably, by
allowing Grusch, as apparently credible as he is, to air before Congress his
wild allegations, with no possible publicly available evidence to back it all
up, public trust is thereby eroded. And since “UFO crashes almost certainly
aren’t real” this public spectacle is a very, very bad thing. And, surely, “UFO
crashes” </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">can’t</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> really </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">be</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> real, right?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">We have, then, two issues which the article has to disentangle.
On the one hand, there’s the issue of the </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">veracity </i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">of the allegations:
Grusch tells us (and we have every reason to at least believe this) that he’s
supplied the material evidence substantiating his whistleblower claims to
various Inspectors General – who presumably are now conducting their own
investigations. On the other hand, there is the question of whether Grusch’s
credibility as an intelligence official should have any epistemic bearing on
our acceptance of his allegations: should we trust this government official and
what he’s alleging about government coverups, and what those coverups are all
about (i.e., UFOs)? Since none of the evidence which could possibly
substantiate Grusch’s allegations is publicly available – it’s all classified,
we’ve been told – we can’t possibly evaluate any of the evidence independently.
Period. So where does that leaves us?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Logically, this should require <i>agnosticism</i> regarding
the veracity of that evidence: since there’s no independent access to it, we
can’t evaluate it, so we can’t form a specific judgment about it. Yet, that’s
not quite the position Burgis takes. And it’s not the position that he thinks <i>anyone</i>
ought to take, rationally speaking. What, however, fills the vacuum of evidence
here, and gives us something more to stand on regarding the fact that Grusch’s
allegations deal with, well, … UFOs? I mean, anyone can allege anything, and
then turn around and say “... yes, but the evidence to substantiate what I’m
saying can’t be accessed or released to you”. If we’re talking about angels
dancing inside of interdimensional portals in my bedroom, I really don’t have
to wait for that “evidence” to be released, because it’s not something that the
evidence is really going to bear out. Right?</span><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">So what in fact fills the evidential vacuum for Burgic is,
of course, the usual skepticism that is always applied, </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">a priori</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">, to </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">every</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
UFO claim. And this is where Burgis – and many others – are wrong. Yes, it’s
common and accepted in mainstream discourse to discount UFOs as pseudoscience,
quackery, and so on. But as Burgis flies under the banner of rationalism, which
cares about truth not dogma, let’s see where the UFO skepticism – which is
institutionalized by now – is just more (para-rational) dogma pretending
rationalism.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">To begin with, Burgis easily conflates UFOs with aliens and
alien spacecraft. Insisting on returning to the the term ‘UFO’ as opposed to
adopting the term ‘UAP’ as preferred today, Burgis forgets that the terms were
switched precisely to avoid the conflation between these unidentified aerial
phenomena and the hypothesis that some of them might be nonhuman vehicles. The
truth is we just don’t know what UAP are – but, as the government has admitted,
and as NASA has supported, given the evidence that has so far been collected,
we can’t </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">a priori</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> rule out that hypothesis. And why would we want to?
Science isn’t in the business of telling us what must be true (that’s
dogmatism); it’s in the business of trying to explain what we don't know or
don’t understand. And we don’t really understand what’s going on with some
UFOs.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">And what about that spaceship hypothesis? Well, aside from </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="https://www.popsci.com/realistic-generational-spaceship/"><span style="color: #1155cc; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">generational spaceships</span></a></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> – a possibility sometimes invoked in mainstream academic
papers examining the so-called Fermi Paradox or the related Drake Equation, a
possibility certainly consistent with known science – our actual knowledge of
physics <i>doesn’t </i>actually rule out interstellar travel <i>in any way</i>.
Burgis, like many others, confuses practical and theoretical possibility, and
then compounds the problem by repeating the mistaken view that only
faster-than-light travel can pull the trick off. Since relativity, we’re told,
rules out faster-than-light travel, aliens just can’t get here.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Here Burgis reproduces a common misunderstanding of
relativity that conflates special and general relativity, and so he is unable
to consider the general relativistic solution to the problem, and offer this to
his readers. Since at least the 1930s, it </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="https://journals.aps.org/pr/abstract/10.1103/PhysRev.48.73"><span style="color: #1155cc; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">was realized by Einstein and
Rosen</span></a></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> that general relativity
allows for counterintuitive connections not just “between” remote points in
spacetime, but, even more strangely, <i>through spacetime itself</i>. Einstein
and his colleague Rosen called this a “bridge”, and it </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="https://physics.aps.org/story/v15/st11"><span style="color: #1155cc; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">eventually led</span></a></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> to the concept we all know as a “wormhole”. Much
later in the 1990s, a surprising solution to the basic equations of general
relativity was found by the Mexican theorist Alcubierre that sets up a kind of
pressure difference – again <i>in spacetime itself</i> – that </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349943636_Warp_drive_basics"><span style="color: #1155cc; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">can be exploited for travel
purposes</span></a></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">. <i>Very </i>fast travel.
So, despite what Burgis and many others think, it <i>is</i> theoretically
possible to employ not special but <i>general relativity</i> to pull off the
right spacetime-bending tricks to get around the extreme distances involved in
actual interstellar travel. It’s just that finding the right engineering to
realize these theoretical possibilities as usable technologies is quite beyond
human reach at present. (The irony here is that Carl Sagan himself was the
inspiration for the development of the “wormhole” idea: Sagan reached out to
his friend, Nobel Laureate Kip Thorne, to see if there was a theoretically
plausible mechanism for rapid interstellar travel that he could use for the
SETI novel he was writing – <i>Contact</i>. Turns out there is.)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Sufficiently rapid interstellar travel, then, is not ruled
out by physics: it’s possible but</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="https://bigthink.com/hard-science/star-trek-warp-drive-possible/"><span style="color: #1155cc; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> immensely challenging</span></a></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> technologically (there’s even a whole mainstream field in
physics </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="https://appliedphysics.org/physical-warp-drives-2/"><span style="color: #1155cc; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">devoted to this</span></a></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">). What this means, rationally, is that only <i>some</i>
UFOs <i>could</i> be nonhuman vehicles since no physics rules it out. However,
the real question is whether the evidence for UFOs that we do have, independently
of what Grusch claims, really counts towards the hypothesis that some UFOs are
nonhuman vehicles. This is where Burgis’ argument is, again, the typical one.
It’s a conversational argument based on a convenient observation about what the
prior probabilities are supposed to tell us here: that it’s <i>much more likely</i>
that UFOs are all mundane than that they are not – that is, on balance (and
here David Hume joins the party) the probability of an extraordinary hypothesis
being true is <i>much less likely</i> than that an ordinary one is (i.e., that
UFOs are all mundane phenomena of one sort or another). In other words, we have
the Sagan dictum again: “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” –
and we just don’t have that extraordinary evidence, right? Ergo, “UFO crashes
almost certainly aren’t real”.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Well, if we don’t have that “extraordinary evidence” then
we should obtain it, according to the dictum. But how can we if there is a
consistent drumbeat in mainstream media and elsewhere that says “there’s
nothing here”? This is another confusion on the part of just about everyone who
repeats Sagan’s overused (and little examined) dictum in connection with UFOs:
if the science isn’t (or won’t be) done, we’ll have no evidence at all – let
alone of the “extraordinary” kind that we supposedly need. If everyone is
convinced UFOs are mundane, and no one does the science because of that prior
conviction, then in logic we call this situation a tautology. And it’s a trap.
In particular it’s a trap that reliance on naive Bayesian arguments about </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/bayes-s-theorem-what-s-the-big-deal/"><span style="color: #1155cc; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">prior probabilities</span></a></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> won’t get you out of, and indeed might lead to in the
first place. As my friend and colleague, former NASA scientist Kevin Knuth
tells me – who is himself trying to break through academic dismissal of UFOs –
this situation is exactly the one that we program our learning algorithms to <i>avoid</i>:
getting stuck at local optima which we know work well. We have to program the
algorithms, he says, to deliberately walk away from these local optima in order
to explore the larger possibility space. Otherwise the “learning” algorithm,
well, won’t learn anything. Why can’t we scientists do the same, he wonders?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Ironically, what this tautology does – perhaps unbeknownst
to Burgis and other rationalist defenders of science against pseudoscience – is
to slowly and perhaps subtly erode our trust in the very institution of science
which the dictum, and past figures like Carl Sagan, want to protect. If all
science does is to stay in the familiar zone of local optima, how will it
progress? It has progressed, so presumably it can’t be afraid to explore.
Historical consistency bolsters trustworthiness.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">So yes, let’s talk about trust for a moment – and
responsibility. In particular, who has responsibility for upholding and
preserving </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">trust in the institution of science</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">? By failing to distinguish
between the myth and the mystery from the factual reality of UFOs (which is far
more subtle a problem, needing serious science), Burgis and other rationalists
quite ironically perpetuate a mystification that for almost 90 years has
hampered attempts to bring science to bear on the subject. It’s this level of
persistent ignorance mixed with unexamined beliefs about rationality that
really explains why we don’t know much scientifically about UFOs. While Burgis
takes Grusch to task for corroding trust in government by passing on supposedly
tall tales from the </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">X-files</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">, he and other writers like him fail in their
duty to promote trust in the one institution that can help settle the matter:
science. If public intellectuals writing enlightened pieces in the </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Jacobin </i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">and
elsewhere, cautioning against pseudoscience, conspiracist quackery or
delusional thinking, fail to grasp the need for unbiased – and undogmatic –
scientific inquiry, aimed at breaking through the myth and mystery to the
reality of UFOs, as complicated as that reality is likely to be … then who is
the responsible party here?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Maybe Burgis and other writers can’t be faulted. Like many
ostensible spokespersons for “reason” who like to hint that UFO research is
really “pseudoscience” (one can think of any number of </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-wealthy-ufo-fans-helped-fuel-fringe-beliefs/"><span style="color: #1155cc; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">opining journalists</span></a></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> in mainstream media of late), Burgis perhaps operates with
his own myths or stereotypes or school textbook caricatures of science and “the
scientific method” – and with his own History Channel version of something
called “ufology”, which is supposed to be the (pseudo)science of these
phenomena.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">The fact is that Burgis is just </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-wealthy-ufo-fans-helped-fuel-fringe-beliefs/"><span style="color: #1155cc; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">typical here</span></a></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> – and typically unsubtle. It is true that there’s a lot of
what by all accounts is best described as “pseudoscience” connected with the
issue of UFOs– mainly it’s the stuff written by amateurish “researchers” who
have no real scientific background or credibility. Sure, a lot of this is just
plain bunk. But what is usually never distinguished between <i>here</i> are the
more serious <i>forensic</i> investigations of <i>past</i> UFO incidents, as
opposed to the actual scientific work done by robust research programs actively
searching for UAP <i>in the present</i>. And the reason why that distinction
isn’t made is, well, because we’ve never been serious about studying UFOs in a
systematic way – like with academies of science, science departments at major
research universities, NSF grants, and the like backing it all up. In the way
that the sciences treat anything they take seriously. Which brings us back to
the tautology we noted above: UFOs aren’t taken seriously because nobody
studies them seriously in science, but nobody studies them seriously in science
because nobody takes UFOs seriously…</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Historical UFO incidents were (and continue to be) largely
unexpected and fleeting events, happening to a range of individuals but for
which we only have reports of inconsistent quality. This raises an obvious but
very basic question: can you actually have a science here? I think the answer is
an honest no – what you <i>can</i> have here is <i>forensics</i>. And that’s a
whole <i>other</i> ballgame that’s got a whole <i>different</i> set of rules.
And forensics shouldn’t be conflated with science. What most skeptics or
champions of “reason” against UFO enthusiasm fail to see is this obvious
distinction: classical Ufology, which the mainstream skeptics love to hate, is
forensics – not “science”. Many of the more serious investigators of UFOs even
seem to get it wrong, as they do forensics with a mix of science and criminology
while thinking it’s unproblematically “scientific”. Just take a look at the
farce that was the 1969 University of Colorado “</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="https://www.colorado.edu/coloradan/2021/11/05/condon-report-cu-boulders-historic-ufo-study"><span style="color: #1155cc; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Condon Report</span></a></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">”. Maybe this is what critics here mean when they
offer their rejoinder that “oh, yes, the scientific community <i>did</i> look
into it, but found there to be no real scientific value to UFO; and so, end of
the story”. All that this University of Colorado committee did was to perform a
forensic audit of UFO cold cases. They didn’t audit any scientific research
program set up to study UFOs. In fact, they recommended <i>against</i> setting
that up! So, we’ve ended up in that tautology: with no active, ongoing
scientific research on the subject – no research programs, no university
support or funding, no nothing – we’re convinced all UFOs are uninteresting for
science. And that’s where we’ve been for decades.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">What has </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">never</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> been set up with any level of
seriousness or significant institutional backing in the history of our dealings
with UFOs is what actual scientists in the </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Galileo Project</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> or over in
Germany at Würzburg University are doing right now: building the research infrastructure
required to capture the relevant data that can begin to adjudicate on the
question of how to explain UFOs, and the much more difficult question of
whether any of them count as (to quote J. Allen Hynek, the father of American
“ufology”) “truly new empirical observations” – observations that would
contribute significantly to the progress of science.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">If anyone wanted to read the </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/10.1142/S2251171723400068"><span style="color: #1155cc; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">most recent peer-reviewed
publications</span></a></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> of these groups, they’d
learn that this distinction – between mere historical forensics and active
science – is now well-appreciated, and helps the young UAP field solidify and
move on. To move on beyond the (no less important) layers of cultural myth and
mythologization which complicate scientific research; to move beyond the
personal mystery in encountering UFOs which has suggestive but not
determinative value in a robust scientific understanding of these puzzling
phenomena. (Human beings themselves, after all, are sources of important – and
scientific – data. Data which shouldn’t be dismissed just because it’s
“subjective”.)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Research on UFOs is </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">only now</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> getting serious,
organizationally and academically (though there have been previous serious
efforts – just examine the references and discussion in the large recently
published study on instrumented observations of UAP by Harvard’s </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Galileo
Project</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> referred above). Like with any field (young or well established),
we wait for the work to be done, results to come in, analysis to be performed
and conclusions to be drawn, and the community to reproduce and verify. Only at
this point we can start to have a rational debate, since we’d be debating not
whether George Adamski met with space brethren in flying saucers in trips to
the surface of Venus, or whether crashed UFOs could be “real”, but whether that
UAP report received by our well-designed and well-funded reporting system found
corroborating evidence from that active aerospatial UAP research network that’s
up and running (and interfaced with the reporting system); and whether that
suggestive matrix of anomalous data was also observed by the four or five other
research networks utilizing similar instrumented observation system designs.
(Astronomers cooperate in networked systems of research exchange – why not for
the study of UAP?)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">The point is that there’s lots of perfectly general reasons
for paying close attention to the things happening in the sky, and lots of very
good reasons for setting up lots of well-funded research projects devoted to
this – but especially </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">civilian and nonprofit</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> ones, that is (Edward
Condon himself seems to have advocated for keeping government out of these kinds
of scientific projects). The UAP part of this larger operation is that which
hunts for the rarer event: the </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">anomaly</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">. But in order to know what that
is, we have to know just about the whole range of goings on in the sky, not
entirely outside of the earth but very much </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">near</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> to it and </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">on</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> it.
And we need lots of papers like that (now infamous) draft paper by </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Galileo
Project’s</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> Loeb and AARO’s Kirkpatrick that puts </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">bounds</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> on aerial
observations by using the physics we know, so we know </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">where</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> and </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">when</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
anomalies start. And we also need lots of papers and studies doing the
forensics on the good, credible historical cases – like the well-known </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Nimitz</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
encounter detailed by one of the witnesses at the July hearing. Like how
medical science uses suggestive but anecdotal cases of strange, potentially new
diseases to know where to do the science, these historical cases are useful for
showing us the sorts of things we should be designing our suites of instruments
and research programs to find, as we process all the information we gather from
our well-designed observational and experimental UAP networks.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">As these UAP research programs actually come online, we can
put to rest this tired notion that UFOs are bunk, and people who study them
rationally suspect (or delusional), or whatever cheap shots continue to make
the rounds in “rationalist” circles these days. And before we go further we can
just get on with the business of building the infrastructure for the real
science that needs to get done.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Then we can revisit the stories and allegations to see
what’s more myth than reality, and where the mysteries persist for our sciences
to go and work on.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Otherwise, we circle about
in an endless, ideological overdetermined space of science </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">dogma</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">, rather
than getting on with the business of scientific exploration and discovery.</span></p>Mike Cifonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16910256379002179502noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7235611048140260044.post-88747190616849415132023-09-04T11:22:00.009-07:002023-09-04T11:43:56.757-07:00Space Ice: Lessons From Loebism (Once Again)<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2010/04/themis_24.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="512" data-original-width="670" height="277" src="https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2010/04/themis_24.png" width="362" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">I</span></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;"> owe my (five) readers part two of my review of the annual AAPC organized and sponsored by the SCU; but in the meantime, there are a few things on my mind that I can offer before we get to the last part of that review. And what is right now in my mind is more from the annals of Loebism. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"><a href="https://medium.com/@astrowright/oumuamua-natural-or-artificial-f744b70f40d5">This
recent <i>Medium</i> article</a> (of 18 July this year) dealing with the Loeb/‘Oumuamua
controversy, which the historian Greg Eghigian altered us to on Facebook, pretty
much settles the debate. At least for now: Loeb has offered, as the authors of this piece show,
<i>no</i> detailed model of an artificial “light sail” (or something answering to
that description) that is consistent with the observational facts – or <i>any</i>
convincingly detailed model that proposes that the object was a manufactured
artifact rather than a natural space rock. And those observational facts –
which aren’t being disputed, crucially – <i>are</i> in fact consistent with the
behavior of known natural phenomena, as the authors of this article go on to explain at some length (Loeb’s protestations notwithstanding). The article is crafted to be not only detailed and thorough, but as free of polemical dramatics as is possible, given how much attention the Loeb nonnatural origins hypothesis has received. (This attention is partly due to Loeb himself, of course: his book detailing his views became a <i>Times</i> bestseller, and he</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">’s appeared on numerous podcasts, morning coffee news clutches, lecture circuits, and has taken the theory to a number of academic conferences</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">. </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/24/magazine/avi-loeb-alien-hunter.html" style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;" target="_blank">Here is a recent <i>New York Times Magazine</i> portrait</a><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> of the man and the theory.)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">So, unless Loeb <i>et al.</i> can come up with a better
(and detailed) model than the ones on the table which take the object to be purely
natural (that the object is a chunk of tumbling interstellar nitrogen ice seems to so far be
the best model, according to the authors – i.e., the one consistent with all
the facts), or else offer new evidence that discounts either the specific
nitrogen ice model that has been proposed or (more generally) the assumption
that the object is purely natural (a tumbling rock of no intelligent design),
then there’s really nothing more to say. Well, besides that the best
explanation is the “natural” one: that this object like so many other
space-bound objects is one whose behavior can be well explained without the
intervention of intelligent design or artifice.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">What’s really surprising (maybe shocking) to learn, I thought,
is that the authors point out that Loeb <i>et al.</i> didn’t try to provide a
detailed alternative, non-natural model that fits all the data. And that when
such a model was tried, it failed. What Loeb <i>et al.</i> did do, rather, was to
poke holes in the natural models that were proposed for the object’s peculiar
behavior. But of course, arguing that some class of theories is flawed doesn’t
count as evidence for an alternative – especially as novel as that the object
was the product of nonhuman intelligent design (i.e., that the object was a
kind of “light sail” whose observed non-gravitational acceleration could be
accounted for by the <i>intentional engineering</i> of the surface of the object/sail:
the photonic pressure from nearby starlight gives it an extra boost beyond a local
star’s gravitational demands). You must instead follow up the negative
criticism with an <i>actual worked-out alternative</i> and show it’s either as
good as or (ideally) better than those on the table. And that’s what the authors
of this rather detailed <i>Medium</i> piece say Loeb <i>et al. </i>never actually
did. That’s surprising, since you’d think that something like that should accompany
the rather vocal and attention-grabbing criticisms Loeb has become famous for.
(Now psychologically at least, the guy is somewhat trapped by his convictions –
a very dangerous spot to get yourself in as a practicing scientist of some
reputation. After all, <i>maybe </i>he’s right…)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://news.cornell.edu/sites/default/files/styles/story_thumbnail_xlarge/public/2020-01/0107_comet1.jpg?itok=9MPczjAF" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="800" height="211" src="https://news.cornell.edu/sites/default/files/styles/story_thumbnail_xlarge/public/2020-01/0107_comet1.jpg?itok=9MPczjAF" width="375" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">It shouldn’t be that hard to produce a suitable class of
non-natural alternative models consistent with the data (and Loeb and his team
are more than capable of delivering); what </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">is</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> hard is to do this
convincingly in relation to observation – especially when the natural models
work reasonably well, as the authors convincingly explain. (How “reasonably” is
of course where there’s going to be </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">some</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> dispute and </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">some</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> wiggle-room.)
But since the object can no longer be observed, the observational data used to
weigh the relative merits of the various hypotheses will remain highly
constrained: what was seen is what you get. Much like with UAP, by the way: “research”
here has mostly amounted to exercises (more or less futile, depending) in
historical forensics. (At least, for classical “ufology”.)</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">So, it looks like here with Loeb we have a classic case of
rushing to judgment before all the detailed analytical work could be done which
could exhaust the reasonable possibilities within accepted parameters of “natural”
science (i.e., of a science which presupposes that the characteristics of
objects observed beyond Earth can all be explained by appealing to non-engineered,
non-intelligently-designed structures and blind, mechanical forces – in short the usual physics stuff, as problematic as this
all might be for <i>other</i>, much more philosophical but no less important or
interesting reasons). Only when you’ve actually (as opposed to suggestively)
exhausted the natural explanations do we then start to contemplate more radical
alternatives as being the ones we should actively pursue. Sound familiar?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">The philosophy of science lessons learned here do directly
transfer to the situation we face with UAP today. The complication is that not
only are we having to deal with anomalous instrumented observations, but also
the reported observations of <i>human witnesses</i>. Additionally, unlike with
Loeb’s object of astronomical fascination, with UAP observations we’re not
dealing with objects putatively behaving anomalously as detected by a community
of observers actively doing known science (astronomy, astrophysics, etc.);
rather we’re getting <i>reports of observations</i> done in another
(non-scientific) context which suggests but by no means proves anomaly. The
added complication for UAP, then, is that we’re constantly doubting and
questioning the data themselves: whether witnesses succumbed to erroneous
judgement based on limited perceptual information; whether the instrumented
observations were flawed; or a combo deal: whether the instruments worked well,
but were mistakenly interpreted (good data, bad human judgment). No one doubts
that Loeb’s object is interstellar, or that its trajectory displayed
non-gravitational acceleration, etc. Indeed: no one doubts it was actually
observed with seemingly odd or otherwise interesting characteristics. Rather,
what is doubted (by Loeb <i>et al. </i>that is) is whether a purely natural explanation
can account for that (undisputed) observational data.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.the-sun.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2022/05/NINTCHDBPICT000553218107.jpg?w=960" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="746" data-original-width="782" height="251" src="https://www.the-sun.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2022/05/NINTCHDBPICT000553218107.jpg?w=960" width="263" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">When we turn to a classic UAP case – and we like <i>Nimitz</i>, with
Kevin Day’s or Gary Voorhis’ or Dave Fravor’s reported observations of data and
objects – we’re dealing with a whole different context: a forensic, not a
strictly scientific, one. The import of </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">these</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> observations – which do admittedly
constitute </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">anecdotal</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> evidence, because of the adventitious nature of most of it – is
to raise the likelihood that there is indeed something unconventional and
perhaps even nonnatural occurring in the atmosphere and on Earth, as radical and fringy as that sounds. Attempts to explain Fravor’s direct observations as psy-ops, or Day’s
radar observations as malfunction/radar echoes (and so on), or misremembering/misinterpretation,
are attempts to dispute the observations themselves – to call the instruments
(and their readings) or the witnesses’ testimony into question. We should do
this, and we can argue about it too. But when multiple witnesses give similar
accounts of objects seen at relatively close range, for longer than a few
seconds, and when the associated (if not exactly correlated) radar evidence and
other reports suggests speeds and flight characteristics well beyond the
performance envelope of known human craft, then while this is not inconsistent
with some perfectly natural or even technological explanation, the kinds of
explanations that plausibly remain challenge both science and technology as we
know it.</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">But this is all just <i>suggestive</i> of the sorts of scientific
infrastructure and apparatus that needs to be put in place in order for this
anecdotal evidence to become strict scientific data – just like popular
accounts of bizarre diseases and bodily ailments of one kind or another can
count as solid (but anecdotal) leads in medicine for where and how to look for
potential new medical discoveries: the forensics guides the science, after
which the science can return to the forensic evidence (some of them cold cases)
and reconstruct what was “really” going on with a more detailed (and hopefully
well-confirmed) model of what has happening. This epistemic circulation,
hopefully, will go some way in helping us derive and describe some relevant ontological
structure – a theoretical picture of where the myth, mystery and reality of UAP
converge or coincide (and there are going to be important psychoanalytic, sociological
and even semiotic complications here), and where the three part company. (And
yes, as with any theoretical endeavor that has ontological pretensions: <i>there
will always be a normative not merely descriptive dimension to this procedure.</i>)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">The problem we’ve faced thus far, as Kevin Knuth, Matthew
Szydagis and many others well know, is that the overused Sagan dictum, cited in
this <i>Medium </i>article to good effect, becomes – at the sociological rather than at the
strictly cognitive/rational level – an inhibiting factor to <i>actually setting
up</i> the robust scientific research programs that <i>could</i> produce the “extraordinary”
evidence of sound and convincing provenance. I mean, those usually citing it seem to assume that the science has been tried but that it failed, yet few offer details here </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">–</span><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"> other than maybe making reference to those justifiably dubious projects figures like Bigelow orchestrated and got government funding for, as Kloor and others are right to crinkle eyebrows over. (But do these kinds of endeavors count as the best cases of the <i>science</i> that has been attempted? One smells a <i>straw man</i> lurking about.) Or else, the dictum is employed as a rhetorical tactic to shift the burden of proof onto the UFO enthusiast: well, give us the extraordinary evidence, why don</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">’</span><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">t you?! And of course, extra-ordinary evidence of the kind requested <i>doesn</i></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;"><i>’</i></span><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"><i>t</i> exist. Why doesn</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">’</span><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">t it exist? Well, if no university or credible scientific foundation is
<i>willing</i> to support and do the science </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">needed to produce the “extraordinary evidence” always demanded in the rational UFO debates (which just turns out to be evidence <i>plain and simple </i></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">– I mean, why </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">“</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">extraordinary</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">”</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">?</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">); if because of stigma no one </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">sets up the infrastructure, makes the observations and records the data, and <i>is actually consistently well-</i></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><i>paid to do it,</i></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><i> </i>like anyone else doing institutionally-supported scientific research; ... well, then: no evidence (extraordinary or otherwise) <i>can</i> or <i>will</i> be produced. We will just persist in the <i>cul-du-sac</i> of (dogmatic) dismissal and denial, and have to entertain fruitless debates between so-called believers and the denialist-skeptics fighting the good fight for science & reason. And on and on without foreseeable end. (One imaginatively hopes that at least some dim awareness of this tautologous situation was recognized by NASA as they formed the study panel <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/nasa-holds-public-meeting-on-ufos-ahead-of-final-report" target="_blank">whose report was promised</a> for the month of July.)</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">It</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">’</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">s the Szydagis Paradox again, which I named after physics professor Matthew Szydagis who in a 2022 SCU conference put it so well: UAP
aren’t </span></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">taken seriously because scientists won’t study them seriously, but
scientists won’t study them seriously because UAP aren’t taken seriously! So, <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-wealthy-ufo-fans-helped-fuel-fringe-beliefs/#" target="_blank">journalists</a> or <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/08/ufos-aliens-government-secrets-whistleblowers-transparency" target="_blank">academics</a> can take their easy shots against the low-hanging </span><span style="font-size: 18px;">critical</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> thinking fruit (and there</span><span style="font-size: 18px;">’s plenty rotting on the ufological vines from which to choose); but they do so without appreciating the paradoxical situation the study of these phenomena has faced for almost nine decades. Instead, the preference in mainstream discussions is still to foreground UAP as fringe, reference the <i>X-Files</i>, conversationally discrediting the topic (and those who want to seriously study these phenomena), and </span></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18px;">to proceed to label UAP/UFO study as pseudoscientific </span></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">– </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18px;">when there</span></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">’</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">s never been science! (Some in the UFO world opine that we</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">’re at the </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">“</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">pre-science</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">”</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;"> stage, thinking here of the philosophy of science of Thomas Kuhn; but that</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">’s another story we can and should take up in detail later.)</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">In any case, we continue to draw useful lessons from the annals of Loebism, and so we should really keep one ear to the ground here. However, we suspect that, if Loeb</span></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">’s way of </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">thinking is driving the analysis of these allegedly </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">interstellar</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">“</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">spherules</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">”</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> (the things <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/24/science/avi-loeb-extraterrestrial-life.html" target="_blank">being used to demonstrate the nonnatural origins</a> of a meteor that came crashing down into the Pacific about a decade ago), then we should be worried that the same kinds of epistemic gaps and leaps in analysis, as chronicled by Wright, Desch and Raymond for the </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">‘Oumuamua case with which this post began,</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> will <i>also</i> show up here for the </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">“</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">spherules</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">”</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">. </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">I mean, human beings are nothing if not consistent in their foibles </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">– philosophical or otherwise.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">We shall see.</span></p>Mike Cifonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16910256379002179502noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7235611048140260044.post-44295590378615518272023-08-17T04:31:00.032-07:002023-08-18T13:36:10.686-07:00SCU’s Anomalous Aerospace Phenomena Conference (AAPC) 2023 – Day 1<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://cdn.uploads.webconnex.com/43130/scu%202023.jpg?1679092558018" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="379" data-original-width="800" height="168" src="https://cdn.uploads.webconnex.com/43130/scu%202023.jpg?1679092558018" width="356" /></a></div><p><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">E</span></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">very podcast, tweet, article … every everything UFO or UAP
has, of course, been agog with the Grusch bomb since that fateful day last
month. One is left wondering: Will this be one of those “do you remember where
you were when Kennedy was shot” moments? (The reference is particularly unsettling,
of course, since the recent Schumer legislation, in an act of perhaps unwilful
entwinement of real-life intrigue with the sensationalist fluff of conspiracist
fantasy-mongering, bases itself on that surrounding efforts to declassify and
release documents related to the Kennedy Assassination.) The fallout is left
hanging around like a </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/30/books/review/don-delillo-white-noise-today.html" style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">White
Noise</a><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">-style miasma following – in this case – the hapless among us who wish
to move on to the more fundamental question of </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">evidence</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">. It is not just
a fundamental question, without an examination of which we make no progress in
the empirical, factual study of UAP </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">qua</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> object of science (a fraught
question, to be sure, and one worthy of careful epistemic diagnostics); it is
also a rather basic – no </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">elementary</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> – question.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">I will repeat myself: Since no independently verifiable
material evidence has been supplied <i>to the general public</i>, which can
possibly form the basis for a sound, reasonably informed judgment regarding the
factual status of Grusch’s allegations, or which can provide the foundations
for an independent assessment as to whether those with supposed “first-hand”
knowledge (allegedly of crashed craft, anomalous material fragments, or
nonhuman “biologics” associated with any of this) have come to their own
beliefs on a sound basis in fact (just <i>what exactly is it</i> these unnamed
persons with special access have seen, or think they have seen, and are <i>their
</i>claims reasonably secure?) … without any of this, we on the outside of
special government access <i>must remain in epistemic limbo</i>. The only
reasonable position to maintain here is – <i>let’s see the evidence to
substantiate the claims</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">I am a bit less inclined than my interlocutor Bryan Sentes is
to slide into the skepticism of critical contextualization, which attempts to
reduce the current Grusch affair to yet another iteration of some ongoing reproduction
of the <i>mythological</i> UFO – “the myth of things seen in the sky” (which by now has become a well-engrained trope on this more skeptical side of the fence). The conversational implication is that the Grusch allegations are dubious <i>because</i> they are more myth than not. I am not
inclined towards this position (but one of decided agnosticism) because I distinguish between the mythological
UFO and the thing itself, the latter of which stands as an unknown <i>real </i>entering
into the sphere of the known (as all “real” phenomena do … and this is the
heart <i>of science</i>: even fire was once an unknown). As I have <a href="https://entaus.blogspot.com/2023/08/of-scifs-oigs-and-igs-more-on-grusch.html" target="_blank">said before</a>, we do not know what to say about these allegations (aside from more speculation both skeptical and believing) just because we do not have access to the relevant evidence. But <i>someone</i> does: namely, the various inspectors general now involved, and who have been involved since at least 2021, as I previously pointed out. (And now apparently <a href="https://www.dodig.mil/reports.html/Article/3496071/evaluation-of-the-dods-actions-regarding-unidentified-anomalous-phenomena-dodig/" target="_blank">there is the first</a> (classified) report of what we should expect will be a number of reports (classified and not) containing the results of their investigations, as I hoped in my previous post on this ongoing affair.)</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">The mythological UFO (which
surely there is) acts as a kind of cypher or epistemic black box into which
humanity can dump its fantasies (it even brings them into being), to have them
reprocessed and reflected back to us, yielding insights more about the human
than about the unknown that is the object-cause of these mythical (and in some
cases mystical) productions. (This picture of course is complicated by the
phenomenon of the hoax … but let’s not forget that the hoax itself <i>attempts,
in its lying playfulness, to reproduce something unknown that inspires the hoax
itself</i>, and hence the hoax effectively ends up reaffirming the very reality
of the unknown object-cause which it pretends to create.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">The mythological, as with all human productions of meaning,
complicates the <i>being</i> of those phenomena that act as objects-cause of
the mythical productions. I claim that science was precisely that moment that
intersected this mythological world, and countered with a <i>real</i> that acted
<i>against</i> the myths while not entirely refuting them. Thus religion in my
view is an attempt to domesticate some uncanniness, some <i>unknown</i>
phenomenon or phenomena the human being actually encounters (even if only
something emergent from the depths of the human psyche—but what is the psyche?);
as science determines there to be a “natural” phenomenon operating here, the
spell of the myth is broken, and religion is forced to expand or abstract from
its specific and systematic attempt to domesticate that uncanniness – its
theologies or metaphysics is challenged. Religion changes, perhaps adapting to
the new depths provided by the sciences. It is conflictual, to be sure. But on
the side of science, it too must operate with a kind of mythical layer to its
own discoveries and determinations. Science is not free of either ideology or
“myth”.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Here I claim that the myths with which science operates are
those that are determined by the implicit metaphysics with which a community of
scientists operates, especially when offering its treasure: a scientific <i>explanation
</i>of something. In its reductionist tendencies, which posit material
mechanisms as the basis for its phenomena, science becomes mythological and
ideological. This, too, must be neutralized by a counteracting discourse – and
I’ve suggested that this is provided by the standpoint of <i>empiricism, </i>which
seeks a metaphysically neutral stance regarding that metaphysical dichotomy,
for example, between the material v. the spiritual or mental. So, equally,
science, in its own attempts to domesticate the unknown, <i>produces its own
myths</i>. It, too, is an ideological factory as it wrestles with that <i>real</i>
which resists complete or final conceptual, intellectual determination.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">The fundamental problem with the UFO phenomenon is simply
that we are confronted with <i>a real unknown</i>, once the procedure of
finding an explanation within the existing boundaries of the sciences is
exhausted. And that’s the rub: there is no general agreement that this point –
the point where we’ve exhausted the set of explanations provided for by existing
science – is ever reached. I have pointed out several times that <i>of course</i>
this is true, <i>because existing science can always be modified to keep up
with anomalies</i>. This is simply an example of the epistemological phenomenon
(which becomes a kind of quagmire) philosophers of science have called
“underdetermination” (about which we’ve opined before in these pages). And this
predicament will never go away. It is simply escaped by theoretical leaps of
faith (a begrudgingly-admitted <i>existential</i> dimension of the sciences),
corroborated by a structure of empirical data and information that can be
coherently and consistently organized by the (new) theory, and if the new
theory can <i>also</i> be systematically linked to that which the new theory
proposes to replace, then we can perhaps forego a <i>radical</i> revolution (although this needn’t be the case – it’s just a good idea
to keep some things we’ve learned in the past as elements or structures,
however modified, within the new theory … something like </span><a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bohr-correspondence/"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Bohr’s
principle of correspondence</span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://daily.jstor.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/the_changing_meaning_of_mysticism_1050x700.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="533" data-original-width="800" height="280" src="https://daily.jstor.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/the_changing_meaning_of_mysticism_1050x700.jpg" width="421" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Thus there is and perhaps will be for quite some time the </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">suspicion</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
that any and every UFO sighting, claim, whatever, is only a </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">temporary</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
unknown that </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">will</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> (with certainty) be explained conventionally,
mundanely, uncontroversially. Except when it can’t: hence Cmdr. Fravor’s (and
his colleagues’) fairly clearly anomalous observations that can’t be
convincingly explained away with the desired menu of conventional options. An
object he and at least six other “pairs of eyes” (as he puts it) clearly saw
approaching his aircraft, only to suddenly fly off to a position over 60 miles
away in about a second (which if you’re keeping track, is 216,000 miles per
hour). This isn’t much scientific evidence to go on in order to form a solid </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">hypothesis</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
about </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">how</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> the object did what it did; but it </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">is</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> good evidence on which
to base a reasonable </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">conjecture</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> – one reasonable in a court of law, for
example, or in the science of </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">archaeology</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> – about what it </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">was</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">: a
structured object displaying technological capabilities of an unknown nature,
under the control of some unknown intelligence. And let’s not get confused
about when and what kind of science is relevant and for exactly what claims
about these unknowns. This conjecture (about the </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">what it was</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> of the
unknown) is simply an attempt to bring this unknown within the realm of the
familiar, however problematic it is. (This Bryan Sentes correctly points out in recent <a href="https://skunkworksblog.com/2023/07/22/theres-no-such-thing-as-intelligence/" target="_blank">Skunkworks posts</a> – to which I respond: yes, ‘technology’ and ‘intelligence’ are
surely concepts about which we ought to be very critical … but you have to put
the shovel down </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">somewhere</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">, and in any case the complications raised in
Sentes’ recent meditation on ‘intelligence’ don’t provide a reason why </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">some</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
forms of intelligence might very well operate with similar kinds of fabricated
structures we call </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">technological</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> – just that we have to be careful not
to blind ourselves to other possibilities or forms. But then, </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">how would we
discover them</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">? … is there an epistemological </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">cul-de-sac </i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">somewhere
here?)</span><div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Once we do this, we can bring to bear our scientific and conceptual resources
in an attempt to explain the nature and possibly the origins of this phenomenon
and </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">similar</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> unknown phenomena. But in order to get to the point where we
can start to offer explanations of these sorts of phenomena, we need good and
much better data, of the sort that groups like Galileo Project, UAPx and Hakan
Kayal’s IFEX team at Würzburg, are all trying to produce. With this database of
good empirical information, we can start to offer a better descriptive taxonomy
as a prelude to a better understanding of the nature and potentially the
origins of these phenomena – phenomena now categorized very roughly as “UAP”
but which will begin to differentiate into more precise subclasses identifiable
by means of more exact physical parameters. And then there is the further
question of the extent to which some of these anomalous phenomena exhibit </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">even
stranger</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> characteristics that truly begin to exit the general framework of
scientific thinking. But until we have generally acceptable databases of good
empirical information, we’re stuck at the initial stage of phenomenological
description – the stage of a young observational science of phenomena for which
it is unclear just exactly which science, or what community of sciences, is
relevant for a better understanding. Though it’s the physicists, data
scientists, engineers and “instrumentalists” who are first in line to study
UAP/UFOs, it remains unclear what a science of these phenomena really requires
– and perhaps it requires a </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">new science</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">, as I’ve suggested in this blog
many times before.</span><div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">So let’s get back to what I’m actually supposed to be
writing about today: the </span><b style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">SCU’s AAPC 2023</b><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">. It began with a talk that
picks up on the theme I just introduced – the extent to which UAP harken an
upheaval, a revolution, in science. A great question worthy of a deeper, more
informed dive than I’ve given it in these pages. And that’s what I was looking
forward to hearing about in the alleged “keynote”. But that’s not what we
actually got. And so, crankiness began rather quickly for me…</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://assets2.cbsnewsstatic.com/hub/i/r/2023/07/26/ca1c19b7-c2f8-4796-a5c9-c7760901b986/thumbnail/1200x630/4c6e051df38b9b15efac5775831a301f/gettyimages-1556765955.jpg?v=46e0dad4db516ed39a3a8f6257e75e73" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="420" data-original-width="800" height="162" src="https://assets2.cbsnewsstatic.com/hub/i/r/2023/07/26/ca1c19b7-c2f8-4796-a5c9-c7760901b986/thumbnail/1200x630/4c6e051df38b9b15efac5775831a301f/gettyimages-1556765955.jpg?v=46e0dad4db516ed39a3a8f6257e75e73" width="308" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Just to complete the thought with which I began this post by
broaching the explosive subject of the Grusch allegations <i>once again</i>: This is all anyone
seems to want to talk about in any discussion of UAP, at least right now. Makes
sense, I suppose. But the point I was making above is that while some want to
retreat to the safety of the all-too-easy contextualization of Grusch’s
allegations (and yes, we </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">have </i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">been here before, sort of: just read all
about it on pp. 85 forward of Thomas Bullard’s absolutely excellent foray into </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">The
Myth and Mystery of UFOs</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">, published more than a decade ago now – we just
didn’t get these kinds of explosive public hearings in the past), which retreat
signals to us that, no, it’s all the same toxic conspiracist fear-mongering
conveniently manipulated to good effect as the U.S. enters its second Cold War
with Russia/China, this retreat to contextual reduction distracts from the core
issue: that there </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">really are</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> UFO cases that resist explanation in ways
that </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">really do</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> force the issue of the recalcitrance of an anomaly.</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">We can’t be misled by some wild allegations by some
(seemingly) credible individuals – for which independently verifiable evidence
isn’t immediately forthcoming – to think that <i>all UFO claims are equally
aberrant</i>. Indeed, we might want to see the Grusch bomb as yet another
chapter of the “myth of things seen in the sky” – and maybe it is – but we
can’t let the mythological proportions of “the UFO phenomenon”, which largely
reflects how we human beings have sought to make <i>meaning</i> of these (real!)
“things seen in the sky”, distract us from the more fundamental problem <i>of
the reality of these phenomena</i> as disclosed in the few cases like the one
Cmdr. Fravor recounts to us, and which is by now well known. The literature on
UFOs is replete with such cases. And such literature – correctly described by
Watters <i>et al.</i> (2023) as “grey” – must be seen in proper perspective: as
indications of a kind of phenomenon (a class of variegated phenomena presenting
clear enough physical parameters, amenable to rigorous empirical observations –
hence the development and deployment of observational equipment, as detailed in
the SCU conference, as well as in the <i>Limina</i> conference I organized back
in February) … indications of a class of phenomena <i>that ought to be studied
carefully by some subset of our existing sciences</i>. And studied in such a
way that we’re looking for what appear to be <i>anomalies</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">We are on the hunt for anomalies, meaning that we have to
exercise perhaps extra caution that, on the one hand, we’re not finding what we
want to find but that, on the other hand, we’re not excluding what we <i>don’t</i>
want to find, or aren’t <i>supposed</i> to find, either. In other words, we’ve
got to operate in a decidedly <i>liminal</i> space where what is known doesn’t <i>a
priori</i> blind us to the possibility that the unknown (the anomalous) might
require something new from us, conceptually, theoretically, philosophically. We
have to open up to at least four (interrelated) possibilities, all of which,
unfortunately (but necessarily) are already always overdetermined by history,
by myth, by fiction – by a whole realm of existing human meaning-making: new
biology; new intelligence; new technology; new physical principles. Fravor’s
“tic-tac” (which, to repeat, <i>was seen by multiple other witnesses</i>)
speaks to at least three of these four. But we’re hard-pressed to say anything
more specific since we have only witness testimony, some suggestions of radar
data (or other “hard” evidence), and little to no other physical evidence on
which to hang specific hypotheses regarding the how, the who or the
what-exactly (the specific kind of technology he saw – employing the term
‘technology’ here as a placeholder which, indeed, might have to be revisited in
a more critical-philosophical register later on). Fravor’s experiences, and
those of other witnesses like him, constitutes what we might call the suggestive
directional basis for a scientific follow-up – the “grey” literature – that
acts, as in medical science, as an indication as to <i>where</i>, <i>how</i>
and with <i>what</i> suite of instrumentation to look for these kinds of
phenomena. What perhaps is not entirely clear in these discussions is that we
start out in scientific <i>forensics</i>, searching <i>backwards</i> from the
(perhaps scant) evidence at/for the scene of a crime, to the source – the
perpetrator of the crime itself. But in this case, the evidence for the crime,
as it were, is itself suggestive (not “proof”) of means and mechanisms which
our physics and engineering doesn’t fully understand. That adds a level of
complexity to the forensics not typically encountered in this kind of
investigation. But this complexity is why the amateur “investigator” – which
has been the typical person attached to looking into these phenomena, with
wildly varying training and expertise, if at all – isn’t where the empirical
study of these phenomena can end. It’s where it begins, only to at some point
be <i>turned over</i> to those more skilled in the rigors of strict, scientific
observation, data collection and analysis. This is the point at which we <i>transition</i>
from mere forensic investigation to scientific research proper (a distinction
emphasized to me by the architect of GEIPAN’s own system of UAP case resolution
assessment: Michaël Vaillant). Since this proper scientific research program
for UAP <i>hasn’t ever existed in any meaningful sense</i> – quite because of
the stigma attached to the subject, as we all know – no categorical statements
regarding the nature, origins, intentions, physics (or “strangeness”) of <i>any</i>
of these phenomena can really be justified beyond the reasonable conjectures we
can make based on good UFO cases (a statement, I grant, which requires <i>lots </i>of
explanatory follow-up).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://static.scientificamerican.com/blogs/cache/file/BE39DFC7-5B3A-4DB0-B05C673745F643C2.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="600" height="229" src="https://static.scientificamerican.com/blogs/cache/file/BE39DFC7-5B3A-4DB0-B05C673745F643C2.jpg" width="344" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">B</span></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">ack to the SCU’s AAPC Keynote: former Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet’s
“The New Scientific Revolution”. It was a </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">really</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> poor talk from an
academic standpoint, or even from just a basic
this-is-supposed-to-be-a-talk-focused-on-the-title kind of a standpoint. I
mean, it was a somewhat disjoined and uninformative mélange of well-known UAP
cases (like the </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Nimitz</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> case), sprinkled with interesting suggestions
about undersea cases, that just aimed to restate the obvious: there are
relatively incredible phenomena being reported by relatively credible
individuals (to use the vernacular first articulated by a military official in
the early days of uforia in the U.S.). Gallaudet, a member of SCU and board
member on Ryan Graves’ new safety-of-flight/UAP-destigmatization initiative, is
a retired rear admiral for the U.S. Navy – no slouch as they say – who, besides
the other items listed among of imposing credentials, was also a top
administrator for NOAA. So, the </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">ocean</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> is his expertise: he has a Ph.D.
in oceanography, and so we can say that the retired rear admiral is a scientist
as well. But I’m not sure if his research on ocean science alone quite gave him
the tools to discuss a potential scientific revolution. Did it provide even
anything robust in terms of a reflection on the history of science, the concept
of ‘revolution’ in science? Anything beyond what a well-educated person might
observe? Didn’t seem so. And it didn’t seem that Gallaudet was interested in doing
any serious research on the topic, or at least seeking to inform himself of any
existing literature – which is vast and perhaps therefore imposing to the
uninitiated – which could have been the basis for some kind of reasoned expansion
on the stated theme of the talk. What was really annoying was that the title
seemed to be </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">purely</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> cosmetic, almost like click-bate. In a conference
that is supposed to be organized by the leading scientific group devoted to the
study of UAP, this kind of a talk is totally unacceptable, no matter what the
credentials of the speaker are. Indeed, the talk is really an embarrassment to
anyone who knows anything about that literature on the history and philosophy
of science: lots has been written on the subject, and the least one is
intellectually responsible to do is to inform oneself before attempting to
position UAP (or the scientific research that’s being attempted on the subject)
within this context. Yes, I was grumpy.</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">More interesting than the admiral’s talk was the ensuing
Q&A period, which he seemed eager to get to, and which might explain the
hasty quality that his talk displayed: little substance, but lots of fast-moving
slides that seemed aimed to get as quickly to the end as possible. And here, as
with even the talk itself, we dwelled mostly on the Grusch allegations and all
of the government miliary, intelligence and security apparatus surrounding it (a
discussion suitably decorated with sometimes oblique, flowery jargon). [At this
point, I veered into a long tangent on the Grusch affair—again!, but decided
for your, the reader’s mental health, to segregate it safely in an entirely
separate post </span><a href="https://entaus.blogspot.com/2023/08/of-scifs-oigs-and-igs-more-on-grusch.html"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">here</span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">.] <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Occasionally, the focus in Gallaudet’s talk and subsequent
Q&A shifted to the other two witnesses called to testify at this bombshell
public congressional oversight hearing: Lt. Graves (who gave the keynote at
last year’s AAPC) and (ret.) Cmdr. Fravor (who has yet to appear at an SCU
event – maybe he’s been invited to other UFO/UAP conferences?). That the
testimony of either Graves or Fravor at times only seemed like the
second-fiddle is curious, and maybe it’s worth dwelling on this for a moment.
If only symbolically, the set up we faced during the hearing was interesting,
telling even. Grusch is the central witness, because of the gravity of his
claims; on either side are Graves, whose testimony involves recounting what
many pilots under his command have had to deal with – near-misses with bizarre
UAP, and Fravor, whose testimony recounts what he himself witnessed, along with
several of his squadron crew: the now-famous “tic-tac” zig-zagging around a
roiling ocean, noticing his approach, and then darting off (at about
210,000mph) to Fravor’s classified rendezvous point. What Graves and Fravor provide
for the Grusch testimony is context: yes, the UAP we saw were real objects;
they moved in ways not readily explainable; their flight capabilities appeared
to far exceed that of any known human tech; ergo, either some gov’t has tech <i>far
</i>in advance of U.S. assets, or <i>some UAP are nonhuman tech</i>. And so if
some UAP are advanced nonhuman tech (of the sort witnessed by Fravor, or
reported on by Graves from his subordinates’ testimony), then the testimony of
Grusch is not entirely wildly unbelievable; maybe some of these objects <i>have
</i>crashed and have been recovered. At least, this seems to be the (surface-level)
symbolic implication of the hearing’s witness positioning…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">If that’s so, and the very order of the witnesses called to
offer their testimony was a rather deliberate <i>mise en scène</i>, then we
have to wonder: How much of the hearing was orchestrated (don’t want to say <i>staged</i>
exactly), with the characters positioned quite deliberately, for effect? It
doesn’t help when the vociferous and seemingly ubiquitous Jeremy Corbell talks
as if the </span><a href="https://youtu.be/t2xSFMkmWg4?t=460"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">hearing
was his baby</span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"> (for him the admissions are in the interests of
“full disclosure”), feeding into the belief that the hearing was far from an
impartial, truth-seeking inquest, but a bit of political theater at the expense
of the true-believer crowd…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">But we digress (again I had to resist including an even
longer tangent for the sake of the reader’s sanity). Aside from insights into
the inner working of the intelligence community, and other parts of the DOD (to
the extent, of course, that Gallaudet could even comment on anything here,
since he himself has certain security clearances that bind any of <i>his</i> assertions),
nothing much new was learned. I mean, we started out at the beginning of this
talk in the zeroth setting of rational epistemic indecision (to repeat: since
the material basis for Grusch’s allegations relates to entirely classified
disclosure-discussions, documents, etc., none of that material is accessible by
the scholarly community at large for independent assessment regarding the
veracity or cogency of the claims, documents, photos or anything else to which
Grusch alleges to have been privy). And by the end of the talk, <i>we remained
at that same zeroth level</i>. Neither Gallaudet’s discussion, nor the
breathlessness of the <i>n-</i>th tweet, nor the sum over all podcasts,
self-appointed commentators, news follow-ups, op-eds, letters-to-the-editor,
interviews with the journalists on the beat, or rebuttals from Pentagon
officials … none of this really changes our – i.e., the general public’s –
rational epistemology regarding Grusch and his allegations. But that’s probably
not why Gallaudet was invited, anyway, since SCU started to plan for their
conference a few months ago – even before the early June news bomb from Kean
& Blumenthal that broke the story for <i>The Debrief</i>. Still, I wonder
why the rear admiral was assigned the dignified slot as keynote, and then why
he didn’t supply the SCU’s conference-goers with a robust keynote talk worthy
of the attention of serious-minded UAP researchers. For all the heft that a
figure such as Gallaudet brings to the affair, it was belied by his actual
intellectual performance. It’s a reflection of the very deeply inchoate state
of affairs in anything like an academic field called “UAP Studies”. That field
doesn’t actually exist as yet, and we struggle to bring it into being.
Accordingly, I suppose you’re going to find this kind of content inconsistency.
But we press on.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://cluelesspoliticalscientist.files.wordpress.com/2020/08/hourglass-model-of-security-1.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="501" data-original-width="800" height="194" src="https://cluelesspoliticalscientist.files.wordpress.com/2020/08/hourglass-model-of-security-1.png" width="310" /></a></div><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: x-large; line-height: 107%;">A</span><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">nd now for something completely different</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">, I
thought as Mr. Rojas—many now know him as part of <i>EnigmaLabs</i>—introduced the
next speaker: the young Ph.D. student (soon to be graduate) Inbar Picu, living
and studying in Israel. I got to know Inbar personally for a few days while at
the excellent workshop I was invited to attend by its organizer, Prof. Alex Wendt
(of Ohio State). She’s exactly the kind of student you want to see entering
this nascent field (if we can call “UAP Studies” that—though her approach, like
many of us thinking about UAP and related matters, is grounded in an existing
research tradition, a traditional discipline as it were: in her case it’s
International Relations, which is Prof. Wendt’s area of expertise and where he’s
a widely respected and well known thinker). Inbar is energetic, consumed by her
question, diligent, careful, attentive, thoughtful, respectful of others’ views,
open, curious and (I would say) indefatigable (I don’t often use that word). He
talk was entitled “What Is There To Talk About? The Framing and Securitization
of UFOs in the US New Media Under the UFO Taboo”.</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">The process of “securitization” is a well-studied phenomenon
in International Relations (it may be central to that discipline). As the
definition informs, “securitization” is a complex strategic process, internal
to a nation state, whereby it seeks to convert some subject, of initially general
political concern, into an issue of “security”—national security, of course.
This process of transforming some subject into a security matter allows the state
to bring to bear its national security and defense apparatus, creating policy,
infrastructure, strategic planning, etc. in an effort to mitigate the potential
<i>threats</i> that may derive from or arise out of whatever is the significant
content of the subject it seeks to securitize. In the case of UFOs, of course, the
situation is curious, since by its nature we’re dealing with a disputed reality—or
rather, a complicated one that mixes mistake, misperception, hoax, with something
<i>there</i> that might really be of national security concern (witness the <a href="https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA2475-1.html">recent RAND
report</a>, which can in effect be read as a strategic recommendation for the
government in its attempt to <i>securitize</i> the UAP). What Inbar is very
much focused upon—quite significantly, conceptually and philosophically in my
view, though I’m no expert—is the imbalance in the scholarship surrounding this
process of securitization. The focus in the scholarly literature, she contends,
is on when securitization <i>is successful</i>; very little concerns when it fails.
Thus the implication (if I might opine here) is that we have a very imbalanced
understanding of the process itself—indeed, if we don’t know what failure is,
we won’t be able to perceive the structural or even strategic limitations of an
attempt to securitize something. This has, I think, important practical
implications, if only for policymakers and those involved in the material
processes of securitization, for, not knowing the nature of securitization <i>failures</i>,
we don’t know what exactly to recommend on possible subjects of (successful) securitization—we
don’t know because we don’t clearly know <i>why</i> something failed to be
securitized. If all we know are successes, then we’re effectively always guessing,
and muddling through with no clear direction—stuck in: <i>maybe, let’s try
this, let’s try that</i>. So this, then, this gets to an even more fundamental
question: what are the conditions under which something <i>can</i> be successfully
securitized? All we know from the literature are those cases where it succeeds,
not when or where it’s failed (it’s not studied), so, in a sense, we don’t
really know what securitization is—just when it has worked. In other words: we
have “techne” but no “episteme” (to use the ancient Greek epistemological
distinction some readers might be familiar with), know-how without knowledge <i>per
se</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">In any case, maybe I’m wrong here and this really doesn’t
amount to a worry, or even to the most important worry, but this was a concern which
prefaced Inbar’s talk. In order to examine the process of securitization of the
UFO (or UAP, rather), which she argues began in earnest with the ODNI report in
2021, she examines the structure of the discourse surrounding UAP, as it
appears especially in the news media, to get clues about how exactly the
process is in play for this subject. It is, as she describes it, a “discourse
analysis”. I wonder, however, if a discourse analysis of news media is the
right focus—but for all I know that’s how one begins to study securitization,
or it’s an approach unique to Inbar herself. Shouldn’t one attempt an analysis
that balances discourse in media—which is external to the defense and security
apparatus that enacts securitization—with discourse <i>internal </i>to those
agencies which are directly involved in structuring the securitization? I also wonder
if the periodization she’s adopted for when securitization begins is well-motivated:
surely securitization has been attempted (perhaps <i>abortively</i>) ever since
the UFO phenomenon broke out during and after the Second World War. If
anything, what we see with UFOs (now UAP) is <i>periodic securitization</i>:
starting and stopping of the process. Perhaps this adds another dimension of
uniqueness and complexity to the securitization of the UFO/UAP (indeed: perhaps
the shift in name is itself structurally significant for securitization, in
that it indicates important shifts in attention, perspective and perception). Inbar
also concerns her study with the aspect of <i>taboo</i> that functions within
the discourse around UFOs/UAP—and here she cites the seminal <a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/WENSAT-2">Wendt paper</a>, who, as it turns
out, is one of her Ph.D. thesis advisors. It was an <i>excellent</i>, and
academically substantial talk, I thought. Not like the keynote.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/c_fill,f_auto,fl_progressive,g_center,h_675,pg_1,q_80,w_1200/4251dc08e655c6d9c0f1ec4f89add274.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="800" height="225" src="https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/c_fill,f_auto,fl_progressive,g_center,h_675,pg_1,q_80,w_1200/4251dc08e655c6d9c0f1ec4f89add274.jpg" width="399" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Following Inbar’s talk was one by <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=c_wrbxwAAAAJ&hl=en" target="_blank">Prof. Richard Griffiths</a>, a rather
distinguished professor of (observational) astronomy and physics, emeritus at
Carnegie Mellon, now living and teaching (I believe) in Hawaii (not a bad place
to which to retire—though the recent catastrophic fires in Maui are a wake-up
call). I had the occasion to hear his talk (or something close to it) when I
attended the AAAF seminar (“<a href="https://www.societyforuapstudies.org/event-details/scientific-approaches-to-data-collection-optical-observables-of-uap-3" target="_blank">Optical Observables of UAP</a>”) in France back at the
beginning of June this year, so I elected to skip this talk and turn my
attention to friends and family here in Cairo. (The talk was an exposition of
Griffith’s UAP case study, which he entitled “A Very Large UAP crosses the
North Pacific: Observed by Five Pilots, with two Photos and a Video”.
Curiously, the talk is no longer on-demand like most of the others. I suspect
this is because, as it </span><a href="https://www.metabunk.org/threads/solved-mufon-case-124190-mothership-uap-crosses-the-north-pacific-starlink-stack.13071/" style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">has
come to light</a><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">, the case is most likely best explained by a satellite deployment—probably
Starlink. As the work of people like Mick West rightly demonstrates, as we
investigate UAP cases we must simultaneously educate ourselves on the phenomenology
of those technological phenomena which are new in our skies but unfamiliar; the “debunkers” do
very crucial work, and must </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">always</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> be respectfully and attentively studied.)</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Following the Griffiths presentation, was a talk by one of
the Galileo Project’s student researchers: Abigail White, who’s gained <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/posts/abigailgwhite_i-am-delighted-to-share-that-in-just-over-activity-6934163214523908097-qrxw">some
notoriety</a> through the Ryan Graves (uneven in my view) “Merged” podcast. While her
story is a sensitive recounting of her “journey”, I found the talk to be very
much inappropriate for a <i>conference</i> on something like the scientific study
of UAP. I mean, the talk had no real content to offer the community, <i>besides</i>
a self-portrait of a young researcher just trying to figure out where she wants
to go next in her career. What was really odd about the whole thing was that, almost
as an afterthought, <i>she admits she won’t really be pursuing UAP in her
upcoming Ph.D. research studies</i>! Or at least that’s what I <i>thought</i> I
heard. So what’s the lesson from this self-portraiture? In what content
relevant to the conference there <i>was</i> in the talk, it was mostly a general
survey of some of the architecture of the GP’s multimodal observational “suites”,
which range from modestly-priced smaller apparatuses to much larger, and pricier,
stationary systems. But mostly this part of the presentation was meant to
explain where she worked on the project and what instrumentation she was
particularly concerned to work with. I mean, it’s interesting and all, but I
thought it wasn’t appropriate to go <i>personal journey</i> on those in
attendance. Maybe it’s a generational thing…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Next—and we detect a clear theme here—was another student (Robin
Schaub), offering a much more substantial presentation on a reporting and
analysis system being developed and deployed at his university: Würzburg, the
homebase of Prof. Dr. Hakan Kayal (whom Schaub’s working with), who is one of
the most important, serious, robustly academic scientists involved in the contemporary
effort to study UAP scientifically (in Germany, no less—a country that suffers
even more from the debilitating taboo that, as we know, has beleaguered attempts
to study UAP seriously). The system Schaub detailed is a project of a
UAP-focused group at Würzburg: “IFEX”. Auf Deutsch, the name fully spelled out
is: <i>Interdisziplinäres Forschungszentrum für Extraterrestrik</i>, or in
their preferred English vernacular: <i><a href="https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/ifex/">Interdisciplinary Research Center
for Extraterrestrial Studies</a></i>. (One might pause to complain about the “extraterrestrial
studies” here, but we have to remember that part of their focus, being lodged
within a <i>space sciences</i> program at the university, is well, <i>extraterrestrial:
things outside of and beyond the earth proper</i>. (It’s all spelled out in
detail on their website, linked <i>supra</i>.) That, and the association was
formed in 2017, just as renewed attention, and scrutiny, emerged for UAP.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">What was curious about Schaub’s presentation was that he
positioned it in relation to an existing system employed in France—but which he
only mentioned in passing, revealing a lack of understanding of what exactly “this
system” is. I presume Schaub was gesturing towards the GEIPAN system. If that’s
so, then it’s unsurprising he doesn’t know much about it, because GEIPAN hasn’t
exactly gone out of its way to detail their system, or provide much insight for
non-French speakers (which, unfortunately, is most of the world; English is very
much the <i>lingua franca</i> today—yes, with all due irony and respect to <i>Français</i>,
which indeed <i>had </i>that status, <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-137-57647-7_6#Abs1">sort
of</a>, some centuries ago, when the cultural imperialism of empire wasn’t so <i>totalizing</i>).
It’s a tragedy for current UAP research, but it’s part of a general phenomenon I’ve
noticed (perhaps explained by the persistence of the taboo Pincu worried about
in her talk): the lack of UAP-related research contained in searchable databases
scholars regularly access. Anyone, like Schaub, just starting out in this area has a monumentally difficult challenging (needlessly so) in finding, studying, and then incorporating
the results of past work immediately relevant to their own. It is an elementary
but importantly preliminary exercise to engage in a thorough <i>literature
review</i> before one begins to develop their own work in a given discipline or
field. For UAP, not only is there really <i>no</i> field as such—but the work is (therefore) scattered amongst publications in already-legitimate fields or disciplines, or
embedded in what Prof. Watters of the Galileo Project <a href="https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/10.1142/S2251171723400068">has
recently called</a> the “gray literature” of uneven quality, sometimes
questionable integrity, and therefore of limited or uncertain scholarly usability
(certainly not something that can be uncritically cited as authoritative—an enduring
and perhaps under-addressed methodological quandary vexing UAP scholarship
going forward).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">The GEIPAN system provides two things: on the front-side, there
is a <a href="https://www.cnes-geipan.fr/index.php/en/what-did-i-see/step-1">place
to report</a> your (or a) UAP/UFO sighting/encounter/incident—they ask you to “testify”
(but the website is stubbornly resistant to English translation). But on the
backside, as I have come to learn, there is a very sophisticated UI for the investigative
team (though it could be a single investigator working on a case-of-interest—the
COIs). And it’s here that the process really begins, from initial report
(uploaded by the witness(s) or manually entered by GEIPAN), follow-up (after a
kind of triage system), to the software-system-generated set of hypotheses attempting
to offer a possible explanation for the sighting—ranked in a clever way,
according to two dimensions: “robustness” and “strangeness”. The suitably analyzed
COIs are at some point shunted over to a “college of experts” (sans periwigs
one assumes) to take a (presumably well-informed and educated) <i>vote</i> on
how to classify the case. And it’s their system of classification that, while
of course not perfect, is (or should be) a model of what needs to be happening
(<b>attention: AARO </b>… let’s not reinvent the wheel). There are <a href="https://www.geipan.fr/en/node/58787">four classes</a> into which a UAP
incident case is put: A, B, C, and D. The A’s are <i>nearly proven</i> to be
something <i>known</i>; the B’s are those that are shown to be <i>probably</i>
something known. The C’s are those cases for which there is <i>lack of reliable
data</i>, and so the cases must remain <i>undetermined</i>. Whereas—and here’re the
cases of <i>most </i>interest to those of us who want to get down to scientific
and scholarly business—the D’s are … and please let’s pay attention to what GEIPAN
is saying here … <i>those which, while having sufficiently reliable information
and adequate data on which to make a determination, nonetheless fail to be understood
as containing a report of a known phenomenon of some kind</i>. The D cases are
further subdivided into D1 (“strange”) and D2 (“very strange”). It’s the D’s
that are passed on for further investigation—forensic follow-up. They are thus,
in effect, cases that are submitted to field investigators for reevaluation.
Thus, a D might be converted into A or B (presumably the fact that it’s deemed
a D case means C—cases that lack sufficient data—is no longer an applicable label).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">What GEIPAN does <i>not</i> do, after looking into the D’s,
is research further to see what explanation <i>would</i> work, once the reevaluation process is complete. That’s the point
at which a science begins, for these cases are those which would seem to
suggest “truly new empirical observations” (to use Hynek’s expression, which I’ve
come to like).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Schaub shows us that they’ve got some part of this kind of
thing in the works, and partially up-and-running. But what’s importantly
different here is that suites of observational equipment will be part of the hypothesis-generation
mode of the initial analysis of the UAP case data. This is important, since it
will begin to integrate live, empirical data that can be used to create a
richer informational tapestry, from which one can derive more secure analytical
conclusions. Indeed, in so doing, we begin the process of converting the data from
mere UAP report to factual (and verifiable) data on the UAP itself. (Let’s not
forget Vallée’s important proviso, which haunts the science of these phenomena:
<i>we deal not with the UFO, but with the report of the UFO</i>…) But there was
one thing I caught from Schaub’s talk that was potentially worrisome, and that’s
the stated desire to “delete the role” or participation of the human subject in
the UAP incident. I think he means to <i>mitigate</i> the potential biases introduced
in the testimony supplied as part of the data on a UAP incident. One cannot “delete”
the human from anything—for then we’d have nothing of meaning or significance on
which to work. (This is a characteristic concern of the <i>humanities</i> in dealing
with how, methodologically speaking, the scientists propose to go about studying
UAP, and why humanists and social scientists have to be involved in some reciprocally
significant way. Thus we bring the <i><a href="http://www.societyforuapstudies.org/">Society for UAP Studies</a></i> to bear…)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">After a short break, we found two final events: one more talk,
related to the work members of SCU itself were conducting (let’s not forget SCU
is in essence a think-tank), and a closing “AIAA” panel which provided a series
of (shorter) pre-recorded talks derived from the three <a href="https://www.explorescu.org/post/announcement-american-institute-of-aeronautics-and-astronautics-accepts-three-papers-from-the-scu">papers
accepted</a> by and presented to the <i><a href="https://www.aiaa.org/publications/Meeting-Papers">American Institute of
Aeronautics and Astronautics</a></i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-1567c8fea030dd470f039d74b08a9b19-lq" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="650" data-original-width="602" height="330" src="https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-1567c8fea030dd470f039d74b08a9b19-lq" width="306" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">The talk, “A Descriptive Analysis of the Characterization of
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Cases” involved an exposition of the SCU’s study
of UAP shapes—a kind of phenomenology of UAP visual presentations. And by “phenomenology”
I don’t mean anything particularly specific—which lack of specificity here
might ultimately be a problem for (or weakness of) the study. What’s the underlying
theory driving the descriptive method? Phenomenology, at least in philosophy,
means something very specific; there are strict methods applied to the examination
of the </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">data of first-person conscious human experience</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">. So, one issue here
might be that what’s examined is just the (uncritical, maybe phenomenologically
naïve) </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">claims</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">, made in reports, about how various UAP appear. So, we might
say that it’s not phenomenological in a rigorous philosophical sense (and I
guess it needn’t be—at least not initially); it’s a characterization of what
people say they see in reports that the authors of the study chose to include.
I </span><a href="https://www.explorescu.org/research-library/categories/scu-papers" style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">don’t
yet see the paper published</a><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> at the SCU’s website, so I don’t want to
comment further (it’s just a talk, after all), but it will be interesting to
see if there </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">is</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> a critically examined and explicit methodological underpinning
(which perhaps bears some relation to an accepted methodology in use elsewhere
in science or scholarship) to their shape characterization study. If we want to
do serious work, we can’t just stay within the parameters of UAP discourse, or
of classical ufology; we must (as with some of the other work SCU has produced)
try to ground the study in something well-understood elsewhere in existing (and,
ideally, </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">uncontested</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">) scholarship. This ought to be a meta-theoretic methodological
criterion guiding UAP Studies…</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Finally, the panel. The three, very high-quality, substantial
(and <i>technical</i>) talks here were:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Peter Reali’s “System Study of
Constraints for the Creation of UAP Electromagnetic Signature Optimal Detection
Systems.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Ralph Howard’s “FAA Unmanned
Aircraft Systems (UAS) Sighting Reports: A Preliminary Survey.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Tim Oliver’s physics-heavy “Aerodynamic
Interactions and Turbulence Mitigation by Unidentified Aerospace-undersea
Phenomena.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Only a few scattered comments are in order, as I’ve
doubtlessly already taxed the reader’s patience (and need for sleep).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">What Mr. Reali talked about was work done on examining just
what it would take, across the board, to really get optimal detection rates for
UAP, given what we know about their frequencies of occurrence as a function of
geographic location. Just how much geography does one have to cover, to get
optimal (EM/optical) detection? That’s a hard question to answer in detail, though
it’s not hard to set up the problem itself, as Peter does very naturally, and
with obvious competence. The work is practically relevant—he’s an engineer,
after all, so practicals (like, <i>so how much are we talking?</i>) have to
matter at some point. The talk breaks it down: there are so many geographic
regions that need to be covered, and with a certain swath of aerospace able to
be scanned, relative to the instrument-specific specs (that are a necessary
factor to consider here), this determines the total number (and type) of
systems needed. And you can put a price tag on that (it’s in the millions for
each subsector—but not insanely unreachable budgetary goals, esp. considering
the total U.S. national defense budget … lol’s all ‘round: we can do this if we’re
serious about it).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">I was sadly distracted by house-matters during Ralph’s talk,
but I did manage to catch the bulk of Tim Oliver’s (well, ok, I’ll admit to being
enthused about any physics talks related to UAP). What we got here was a substantial
study of one of the hallmark phenomenological features of many UAP reports (or
at least, those of a certain type): the observed and sometimes radar-recorded
rapid acceleration to extreme (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypersonic_speed" target="_blank">hypersonic</a>) velocity of apparently structured objects but <i>with no discernible
sonic-boom or other—expected—thermal signatures</i>. Is it possible, the talk
asks in effect, to model this with known physics? Apparently, it is: you can mitigate
the propagation of the shock wave or other thermal energy through the
generation of a surrounding force field (of some kind) which acts to counter these effects (basically, of a rigid object passing through a fluid). Or so proposed the perhaps obscure but significant UFO researcher <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_R._Hill" target="_blank">Paul Hill</a> (NASA scientist no less) in a little-read tome entitled <i><a href="https://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/aclk?sa=L&ai=DChcSEwjDqdzBs-OAAxXWiWgJHSQZAzMYABABGgJ3Zg&gclid=CjwKCAjwivemBhBhEiwAJxNWNyJmrnwTjSJl2AB6YMJtDMGlyOnkbJdMyAdOv2DK1kslSfUObKixoxoCD9kQAvD_BwE&ohost=www.google.com&cid=CAESauD2voAhKaAat89Evi_NQGDamcKMjhbvdO1B4c8WKiAIhnt1p_b-lVesvu-4YZzt6auwWCGufUMO2o65kMAEFsoXg14sbUpPtSLuvIIvYkkLZddxOTNyW8zFNGKUKl8OamqzX-EjRffhEZ0&sig=AOD64_2g_ELl7r6VhcMy2lKQfjaGdh8c_g&q&adurl&ved=2ahUKEwjgjdTBs-OAAxX7TaQEHcp4DysQ0Qx6BAgKEAE" target="_blank">Unconventional Flying Objects: A Scientific Analysis</a></i> (1995). And this was Oliver</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">’s theoretic starting point (practicing classic scholarship in the process: starting off where others have left off).</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">The approach adopted by Oliver, following Hill, uses computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to create the basic model for how the hypothetical field of force behaves with respect to the surrounding fluid (which is what the media, through which the UAP would travel, are conceived to be</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">—at least </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">for the purposes of this analysis) in order the get the right effects to work out that would be needed to </span><span style="font-size: 18px;">suppress</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> or nullify the stuff we don</span></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">’</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">t but should observe (sonic-booms, etc.). But what is (or would be) the nature of this hypothetical force field? In an analytical tactic that goes all the way back to Newton himself (who similarly just looked for the mathematical/physical <i>form </i>the force we now call gravity must take, which acts in this case </span><span style="font-size: 18px;"><i>universally</i></span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><i> on all material bodies</i>), Oliver in effect splits this problem into two, independently tractable ones. First find the form that this field-of-force must take in order to achieve the desired effects (mitigating sonic-booms, etc.); then ask what physical mechanism or process could create such a field with the required properties. As far as I can tell, Oliver has completed the first part of the problem, and the second one still remains an open question (though I am no expert, so my claims here are tentative).</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">So then, first, following Hill, we can simply ask: what form should a counteracting force field take (what must its mathematical/physical properties be), in order to cancel (or otherwise nullify) the resulting shock-waves (and other thermal effects due to frictional forces acting on a rapidly moving rigid body through a fluidic medium)? In the introduction to his paper submitted to AAAS, and presented to them (a paper not yet peer-reviewed, but <a href="https://www.explorescu.org/post/aerodynamic-interactions-and-turbulence-mitigation-by-unidentified-aerospace-undersea-phenomena" target="_blank">just released on the SCU website</a>), Oliver writes that (and we quote him at length):</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">“Hill proposed that
fast-moving objects can manipulate the surrounding flow field by imposing a
force field. This method, which draws on potential flow theory, involves
equating the force field potential to the kinetic energy</span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"> </span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">associated with the flow. The engineered force field can
theoretically counteract the kinetic energy of the flow, resulting in a
constant density, constant pressure flow without energy losses. When correctly
formulated and employed, the force field should produce speed-independent flow
patterns that apply to both compressible and incompressible fluid flows.<o:p></o:p></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">”</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">So, once the details of this flow structure are worked out (and that constitutes the bulk of Oliver</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">’</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">s analysis, at least in the paper), we can then move on to part two of the problem, which involves a question about what the exact nature of the force field itself could be, as in: what could the physics of this field be? What know what form that force field must take, and the properties it must exhibit, but is there anything physical that can satisfy these theoretical demands? </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Presumably, those finer details (like the particular equations that would describe the behavior of the force field, as Hill requires there to be, which surrounds a UAP and is supposed to enable its evidently smooth, shock-free travel) could be derived from the
principles of </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetohydrodynamics" style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">magnetohydrodynamics</a>. <span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">MHD, as they call it in the biz, seems to be an increasingly popular alternative conception to how exactly the UAP can move so fast. That is, MHD is a popular alternative to even more speculative (and conceptually problematic) accounts of UAP kinematics using what they call </span></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">“</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">metric engineering</span></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">”</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> but which you probably know as </span></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">“</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">warp drive</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">”</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> (yes, the <i>Star Trek</i> thing). Maybe we can exploit this same hypothetical MHD propulsion mechanism to <i>also</i> explain the absence of sonic booms? (At least, this is the question I would pose.) In other words, the question here is: could a </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">suitably</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> engineered (magnetohydrodynamic) <i>plasma</i> do the trick? If so, then we might be able to come up with a unifying explanatory model of UAP kinematics, since if the plasma is also related to the propulsion (an MHD drive of some kind), then we have an idea even of the architecture of the technology that has been engineered (presumably by whatever intelligence(s) is(are) responsible for these evidently structured objects) for trans-medium (and especially atmospheric) travel at extreme velocity (greater than Mach 5; for example, the tic-tac Fravor describes appeared to move at over 200,000mph and that works out to be, in air, a cool Mach 260 or so. I mean, is that even hypersonic anymore?).</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://theory.pppl.gov/images/research/Magnetohydrodynamics_01.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="596" data-original-width="800" height="280" src="https://theory.pppl.gov/images/research/Magnetohydrodynamics_01.png" width="375" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">In my personal view (which is not necessarily endorsed by Oliver or part of his paper</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">’</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">s analysis), according to this CFD + MHD model you’d basically be dealing with the interaction between
</span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">two</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> fluids manifesting different physical properties (electromagnetically
active plasma and air, for sky-bound UAP, or water, for submerged ones), so the key is in understanding exactly how the (proposed) MHD
plasmoid surrounding a (hypothetical) UAP interacts with the rest of the medium-of-travel in the UAP’s immediate physical environment. (I suppose the
creation of the plasma would at some point entail, at least along the surface where the plasma
interacts with atmosphere, ionization, and that might be useful in mitigating the thermal effects, sonic-booms etc.)</span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">In any case, I don</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">’</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">t want to get ahead of what Oliver has very carefully worked out (especially since I</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">’m not a physicist)</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">. In his conclusion, he writes (and again we quote his recently-released paper at length):</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">“The[ese] research findings
highlight the significant stabilizing effect that an applied force field can
have on flow field</span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"> </span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">pressure
and flow patterns, particularly in compressible cases. This suggests the
potential to utilize an engineered force</span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"> </span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">field to neutralize any pressure differences that may
arise within the flow field when objects move rapidly through</span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">
</span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">compressible and incompressible media. The study
demonstrated that the force field strength would need to be</span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">
</span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">proportional to the square of velocity to achieve the
desired effect, and the form of the resultant pressure field is largely speed-independent.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">“To implement this approach,
the force field strength could be adjusted according to the craft's velocity,
allowing</span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"> </span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">it to be
used across a range of speeds. However, challenges may arise at higher speeds
due to increased misbalanced</span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"> </span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">forces. Rapid maneuverability would necessitate rapid
changes of field strength, and radial movements of the object</span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">
</span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">would necessitate changes in field form. Furthermore,
when passing through atmospheric pressure disturbances,</span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"> </span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">continuous monitoring and adjustments to the force
field's strength and shape may be necessary</span><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">.</span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">“Despite these concerns, the
use of an engineered force field, whilst speculative, could offer a potential
explanation</span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"> </span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">for the
lack of interference of fast-moving objects in compressible and incompressible
media, potentially preventing</span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"> </span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">the formation of shock waves and aerodynamic heating for
objects traveling at extreme speeds in the atmosphere.”</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">With this, Day One of the 2023 AAPC closed. I went to sleep that evening very happy in the end, after having gotten very cranky with the keynote and with some talks that were, in my view, inappropriate or otherwise insubstantial additions to an evidently professional and scientific conference. I was therefore enthused about and very much looking forward to Day Two.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal">Which I<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">’</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">ll get to in my next post...</span></p></span><p></p></div></div>Mike Cifonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16910256379002179502noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7235611048140260044.post-53092438707995418572023-08-01T15:20:00.027-07:002023-08-17T14:40:06.813-07:00Of SCIF’s, OIGs and IGs: More on the Grusch Affair<p><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">[The following arose as a long tangent during the course of
writing up my thoughts on this year’s SCU “<a href="https://www.explorescu.org/conferences" target="_blank">Anomalous Aerospace Phenomena</a>”
conference. For the sake of the sanity of my three readers, I thought I would segregate these thoughts in an entirely </span><span style="font-size: 18px;">separate</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> post. My review of this year</span></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">’</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">s AAPC is in preparation and should be released in the next week
or so.]</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://s.abcnews.com/images/Politics/ufo-hearing-1-rt-bb-230726_1690381608009_hpMain_16x9_608.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="342" data-original-width="608" height="232" src="https://s.abcnews.com/images/Politics/ufo-hearing-1-rt-bb-230726_1690381608009_hpMain_16x9_608.jpg" width="412" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">I</span></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">t’s not clear what the real epistemic effect will be of the “</span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_compartmented_information_facility" style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">SCIF</a><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">”
offering which Grusch, several times, made to the congresspeople presiding over <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ufo-hearing-congress-uap-takeaways-whistleblower-conference-david-grusch-2023/" target="_blank">last week’s bombshell hearing</a>, or directing questions to him. (You can <a href="https://theconvergenceenigma.com/uap/f/uap-hearing-07262023" target="_blank">read the transcript of the hearing</a> for yourself to see how many SCIF offers he made, and to whom he made them. Is anyone going to keep tabs on whether those congresspeople given the invitation actually follow through?) Let’s suppose for fun that
congressperson X steps into the SCIF with Grush, and Grusch spills the beans:
names, locations, … you name it: </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">here’s the beef</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">. What happens? Well,
insofar as the information in Grusch’s SCIF-ed disclosures is classified, then
those congresspeople made privy to it would then </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">also</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> be bound by an
oath of secrecy, unless they can act to have all or part of that information
declassified. So, we have a dilemma: either the information will be
declassified or it won’t. The problem with the former is that there is a long
and torturous path for information once deemed classified to make it to the
point where it’s declassified. And then, even if it is, it’s likely going to be
scrubbed. In other words, by the time </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">we</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">, outsiders, get any of that
information it’s going to have succumbed to the government’s version of the
game of telephone. In any case, the information-gets-declassified horn of our
dilemma isn’t likely going to be straightforward, quick or determinative.
Certainly not likely to be a “my fellow Americans, this is a momentous day for
humanity” sort of moment. Whatever emerges will likely be subject to some of
the same epistemic problems that are already faced by any such shockingly
unconventional disclosure. Now, if the information remains classified, then
even if congressperson X throws hints, winks and nods, </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">we will be in no
better epistemic position than we are now regarding Grusch’s original testimony</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">.
Which is to say we’ll just be left wondering: so </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">you</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> say you saw x,y, and z
but <i>we</i> have no access to any of it (it’s classified!), so … either we trust you
or we verify. We can’t verify (it’s classified), so we have to trust you. But,
you’re a politician (or a believer, or …), so we don’t (or can’t or won’t) trust you. And so on and
so forth goes the epistemological <i>cul-de-sac</i> we’ve seen time and again when it
comes to the government and what they allegedly know about UFOs. But…</span><div><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">T</span></span><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">here is at least <i>something</i> more to go on, it would
seem. And that’s the not-often-remarked-upon exact <i>function</i> of these “Inspectors General” in all of this, as local Hudson-Valley journalist </span><a href="https://www.theexaminernews.com/amid-ufo-hearings-in-congress-moment-of-contact-offers-history-lesson/"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Adam
Stone briefly remarks on in a recent op-ed</span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"> for </span><a href="https://www.theexaminernews.com/about-us/"><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">The Examiner News</span></i></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"> (not to
be confused with the dubious </span><a href="https://www.thefactual.com/blog/is-the-washington-examiner-a-reliable-news-source/"><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Washington
Examiner</span></i></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">). Let’s just dwell on this for a moment – and
since <i>a lot</i> of the SCU’s conference came back to the Grusch story time
and again, I guess we can employ a principle of <i>content density parallelism</i>
(how’s that for neologisms?).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Stone writes that “[a]n inspector general already vetting the
whistleblower’s claims is a monstrous credibility threshold many in the media
have failed to fully grasp when discounting Grusch’s claims as secondhand”
(ibid.). Since we seem to now have a minimally-respectable executive administration
in place, following the dumpster-fire that was the Trump administration (though
I’m personally critical of all parties, and the well-entrenched partisanism
that eternally debilitates American politics, firmly believing that both
contribute important elements to the American Thing), I’m inclined to put <i>some</i>
measure of trust in the mostly a-political functionaries (though some are
presidentially appointed) called “Inspectors General”. But who exactly are
they, and what exactly do they do?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">I’d defer to experts here, since there is a complexity and
nuance to the architecture of government, its agencies, officials and officers
which is beyond my level of understanding. But put simply, there are <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Inspector_General_(United_States)#:~:text=In%20the%20United%20States%2C%20Office,operations%20within%20their%20parent%20agency." target="_blank">multiple inspectors general</a> spread across and attached to multiple Offices of Inspector
General (OIG), and in the 1978 Act of Congress that created them, 12 were
created. Most OIG are associated with departments within the executive branch of
the U.S. government (but there are OIG associated with U.S. state entities too).
It is a structure like the OIG, with its Inspectors General, that makes the
U.S. a relatively low-internal-corruption country (or at least I like to think
so). Well, at least it makes us look good.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/59/Seal_of_the_Inspector_General_of_the_Intelligence_Community.png/220px-Seal_of_the_Inspector_General_of_the_Intelligence_Community.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="220" data-original-width="220" height="220" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/59/Seal_of_the_Inspector_General_of_the_Intelligence_Community.png/220px-Seal_of_the_Inspector_General_of_the_Intelligence_Community.png" width="220" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">We <a href="https://thedebrief.org/intelligence-officials-say-u-s-has-retrieved-non-human-craft/" target="_blank">seem to know</a> to which specific IG Grusch spoke: </span><a href="https://www.dni.gov/index.php/who-we-are/organizations/icig/icig-about-us/icig-leadership/icig-ig-bio#:~:text=Monheim,by%20the%20United%20States%20Senate."><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Thomas
A. Monheim</span></a><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">, the Inspector General of “the Intelligence Community”,
although in Grusch’s official filing (mentioned below), we learn that he first
contacted the </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Defense_Office_of_Inspector_General"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Office
of the Inspector General for the Department of Defense</span></a><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"> – DoD
IG, in which case the relevant IG at the time (2021) would have been </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_O%27Donnell_(EPA)"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Sean
O’Donnell</span></a><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"> (now IG for the EPA). Monheim’s office is charged with
oversight of the activities of those working for the Director of National
Intelligence, in an effort “to prevent and detect fraud, waste, and abuse in
such programs and activities” (as the website writes). As is probably well
known by many following this case, IG Monheim supposedly found Grusch’s
testimony to be “urgent and credible” – although it’s hard to find a statement
from Monheim himself asserting just that (I suspect that this claim associated
with Monheim may have been taken from the </span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1463r6w/the_intelligence_community_inspector_general/"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">statement
issued by Grusch’s legal team</span></a><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">, Compass Rose; but I’ll leave
that to the journalists among you. I mean, <i>can </i>acting inspectors general
go on the record and comment on cases actively being investigated by their
office?). The whole affair is complicated by the fact that the attorney who
worked with Grusch in making the </span><a href="https://docs.google.com/viewerng/viewer?url=https://www.metabunk.org/attachments/dave-grusch-icwpa-ocr-pdf.59804/"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">relevant
whistleblower filings</span></a><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"> – Irving Charles McCollough – was <i>himself</i>
an inspector general … for “the Intelligence Community”.</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">I</span></span><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">t is commonly remarked that the whole UFO affair, no matter
within which country one contextualizes it, is a rabbit hole. A very deep,
dark, befuddling black hole of allegations, tall tales, innuendo, suspicion,
hypothesis, and speculation, balanced on top of conjecture, verisimilitude and
scant else of verifiable substance. This situation is really a consequence of the fact that the core phenomenon </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">– </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">the UFO itself </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">– </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">remains, still, a recalcitrant enigma, but one about which we at least know that conventional explanations </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">cannot be offered to rational satisfaction</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> in the best of the historical UFO cases. (Thus we have the growing awareness that these phenomena, which constitute a complex class of different types, merit much more serious scientific/scholarly attention, of the sort that doesn</span></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">’</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">t enter the fray only to play the tired game of <i>a priori</i> debunkerism.</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">) That governments are necessarily secretive
(whether lawfully or not) only makes the hole blacker. Government officials are
by default evasive, opaque; they seem to have a penchant for obfuscation,
dissimulation or at least for answering direct questions with contentless
non-answers offered with that strangely alluring verisimilitude that is the
bureaucrat’s particular skill.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/09f355be-6574-4f09-8d83-796ca287f951/ddthbkl-78263087-555d-4670-be4e-9ea51ddc76ba.png/v1/fill/w_1280,h_960,q_80,strp/down_the_rabbit_hole_we_go___by_absolon_resonance_ddthbkl-fullview.jpg?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ1cm46YXBwOjdlMGQxODg5ODIyNjQzNzNhNWYwZDQxNWVhMGQyNmUwIiwiaXNzIjoidXJuOmFwcDo3ZTBkMTg4OTgyMjY0MzczYTVmMGQ0MTVlYTBkMjZlMCIsIm9iaiI6W1t7ImhlaWdodCI6Ijw9OTYwIiwicGF0aCI6IlwvZlwvMDlmMzU1YmUtNjU3NC00ZjA5LThkODMtNzk2Y2EyODdmOTUxXC9kZHRoYmtsLTc4MjYzMDg3LTU1NWQtNDY3MC1iZTRlLTllYTUxZGRjNzZiYS5wbmciLCJ3aWR0aCI6Ijw9MTI4MCJ9XV0sImF1ZCI6WyJ1cm46c2VydmljZTppbWFnZS5vcGVyYXRpb25zIl19.v3bV3X0tT4Qd-deyLt1kUoCu1O6qVDhs7s1cGj01E0I" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="230" src="https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/09f355be-6574-4f09-8d83-796ca287f951/ddthbkl-78263087-555d-4670-be4e-9ea51ddc76ba.png/v1/fill/w_1280,h_960,q_80,strp/down_the_rabbit_hole_we_go___by_absolon_resonance_ddthbkl-fullview.jpg?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ1cm46YXBwOjdlMGQxODg5ODIyNjQzNzNhNWYwZDQxNWVhMGQyNmUwIiwiaXNzIjoidXJuOmFwcDo3ZTBkMTg4OTgyMjY0MzczYTVmMGQ0MTVlYTBkMjZlMCIsIm9iaiI6W1t7ImhlaWdodCI6Ijw9OTYwIiwicGF0aCI6IlwvZlwvMDlmMzU1YmUtNjU3NC00ZjA5LThkODMtNzk2Y2EyODdmOTUxXC9kZHRoYmtsLTc4MjYzMDg3LTU1NWQtNDY3MC1iZTRlLTllYTUxZGRjNzZiYS5wbmciLCJ3aWR0aCI6Ijw9MTI4MCJ9XV0sImF1ZCI6WyJ1cm46c2VydmljZTppbWFnZS5vcGVyYXRpb25zIl19.v3bV3X0tT4Qd-deyLt1kUoCu1O6qVDhs7s1cGj01E0I" width="306" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">So, in discussing the IG’s role in the Grusch
affair, I fear that I’ve started down this rabbit hole. But the only point I
want to make here is that first, we should be clear on to whom Grusch has
spoken, and about what exactly he has spoken to them. Second, we should
endeavor to clarify what evidentiary bar has to be met in order for the IG to
take action and actually investigate the specifics of the whistleblower’s
allegations. Third, we really need to know the nature of the process(es) of evaluation and investigation that the IG(s) involved is(are) conducting, or will conduct, and, perhaps more importantly, the principles guiding their Office</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">’s </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">assessment of the veracity of the allegations Grusch </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">qua</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> whistleblower has asserted (under oath).</span></div><div><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Presumably some one or more inspectors general have already been
compelled to undertake a formal investigation. But what is their criterion of
actionability? Is it enough for the IG to become convinced of the
whistleblower’s <i>general</i> credibility, based on the character testimony of
other (presumably credible) individuals of immediate relevance and importance
for the content of a whistleblower’s allegations? Or does the (office of the) IG
first do a preliminary assessment of the specific details of the allegations
made, contacting the named parties and/or visiting the specific sites
mentioned, in order to verify that, indeed, those sites exist, and that those
individuals do indeed have the information alleged? Does the IG only take
action when, for example, person X alleged by whistleblower W to have
information I, actually confirms I and X? But then, in what specifically would
that confirmation consist? Does the IG just confirm that X <i>says</i> that I
exists, or is the IG actually given access by X to the information (and all
relevant materials) W alleges X to possess, or to which X is or has been privy?
In other words, if the reader can forgive these abstractions,
we need a much better understanding of the exact process the IG (at least in
this particular case) undertakes in order to consider that, indeed, Grusch’s
allegations are, as Monheim is supposed to have remarked, both “credible and
urgent”. </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">As
</span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;"><a href="https://twitter.com/shellenberger/status/1666583141753192448?lang=en"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Michael Schellenberger
writes</span></a>, </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Monheim was supplied with the goods (documents, etc.) “as
the law allows”. But what does the IG </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">do</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> with those goods, once supplied
– does he take steps to independently verify what was supplied, and if so, </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">exactly
how does he do it</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Aside from these detailed questions, we can infer <i>something</i>
useful, I think: since the relevant inspectors general <i>did</i>, presumably, take
action, that means that they <i>did</i> become convinced that there’s something
here. What exactly it is that’s really here we can’t say because the evidence
that could justify offering anything more specific is locked down under layers
of classification. But what is clear is that <i>someone </i>is lying about <i>something</i>
that is being kept from congressional oversight and from the public eye but
which should be known (or at least knowable) by both. (In his recent talk at the SCU AAPC 2023, for which I will provide a review shortly, Bryan Bender made at least this much clear.)</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Will we in the general
public ever be made privy to the results of the investigation(s) conducted by the
relevant Offices of the Inspector General? I think so. I mean, we have to wonder who exactly <i>does</i> get the results of the investigations of a particular OIG, and what portion of it is made public? Well, for sure we know that the <a href="https://www.dni.gov/files/ICIG/Documents/Policy/Authorities/3033%20Inspector%20General%20of%20the%20Intelligence%20Community.pdf" target="_blank">OIG IC has to by law produce both classified and unclassified reports</a> twice-yearly (one by 30 Sept. and the other by 31 March) and that, since the IG of the Intelligence Community reports to the Director of National Intelligence (did you know that the DNI is IG IC</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">’</span><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">s boss?), it will be the DNI who first gets the report (<i>see</i> pp. 8ff, subsection (k) of the <a href="https://www.dni.gov/files/ICIG/Documents/Policy/Authorities/3033%20Inspector%20General%20of%20the%20Intelligence%20Community.pdf" target="_blank">policy document</a> posted at ODNI</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">’</span><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">s website). But then this report has to make its way to the Congress (specifically, the law mandates that the reports have about 30 days to be transmitted to the relevant congressional intelligence committees). So, at some point, the public should be able to gain access to some portion of the OIG</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">’s final report, at least the one going to Congress, and at least whatever of it isn</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">’t classified (the mosquito that keeps on biting)</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">. It could even end up in a report <a href="https://www.dodig.mil/Reports/Semiannual-Report-to-the-Congress/Article/2851738/semiannual-report-to-the-congress-april-1-2021-through-september-30-2021/" target="_blank">like this one</a>.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">These are the real questions and details we ought to
be worrying about at this point. And, again, will we be able to gain an insight
into just what process those working for the relevant inspectors general have
gone through in their investigations, so that </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">we</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> can make an informed
decision about the extent to which their work is both cogent and definitive?
Perhaps this is too much to ask from government officials and offices engaged
in the investigation of such sensitive information, material, and personnel.
But in the interest of real democratic transparency and the general openness
that is required for true knowledge and understanding, these are the sorts of questions
that must be posed, and to which we are owed clear answers.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Right. Good luck with that.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://scifglobal.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/40-SCIF-Container1.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="415" src="https://scifglobal.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/40-SCIF-Container1.jpg" width="554" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>This is what one type of SCIF actually looks like.</i></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><o:p><i>**Important update <b>17 August 2023</b>: apparently, we are indeed getting some results from the investigations the OIG (at least the DoD OIG) has had to conduct. Here is <a href="https://www.dodig.mil/reports.html/Article/3496071/evaluation-of-the-dods-actions-regarding-unidentified-anomalous-phenomena-dodig/" target="_blank">the announcement of their classified report</a>, to which we in the public of course do not have access, and a promise that the required </i>unclassified<i> one will be released forthwith. Let</i></o:p>’<i>s stay tuned, and not forget about the IC OIG: the most recent IG Office with which Mr. Grusch interacted...</i></span></p></div>Mike Cifonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16910256379002179502noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7235611048140260044.post-61036615326986872802023-07-14T05:20:00.001-07:002023-07-16T06:02:04.249-07:00Reenchantment of the World & The Romance of Transcendence: Archives of the Impossible II. Part Three.<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://s01.sgp1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/article/172773-brlqkcxxjj-1649427491.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="420" data-original-width="800" height="180" src="https://s01.sgp1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/article/172773-brlqkcxxjj-1649427491.jpg" width="344" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">T</span></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">he last day of the conference, which was Saturday the 13</span><sup style="font-family: Garamond, serif;">th</sup><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
of May, was for me a half-day of rest. I missed the first sessions in the
morning. I needed rest and recovery time. I’m sad, since the menu seemed
tantalizing, with talks on more </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">siddhis</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">, Halperin’s intriguing “The
Academy and the Impossible—A Tale of Two Bibles”, and the one I most wanted to
hear, Gregory Mamedov’s “Dialectical Notes on the Human: Marxism as the
Impossible, and the Impossible Through a Marxist Lens” (suitable dialectical
inversions duly noted). The crown jewel of that first part would have to have
been the plenary: Karin Meyers’ “Buddhism and the Impossible”. I was dismayed I
missed these, but in any case that’s water under the proverbial bridge.</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">What I did do was have an impromptu pre-lunch (which spilled
into lunch proper) chat with noted (but more skeptically-inclined) journalist
of matters UAP Keith Kloor, whom I’ve had the opportunity to get to know pretty
well (he’s interviewed me for a piece on academia and UAP he’s writing for <i>The
Chronicle of Higher Education</i>, due out soon I’m told). I seem to get along
rather well with Keith, even though I’m not as skeptical as he is (though, as
readers know, I <i>am </i>skeptical—of much of the speculative efflorescence
coming out of ufological quarters … it’s just that I’m <i>also</i> rather
skeptical of the skeptics, adopting a stance I like to call, somewhat
humorously, and complicatedly: <i>transcendental skepticism</i>). We talked
about how I see the UAP issue intersecting with mainstream academia, and how
there’s good cause for it to be woken up to the issue of how UAP ought to be
studied, if it is to become something about which we can claim a measure of <i>knowledge</i>—rather
than the academy acting in its traditional role as naysaying gatekeepers of
accepted knowledge. After all, as we’ve said in this blog over and over (and as
many others have pointed out), what needs to happen is that the embargo on
serious study of anomalous phenomena needs to be broken, and the conspiracist <i>haze</i>
that chokes off that serious treatment needs to be blown away by bringing to
bear the meta-theoretical acumen of real (which means <i>intrepidly rigorous</i>)
humanist academic scholarship, and disciplined empirical research on the
subject of UAP—and not dodging the <i>reality</i> question in favor of
convenient scholarly distanciation in which that reality is constantly
bracketed in favor of safer ontologies of reduction or criticism. Not that <i>some</i>
of this isn’t truly needed (as contrapuntal) as we pursue the “reality”
question … the <i>thing</i> itself. Participatory and engaged <i>dialogue</i>
is key here among these different standpoints: of the “being” v. the “meaning”
v. critical interrogation and so on (thus have I founded <i>The Society for UAP
Studies </i>to further this dialogical, which is also a deeply philosophical,
end).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">After the lunch—we had Greg Eghigian, Kevin Knuth, and others
at one point in a crowd at the table with Keith … quite a pick-up event!—we
gathered in the main auditorium for the final slate of “flash talks”, plenaries
and panels. Another, but final<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>romp
through <i>Impossibilia</i> for May 2023 at <i>Archives II</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Of the flash talks, which I generally didn’t like because of the
“flashiness” (I prefer depth, an hour or more of careful exposition, and the
tedium of focused questions-and-answers), I <i>really</i> liked Sharon Hewitt
Rawlette’s talk, entitled “The Impossible Efficacy of Intention? Psi as a Model
for Value-Based Holistic Causation”. It was a beautiful example of what can
happen when an analytically-trained philosopher turns their attention to
something <i>really</i> interesting but outside of accepted tradition … the
accepted <i>range</i> of phenomena of nature. Rawlette is a gifted thinker, and
(it seems) a really gifted writer. From my notes, it seems I gathered a few
precious gems of insight—those few I managed to scribble down, at least. Before
we get to the final panel (one focused on the art of <i>film </i>and the
impossible), and Jeff’s very existential closing remarks, let’s dwell for a
moment in Rawlette’s conceptual landscape of thinking the impossible into a
structured, coherent conceptual framework. It really helps organize our
thinking about these phenomena of the seeming “impossible”, even if it just
gives to us a sharper system by which to see <i>where we need to gain more
experience</i>, where we might focus our empirical concerns…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">R</span></span><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">awlette frames her analysis of the problem of “psi”
phenomena as one requiring the abandonment of “smallism” when it comes to mind
and cognition, in favor of an even more radical “holism” than is countenanced
in current academic discourse concerned with mind and cognition (when it is
considered at all). Smallism can be associated with another position on the
scope of the causal or productive efficacy of mind and cognition, called
“localism”. The former is a version of a position that is much more well known
in (philosophical) discourse on mind and cognition: <i>reductionism</i>. A
reductionist holds that the best way to understand some phenomena is to show
how (and that) they can be <i>reduced</i> to some other class of phenomena
which can be more readily explained, understood or otherwise analyzed. And so
it is to the <i>base</i> of the reduction (the phenomena to which the target of
explanation is reduced) that all the explanatory force is shifted. It is a very
general strategy. For example, one might argue that in order to understand what
tables, chairs, trees, or anything else is, one should simply reduce those
phenomena to their parts, and then seek to understand how the parts are
arranged, along with the forces that keep it all together (physical ‘forces’
being part of the reductionist base phenomena, which are primitives in the
sense that, at least for the purposes of the explanation, aren’t themselves
further reduced—a hint of a deeper issue with reductionism as an explanatory
method adhered to strictly: can there <i>be </i>primitives in any reductionist
explanation—so-called “unexplained explainers”? It’s a paradox of a more
general conceptual standpoint: that of hierarchical verticality. Thus am I
attracted to the radical immanence of someone like Spinoza: there can be only
one “primitive” in any system, and it has to somehow be <i>infinite</i> in
expression and implication, delimited and constrained only by the actuality of
nature itself, which supplies <i>content</i> to the form). This reductionist
analysis then yields a compositional analysis of the whole in terms of its
parts. And <i>voila</i>, you now have understood the phenomena as nothing but
their more basic constituents and how they are (structurally) arranged. That
particular arrangement might be further analyzed in terms of a structure of
natural principles or laws that <i>ensure</i> or establish the particular
structural arrangements that these things manifest: the arrangements might be
determined to be what they are as a matter of <i>natural law</i>. And those
laws are just a matter of the way nature itself operates—something discovered
only by way of an empirical investigation of nature herself. Things are what
they are because of the way <i>nature</i> is, and our scientific/empirical laws
or principles supply us with a knowledge of just that—how nature operates.
Indeed, Rawlette here refers to “organizing principles”. “Smallism” is just a
more restrictive version of reductionism, in that it insists that composite
wholes be explained or determined by an analysis of their <i>smallest</i>
parts.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8f/Digesting_Duck.jpg/800px-Digesting_Duck.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="796" data-original-width="800" height="350" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8f/Digesting_Duck.jpg/800px-Digesting_Duck.jpg" width="352" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Reductionism, and its more restrictive offspring </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">smallism</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">,
are both compatible with “localism” which says that the activity and behavior
of the whole is given only by an analysis of the </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">local</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> action of its
parts. The blowing off of the cork on my champaign bottle is a function of the
action of individual molecules of a gas released and expanding into the empty
spaces of the bottle, which molecules in turn press up against the cork; and
the cork—though held in place at the bottle’s opening by frictional forces
between the molecules of the cork itself and those making up the bottle—is
launched free by the force of the gas pressing up against the cork, which gas
manages eventually to overcome the frictional forces that had kept the cork in
place up until now. This whole picture, though, is framed by a very basic grasp
of the Newtonian analysis of nature, which remains a very intuitive picture of
how the world works (a picture, of course, we know to be false, though useful
up to a point). In this picture, the forceful ejection of the cork is explained
everywhere </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">locally</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> in a chain of forces going from the gas in the
bottle, to the cork: from A to B to C.</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Reductionism, smallism, and localism seemed to work well for
the physical processes investigated by the sciences—until the introduction of
the quantum theory, which seems to complicate if not entirely overturn this
picture. Some degree of “holism” would seem to be demanded by the phenomena
which the theory describes: for example, a so-called “entangled” quantum
mechanical state is one that cannot be analyzed in terms of independently describable
<i>local</i> states of the system. Indeed, an entangled quantum system—which we
might represent as (A+B)—<i>cannot</i> be given in terms the independent states
of the systems by the sum (A) + (B). An entangled state is not just the sum of
the individual parts of the system—the <i>act as a whole</i>, no matter how far
apart A is from B in space or time (indeed, until measurement, a quantum state seems
to evolve without regard for the restrictions a spacetime description imposes).
And that’s what makes quantum phenomena, and the resulting theory, so strange:
if I am going about measuring the system (A+B), well, I have to choose whether
I’m going to use the A or the B subsystem as the basis for making the
measurement, but as soon as I make that choice, and perform the measurement on
the system (A+B) using my chosen measurement basis, both A and B are <i>immediately
</i>affected (well, “affected” … it’s not clear if a <i>causal</i> action has
occurred; certainly a context of measurement has been concretely established,
but is a change in context a “causal” action? I think you can argue, surely
not.). For example, I can prepare two particles in an entangled state (A+B) and
send them off to different parts of the universe. A goes one way, and B goes
another (but even this description is somewhat wrong: I’ve “sent out” the whole
system (A+B) which, before my interacting with it in order to measure its
properties, is one whole “thing” … so I’m increasing the spatiotemporal range
of the whole, which can be arbitrarily large without affecting anything about
the entanglement itself … Schrödinger himself realized this as early as the 1930s,
and in a somewhat obscure paper described it as “steering” the system). When I
measure A, or B, it immediately affects (?) the other partner, no matter how
far apart they are in space (or in time)! It’s as if the particles are acting
“at a distance”. (And that was the worry, as Einstein was to put it: is this “spooky
action-at-a-distance”?) Or perhaps this just shows that the particles’
connection is insensitive to <i>spatiotemporal</i> separation—but then what are
space and time <i>for the particles</i>? Here’s where quantum phenomena heat up
to become real philosophical-conceptual mysteries… (I should note briefly that
one solution, at least conceptually, would be to eliminate a description in terms
of the actions on or within <i>fields</i> (obviating the mathematics of <i>continua</i>),
and opt instead for some direct, relational—and consequently finite—description
in terms of the direct action <i>between individual particles</i>. The physicist
Michael Ibison for example proposes to replace the calculus of fields with very
large but finite sums over all actual particle interactions. But this is a
side-note for the more technically-minded—not that I’ve done a very good job
for those technicians.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://d3i71xaburhd42.cloudfront.net/f72aff47d367cf7704b1126084317524c41e935e/2-Figure1-1.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="316" data-original-width="800" height="141" src="https://d3i71xaburhd42.cloudfront.net/f72aff47d367cf7704b1126084317524c41e935e/2-Figure1-1.png" width="356" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">So as if this isn’t bad enough for our attempts at
reductionism, smallism, or localism, now let’s add mind and cognition to the
mix. Reductionism <i>et al.</i> is meant to show that mind and cognition (and
human consciousness more generally) are just part of the physical world, and
can be reduced (somehow) to effects of purely physical, and local,
processes—presumably in the material brain. But this presupposes that mind and
human cognition are already tightly confined to just the matter of the brain.
What if their scope is wider than that? Indeed, what is the <i>extent</i> of
cognition, or of consciousness more generally? Here’s where the conceptual
dangers begin, for does <i>reductionism</i> act first as an <i>a priori</i>
demand—an imposition and <i>requirement</i> from nature—before one takes
account of the full extent of the phenomena of “mind”? Or, rather, does
reductionism act as a somewhat useful (because simplifying) methodological
procedure for <i>trying</i> to come up local, and “smallist” explanations of
the phenomena of nature—which might turn out to be false, or at least
incomplete (i.e., inadequate to the phenomena of “mind”)? Rawlette, of course,
proposes to take the <i>impossible </i>direction and relax if not entirely
surpass “smallism” and all its manifestations in favor of a radical holism
sufficiently rich to encompass more than just the default conventional
assumption that the phenomena of “mind” are tightly confined to one’s physical
brain.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">What, she asks, are the mind-based “organizing principles” of
nature? It’s a brilliantly <i>flipped</i> and impolite question which challenges
the “mater”-oriented “organizing principles” put forward by a science of nature
that had excluded the operations of mind from the beginning (going all the way
back to the then-somewhat-sensible distinction between “primary” and “secondary
qualities” … but that’s another story). What is fascinating about Rawlette’s
approach is that she argues that the unduly constrained matter-based organizing
principles in fact yield certain imprecisions or inaccuracies which <i>make
room for</i> a structure of mind-based organizing principles. Given these
imprecisions in the observed predictions from the matter-based principles, a
number of future states, she argues, are consistent with the past, and it is
this alternative range of possibilities (I suppose) that makes room for the
(nonlocal) operation of mind. Or at least this seems to by an hypothesis which,
given a suitably arranged experiment, ought to be susceptible to some empirical
study.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">The trick is that Rawlette wants to focus on <i>intentionality</i>:
the endogenous (as it were) <i>orientation</i> of thought on some aspect of the
external world <i>to which it is directed</i>. Ever since the phenomenologists
of the 19<sup>th</sup> century began to study the structure of our
subjectivity, it was noted that thought is directed—it has some orientation
which is efficacious: I see my cup of delicious cappuccino right before me, and
I direct myself towards it first (seemingly) in thought then in the world
outside of that thought. But this might not be the right example, because it is
already steeped in a world of local causation, and it would appear to get
caught in the Cartesian trap: is my thought (mind) “causing” my body (matter)
to <i>do</i> something? What is going on, exactly, at the moment of <i>initiation</i>,
as we pass from intention to physically efficacious action on the material of
the world? What is the place of mind (and its intentions) in a material world?
This leads us to the problem of mind and consciousness itself—and on towards
what David Chalmers decades ago dubbed “the hard problem” of consciousness.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">There is one solution, perhaps crude, to which, it would
seem, Rawlette is able to move. If we eliminate reductionism (and the
physicalism or materialism to which it is dogmatically aligned), we are left
with a structure of empirical correlations, given to us through our experience
of the world. We therefore can conceive of the relationship between “mind” and
“matter” as one of correlation: my intentions are correlated with the goings-on
of the “physical” world outside of them. Sometimes my intentions are tightly
correlated with those goings-on: usually, I managed to get the cup of
cappuccino ordered (in very bad Italian, French or slightly better German), and
to my mouth for drinking. But sometimes I don’t—something else intervenes and
breaks that correlation. If I then want to present some <i>scientific image</i>
of this situation (i.e., according to some set of “organizing principles”)
then, beginning from a rather neutral standpoint that preferences neither
“mind” nor “matter” (and hence which eschews reductionism, etc.), but which
starts from a characteristic set of <i>psycho-physical</i> correlations given
to us experientially, then we might say that we have two representation spaces
from which we may draw the correlations. We have the representation of a
structure of purely “physical” phenomena (call it system “A”), and we have one
corresponding to those purely “psychical” phenomena (call it system “B”). A and
B are correlated. But the predictions of the future states of A by means of a
purely physical set of “organizing principles” is only approximate, and there will
(perhaps always) be imprecisions; the real and its (theoretical) image (our
representations) <i>do not exactly coincide</i>. Likewise for B. But we
don’t—yet—have organizing principles which characterize B very precisely: they
would be purely psychical principles that yield a kind of “law of motion” for
the evolution of the states of B (i.e., those confined to “mind” in exact
parallel with those confined to “matter” for A).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">And that’s what Rawlette is looking for; with this, we might
then characterize the correlations between A and B. Immediately, however, we
can see that in this more metaphysically neutral space of conceptualization, we
can begin to introduce the more impossible—“paranormal”—aspects of mind-matter
relations into the picture. They could be characterized in terms of a coincidence
or correspondence between the states of evolution of a physical system (A) and
those of a psychical system (B). If we then relax the meta-theoretical
requirement that all substantial correlations be resolvable by some
reductionist model, i.e., by some structure of local/causal processes, then we
must “explain” the presence of these psycho-physical correlations by invoking
some non-causal—perhaps purely a-causal <i>structural</i>—principle (or
principles) which can be <i>abstracted from</i> these empirically-given
correlations. After all, reductionism is built on a kind of historical process
of abstraction from an arguably <i>a priori</i> constrained experiential
base—the Newtonian point of view. This, I think, is a more honest portrayal of
the search for organizing principles: allowing experience to guide; freedom
from dogmatic assumptions; description (of empirically given correlations);
abstraction and generalization; positing (of laws or “organizing principles”),
and a-causal or “structural” explanation: x explains y because x is an
empirically-discovered constraint (regularity or “law”?) on the activity of y.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">There is a lot of “noise” in the A and B systems, so finding
the correlations, if and when they exist, is nontrivial. But if there is to be
an “impossible” science of some kind (to which perhaps Rawlette is gesturing),
then perhaps this is the right direction. (My attempt at a description of it is
poor, I admit; rest assured that there are far more knowledgeable scholars
capable of providing a much clearer account of what I’m trying to get
at—Rawlette herself of course being one of them.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">The next speaker (Joel Gruber) was a kind of “now for
something completely different” moment: a strangely dogmatic ex-academic, fired
from his post—as he not-so-subtly informed the audience—because of his passion
for trying to <i>screw</i> with the students’ presumably conventional
attachments and psychodynamics. He really wanted them to have a “nondual
experience”. I suppose it was a kind of <i>flipped </i>classroom, with a twist:
a mysticism lab. Here was an evangelist of the impossible: Joel Gruber
preaching the gospel of “Manufacturing the Impossible: A Practice-Based
Approach to Instigating the Mystical Experience (Without Psychedelics)”.
Indeed, perhaps we ought to place the emphasis on <i>manufacturing</i>. It’s
the kind of thing I myself felt passionate about once-upon-a-time: o woe as me,
the conventional world, and their suffering minions of workaday
insensitivity—if only they be woken up by the power of the mystical! Perhaps I
operated with these illusions as I myself taught the great range of non-Western
philosophical-religious (or more properly “soteriological”) traditions. They
are such a breath of fresh air, given their intrinsic orientation towards some
kind of practice (though not without the foibles of experiential detachment—the
phenomenon of the “schools”. There’s plenty of <i>scholasticism</i> in the
Asian traditions!).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Rather than stay with the academic grind, Gruber founds his
own nonprofit (as ex-academic evangelists are wont to do): “New Gods: A
Mind-Expanding Community Integration of Heart, Spirit, Plant (!) and
Mind”—quite the combo (perhaps it has a better ring in Sanskrit?). He aims, it
would seem, to make the mystical <i>personal</i>, to “normalize” the
paranormal. Convention be damned. I suppose there’s always the wounded healer
thing in every crowd—or in this case, a wounded shaman of the nondual sort. For
someone so very radically and rabidly <i>anti-ego</i>, like someone who takes
pride in their humility, something rang false about the whole thing (except
perhaps their passionate <i>conviction</i>: there was no disputing that one).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">I can’t seem to recall anything useful from the final flash
talk of the event—Scarlett L. Heinbuch’s “A Lifetime Between Worlds: Love is
Key”—and perhaps it was because after the anti-ego egoism of the converted, I
had to get up, take refuge in the toilette, and find some coffee, Danish and
fresh air. Or something to feed my starving ego. I just can’t recall. But I
certainly made my way back to my seat for the last panel of the event on “The
Impossible and Film”. This is the one I was waiting that afternoon to see
(after of course being wonderfully surprised by the philosopher in the room,
whose thinking we covered, perhaps with undue obscurity, <i>supra</i>). On the
panel were filmmakers and producers whom I really didn’t know (but that’s not
saying very much, as I’m pretty ignorant of these things): Brad Abrahams, Josh
Boone, Stuart Davis and </span><a href="https://kevinlincoln.com/UFO"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Kevin
Lincoln</span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"> (the latter of whom was co-executive producer for the recent
Showtime UAP docuseries). I really seemed to click with Kevin in particular. For
the most part, the panelists recounted their various experiences involved in
the artistic side of the UAP/UFO experience, attempting to document or
dramatize what is essentially an impossible encounter—at least one so fleeting,
yet so often very disturbing, as to be impossible yet again: to actually <i>meaningfully</i>
document. One of the panelists has been involved in a multi-year project
attempting to document a kind of multiple abduction case, which, if I can
recall correctly now, began as an “ordinary” UAP sighting (a nocturnal light,
or something of the kind). This case wasn’t just the usual one, marked as they
tend to be, by either seriousness or trauma or both (though there was that,
too). Rather, what the filmmaker managed to capture was the humor the abductee
managed to find in it all: now an elderly gentleman, the abductee claims that
the encounter with the UAP being (a pilot it seemed) led eventually to his
first sexual experience. He lost his virginity, he tells us, laughingly, to an
extraterrestrial! (Of course, not all that uncommon in the abduction lit, to be
sure.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.hindustantimes.com/ht-img/img/2023/06/22/1600x900/ufo_1687436220020_1687436227914.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="800" height="228" src="https://www.hindustantimes.com/ht-img/img/2023/06/22/1600x900/ufo_1687436220020_1687436227914.jpg" width="406" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">I mean, this just raises the more general question of the
whole conference, doesn’t it? Or was it the </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">problem</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> of the whole event?
Experience, and experienc</span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">ers</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">. Lots of extraordinary, paranormal,
uncanny, absurd, or </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">impossible</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> events, occurrences, sightings,
encounters, feats, … </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">phenomena </i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">were claimed, asserted, stated, spoken
about, referenced, and finally theorized. What the Asian traditions have a leg
up on I think (if only by virtue of the sheer amount of time spend on the
problem) is the formalization of the process of </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">accessing</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> or </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">producing</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
these alleged realities: they frequently will provide a kind of spiritual
recipe for the reconstitution, recovery or creation of the key phenomena—often
acknowledged to be rare, or special, or unique or otherwise nonordinary but
real all the same. Many of these traditions acknowledge that in order for the
phenomena to be accepted, one must worry not only about the sources of
knowledge about and for them, but also the conditions for their ontological </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">and</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
epistemic possibility: none of the more extraordinary phenomena are given for
free, as it were. But to be sure, in the Asian (especially </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">south</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> Asian)
traditions, there isn’t the same problematic dichotomy of mind and
matter—indeed, in Buddhist scholastic discourse it’s taken for granted that the
mind is a kind of organ which “senses” material of its own (of a very “subtle”
sort). Thought (ideas) is (are) “sensed” by mind (“manas”); both are
democratically laid upon the same ontological plane, as it were (from Spinoza’s
point of view, this is what Descartes was up to, we might note in passing). So,
what in the Western tradition is ghettoized as “paranormal” is already in
principle a possibility given the absence of an </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">a priori</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> mind/matter
split: mind acts on matter, as much as matter affects mind (thought, emotion,
etc.). Mind never got banished from nature as an active force or power (to slip
into somewhat archaic terms). There are just special conditions of possibility
for the occurrence of these non-ordinary mind-matter/matter-mind conjunctions
(what we have previously called, following a recent tradition in Western
philosophy, </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">psychophysical correlations</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">), often involving (at least on
the </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">mind </i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">side of the equation) some inward practice (which is practice
in what we might call the recovery, instigation or stabilization of nonordinary—expansive—states
of experience, or awareness). I mean, that’s what I think is up.</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Well, perhaps I’ve distorted the actual situation. Maybe what’s
being said is that the existence or not of these <i>impossibilia</i> is more a
matter of perspective, some shift which reconfigures what is already there in a
new, more expansively revealing way. It’s not that the impossible has to be
created by instituting the requisite conditions of possibility—as if we can
conjure the <i>siddhi</i> out of the matter of the conventional sciences. On
this view, the impossible is obscured by a framework. Change the framework and
voila! I don’t know. If something like that is being said, it’s just not very
convincing. Frameworks are surely important—but are they <i>that </i>ontologically
important? Maybe. Then again, there is a sizeable literature allegedly
documenting the <i>impossibilia</i>. Hence, <i>Archives of the Impossible</i>…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://cdn-s-www.leprogres.fr/images/F467DF40-B3C8-4A48-BA32-D1C2F1D61EFA/NW_raw/photo-universal-studios-1660054136.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="359" data-original-width="800" height="163" src="https://cdn-s-www.leprogres.fr/images/F467DF40-B3C8-4A48-BA32-D1C2F1D61EFA/NW_raw/photo-universal-studios-1660054136.jpg" width="364" /></a></div><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">I</span></span><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"> did manage to ask a question to the final panel of
filmmakers and producers, and it touches on the issues I was just raising. At
least with UAP (and I guess also with the whole range of alleged <i>impossibilia</i>
under discussion during these two and a half days), nature is trying to teach
us <i>something</i> which we don’t already know. Yet, we come armed with
expectations, ideas, needs, desires, frameworks. A passion for seeing,
capturing, collecting, studying—all the armature of the sciences, of
scholarship. Yet what was the deeper lesson of a film like <i>Nope</i>—or even <i>2001:
A Space Odyssey</i>? The uncanny strikes at the core of our conceptual and
linguistic failings, hitting us exactly in our blind spot. Where the eye joins
nerve, and nerve brain, in this in-between space is where the uncanny resides.
It exists <i>outside</i> our systems of enchantment—that is, our ways of
appropriating nature, naming it, and reducing it to the field of the human (a
move of desperation of which we’ve lost sight of the origins). So finally it’s
not about enchanting or disenchanting nature; it’s just about finding the silence
to <i>listen</i> to her. Our systems of appropriation of the events of nature
are approximately good; but between the approximation and the thing(s)
approximated, there’s lots of room—Rawlette’s “imprecisions”. <i>There</i> is
where the new science resides, in the company of the uncanny, a host of
experiences perhaps waiting for engagement. So it may be about “perspective”
and the ontological implications (not only epistemological or conceptual) of
the shift from one framework to another (silencing or diverting from one system
of appropriation to one more adequate to what is lost in the noise of the imprecisions
of existing systems).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">I have to bring these reflections to a somewhat abrupt close,
as always, lest they meander further into the realm of the absurd (reproducing
the uncanniness with my prose, and distracting from the main event). There were
not a few talks I’d missed, or overlooked or just plain slept through (not in
the audience of course—I do take pride in my non-sleepy attentiveness).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">If the reader will allow me, I will append a coda to this
nomadic review, penned as I awaited my flight to Frankfurt, Germany, where I
continued my adventuring through the realms of ufology, UAP studies and all
things UAP…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Sitting at the large observing windows of the <i>Condor</i>
terminal, awaiting the boarding and final departure of my plane (it ended up
three hours late—ain’t I due compensation per EU laws?), I took up the reading
of a short text by one of those intellectuals whose work really transformed my
whole outlook on academia, and the world from which it sometimes escapes.
Morris Berman begins his <i>Eminent Post-Victorians </i>with a quote from the
great sociologist C. Wright Mills:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">In our time, what is at issue is
the very nature of man, the image we have of his limits and possibilities as
man. History is not yet done with its exploration of the limits and meanings of
‘human nature’.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">—it really comes down to this, doesn’t it? “The Archives of
the Impossible” presents at each instance an image of what is beyond accepted conceptual
or experiential boundaries; but it was the <i>human</i> that was the conduit,
bounded by “the possible” (frequently determined out of practical or material
desperation), but yet who is <i>thrown</i> into a condition of freedom, a void
where the human is suspended before the uncanny, which acts as a sign,
indicating a way through … or beyond. That seemed to be the general sentiment.
Kripal frames it as <i>super</i>-human(ities) … and yet when we stand at those
limits, we really first grasp what? What we have learned, through hard work
engaging with Nature beyond ourselves, has shown us what <i>is</i> possible.
But then we turn this into a <i>limit</i>: this here is possible, but no more.
This is where our knowledge becomes dogmatic, illegitimately generalizing into
a beyond which has not yet been grasped. What more is possible? The
“impossible” is empty, or tentative, momentary, uncertain. The possible is
certain, determinate; the impossible uncertain and indeterminate. So, what
really I worry about is not so much that the impossible becomes a kind of empty
signifier; but that there is a <i>dogmatism of the possible</i> in play which
says that: no, <i>here</i> is what is truly possible and that is beyond what
you think is possible, from you peculiar zone of understanding (the sciences,
etc.). But what determined this new possible as possible—beyond a report, a
claim, a sighting? That only gives us reason to explore, not to become
convinced of a new possible. Each possibility gives conditions under which the
possible may (or does) come into being. What are those precise conditions? This
is where the cult of the possible, adjoined to its negation: the cult of the
impossible—goes astray. For, not having a grasp on the determinate empirical
conditions of possibility (or not even supplying a new way of thinking those
conditions), what is left is but the <i>convenience of idealism</i>: a retreat
to the infinite malleability of ideas, of “mind”. What gives resistance is what
is non ideational. The uncanny starts <i>there</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">In a very beautiful, and appropriate, close to the whole event,
Jeff simply ended with, <i>well, I don’t have anything to end this conference
with, except thanks, and good night</i>. Or something to that (existential) effect.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Indeed, good night. Or good morning. (And thanks for
reading.)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://events.rice.edu/live/image/gid/77/width/600/height/600/crop/1/src_region/0,0,1500,840/7541_Archives_of_the_Impossible_graphic_image.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="600" height="302" src="https://events.rice.edu/live/image/gid/77/width/600/height/600/crop/1/src_region/0,0,1500,840/7541_Archives_of_the_Impossible_graphic_image.jpg" width="302" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span><p></p>Mike Cifonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16910256379002179502noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7235611048140260044.post-55398598907297459292023-06-29T03:30:00.006-07:002023-08-22T14:36:44.039-07:00Reenchantment of the World & The Romance of Transcendence: Archives of the Impossible II. Part Two.<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ-4BfQJ9U-jPbfGrnxYHHhVLO-28jGgwwY1A&usqp=CAU" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="183" data-original-width="275" height="183" src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ-4BfQJ9U-jPbfGrnxYHHhVLO-28jGgwwY1A&usqp=CAU" width="275" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">T</span></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">he great (perhaps under-read but notoriously difficult)
philosopher Gilles Deleuze once remarked that all truly great thinkers have
really only one thought, which becomes a kind of pathological obsession
throughout their lives, to which they return again and again. Because I am too
close to these issues, I cannot judge the greatness or not of Jeff Kripal; I’ll
leave that assessment to others (which in any case is not something appropriate
on which for me to opine). But there is an idea to which Jeff returns time and
again. Or it is an intellectual-spiritual movement from which his thinking has
emerged, and to which it constantly returns, like a comet entering and leaving
the firmament? I mean the human potential movement, yet one more subcurrent of
the 1960s Great Reaction against the conservativisms of modernity.</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">The 20<sup>th</sup> century grew up under the specter of
oppression, as it became clear in what ways “Progress” (that fateful moniker of
the age) was purchased, at what cost <i>advancement</i> was gained as humankind
was lifted from its <i>thrownness</i> in nature – an infant incapable of
extricating itself from its given conditions – to a position of self-reliance,
self-determination, <i>and self-creation</i>. Indeed, Nietzsche, the great
celebrant of human potential (as <i>Wille zur Macht</i>) dies in August of
1900, the year we see Freud’s publication of <i>Traumdeutung</i>, <i>The
Interpretation of Dreams</i>. Had the ironworks, and the factories that were
their home, producing from the raw materials of the earth new materials for
building the Modern World of steam, speed, and smoke … had they pressed down
upon Man and stifled his spirit? Was his being thereby lost, forgotten,
displaced, exorcised from the material world to the airy world of the
immaterial (what was that late 19<sup>th</sup> century fascination with the
spirit world, with its vain attempts to <i>materialize</i> it?) What was
‘spirit’ after all – not the abstraction of religion or theology (itself <i>already</i>
a kind of obscuration, according to Nietzsche, as body was forsaken for the
smoke of an immaterial ‘soul’), but that which is the temple of the body (to
invert Christ’s formula)? Both Nietzsche and Freud – and many others: Marx,
Durkheim, Weber, Simmel, … the grandchildren of the somewhat anxious
post-Enlightenment – looked askance at what was eventually called ‘modernity’
to see a high cost in this newfound ‘progress’. For Nietzsche, what replaces the
necessity for self-building in the (then-nascent) modern world is the blinking
a-hedonic indifference of <i>die letzte Mensch</i> (the “last men”), whose
needs are taken care of and who do not therefore have to build themselves into
something of solid, self-reliant standing (his thinking here quite dependent on
the American “transcendentalist” Emerson). For Freud the displaced, arrested
erotic fulfilment that comes from the imposition of the socially necessary
demands of the super-ego, curtailing pleasure in favor of what is practically
required by the modern system in order that it function (a kind of rational
irrationality): the erotic gets restrained, sublimated, leaving man frustrated,
anxious, <i>neurotic</i>. “We’ll get to that later, after work” is perhaps the
death rattle of <i>eros</i>…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Of late Kripal has taken to Nietzsche, a thinker who, he once
told me, he had sort of overlooked, able to see the radical philosopher only
through the distorting lens of academic summary or outline. It is to Nietzsche
that his concept of the super-humanities (perhaps somewhat obliquely) is ultimately
indebted: <i>Übermensch</i> could be translated (poorly) as super-man. But then
there’s Hollywood. And before that the Nazis, in their once-successful
appropriation of the Nietzschean philosophy of <i>Wille zur Macht</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Nietzsche surely believed in some kind of <i>potency</i> of
which human beings were capable but had not expressed (because of social,
cultural and conceptual repressions from without). But what are the conditions
of its realization? Does it require a <i>metaphysical</i> transcendence? What
is metaphysics (the greatest of the philosophical questions)? Does this require
a movement from materialism to something else, and in which case is the
transformation merely conceptual or intellectual – is it just about
‘paradigms’? Surely that wasn’t what Nietzsche meant at all. All this is
second-order; Nietzsche was first- or even zero-order: it was an unrealized
potency of the human body as a “body-spirit” – and that has nothing to do with
materialism or idealism, or any ‘ism’ the mind (as a “believer”) might adopt.
So perhaps we cannot appreciate the import of Nietzsche’s thought without the
kind of deflationary metaphysic of the so-called Existentialists, who tried to
refocus on doing and creating, rather than “thinking” <i>per se</i> (and yes,
this sets up a dichotomy about which we ought to be <i>very</i> cautious—if not
outright skeptical).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://daily.jstor.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/the_european_moneulith_nietzsche_and_nationalism_1050x700.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="533" data-original-width="800" height="241" src="https://daily.jstor.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/the_european_moneulith_nietzsche_and_nationalism_1050x700.jpg" width="362" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">If there is anything to what I like to call (somewhat tongue-in-cheek)
“mystical atheism” or “spiritual materialistic irreligion” then it’s found <i>here</i>,
in what Nietzsche called the “reevaluation” and later “transvaluation” of all values:
a spiritually treacherous but fruitful movement from ‘mind’ into the body (but
not ‘body’ <i>as opposed to the mind</i>). If there is any ‘transcendence’ in
Nietzsche’s concept of Übermensch, then it is one that is well within <i>this</i>
world. It is therefore anti-Platonic, anti-theological, non-metaphysical (in
the sense of isms like materialism, idealism, etc.). It is a kind of
“nomadology”, horizontal as opposed to vertical, “rhizomatic” as opposed to
“arborescent” if we want to borrow the terminology of Deleuze & Guattari’s <i>Thousand
Plateaus</i>. It seeks surfaces, and never sees depths under them (an
exuberance of the surface!). If there is an ‘unconscious’ then it is precisely
that which lives upon the surface(s) of the body (was this not the basic critique
of Deleuze and Guattari’s first text, <i>Anti-Oedipus</i>?). This is
non-transcendence. Nietzsche refers to “überwindung” or <i>overcoming</i> of
something in the world, in the body but never outside or “beyond” it. We can
imagine an echo of the Confucian admonition here: <i>leave the dead beyond to
take care of themselves</i>. What is beyond the body is death, so leave death
to death; take care of the body! This is more <i>zen</i> than <i>tantra</i> or <i>lama</i>.
It is the quietude of the morning doves with their squeaking wings in the
breeze, than the rapture of the yogi (Rajneesh-style).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">What, then, were we witness to during the <i>Archives of the
Impossible</i>, which cut no dissimulation by adding “transcendence” to one of
its <i>trans</i>-es? Surely, it was an example of this trend, slowing growing
since the dawn of the previous century, of – and what should it be called? – the
“Reenchantment of the World”, the self-conscious reversal of a structural
(perhaps sociological) fact discovered by Weber, which he called <i>die
Entzauberung der Welt</i> – the disenchantment of the world.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">But it was curious and remarkable that <i>Archives II</i>
began with two talks on the UFO phenomenon: an “outside” (historical) and
“inside” (religious-cultural) view of it. Because it is clear that the UFO
phenomenon itself (at least from an historical perspective) is caught up in a
larger socio-cultural and historical phenomenon; the Europeanist and Historian
Alexander Geppert calls it “astroculture”. And it is very much concerned with
transcendence – but of the off-worldly, rather than this- or other-worldly
kind. As such it makes striking contact with what Bruno Latour has noted is the
emergence of a new coordinate space of <i>sociopolitical possibilities</i>: the
Earth-bound (Gaia-centered) v. the off-world-bound (though we should note that
the gospel of transcendence, starting with the “space brothers” of Adamski –
gospel we find repeated frequently in contactee or abductee narratives – is
very much concerned to admonish human beings in their this-worldly
stupidities).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://cdn.britannica.com/59/59359-004-87081734.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="415" height="386" src="https://cdn.britannica.com/59/59359-004-87081734.jpg" width="356" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">A</span></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">s I try to bring my reflections on these </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Archives</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
talks to a close, I am embedded in Europe, the Old World that gave us so much
transcendence, which only yielded to the inner dynamical forces of expansion,
the </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">will-to-power</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> of human desire, conquest: the New World was a lateral
freedom, a migration of peoples in search of new land – which they happened to
then take from those human beings who already had found their place on the
surface of the world. Every now and then, the historical weight of the past
bears down upon you, and you become inward-focused, closed up upon yourself and
culturally you get buried within an onion of increasingly burdensome layers of
demand, tradition, </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">the reality principle</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> of necessary civilizational
duty, expectation, the “must” of daily life. You can’t breathe. But the surface
of the world, the lateral movement that is possible because of it, affords one
the possibility of what we might call </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">nomadic</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> emancipation, a
spirituality (and attendant politics) of movement; with this lateral movement,
which entails a </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">change of place</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">, is expiation, dissipation, rather than
that coil of oppression that emerges in the sedentism of civilizational life,
when a people puts down “roots” only to have a dense choking forest grow up
which occludes the sunlight and obscures the </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">way out</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">. The civilization
thing is a logic of placement, permanence, and therefore of the static (and
circularly repetitious) dynamics of </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">cultivation</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">. The Neolithic
Revolution was not just a sociopolitical one, but also a psycho-somatic
(mind-body) one, fostering an attachment to the land and geography, to </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">borders
</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">and </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">divisions</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> that became political, cultural, and finally </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">psychological</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">.
Was this the moment of </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">identity</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">? Of the formation of the reality
principle in relation to the physical and then psychological demands of </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">place</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">?
A pragmatic demand that gets transmogrified and ramified into the theological –
the eventual search for upwards (vertical) transcendence, the outward escape of
</span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">the gods</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">, the sky?</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">At our late stage of civilizational development, in which the
world is no longer the infinite expanse of possible nomadic, lateral wandering,
in which nowhere is enough of an escape, this logic of permanence of place necessarily
takes the <i>whole world</i> as that towards which nomadic liberation moves in
search of the freedom of the human spirit. Hence the logic of the <i>off-worlders</i>
Latour worries about: there’s no where to go except outer space (or inner space—and
we’ve had enough inner, haven’t we?). Is, then, the more profound confrontation
at work in the phenomenon of the “things seen in the sky” which presently is
caught up in the dynamics of an emergent religion of skyward transcendence (is
this finally the Pasulka thesis?), the incipient religion of the “space
brothers” (and sisters?) that form a significant sociocultural layer to the
historical phenomenon of our fascination with the UFO, … is this complicating
the attempt to reach into the empirical (non-mythic) core—the “real” that
fascinates even as its frightens, or deludes? Are we confronted, that is, by a
nomadic phenomenon intersecting our civilizations of place and permanence just
at the moment when the <i>surface</i> of our world becomes inhospitable,
increasingly uninhabitable—necessitating a Planet B?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Our only option, if we confront the reality of <i>Gaia</i> head-on
would seem to be total structural change (induced by a serious alteration in
our relationship with energy and matter, leaving behind our <i>Promethean</i>
impulses), or escape (leaving the miseries of our poor, desolating surface
behind). But why not a third option, the excluded middle: A return to the
oceans? Why not a submergence, descending <i>into</i> the world rather than
seeking an escape from it (off-world)? Is there more intimacy in the ocean, in
water, where light is lost and the body is afforded perhaps more development of
the somatosensory architecture of a diffuse, distributed “mind”? (The octopi
are creatures of extended mind, each portion of their bodies a kind of brain,
or a brain distributed over the surface of their bodies, the eye being perhaps
subservient to touch, smell, taste—or perhaps their senses are configured
without the rigid dominance of the visual which burdens many of the larger creatures
of the land.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Returning back to the mundane machinations of the UFO, we
wonder. With no framework for dealing with the uncanny, it is easy to get lost
in a sea of empirically unconstrained speculations. It’s this, I believe—the
lack of empirically constrained frameworks for capturing the uncanny—that
constitutes the foundational problem in UAP Studies, and in “ufology” more
specifically. And it is this that forms the major division in that subject—not
the vulgar distinction between “nuts-and-bolts” v. the “woo”. The former simply
tries to force the uncanny remainder of the UAP into existing but problematic
frameworks (or drops it entirely—falsifying much of the UFO experience in the
process), whereas the latter exit them all together. But <i>Archives II </i>offered
some academics the chance to try to bring the speculations to some kind of more
definite articulation, to situate the uncanny, the paranormal in something that
offers inner conceptual coherence, as strange (to us) as the core phenomena might
remain. But what are these phenomena of the uncanny—Kripal’s “impossible</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">”</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">? I am
suggesting that a mere framework is not enough </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">until</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> it is empirically
constrained, situated within the realm of nature. Or what Spinoza would have
called, perhaps, </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Deus sive Natura </i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">(i.e., “God, or Nature”). The “divine”
for him was an “infinite substance” which had an infinite array of expressions,
a plurality that would only be more consistently thought by William James
centuries later but which still yet remains external to the empirical
disciplines, and whose formal implications have yet to be rigorously developed
and deployed for the purposes of surpassing (and finally overcoming) the matter/mind
break complicating and debilitating the sciences (at least in their function of
providing explanation and understanding. I say this, but of course there is a
rich tradition of making an attempt to elevate these reflections beyond mere
critique, to achieve a new (empirical) logic of the specific that is </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">neutral</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
with respect to the persistent division of matter and mind. We might refer here
to the rigorous work of Harald Atmanspacher, for one example with which I am
familiar. It is this kind of work that can obviate the slide towards </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">idealism</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
that could be detected amongst many of the academics (and other speakers) at </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Archives
II</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">. (I will have occasion later in this review to revisit this issue, and
to submit my own response which was prompted by some of my colleagues’
interventions in a discussion I had recently with them.)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">I am writing these reflections in the wake of the increasingly
confusing, titillating, frustrating and ultimately epistemically indeterminate
“disclosures” of the apparently high-level whistleblower, David Grusch. As the
world already knows, Grusch ostensibly spilled the disclosure beans in a
bombshell article for the Debrief, penned by the Kean/Blumenthal team that had
exploded the subject (of government investigating UFOs) in 2017 in a well-known
article for the <i>New York Times</i>. Overnight, we were thrust into a miasma
of hearsay, the he-said, she-said of the typical Elizondo-style insider who
insists on (and in this case purports to <i>disclose</i>, in detail only to
Congress and its Inspector General) the existence of highly secretive,
ultimately classified (and compartmented) data and information indicating the
U.S. government’s possession of “nonhuman technology” (fragments or “intact
craft”), even (it would seem) bodies of nonhuman creatures who piloted some of
these technologies. We’re told of long-standing “reverse engineering” programs,
intentional downing of some UAP, and even malevolent interactions between human
military officers and nonhuman intelligence in which the officers were either
harmed or killed in the process. And as with much of these insiders, the drift
towards speculative hypotheses is irresistible, as if these “disclosures” are
not enough on their own. In his interview with Ross Coulthart, and as recounted
in a recent article for the French news website <i>Le Parisien</i>,<i> </i>Grusch,
who admits he has no first-hand knowledge of the material evidence he says exists
(he claims access to reports and the testimony of others), opines that the
objects/craft “could be extraterrestrial” or “something else, from other
dimensions as described by quantum mechanics”—quite despite the fact that
quantum mechanics neither requires nor deals with “other dimensions”. Maybe
he’s thinking of a particularly controversial <i>interpretation</i> of the
theory which posits the existence of parallel and constantly-forking branches
of the wavefunction describing the evolution of the whole universe? (But in
this case, descriptions of processes in space and time—with three spatial
dimensions, plus the one for time—evolve in a higher-dimensional state space
which must be projected into our ordinary spacetime. But <i>these</i> higher
dimensions are just facts about the representation space, not about the world
itself, which does just fine with four dimensions.) He claims to have “graduated
in physics” but offers only a stilted articulation of quantum theory (which in
any case is somewhat interpretationally confused), so it’s hard to form of
judgment here. (The landscape of interpretation of quantum theory requires a <i>much</i>
longer discussion to be sure as there’s lots of controversy and disagreement
among scholars—so it’s best tabled for the moment.) What I suppose this
demonstrates is that the uncanny is an occasion for the derailment of thought,
and in the current context of “disclosure” is just radically unhelpful. Even if
we could accept the disclosures of Grusch, given that our understanding of the best
physical theories we have—the gravitational/spacetime theory of Einstein, and
the quantum theory of matter—is at best tenuous, especially if we try to
coherently <i>relate</i> the former to the latter, whatever the government does
possess is likely to be strikingly incomprehensible. Surely not understood to
the point where it makes much contact with physics (or science) as we know it.
If even the known physics we have is either incomplete or inadequately
understood, then surely our understanding will be even <i>worse</i> if, as
Grusch alleges is the case, we were to come into the possession of nonhuman
technology capable of engaging in the kinds of kinematic acrobatics we have
evidence for in some of the more well-documented UAP cases on record. We
therefore must leave these allegations, as arresting as they are, alone. At
least for the moment…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.newsnationnow.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/108/2023/06/download-1.png?w=1280" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="800" height="199" src="https://www.newsnationnow.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/108/2023/06/download-1.png?w=1280" width="354" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">If I struggle with the kinds of allegations Grusch wants the
public to accept about what the government does (and likely </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">doesn’t</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">)
know about UFOs (which in any case are far from new, as many who know
ufological history well know—just read Thomas Bullard’s </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">The Myth and Mystery
of UFOs</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">, pp. 83ff for example) then I find it harder to deal with the range
of the “impossible” that had been spread before the audience during the final
two days of </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Archives II</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">. I mean, advanced nonhuman tech, downed craft
(meaning, pilotable vehicular somethings), fragments of UAP, biological forms,
bodies—it all easily crashes into a </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">known </i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">which we can immediately
confront with the resources of current scientific understanding. And if any of
this is real (without complicating ‘real’ as might well try to—but why might
we?), then a simple principle of modal logic would guide us in our researches: </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">actuality
implies possibility</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">, meaning simply (and perhaps quite naively—but then,
mustn’t science </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">start</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> with the naïve?) that whatever the objects (and
beings) are capable of doing, if we interact with them and they are part of our
</span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">lebenswelt</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">, then there exists some suitably expanded set of natural
principles by which these (technological) objects and these beings who created
them have come to be. Unless the entire thought of the ‘technological’ and of
the story of ‘coming into being’ in the explanatory sense of science, drawing
on the concept of a </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">principle of nature</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">, is entirely mistaken. But if it
is, then we can only begin to exit our mistaken frameworks through a
determinate </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">confrontation</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> with a specific structure of nature which
teaches us otherwise. We must therefore listen to what the phenomena could
teach us. But </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">what</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> are the phenomena? Allegations do not a truth make.</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">In contrast, the range of the impossible under consideration
at <i>Archives II</i>, from Day 2 to 3, draws on conceptual (and experiential)
worlds that would seem to be incompatible with modern science. <i>Seem</i>—but
wherefore the incompatibility? The stock answer to this simple question (I
mean, does vocalization enable the crystallization of material forms, as we
considered in Prof. Biernacki’s walk through the philosophical intricacies of
Indian <i>mantra</i> soteriology?) is something about the “materialism” of
science, about its exclusion of mind from the material world. But what if we
imposed, out of democratic concern for cognitive balance, a principle of
critical symmetry: if science might not grasp the non-materialistic
possibilities of reality because of its materialistic biases, then shouldn’t we
say that (equally) the Vedic or Buddhist philosophies of India might not grasp
the detailed structure of (material) nature because of its bias towards the concerns
of spiritual salvation (these traditions are, after all, structured by a logic
of <i>soteriology</i>)? And if these non-scientific soteriological traditions
have approached nature through only the lens of “moksha” (or nirvana—the
soteriological or salvific end goal, the structuring <i>telos</i> of these
traditions, which we might call <i>liberation</i>), then haven’t they in effect
<i>distorted</i> or even <i>complicated</i> the structure of nature (which we
might seek to <i>free</i> of such narrow concerns). We might say (that is) that
because science has inadequately incorporated the dimension of mind into its
conceptual architecture, <i>then matter is also distorted in the process</i>.
Yet, by our principle of critical symmetry, we say that because of the
soteriological orientation of these traditions, <i>mind has itself been
distorted because matter is inadequately grasped and assimilated by them</i>.
If “materialistic” science doesn’t have the complete picture, well then neither
do the “idealistic” (soteriological) systems of the Indian traditions. If matter,
then, is only partially grasped well by science (with mind awkwardly dangling
as an outlier), mind is, too, only partially grasped well by these
philosophically sophisticated soteriologies of India (with matter dangling as
an outlier, an adjunct to something “higher”). As we criticize science for its
materialism, we risk failing to perceive the shortcomings of those idealistic traditions
which seem to provide a more subtle accounting of mind, but which (perhaps
because of this) fail to perceive the factual structure of matter itself.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Biernacki spoke of a “sun” science, defined in terms of a
capacity to materialize an object from the vocalization of sounds (<i>mantra</i>
is the art of, as it were, spiritually efficacious vocalizations—that is, those
with a liberating power). Apparently, it has something to do with one’s “will”.
But the secret to this power rests with a more general principle which (like in
the Western Hermetic and alchemical traditions) has it that “everything is of
the nature of everything else”. Mantric sounds are the drawing forth, then, of
what is already implicitly present in anything. Not a creation so much as a
transformation of one form into another—because the latter is already found in
the former. This calls to mind the (perhaps obscure) debate in the ancient
Samkya-Yoga tradition (considered one of the orthodox Vedic “darshana” or
philosophical-visionary <i>schools</i>) of whether, when something comes into
being, it was already preexistent in the cause(s) implicated in the process—or
if it is new (i.e., not itself found already there in the cause(s)). A little
paradox ensues, it would seem, if something is truly new; so, we seem to have
to fall back on the view that anything new is just a kind of modification of
what already exists (if something is absolutely new, how could it have come
into being at all—from nothing?). So, we end up with a kind of holographic
principle where, at least theoretically, everything has the nature of anything
else—from one thing to another is just a series of modifications from the one
to the (different) other.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://kajabi-storefronts-production.kajabi-cdn.com/kajabi-storefronts-production/blogs/10459/images/zoK7Kws5QFmm0gtv4Qdu_BM_N418747002_faded.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="800" height="219" src="https://kajabi-storefronts-production.kajabi-cdn.com/kajabi-storefronts-production/blogs/10459/images/zoK7Kws5QFmm0gtv4Qdu_BM_N418747002_faded.png" width="389" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">From one point of view, this seems too cheap: if this
principle articulates a fundamental fact about reality, then of course sound
can materialize into anything and the “sun” science is possible: just because,
whatever else sound is, it will have the nature of whatever the “will” behind
it wants to call forth: “everything is of the nature of everything else”). But
from another point of view, which is </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">too restrictive</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">, getting from sound
to solid forms seems, well, formidable. And in any case, it wouldn’t be a
material process of derivation of the one from the other, in any sense that
science would recognize. What is interesting, of course, is that there appears
to be an </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">empirical</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> basis for this kind of a view: phenomena like the </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">lingam</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
and other other manifestational “siddhi” accepted in many </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">yoga</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
traditions are visible, tangible—in principle. Like so-called “physical
mediumship” it is something one can see, feel, hear and even touch. Again, in
principle. Is science not able to perceive these because of its materialist
biases? That seems a silly position to take. So why hasn’t or can’t science
access it—why aren’t these phenomena accepted aspects of the experiential world
which science engages? If these are phenomena allowable by nature (somehow), it
should be at least present as a seemingly “impossible” occurrence able to be
witnessed—and that’s what’s claimed in both the historical literature (the
philosophical and spiritual texts) and in current practices. But witnessing, as
we know especially in ufology, is not nearly enough. It must be reproducible in
some way. The yoga traditions do propose to offer a kind of program for the
production of these things—so there’s a method. Then what? It’s a simple
question of intersubjective accessibility: If such extraordinary siddhi are
available, even under certain conditions, what are those conditions such that
it can be made manifest even to “Western” science? Surely physical
manifestations or extraordinary transformations ought to be—if nothing
else—phenomenologically accessible to anyone, including scientists. And that’s what
I want to see.</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">As the reader no doubt can detect, the above reflections in
connection with yogic siddhi are a real struggle for me. And I don’t propose to
make pronouncements here as if I’m an expert. I just am genuinely wanting to
know, to experience, to see, and to think these phenomena properly. If the are
“secrets” of the “inner tradition” or somesuch, then it’s not clear to me that
“materialism” is the real problem, for the deeper structural logic of “Western
materialist science” is democratic openness and replicable transparency of
experimental demonstration: nature isn’t so greedy as to keep her secrets locked
behind all-too-human systems of esotericism. Science is fundamentally
exoteric—and to repeat this has nothing to do with “materialism”. So, the
ball’s in the court of the impossibles…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">The danger now is that I’ve gotten distracted, and the review
is falling by the wayside. But let’s press on.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Somehow, I really liked the talk by Dale Allison, entitled
“Comparing Like With Like: The Impossible Jesus and Impossible Others”. He
offered what appeared to be a kind of empiricism of the uncanny, attempting to
suspend judgment about what was gotten through testimony regarding the
miraculous acts of Jesus, as if trying to perceive a moment prior to the
historical accretions of the subsequent metaphysical-theological shroud put
over the face of Christ. But the next talk was another story.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">We come to the Rey Hernandez phenomenon, a
cognitive-intellectual disaster zone all unto itself. Talk about a holographic
principle at work: he embodies <i>every </i>fraught aspect of ufology. I mean,
it’s all there: narcissistic egoism; self-selling; the “experiencer” and “contactee”
thing; dubious “studies” that prove this or that; hob-nobbing and name-dropping
the greats. Oh, and then there’s the song-and-dance we’re given about why he <i>doesn’t</i>
have his Ph.D. but <i>almost </i>did. And so, he actually went through the
trouble of listing himself as an <i>almost</i>-doctor-of-something on his first
slide, before, in the talk itself, we were bombarded with a
hundreds-of-pages-long text he’s written (or produced, or whatever it was that
caused it to exist). This is the person who typifies exactly the kind of person
you <i>never, ever </i>want to invite to an actual conference. I just don’t
know why this guy was given the podium—especially with so many actual scholars
and intellectuals who graced us with their presence (Kripal himself, Eghigian,
Finley, Biernacki, the medievalist Barbara Newman, Classical Chinese scholar
Michael Lackner, Sharon Rawlette, and so on).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Best I could tell, Hernandez was there to essentially <i>sell</i>
the audience first on his own importance and books, second on the brilliance
and significance of this “FREE” study of which he was a part, the one that
boasts a few thousand respondents claiming experiencer status of some sort or
other and purporting to reveal something significant about the character of
their experiences. In other words, all we have is a survey, and a dubious
generalization to some relevant population—CE3- & CE4-ers. The study as far
as I know was published in the <i>JSE</i>. It’s trying to provide some
seemingly empirical basis for this claim that drifts around the ufological community
that the UFO experience is <i>positively transformative</i>—something like what
we might call the Mack thesis. But since we have to independent access to these
phenomena which are supposed to be the object-cause of the experiences the
“experiencers” are having, we really cannot tell if these purported
transformations are intrinsically related to the UAP supposedly associated with
them, or whether we can attribute the transformations to the experiencers
themselves—or just to the general psychology of <i>shock</i>. Yes, UAP can be
shocking—and John E. Mack wanted to impute to it something more: “ontological
shock”, a disturbance to your fundamental orientation in the world as a whole.
The idea, I guess, is that closer contact with UAP (and then with beings in
association with them) rips open one’s seemingly narrow ontological-epistemic
field of understanding, and discloses a kind of reality that upends everything
one knows—or thought they knew. That, at any rate, seems to be the narrative.
Again, there’s lots to be dubious about and as I’ve said again and again, this
doubt <i>has nothing to do with “materialism”</i>. It’s just basic critical
thinking: if we have no independent access to or understanding of UAP (or any
beings associated with them), then how can we really understand the significance
of what a certain segment of “experiencers” of these phenomena report to us? (And
to add to the difficulty, which doesn’t begin with Mack but is certainly
extended by him: are we <i>also</i> being told that no “materialist” scientists
will be able to access these phenomena? Or that their failure to see or grasp is
a function of their incompatible worldview? That these phenomena are not even
susceptible to conventional scientific <i>detection</i>? Are these phenomena
not detectable because the scientists have a certain worldview, or do the
scientists have a certain worldview <i>because these phenomena aren’t
detectable</i>? It’s a thorny problem, but let’s not forget that the sciences
are starting to bring their frameworks to bear on the problems here, and we
must wait and see the extent to which they will or won’t fall, change or
modulate in the process…)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">For the rest of Friday, we were privy to talks by Colm
Kelleher, of <i>Skinwalkers at the Pentagon </i>fame doing his “from werewolves
and poltergeist hitchhikers to UAP” thing (hey, maybe it’s all there in all
those NIDS/AAWSAP docs, but there’s a simple question, as with the Grusch
allegations: <i>where’s the beef</i>?); German professor of Classical Chinese
Thought Michal Lackner talking about “Divination: An Alternative Rationality”;
and longtime adjunct professor Kenny Paul Smith presenting on his enacting of the
ground-level duty of actually trying to teach undergraduates about all of this
uncanniness that’s out there. The absolute highlight of the day, of course, was
twofold—both presentations of which ended up being rather <i>intensely</i>
personal and emotional.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">First, we had the recollections of famed medievalist Barbara
Newman, who for some years was a kind of spiritual companion to a working
mystic, a woman who had this strangely torturous living synchronicity with a
man who’d died but with whom she’d had some kind of relationship. The talk was
made all the more profound because of the earnestness and eloquence of Newman’s
telling of her encounters, which ended with the mystic’s suicide. Very much
present, authentic. The talk was called “‘To Slip Between Dimensions’: A Tale
of Glory and Tragedy”.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Newman’s emotional portrait of her spiritual companionship
took the afternoon plenary slot of the day. It was an immensely eloquent,
sensitive, and learned exploration of a companionship with someone, whom she describes
as a ‘mystic’, operating within a rather different
intellectual-emotional-spiritual landscape. One populated with seemingly
impossible, or at any rate uncanny, nonlocal connections. As Newman recounts,
it was as if the two were acting as “one in another”, bound across space (and
time). Explicating this more exactly, Newman invoked the theological-philosophical
concept of “coinherence”, an idea usually associated with the particular ontological
situation of the Christian “Trinity”. That’s the “three gods in one” idea that
emerged at some point a few hundred years after Christianity arises as a major
religion in the Greco-Roman world. (Scholarship is, if I recall correctly,
fairly clear that in the earliest days, Christ wasn’t really seen as (a) god,
but perhaps as a special appointee of the divine (hence “christos” or <i>the
anointed one</i>) … but eventually <i>so </i>special that, given the ministry
and “signs and wonders” disclosed during and within Jesus’ life, acquired the
interpretation of being <i>the</i> “son” of God, now a “Father” … and hence, we
have a metaphysical <i>procession</i>: out of God the Father follows the Son
(Jesus), and between them the Holy Spirit is manifest as their completeness, this
triune totality manifesting a relation of <i>coinherence</i> with respect to each
of the parts: they exist together with each other, never fully separate or
distinct such that their identities are maintained without erasure, but
nonetheless still maintaining some identity. Perhaps we have a case of <i>identity
in difference</i>. And what’s interesting is that in Christian Theology, it’s
the differences that are stressed, at least in terms of its strong <i>devotionalism</i>
(which, from a comparative perspective, isn’t unlike the popular <i>bhakti yoga</i>
tradition found in the Indian religious landscape—a yoga that has a
corresponding sophisticated philosophical expression). In many ways, this
wasn’t a talk just about one mystic, bearing a relation of <i>coinherence</i>
to her spiritual second. “The human is two,” as Jeff Kripal himself recently
explained in a piece for the journal <i>Mind and Matter</i>, at one point
Newman invokes the African concept of “Obuntu” which expresses the thought that
the individual, the “I”, is really always produced <i>out of </i>the many: “we
are,” Newman paraphrased, “therefore I am”—thus inverting the Cartesian
analysis. So, this talk seemed to suggest an <i>impossible</i> direction in the
very concept, and performance of, human identity. Was this, again, pointed in
the direction of Kripal’s “super-human”? That would seem to be thematically
consistent, as this is the central theme of his current trilogy on the
subject—and he <i>is</i> the conference organizer after all…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">A kind of secondary plenary for the later afternoon session was
given in the form of a panel during which we found an equally emotional
presentation by the John E. Mack Institute’s current (and longtime) Executive Director,
Karin Austin (whom I know very well. Indeed, I consider a Karin a friend—one
who knows and respects where I stand <i>vis-a-vie</i> abductions, ontological
transformations, colliding worldviews and the like). It was partly the story of
Karin’s deep personal connection with Mack, where at some point in the ‘90s she
became Mack’s personal assistant, co-residing with him until his sudden and
tragic death in 2004. Karin tells the heart-wrenching story of driving John (as
she of course called him) to the Boston airport, being the last person he would
see from the U.S. It was a bit of a rushed goodbye, she tells us, struggling to
hold back the tears. She leaves us with the image of the back of John’s tweed
coat as he rushes off to catch his flight to London, where, in the suburbs, his
life would tragically come to an end: a drunk driver strikes him as he crosses
a darkened street one evening (Mack’s family would later plead clemency for the
man).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">The other part of the story, immediately relevant to the very
<i>raison d’être</i> of the whole of <i>Archive</i>, was Karin and Co.’s
monumental effort to convert Mack’s voluminous personal archives of client
case-files (the bulk of which are from his working with abductees and other
“experiencers”), notes, manuscripts (some left abandoned as Mack unexpectedly departed
for Elysian fields), and other sundry written or collected materials into
digital form (where possible—some material is physical, not informational or
documentary). There were a few hundred banker boxes filled to bursting. The
original project began, Karin notes, with team members somewhat naively
thinking it could be dispatched in a few short months. That was a LOL moment. After
the first few days, we’re told in wonderfully humorous, affable turns of
phrase, Karin realized that there was one important physical reality that had
been overlooked in the way that all novices forget the mundane tedium of the
master’s actual craft (as opposed to the magical final product that
mysteriously obscures the nitty-gritty of material production—how exactly did
Marx put it in <i>Kapital</i>?). Oh, no shit: the staples! Each one has to be <i>carefully</i>
dislocated from the paper which it greedily clasps, originally for practical
organizational purposes but which now, decades later, is a nuisance to the
process of digital conversion. Each metal fastener, sometimes perhaps rusted
slightly with age, is a mortal threat to the integrity of the paper into which
it was long ago set in a brief but violent act of practical necessity. And the
staple considerably slows the process down. A few short months expands to,
perhaps, <i>years</i> of careful, tedious effort. Karin and her team managed to
do a few dozen boxes before it was negotiated that the whole lot would be
packed in Boston into a large U-Haul, whereupon through the ice and cold of New
England it would be driven to the balmy hot environs of the Gulf of Mexico, to
Houston Texas, unloaded and delivered to the careful curatorship of Rice
University’s Woodson Research Center.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">From Karin’s beautiful essay on the joys of digitization,
we’re delivered to the staid eloquence of the Center’s master director, Amanda
Focke, joined by Anna L. Shparberg, the earnest-seeming and very devoted
Humanities Librarian at Rice. It is under their care that the extensive Mack
Archives will remain for the next few years as this digitization project
(Digital Humanities, anyone?) is brought to completion. So, it seems that there
will be some time before the general scholarly community will have access to
these rich and likely rewarding archives (which, Greg Eghigian tells me, he’ll
be making use of as he turns his attention towards the whole <i>contactee</i>
phenomenon that has paralleled the UFO story).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:384/0*fU3O3DenlF_7ohpn." style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="512" data-original-width="384" height="312" src="https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:384/0*fU3O3DenlF_7ohpn." width="234" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">I seemed to have become fuzzy on whether I attended the final
(!) plenary talk of the day, delivered by Charles M. Stang—oh now I recall what
happened: after the emotional intensity of Austin’s account of her professional
and personal relationship with Mack, and the process of getting his archival
material over to Rice’s Woodson Center (Harvard was of course approached about
it, but they first actually declined, then later agreed but with heavy
conditions wanting to be placed on it—to which JEMI said, “ah, peace out”), I
was wiped. I headed over to the great old tobacco shop there near the Uni
campus, and I enjoyed a pipe in anticipation of the dinner hour. That night we
gathered in a nice restaurant for libations and a nice meal. Profs. Finley,
Eghigian, Knuth, and I met up with other speakers and guests, including Karin
and some of the Mack Archives Team. It was great fun, and great intellectual
camaraderie—despite some of our differences in approach and epistemic
disposition towards the phenomena under discussion at </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Archives</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">. But that’s
the point, right? We should have no misgivings, no fear of reputational demise
or reproach because of our intellectual curiosity or (gasp!) engagement with the
“impossible”. To the intellectual, if not to the authentic </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">academic</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">,
absolutely nothing is off limits—or (of course) beyond reproach. But critique
must be done from a place of loving concern for </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">truth</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> (was this not the
sentiment of Deleuze?). What is radical is our commitment to exploration, to
the deeper roots of the very </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">educative </i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">act itself: the holding open of
the mind to truth, to what Nature can disclose to the mind quieted of both
judgmental dogmas or fanciful speculation. If only we can listen to Nature,
beyond the “possible”—which just reflects what we </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">conceive </i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">to be actual
within the constraints of a faculty of reason governed by the forces of
tradition and intuitive expectation. Can we not see that, from another
standpoint altogether—that of experience of Nature, an encounter with Nature as
always </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">already</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> “alien” to our transitory conceptual designs—we are
called to freedom, from our condition of perpetual “tutelage”? Can we not make
room for </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">another</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> articulation of that mighty event of rational autonomy
which Kant would understand as the ground of the </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Aufklärung</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> flowing from
the new vigor of the experimentalism which joined with that </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">natural
philosophy</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> of the mathematical scientists?</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">With this I will delay to a separate, final post what of the
last day of <i>Archives II</i> I was able to attend and therefore review. I do
this also because I have no doubt tired the reader beyond what is reasonable
(if to tire the reader <i>is </i>reasonable), possibly myself having gotten
lost in a thick field, laden with weeds, of the possible and the impossible,
the dense forest of ideas, facts, of minds and bodies. Let us therefore rest
for a moment, and take up these reflections again soon.<o:p></o:p></span></p>Mike Cifonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16910256379002179502noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7235611048140260044.post-40315933866216238442023-05-26T12:34:00.026-07:002023-06-29T03:15:06.627-07:00Possible & Impossible: On the Second Edition of Archives of the Impossible. Part One.<p><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">O</span></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">ver two-and-a-half days on the beautiful campus of Rice
University, just near downtown Houston, Texas, I attended iteration no. 2 of
Jeff Kripal’s international conference centered on not exactly the </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Archives</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
itself, but rather the </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">idea</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> from which this very physical collection of
tens of thousands of documents has arisen. There was indeed, a deep-dive into
the archives—the story of one, rather major (we might say monumental) addition
to this ever-growing expanse of documentation of the seemingly “impossible”
(more on that collection later)—but the bulk of the conference was devoted to
working out the stated subtitle of Year Two of what is perhaps fast-becoming an
academic phenomenon all on its own: “Transnationalism, Transdisciplinarity,
Transcendence”. Lots of </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">trans</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">—gression, was perhaps the thought…</span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fuqgf6oWcAEPsx6.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="722" height="254" src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fuqgf6oWcAEPsx6.jpg" width="229" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">As with any conference or symposium (like with my own), the
stated theme is one thing; how it actually unfolds within the content of the
presentations and discussions themselves is quite another. But, on balance I
think that the conference did manage to say on-theme. Except, perhaps, in the
very first talk that kicked off the event—one given by the eloquent historian
of (medical) science, and now historian of ufology and the very human
fascination with UFOs, Greg Eghigian of Penn State University. I’ll get back to
Greg’s excellent (if interestingly </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">incomplete</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">) presentation in a moment.</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">This first talk was followed by one more on-theme, delivered
by Rice alumnus and now Chair of African and African-American Studies at
Louisiana State University, </span><a href="https://www.lsu.edu/hss/aaas/faculty/finley.php"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Prof. Stephen Finley</span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">. Prof.
Finley, a brilliantly animated and engaged speaker, gave a talk that was
well-positioned within his research homeground—religious studies—but which is
also quite clearly itself rather a <i>transdisciplinary</i> pursuit, as his
subject (for this talk, his recent book </span><a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/book/103598"><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">In And Out of This World:
Material and Extraterrestrial Bodies in the Nation of Islam</span></i></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">)<i> </i>quite
clearly crosses into African and African-American Studies.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Both of these talks were engagements with different sides of
the UFO phenomenon, but of course were much more than just that. Both provided
a view of the interiors of the phenomenon—the <i>human</i> interiors, both
cultural-historical (which in a way is a kind of “exterior” view) and
intimately personal (even if situated within a specific cultural-spiritual
milieu, as with Finley’s subject). Whatever the UFO itself (from its own side)
ultimately turns out to be (and as I’ve stressed again and again, there is not
one single “phenomenon” but rather a wide array of <i>phenomena</i> that, in
terms of pure surface appearances, present as a kind of singular event-class
which is frustratingly difficult to penetrate taxonomically), it has meaning
and significance for the human beings who encounter it. Taken as a pure
phenomenal object of fascination and intrigue, of speculative wonder and eerie
ontological disturbance or disruption, impenetrable to the convenience of
ready-to-hand categories and compartments of human comprehension (whether ultimately
justified or not—sometimes we are struck with unknowing just because of our
laziness or lack of diligent post-sighting follow-up—and many of these
phenomena turn out to be, as object-cause, rather mundane) … even so, the
sky-bound wonders inspire sentiment, fervor, fear, terror, … even transcendence
and transformation (not all of which is positive, of course). So, it is quite
well possible to “bracket” the question of the inner reality of these
specula—to withhold, or indeed suspend, the ontological question which seeks to
know <i>what these phenomena are</i>. Which is a question of positioning within
an ontological constellation that links them to the other phenomena of our
(accepted) lifeworld. But this we cannot yet do—at least not yet in a way that
we can position viruses, planets, stars, sand and sailboats within a world of
reasonable ontological transparency (requiring, for some of these things of
course, the intermediation of the sciences—theoretical and experimental). The
UFO can be treated from afar, its “being” bracketed in favor of its meaning.
Such a standpoint allows the scholar to ask after the human meaning, of
course—and this is precisely the default setting of (much of) the humanities (I
mean, they are the “<i>human</i>-ities” after all—a question to which we’ll
have occasion to return with Kripal’s recent attempts at an intervention, with
his concept of the “superhumanities”). Rather than entering into the question
of the “being”, we shift to the (perhaps easier or more comfortable) standpoint
of the <i>meaningful experience </i>of some “object = X” (to borrow somewhat
vulgarly from Kant) which a human being has with this unknown—or better, with
the uncanny. For the first two talks, they might have then been given the theme
<i>Chronicles of the Uncanny</i>, with the UFO and the Extraterrestrial as the
form that that uncanny takes for the purposes of the talks.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article30062247.ece/ALTERNATES/s615/1_New-UFO-footage-shows-mysterious-V-shaped-formation-similar-to-Phoenix-Lights.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="409" data-original-width="615" height="249" src="https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article30062247.ece/ALTERNATES/s615/1_New-UFO-footage-shows-mysterious-V-shaped-formation-similar-to-Phoenix-Lights.jpg" width="374" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Alleged Triangular UFO Military Sighting, 2021</i></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">And this brings us to perhaps the very core of the conference
as a whole, which was a kind of <i>romance</i> story—a romance of experience,
and “experiencers”: those who have had (or allege to have had—when do we get to
discharge the allegations?) an encounter with either an uncanny aerial
phenomenon of one sort or another; a seemingly nonhuman but intelligent
(perhaps tool-using) <i>being</i> (entity?) of some kind; or those who’ve just
been privy to (or otherwise even been the <i>source of</i>) some profound
(sometimes mundane) paranormality of one kind or another. Everything revolved
around experience, and the “experiencer” of the uncanny—dubbed the “impossible”
(somewhat tongue-in-cheek, I might add: we’ll come back to an evaluation of
this concept of the “impossible” which was in play, under the (super)humanistic
direction of Prof. Kripal). And the one thing—conveniently—that is hard to
critique, of course, <i>is experience</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">So what began to disturb me throughout the whole conference
was this retreat to the safety (and immunity) of <i>the experience</i>. Surely
in some sense <i>experience</i> is where everything, including a science that
might then inspire a critique of it, begins. Surely one mustn’t falsify
experience in favor of one’s <i>a priori</i> notions of what the world <i>must </i>be
like, which inspires the illicit axiom “it can’t be, so it isn’t” that refutes
the seeming evidence of experience that this-or-that paranormality <i>actually
happened</i>. Thus these Rice archives are an attempt to document what is
otherwise ruled out—but <i>by what ontological authority?</i>, is the question
loudly begged by these “archives of the impossible”. Hence the “transcendence”
part of the conference’s theme: by collecting and collating and finally
archiving document after document that recounts human tales of what should not
be possible—what is excluded by authoritative ontological <i>fiat</i>—the
metaphysical orthodoxy might burst. And then what? We transcend paradigms? Are
the “materialist” sciences (which comprehend only mundane causal relationships,
and which frustrates the mind by containing it to only the material brain) the
boxes (or provider of them) that are “broken” (to paraphrase one theme of Prof.
Kripal’s opening manifesto of the impossible)?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">It all seemed (if I might be permitted to generalize for a
grumpy moment, before we return to Eghigian and Finley, who are really outliers
here) to slip all-too-easily into a kind of de-politicized (“transnational”?), perhaps
rather vulgar, idealism or anti-materialism, excluding materiality altogether
as it seeks to overcome it as an inhibiting factor for acceptance of the
“being” of the uncanny, the paranormal. Indeed, the humanistic “brackets”
around the question are themselves a convenient illusion, avoiding an
ontological commitment that always lurks nearby. And commitment there was:
either to some form of idealism which has “mind” or “consciousness” as the root
of all being (and there was the necessary genuflection to the current proponent
of such, Bernardo Kastrup—by turns celebrated as “brilliant”, “original” and so
on and so forth), the salvific next step to the impasses and foibles of “materialistic
science”; or, less metaphysically, to a somewhat inchoate fetishism of paradigm
shifts (the likes of which few care to attempt to carefully work out in any
detail—and no, Kastrupian idealism, or the current fascination with reality as
simulation, won’t cut it).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d9/Italien_humanists_by_Giorgio_Vasari.jpg/500px-Italien_humanists_by_Giorgio_Vasari.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="512" data-original-width="500" height="271" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d9/Italien_humanists_by_Giorgio_Vasari.jpg/500px-Italien_humanists_by_Giorgio_Vasari.jpg" width="265" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">I</span></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> suppose I’m a kind of “materialist” after all. In another
register, sometimes I say I’m a “mystical atheist” (a term I get from cultural
critic and historian of ideas Morris Berman, whose work deeply influenced me as
I was myself exiting the straightjackets of academic specialization). Perhaps
here it’s more relevant to say that I’m a “spiritual materialist”, but whatever
it is that my (still-forming) philosophy is, it is definitely concerned with
what we should call </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">the logic of the specific</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> (that’s a term I get from
the greatest 20</span><sup style="font-family: Garamond, serif;">th</sup><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> century Japanese philosopher Nishida, a complicated
figure to be sure). Science arose out of a very specific confrontation with—a
decidedly </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">frontal assault </i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">on—the reigning paradigm of the day, given by
(in the main) a conjunction of Aristotelian philosophy and Christian theology (itself
processed through a richly complicated tapestry of Greco-Roman and Islamic thought).
But the change happened not only because of abstract arguments decrying
paradigms (though there was that too). It happened partly because of a more
subterranean shift in the powers of human productivity that brought new forms
into being—a material determination of what begins as a conceptual innovation.
This dialectic between the ideational and the material, which entails a process
that itself </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">cannot be overcome or transcended</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">, is the essence of those
cultural changes that induce at the same time existential dislocations,
yielding new spaces and new possibilities. The problem with idealisms of
various sorts is that this process is conveniently overlooked, untheorized and
superseded prematurely by the vulgarity of ideological romance. The turn of
idealisms of these “transcendent” kinds, their romance, is towards that of the </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">future</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">.
Yet, the future is unwritten—because neither we nor anything else is a “text”
(a poor yet persistent analogy that haunts philosophy and the humanities more
broadly). The future must be produced—it isn’t just </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">there</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">.</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://i1.wp.com/criticalposthumanism.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/deleuze-art.jpg?resize=1024%2C707&ssl=1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="552" data-original-width="800" height="233" src="https://i1.wp.com/criticalposthumanism.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/deleuze-art.jpg?resize=1024%2C707&ssl=1" width="337" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Gilles Deleuze</i></td></tr></tbody></table><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">I am therefore attracted by a spiritual materialism (that
guides my empiricism—a supporting philosophy in need of patient rejuvenation; I
sometimes invoke the “transcendental empiricism” of Deleuze) that understands
that what is essential about “reality” (I hate this word these days) is that it
is profoundly <i>incomplete</i>. Perhaps so incomplete that the past, as well
as the future, remains radically <i>open</i>. And yet ‘materialism’ isn’t quite
right here, either. Whatever it be, I know that I am decidedly not an idealist:
there is no Mind, no all-encompassing Narrative to be told, no grand Artificer,
no Cosmic This or That. And “consciousness”, whatever else it be, isn’t
“fundamental”. To alleviate my philosophic indecision here, I take refuge in
the noncommittal philosophy of Spinoza, often portrayed as a “dual aspect”
theorist, positing that there are two “aspects” of fundamental reality (do we
need this?): a “mind” aspect, and a “matter” aspect, neither of which is
fundamental or primary. Yet, Spinoza actually posits that we abandon this
duality <i>altogether</i>, in favor of something much richer, much more subtle,
much more (in my view) openly pragmatic and metaphysically deflationary—that
there are an <i>infinite number of</i> “aspects” beyond our favorite two
(favorite since the dawn of the Scientific Revolution which purchased empirical
clarity at the expense of the very real—now materialistically intangible—<i>experience</i>
of “mind” … indeed, as it posited “matter” as fundamental, it called into being
“mind” as a necessary metaphysical counterpoint, which then haunts the sciences
forever thereafter).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">But I suppose all these metaphysical “isms” are here to stay,
and I certainly can’t exorcise them in a single blog post (perhaps not even in
a book, or series of books—or ever). So let’s return to the first two talks,
before I conjure into being a very evil editor who will hack my prose, with much
justification, into much less than what one’s intellectual self-indulgence
would demand…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">P</span></span><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">rof. Eghigian delivered the first talk of the event: “UFOs
and Alien Contact in the Shadow of Deception”. What I really like about
Eghigian’s presentations is that he makes his historical study more methodologically
self-aware, and about demonstrating a particular historical <i>thesis</i> about
his subject matter—rather than a simple chronicle of events, as if there was no
interpretive intervention by the historian himself. Which there most definitely
is! What makes such an inquiry “objective” isn’t that the historian pretends to
delete themselves from the study—the demonstration of an historical thesis by
the characteristic presentation of the subject matter chosen by the historian
is simultaneously an insertion and participation of that historian <i>in </i>their
subject matter—but that they attempt to reveal what principles or theories or
methods have guided them, and what thesis there is which they want to demonstrate
with the material. The act of revealing the “subjective” dimensions of the
historian’s work is a mode of its objectivity—its honest <i>scholarly</i> objectivity.
“What happened” is based on fact and date, but its meaning and the historical
picture go well beyond that—and this will differ based on the historian’s predilections,
preferences, and theoretical assumptions. That’s what makes a good historian produce
interesting, meaningful history. It provides a rich <i>sense</i> of what
happened as we turn our gaze back through time to recover the meaning of what
all of it was about. But, like human memory itself, for every backwards gaze there
will be a change, a difference, a reconstruction. And that’s what it means to
make <i>sense</i> of what happened, after it happened. The historian’s effort,
then, is only slightly different from the philosopher’s. And perhaps it’s we
philosophers who’ve been less genuine than the historian about the realities of
time, change, and difference and <i>memory</i> (<i>that’s</i> a whole other discussion
for another time, as we pass over our unfortunate indebtedness to Plato).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://web.stanford.edu/class/history13/earlysciencelab/body/brainpages/85.gif" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="282" data-original-width="443" height="225" src="https://web.stanford.edu/class/history13/earlysciencelab/body/brainpages/85.gif" width="353" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">In a sense, Eghigian’s talk was about <i>memory</i> and
recollection—what Plato, in connection with the nature of learning, somewhat
mystically referred to as </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">ἀ</span><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">νάμνησις: “anamnesis” or “unforgetting”
(indeed, he dubs truth “a-lethia”, the negation of Lethe, the goddess of forgetfulness).
But this isn’t particularly shocking, since all history is in some sense an exercise
in memory and recollection. All accounts of UFOs and “alien contact” are supplied
only as a matter of recollection, the experiences themselves having receded
into the past. For the phenomena of astronomy and astrophysics, even though
only confined to observations, they can be actively seen through various
instruments, received as if present to us. In experimental physics like
experimental (and something called intriguingly “phenomenological”) particle physics,
conditions can be created under which the phenomena under study <i>are actively
produced</i> (or at least, in an <i>experiment</i> proper, should be produced according
to theoretical calculations—the experiment will or won’t reveal them, which is quite
the point). As many ufologists have pointed out, we do not deal with UFOs themselves
or even alien contact itself when we study these phenomena; rather, we’re
dealing primarily with <i>reports</i> of them. And reports are by their nature historical
documents. Ufology is already historical, its object the nub of a story whose
inner reality, because of its inaccessibility (so far) to accepted channels of observation
or experimentation, remains an ontological toss-up: maybe <i>this</i>, maybe <i>that</i>.
And the range is empirically unconstrained (again, so far), since there are always
three possibilities that remain in play (at least in the minds of the ardently skeptical—the
warrant for their skepticism another matter altogether): (1) misperception or
instrument error; (2) natural; (3) covert advanced human tech … and of course a
fourth: <i>other</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">This leads us to a fundamental realization: that the human
who has encountered UFOs or the beings (presumably in association with them—though
not always of course) constitutes a kind of <i>veil</i>, through which we
attempt to perceive <i>the thing itself</i> … THE phenomenon in question. And it’s
this “thing itself” we seem to want to understand—the phenomenon or phenomena <i>behind</i>
or <i>before</i> the human who then recollects on all this, supplying the historian
(and the rest of us) with the stories that constitute what we, somewhat frustratingly
and always belatedly, try to study. Except when we have that rare thing—a non-first-person,
instrumented observation on record (radar, cameras, and so on), corroborated by
human witnesses—we never get to study <i>the thing itself,</i> only its image
as encountered personally (in the first-person) or narratively (in the stories
told <i>to</i> us by those with the first-person experiences). It’s a fundamental
and longstanding problem in the field. And yet, the allure of the thing itself
persists, and continues to puzzle. And on it we frequently stumble.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">As I understood the talk, Eghigian ultimately wanted to look
at how <i>deception</i> plays into the stories that are told about UFOs and alien
contact, and curiously he sets up for the audience a conceptual or thematic
triad, with the “UFO Phenomenon” at its apex, as if to signify that this is “the
real Thing” which cannot yet be named, but which (whatever it is) is the object-cause
of the flood of stories that emerged (with exponential increase) starting in
1947, time zero for the “modern” UFO phenomenon. “Deception” and “Our Handling/Dealings
Of/With The Phenomenon” were the other two vertices of the triad, buttressing the
Thing Itself. <i>Part</i> of the story here is that the object-cause is a
function not entirely of a “thing” objectively considered (for I suppose
Eghigian, like anyone else who’s honest, must operate under the proviso which admits
<i>we don’t really know what we’re dealing with</i>); it’s rather <i>our making
something </i>of an encounter with something which can’t readily be identified,
engaged with or otherwise stabilized within the <i>lifeworld</i> of the
sciences. Unlike with phenomena like gravity, oxidation or DNA, when Eghigian
goes to give an historical account of “UFOs”, since we don’t have an accepted
sense of what the hell they are (there are some good guesses, but guesses is
all), all we have are “our dealings” with a something the nature of which
cannot be decided. The history, then, is somewhat necessarily lopsided: <i>all
we have </i>is the human dealings which cannot be factored out in favor of
something on which we can agree there is even a consistent history (not even
with the pretenses of the objectivity of the sciences—of course the human is never
factored out of the doings of the sciences; it’s just overlooked, suppressed or
ignored, if I may be permitted a slight hint at a tendentious philosophical
thesis).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://images.saatchiart.com/saatchi/313515/art/2380281/1450409-HSC00001-7.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="581" height="371" src="https://images.saatchiart.com/saatchi/313515/art/2380281/1450409-HSC00001-7.jpg" width="270" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">So to some extent we’re </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">already </i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">dealing with a kind of
deception when dealing historically with UFOs because, well, we’re not really </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">dealing</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
with UFOs are we—we’re always dealing with the stories people have spun from their
encounters with them (whatever the ‘them’ turns out to be, beyond a phenomenal </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">appearance,
</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">a manifestation of an unidentified or unidentifiable object or, more ambiguously,
an unidentified aerial ‘phenomenon’). What, then, </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">are </i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">we dealing with? I
think this is actually a really pertinent, and important, question, since if we’re
not really dealing with UFOs in Eghigian’s historical account (or in any other
historian’s for that matter—the problem would seem to be endemic), then what?</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Other historians have had this question bother them. Rummaging
around the internet, as I sometimes do, for articles on UFOs that I have not read, I
found <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261854096_Extraterrestrial_encounters_UFOs_science_and_the_quest_for_transcendence_1947-1972" target="_blank">this 2012 piece</a> (now slightly dated) that thought the reality question worth
pondering, if only to move on to their particular treatment of it (in this
case, the author wants to position the whole UFO fascination thing within a broader
“astroculutre” that emerged in the post-war years, alongside and with the Cold
War). Let’s quote the author (a Prof. Geppert, who <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alexander-Geppert">lists himself</a>
as affiliated with NYU/NYU Shanghi) at some length, as his analysis is rather
pertinent and illustrative (keeping in mind that it was written in 2011-2012,
just over a decade ago):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">By
their very characteristics and the reactions they have incited, UFOs unsettle
traditional historical analysis. The subject necessitates a careful
self-positioning as to what counts as facts and how they are situated
culturally. Although the phenomenon has given rise to a global, socioculturally
heterogeneous and still active UFO movement, scholars in the humanities have
generally shied away from comprehending the genesis, development and societal
impact of such an unconventional subject, one that constantly oscillates
between fact and fiction, knowing and believing, and science and religion. The topic
is as fleeting, glistening and controversial as UFOs themselves. The handful of
previous academic studies, mainly authored by sociologists, anthropologists and
scholars of religion, is characterized by an almost exclusive focus on the USA.
As non-historical studies, they tend to lack historical depth, awareness of
geography and contextualization. Historians themselves, for whatever reasons,
have been even slower to engage with the topic, despite its historical
dimension and the fundamental questions posed by its sudden rise, widespread
popularity and, since the summer of 1947, unbroken persistence as a contested,
cultural phenomenon. The unclear ontological status of UFOs – ‘Are Flying
Saucers Real?’ astronomer J. Allen Hynek bluntly asked in the title of one of
his publications – may explain some professional restraint and the widespread
belief in the subject’s inherent illegitimacy. Political scientists Alexander
Wendt and Raymond Duvall argue that there may be an actively reproduced social
taboo on taking UFOs seriously. According to their analysis, inquiring into the
nature of UFOs constitutes a threat to the ‘ongoing historical project to
constitute sovereignty in anthropocentric terms.’ The mere act of inquiry
invokes the taboo. ‘The UFO can be “known” only,’ Wendt and Duvall deduce, ‘by not
asking what it is.’ For historians, then, the sole possibility is to do what
they typically do in such situations: to cautiously circumnavigate this blind
spot or <i>Leerstelle</i>. A direct confrontation would only perpetuate the
discursive deadlock between believers and skeptics, proselytizers and
debunkers, and amateurs and scientists reached within a few years after the
1947 incident and persisting to date.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">The
resulting shortage of academic literature – here understood as that without
active investment in the object of its investigation – is in stark
disproportion to the sheer mass of source material that is available and steeped
in controversy. In Western Europe, several specialized UFO journals were
established in the 1950s and early 1960s, and a reliable and fully annotated
bibliography, covering the four decades after 1947, lists no fewer than 1093
English publications in book format alone. Almost all of them, however, were
written in order to intervene in contemporaneous controversies and are
therefore often partisan. Believers and debunkers alike frequently based their
accounts on the same anecdotal and oft-repeated evidence; pursued overt, often
conspiracy-theory driven agendas; and usually chose to attack either each other
or address themselves, rather than operate within and relate to larger
intellectual debates.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">For
what reason have UFOs proved academically so perilous? Is it apt to describe
them as a ‘sociological untouchable’? What, then, are historians to ‘do’ with
the ‘rumours of round objects that flash through the troposphere and
stratosphere,’ as C.G. Jung sketched the situation in 1958? The present essay
attempts to meet such a challenge, charting a viable path along which to
historicize UFOs. As the 1947 founding myth and subsequent US-government
investigations to solve the riddle, culminating in Congressional Hearings in
April 1966 and July 1968 [remember, this article was penned in 2012], are far
better known than most other aspects of UFO history, this article sets itself
three alternative objectives. [pp. 336-337]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">For completeness, let’s just
paraphrase the three “alternative objectives” he’s set for himself with the
article:</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li><span lang="EN" style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; text-indent: -0.25in;">The article
“</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; text-indent: -0.25in;">intends to internationalize the history of the UFO phenomenon.”</span></li><li><span lang="EN" style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; text-indent: -0.25in;">The</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; text-indent: -0.25in;"> article
“comprehends and analyzes UFOs as an integral part of what” the author “describe[s]
by the term ‘astroculture’.”</span></li><li><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt; text-indent: -0.25in;">The article, finally, “asks what issues,
especially those contrasting with professional technoscience, were at stake in
the periodic international controversies on UFOs.”</span></li></ol><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">These aims are not altogether incompatible with those of
Eghigian, who wants to look specifically at the role deception had (or has?) in “our handling
of the phenomenon”; but, unlike for Eghigian’s analysis, Geppert’s wants to
subsume UFOs (or the fascination with them—which is different right?) under a
broader sociocultural rubric: “astroculture”. Fine enough.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">So, OK, surely we <i>are </i>then dealing with “UFOs”: we’re dealing
with <i>unidentified flying (aerial) objects</i>, or more generally even (which
is why I prefer this acronym), <i>unidentified aerial phenomena</i>—the “UAP”
in today’s parlance (despite what Geppert observed in 2012, ‘UAP’ <i>did</i>
manage to stick around). Emphasis here on the “unidentified”. And many people
who’ve witnessed them, or who <i>claim</i> to have witnessed them (and there’s
a difference), want to tell their story. And in the main what this history is
is a history of the stories people spin from out of their experiences of UFOs
(or the encounters they <i>allege </i>to have had with them).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://gray-kptv-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/UMjVowkGy6TD4xKSDXjPZiybEL8=/1200x675/smart/filters:quality(85)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/gray/LAOOGFUUTVHKFEZEPHHLH5UWQA.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="800" height="196" src="https://gray-kptv-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/UMjVowkGy6TD4xKSDXjPZiybEL8=/1200x675/smart/filters:quality(85)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/gray/LAOOGFUUTVHKFEZEPHHLH5UWQA.jpg" width="348" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Perhaps this is where the theme of ‘deception’ enters Eghigian’s
historical study: where and to what extent is </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">deception</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> an element in
the stories people tell of UFOs and alien encounters? But what is ‘deception’,
exactly, and who’s guilty? Is it intentional? Malicious or unsavory? How has deception
(or the various forms of deception that are relevant) played a role “in shaping
the UFO phenomenon as it has been understood over time?” That’s the basic question
of the whole talk.</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">In any case, there are the obvious moments of what can only
be seen as <i>deception</i> in the history of the UFO phenomenon. Adamski, with
his Venusian scouts—the “space brothers” who come to preach the gospel of
intergalactic peace and harmony, perhaps an early Flower Child moment—is one
figure that comes to mind. But what about the Hills, with their (now famous) UFO
sighting and subsequent alleged abduction by the beings onboard? This case
would be more complicated, surely—especially if we have to consider the layers
of interpretation and reconstructive fabulation involved in hypnotic
recollections. For even our most mundane of memories, there is a constructive
element as we try to recall the events that have happened to us—memory simply
isn’t a faithful representation engine, like a movie camera just recording and
preserving what “was there” (not even cameras do this: they always carve
something out of the lived, situated experience of who or what was involved in
the events of the film—cameras are not objective!). But, unlike with World War
I, or the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, with UFOs there always lingers
this question: “yes, but despite what was said, was there a <i>there</i> there?”
And this ontological ambiguity or incompleteness (or just indecisiveness) makes
the historical account all the more complex.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">So, unlike with the typical events
of unproblematic facticity which we’ve just mentioned, the UFO presents the
historian with a weird kind of impossibility all on its own: the UFO itself
cannot be chronicled, so much as our attempts to convey our encounters with it—we
are stuck at our own history-making out of the phenomenon. So, with UFOs, it’s
a(n) (hi)story of the stories told. And it’s precisely because of this inherent
ontological indecisiveness that an element of almost necessary deception can
enter into the (hi)story at a more fundamental level, for since we have no
grasp of the UFO as “factive” (if I’m permitted a neologism), nor even do we
have access to its own inner reality as part of the structure of nature more generally
(as neither “natural” phenomenon nor manufactured object of some intelligent
and possibly nonhuman technological design), we cannot really say what is a
real as opposed to a deceptive account of the UFO in the stories told of them.
We can say that someone like an Adamski is probably fabricating their tales;
but how much of it really <i>is</i> a fabrication, and how much is grounded in
an actual experience he had? Thus the problem of there being potentially good
data from bad (i.e., unreliable) sources. Perhaps Adamski’s fabulations are in fact
rooted in some UFO experience? I myself have seen, on a few occasions, aerial phenomena
which I could not readily explain. However, except in perhaps one fleeting instance
(dots of incredibly maneuvering light my colleague and I saw after a delicious
Vietnamese dinner one night in Lancaster, PA), the sightings weren’t so arresting
as to be the basis for a dramatic story, or so I felt. I suppose I could have made something
out of the sightings; but I thought it wouldn’t be genuine, since I felt they
really didn’t merit such retellings. But that’s me. Someone else, with a wholly
different psychological profile might have made <i>much</i> more out of these sightings.
And so perhaps <i>that’s</i> part of the history of the phenomenon of the UFO. Except
when you have multiple witnesses saying they saw something that would seem to be
objectively shocking: like a 200-foot hovering triangle. Should the historian,
then, try to pare down the stories accordingly—separating the more substantial
and robust accounts from all the rest? Should this vetted set provide a measure
of authenticity, giving a methodological foundation for their study? I don’t
know, but it seems like something to consider, for then we might say that there’s
a degree of confabulation within the external, cultural/social fascination with
<i>stories</i> of the UFO. We wouldn’t be confusing the real thing with the way
that that reality percolates (for whatever reasons) up to the cultural and
social level, where in turn the UFO transforms into <i>this cultural thing </i>called
“flying saucers”, where it then finally makes it to Hollywood (that great <i>marquis</i>
for our cultural consciousness).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://i5.walmartimages.com/asr/a97361ca-019b-4056-8db7-9f48d1d07635.9713aa8533d1556f282e418ff4b21998.jpeg?odnHeight=612&odnWidth=612&odnBg=FFFFFF" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="612" data-original-width="612" height="266" src="https://i5.walmartimages.com/asr/a97361ca-019b-4056-8db7-9f48d1d07635.9713aa8533d1556f282e418ff4b21998.jpeg?odnHeight=612&odnWidth=612&odnBg=FFFFFF" width="266" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">P</span></span><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">rof. Finley’s subject was a kind of microcosm of what we
encountered at a more general level in Eghigian’s opening talk (we’re still only
working through day one-half!). Finley was concerned with the very historically
and culturally specific—but the specific and local as a means of approaching
the universal … or at least as a means of interrogating it, searching it out
through the specific. We’re talking about the ufological and alien contact aspects
of the American religious phenomenon of the <i>Nation of Islam</i> (commonly
referred to as “NOI”). It is a complex religious phenomenon that is perhaps
very much about America (the U.S.) as it is about UFOs and alien contact. The <i>Nation
of Islam</i> preaches a kind of liberation theology all of its own, one that is
deeply problematic in terms of its specific content. <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/nation-islam">The
Southern Poverty Law Center</a> and the <a href="https://extremismterms.adl.org/glossary/nation-islam-noi?_gl=1*vb9v7z*_ga*MTc3OTYzMDg0OS4xNjg1MTE5Nzkx*_ga_S9QB0F2PB5*MTY4NTExOTc5Mi4xLjEuMTY4NTExOTg1MC4wLjAuMA..">Anti-Defamation
League</a> both list NOI as (to quote its <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_of_Islam">Wikipedia</a> entry) a “black
supremacist hate group that promotes racial prejudice towards white people, antisemitism,
and anti-LGBT rhetoric” with the group repudiated by most mainstream Islamic
practitioners as inauthentic. So theorizing the group, understanding its
theoretical religious and philosophical significance in connection with UFOs
and alien contact phenomena, will be necessarily tricky. As I haven’t engaged
Prof. Finley’s new book, which provides a theoretical engagement with the group,
my sketch here is going to be inadequate—based only on my initial impressions.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">What was particularly remarkable about Finley’s presentation was
that on each and every slide, a horrific photo of a lynching was included—intentionally
without comment (as Finley would later go on to say in subsequent conversation
about it). For the <i>Nation of Islam</i>, the UFO and their alleged contact
with the nonhuman intelligences associated with them, represents a moment of
freedom from the white-dominated power structures that had enslaved the Black
population of the United States, still reverberating even today in the post-Civil-Rights
era. Indeed, “post” is an important—and sadly ironic—modifier here, as we can
see that what Finley incisively termed “slavery’s afterlife” can still be found
throughout the U.S.: various forms of racial discrimination still persist, both
structural and immediate (structural if you look at differences in mortality,
access to nutritious food, generational wealth; immediate if you look at the
persistence of racial profiling in law enforcement, and the hate crimes that
are still pervasive). In his talk, Finley avoided the “reality” question (it
was essentially bracketed) in favor of a look at the symbolic importance of NOI’s
appropriation of the UFO/alien contact narrative—whose tellers and discussants have
been mostly white (a perhaps understudied fact in and of itself; very few make
mention of this odd imbalance, like Dr. Luis Cayetano of the “<a href="https://www.ufologyiscorrupt.com/">Ufology Is Corrupt</a>” blog).</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">In my
impression of Finley’s talk, it seemed that the general thesis was that the UFO
and alien contact experiences gets refracted through the historical, cultural
and <i>racial </i>particularities of the human, factors which cannot be deleted
or bracketed without doing violence to the meaning and significance of those
experiences for the experiencers, and that through these particularities the experience
emerges into a space of universal conceptual possibilities for what it means to
be truly human: emancipated, liberated, <i>free</i>—freedom from oppression,
and liberated into a space of the free conduct of one’s own life and culture.
The ideals of democracy, however, require that this liberation into a space of unoppressed,
free conduct of life and culture not impinge upon the equivalent freedoms that
must (through the larger civic space within which this freedom exists and is
supported) <i>be afforded to all human beings as such</i>. Given NOI’s documented
history of supremacist bigotry, it’s not clear that we can keep <i>all</i> of
their particularities (i.e., this particular <i>culture</i>) intact in a democratic
space of radical inclusion. Indeed, this raises the much more difficult
question of how expansive inclusiveness can be in a democratic society which is
founded on the (in principle) neutral, secularized values established during
the Enlightenment: universal brother- and sisterhood, liberty and equality (the Holy
Trinity of the French Revolution, for example). I personally believe that this
is possible (though it is an obviously difficult dialectical process). The rhetoric
of hate and supremacy must be deleted everywhere; if so, what remains? And what
exactly does this process of rhetorical (and conceptual) deletion entail—evangelization?
Proselytizing? What form should this (dialectical) process of the <i>elimination</i>
of hate and supremacist bigotry wherever it is—both of which constitute <i>illegitimate</i>
specificities and particularities in any cultural or social group—take? Can we disentangle
the hate and supremacy from the universal values of liberty, self-determination
and freedom from oppression as manifested by NOI, and still preserve the distinctiveness
of the movement as a specifically <i>black</i> form of liberation theology? (Surely
it is possible.) What do the specific issues of the UFO and alien contact add
to this analysis, moreover?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/media/filer_public_thumbnails/filer_public/fa/39/fa39de3f-ced2-4591-8eb9-76c12afea154/elijah-muhammad-main.jpg__2000x1144_q85_crop_subsampling-2_upscale.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="458" data-original-width="800" height="200" src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/media/filer_public_thumbnails/filer_public/fa/39/fa39de3f-ced2-4591-8eb9-76c12afea154/elijah-muhammad-main.jpg__2000x1144_q85_crop_subsampling-2_upscale.jpg" width="349" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">There is, I think, clearly an act of radical </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">appropriation</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
going on in NOI’s UFO/contact narrative, rendering it a specifically </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">black </i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">experience,
and reshaping it into a story of emancipation. In this way the UFO gets situated,
localized. But does this not show that, </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">whatever</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> the underlying reality
of the UFO experience is, it is an experience that is universal precisely because
it is a kind of blank canvas on which we find our own struggles and trauma
drawn and then transformed? The UFO in itself may be symbolically mute, or
rather symbolically multiple because of its uncanniness, because it intersects
our canny world with strange sides and angles and manifestations which can’t be
easily categorized. Like a supernova, it has its own inner details which
(unlike for this stellar apparition) remain radically opaque to us even as some
have fleeting contact with it (or them). And yet, its symbolic import </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">for us</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
operates independently of that inner nature. Or maybe not, as Vallés’s thesis
seems to suggest: perhaps the meanings we want to make of the UFO themselves
partly constitute what “it” is; maybe we participate in its reality in ways
that we can only dimly perceive. If some UFOs really do represent an
intelligence of some sort on a par with or more advanced than human
intelligence (though we might want to be critical of this interpretation), then
we are locked in a nonlinear dance: as we interact with it, it is thereby
modified and responds to us, like any </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">subject</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> would. Of Being, Hegel
noted that it is subject before it is substance. The same might be said of </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">beings
</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">(our subjective existence precedes our substantial essence, to butcher
Sartre a bit).</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">I think there is a <i>lot</i> more to say here, but as I am
not yet conversant with Prof. Finley’s specific analysis, I can only offer this
superficial commentary. I let it stand for now.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">As I am now just over the 6,000 word mark for this entry for
day ½ of the two-and-half day event, I think I should draw these reflections to
a close. I will compose a separate entry for the rest of the conference, as I
can condense my reflections considerably considering that a good bulk of these
days were devoted to something called “flash talks” where speakers got about 20
minutes apiece, with no Q&A until the end of the set (between three and four
talks in each set, with two sets per remaining day).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">We’re in for quite a ride, it would seem, as the talks ran
the gamut from Indian philosophy, and alternative rationalities as found in
Chinese thought (I’ll be calling on the lecturer, Prof. Dr. Lackner, in Germany
next week so I can get to dive deeper), to the (mis?)adventures at Skinwalker Ranch
(conveyed by none other than Colm Kelleher himself, in person). Of particular
note will be two talks: Tearful and <i>very</i> powerful personal
recollections by noted medievalist Barbara Newman, who had a decades-long friendship
with a kind of mystic who was prone to having a number of “impossible”
experiences of their own (to which Newman was, sometimes unfortunately, privy).
And then another emotionally powerful presentation by Karin Austin on the John
E. Mack archives, which were donated to Rice by his Foundation (the <i>John E.
Mack Institute, </i>affectionately known as “JEMI”). Karin is herself an
experiencer (of what should certainly be called an alien <i>abduction,</i> as
the experiences she reported on with Dr. Mack, as now documented in his books,
were quite harrowing, even if transformative for her personally—at least in the
end); she is now the Executive Director of JEMI, and has worked tirelessly to
get the documents scanned and sent to Rice’s crew over at the Woodson Research Center
(in the final phase actually driving, with a U-Haul, hundreds of boxes of documents
from Boston to Houston, from the ice and cold of Massachusetts to the Texan heat
and humidity).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://wallpaperaccess.com/full/2983888.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="800" height="202" src="https://wallpaperaccess.com/full/2983888.jpg" width="360" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">So, I now leave you for the moment while I prep for the next phase of my
ufological odyssey, first over to Germany, then (hopefully via rail, strikes
permitting of course) to Paris (where I may get to meet Jacques Vallée himself),
then to Porto in Portugal … then probably over to England for a bit (possibly
meeting with a Korean researcher at Oxford). It’s a full schedule, and all the
while I’ll have to keep up with a number of my duties. And try to relax a bit
as well.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">We shall, as they say, see about that.<o:p></o:p></span></p>Mike Cifonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16910256379002179502noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7235611048140260044.post-82541699288553132122023-04-30T18:19:00.052-07:002023-05-20T08:32:47.825-07:00Of workshops and colloquia: a foray into ufological circles and discussions<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://media.istockphoto.com/id/959503074/vector/neolithic-tools-and-weapons.jpg?s=612x612&w=0&k=20&c=o8XMqphp8V-vyBdEzq2UIGn6dcVXdaDMDYObZAtnJ1Y=" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="572" data-original-width="612" height="203" src="https://media.istockphoto.com/id/959503074/vector/neolithic-tools-and-weapons.jpg?s=612x612&w=0&k=20&c=o8XMqphp8V-vyBdEzq2UIGn6dcVXdaDMDYObZAtnJ1Y=" width="217" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">B</span></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">efore April is entirely lost to the past, I owe my four
readers something of an apology, as I had promised an account of my travels
(both geographical and intellectual) over the last month or so. Now that at
least three ufologically-related events have been firmly tucked under my belt,
and before I embark on yet another odyssey of exploration (domestic and
foreign), I should write up some of my experiences, findings, musings,
speculations and general puzzlement.</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Before I get to the past, let’s deal with the future.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">While attempting to fulfil my duties as president and acting
director of the <i>Society for UAP Studies</i>, and lecturer in philosophy, I
have been trying to work out some of my ideas on matters related to the study
of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>UAP—which of course inevitably brings
one to the doorstep, if not the very interior of, the “ETH”. And with that one
must inevitably wonder about the nature of the “ET” in the H. But—as you have
come to expect, perhaps, from me as a philosophically-inclined writer on
ufological matters—one must wonder even more fundamentally, as my friend Bryan
Sentes has often stressed, about the very concept of “intelligence” and what is
presupposed by it. Having been positively (and sometimes negatively—but in a
good way!) influenced by Bryan’s subtle questioning and interrogation of the
issue, I am increasingly more inclined to think that while it might be somewhat
obvious (for some cases, both historical and future) <i>that </i>there is an
intelligence behind some (and by no means all) UAP, because of the radical
empirical <i>distance</i> between human and nonhuman, non-terrestrial being,
coming to know <i>what</i> that intelligence is, and the extent to which the
notion of ‘technology’ is suitable for such being, is going to be a much harder
question to resolve. And I think it will be complicated by the fact that, most
likely, there will be a great range of kinds of intelligence in play, each
perhaps with a characteristic relationship to the tools they fashion and use.
Some perhaps will seek to ambiguate the dichotomy—pronounced for <i>homo faber</i>—between
creator-user and tool used. What SETI expects, for example, is to detect
technologically-induced atmospheric peculiarities in the distant worlds whose
spectra we are just now being able to study in detail (thanks of course to new
and more powerful observation technologies); and with even more powerful
technologies of observation, to perhaps <i>see</i> the megastructures and other
shiny add-ons that a technology-using extraterrestrial civilization would
construct atop their world. But as water worlds might be more common, this
could be complicated by beings who prefer an oceanic and submarine lifestyle.
But the presupposition here is that there will be <i>differences</i> in these
distant world’s observable, physical characteristics that will point to
technology and hence to the operation of some extraterrestrial intelligence.
Indeed, the historical irony here is that science has fallen back on the
favorite “proof” of theologically-inclined intellectuals (and “natural
philosophers”) of the 17<sup>th</sup> and 18<sup>th</sup> centuries: the
“Design Argument”. William Paley, of course, gives us its classical form (which
we <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmaker_analogy">quote at length</a>):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">In crossing a heath, suppose I
pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there;
I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain
there forever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this
answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be
inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of
the answer I had before given, that for anything I knew, the watch might have
always been there. ... There must have existed, at some time, and at some
place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed [the watch] for the
purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction,
and designed its use. ... Every indication of contrivance, every
manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of
nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater or more,
and that in a degree which exceeds all computation.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">From which we are supposed to derive the conclusion that
there must be a grand Designer, God…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://janmichl.com/hodinky-ur.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="336" data-original-width="447" height="194" src="https://janmichl.com/hodinky-ur.jpg" width="258" /></a></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">SETI, of course, seeks to establish not that there is God, but
that, if we happen upon the equivalent of a watch on some distant world, then
“there must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an
artificer or artificers, who formed” it “for the purpose which we find it
actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use”.
The presupposition here being that its “contrivance” and “design” is
manifest—that is, plainly and unambiguously <i>given</i>. Surely this is only
the case because our recognition—in Paley’s famous little thought-experiment—is
given by an object of <i>our own</i> familiar design.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And equally as surely for Paley, Nature
Herself manifestly exhibits a design which requires there be a Designer. The
modern scientific rejoinder to this logic is a double critique: (i) the
attribution is an anthropomorphic projection and illicit generalization to all
of nature (no caps), who operates (ii) by blind (unintelligent) chance (with a
logic all of its own: the logic of random but constrained and therefore
knowable circumstance: <i>enter evolutionary biology</i>—the Darwinian reply).
Yet, if we focus just on the artifice of the object itself, we might convert
this theological argument into an argument for the (inferential) existence of
ETI on a distant world, thus resurrecting the theological argument and
repurposing it for SETI. But what about the argument that Paley was
anthropomorphizing: projecting a human concept of design onto nature? Well, but
if we don’t attempt the projection onto nature as a whole, and hence use the
concept of design, patterned after something clearly human in origin, illicitly
in that way, then we can (surely?) use it as the basis for <i>recognizing the
designs of another designer like ourselves, right</i>? Well, that would seem
right—except that we’d have to be able to recognize those designs <i>as designs</i>—an
“artifice” distinct from the general pattern of the “natural world” which would
not to us indicate the existence of an intelligence. So, are the necessarily
anthropomorphic concepts of design, artifice etc. harmless in this case? We are
back to the N = 1 problem: we only have one example of “technology” and
(supposedly) nonnatural “artifice” to go on, and that’s the shiny, polluting,
invasive and adjunct apparatus of modern technoscience, which inserts itself
all over the globe in ways that, for us, seem both obvious and (to some)
unfortunate. Yet to a distant observer, perceiving us with a radically distinct
set of presuppositions (that perhaps do not entail a radical distinctness
between tool and user/being, or between being intelligent and being
natural—i.e., a “nature” of nonseparable wholes and parts), it might be that we
are seen, together with our tools, as part of one whole system of (natural)
being. And if those distant, extraterrestrial observers (and maybe they have
stopped by already?) cannot (or will not) separate us from nature as we
separate ourselves from it, then wouldn’t we expect <i>silence</i> from them,
overlooking us for a larger view of the whole? (Notice, this is not the “ant”
hypothesis many like to toy with when it comes to thinking about the possible
nature of an ETI; rather, I am saying that it might just be incompatible
conceptual presuppositions—which has <i>nothing at all to do with a supposed
difference in intelligence—</i>that inhibits contact or communication. They needn’t be “hyper-advanced” for there to
be a communicative mismatch … yet another dubious anthropomorphism I suppose: “advanced” by what measure?)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">This gives you some sense of the kind of questions and
problems to which I’ve turned my mind in recent months. I only go on at length
about this because I have submitted (with Bryan) two abstracts to two run-of-the-mill
academic conferences which propose to broach the subject of UAP in relation to
the ETI hypothesis—but in an effort to problematize any future “contact”
scenario. Or at least to interrogate it in a more fundamental philosophical
register. But not only ETI. I have proposed that even the UAP itself, as it
inhabits what I’ve called a “liminal” space (intersecting the known while at
the same time exiting it), presents a more subtle challenge as <i>they</i>, by
their own appearances (and there are important differences among the various
UAP encounters that are rather pertinent here), <i>problematize our conceptual
space of recognition</i>. We see them—but how? We attempt to conceptualize
them—but how? Their empirical distance from us (in more ways than one) suggests
a more fundamental problem: one of quite <i>radical</i> difference, something
that is even anterior to “otherness” or “alterity” (to use the philosophical
lingo). It’s a kind of difference that occasions (I want to argue) a new space
of conceptual possibilities, something outside the coordinates of “natural” v.
“artificial” and so on. Or in any case the UAP are an occasion (at least for
some encounters) for a significant alteration and change in our concepts. But
we have to <i>think</i> ourselves into this new space, thinking <i>with</i>
these phenomena as they challenge those concepts we have ready-at-hand for them.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://ukrant.nl/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/kant-thumb-mobiel2.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="356" data-original-width="480" height="188" src="https://ukrant.nl/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/kant-thumb-mobiel2.jpg" width="254" /></a></div><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">One conference is being held in Budapest in July by the
Society for European Philosophy. The other, perhaps </span><a href="https://alien2023slsa.com/"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">more funky of a conference</span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">, is
being held in late October in Tempe Arizona here in the U.S. by the Center for
Philosophical Technologies in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering (quite
a combo); this is at the Arizona State University. (But though I’ve submitted
my abstract, the email address to which I’ve sent it no longer seems to
function, and two of the conference organizers have yet to respond to my email
of several days ago … which has me worried.) My point of departure for these
talks will be the philosophy of Kant, who, as you may have guessed, is my
intellectual hero of sorts, whose thinking I really believe is one of the most
helpful when trying to navigate the stormy seas of the unconventional. Kant’s
thinking acts like a wheel and rudder as the winds of wild (and frequently
credulous) speculation blow from one side, and the rocky shore of conventional
skepticism, which perpetually threatens to run the ship aground, fast
approaches from the other. I do want to sail these seas, but I want to weather
the storm and find calm waters in hopes of the discovery of another
port-of-call altogether, at which the anchor can be dropped and the real
adventure might begin (free of old encumbrances—a kind of New World, indeed)…</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">There is a third conference to which I’ve sent an abstract,
but this one is a conference on (basically) foundational issues in the theory
of probability and probabilistic inference, and I am second or third author
(with some others in the UAP Studies community). And here we are attempting to
interrogate the problem (in Bayesian inference theory) of prior probabilities,
which seems to always militate against truly “new empirical observations” that compel
progress in science: if every potential anomaly is always given a very low
probability against the more likely conventional explanations of it, then
science cannot change—it cannot find a new paradigm <i>formed around and suited
to the specifics of the anomaly itself</i>. Rather, it will always seek to
extend the dominant paradigm (by introducing any number of paradigm-saving
hypotheses). Yet, we know that science has changed; indeed, we accept that
change is part of the very essence of science as such (as a method of <i>discovering</i>
the structure of nature, the dazzle of the real). So, we might ask (following
the so-called “transcendental” method of Kant—whom I have yet to introduce to <i>this
</i>project!): how is scientific change possible, since we know that it does
change? That is: what are the conditions of the possibility of scientific
theory change—even radical theory change (as in the transition from Aristotle
to Galileo-Kepler-Newton)? It has to rest with the acceptance of scientific
anomalies, or at least with the embrace of the (un-theorized) new. But how does this happen? Since it cannot be an exactly rational
procedure internal to a given paradigm, then change must be extrinsic to a
paradigm, and must derive from the inner structure of the phenomena themselves,
which compel the creative postulation <i>of new theory</i>. That is, the anomaly
represents a potentially <i>new</i> framework with respect to which there will
be <i>new</i> meaning to certain key concepts. Thus, the assignment of the
prior probabilities must be <i>contextualized</i> or <i>relativized</i>: either
the prior probability of an extraordinary hypothesis (that there is a genuine
anomaly not strictly explicable by means of existing science) is determined <i>relative
to the existing </i>paradigm—in which case the probability will be very low—or
it is given relative to a <i>new</i> paradigm, which would be the one implied
by the anomaly itself. In this case, we would have to examine the priors <i>relative
to a context of anomalies</i>: if the existing paradigm suffers from several or
many, then this would raise the likelihood that we, indeed, have a genuine
anomaly and have reason to believe that the extraordinary hypothesis is more
likely than not (especially if the anomaly can be linked to other anomalies in
some systematic fashion). At least this is my (so-far only partially-baked)
contribution to the paper. We’ll see…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/1486825916835770375/i_Tglge2_400x400.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="400" height="264" src="https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/1486825916835770375/i_Tglge2_400x400.jpg" width="264" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">I will also be traveling, on the 9<sup>th</sup> of May, to
the second iteration of the <i><a href="https://impossiblearchives.rice.edu/" target="_blank">Archives of the Impossible</a></i>, which is Prof.
Jeffrey Kripal’s initiative at Rice University to collect, house and make
available a whole range of documents and other sundry resources related to—and what
should the term here be?—the uncanny, the strange … that which doesn’t easily
fit in with the conventional. Here I will meet the more “woo” crowd (though I
hate that term). For my own part (and not to predetermine myself as dogmatic) I
represent something of an alternative view of the alternatives. As I’ve
attempted to outline in my blog posts over the course of the previous year (and
it’s official: though I have slowed my writing these past several months, Entaus
is one year old), I am trying to work out a kind of <i>empiricism of the
unconventional</i>.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Yesterday in the shower (where lots of ideas seem to
percolate from the depths of my unconscious—water is truly rejuvenating to the
soul), I had an insight into what it seems that I am trying to say. Let me try
to recover this flash of a thought: In the 17<sup>th</sup> century, Science came
to embrace two traditions—the one speculative and conceptual, disciplined
by mathematics and elaborated as metaphysics; the other experimental, almost
alchemical in a new sense but disciplined by the mathematical and the metaphysical.
This produced something remarkable: as the great philosophical writer on the
New Science Sir Francis Bacon would conceptualize it, through the synthesis of
these traditions, human beings were given a new power of creation. Heretofore <i>hidden</i>
potencies of Nature were expressed and brought to light, removed from the
darkness of natural secrecy, and opened to the power of human understanding,
control and intervention. The metaphysical and mathematical descriptions of Nature,
passed through the alchemy of experimentation, produced new forms under the
direct control of the human experimenter. Newton (<a href="https://www.wpr.org/isaac-newtons-secret-alchemy#:~:text=He%20wrote%20more%20than%20a,papers%20came%20up%20for%20auction." target="_blank">secret alchemist</a> by night) would then show that we could
discharge the metaphysical specifics (those “substances” or </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">“essences” </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">of the old </span><a href="https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/overview/medieval-philosophy/v-1/sections/doctrinal-characteristics#:~:text=Metaphysics.,existents%20and%20therefore%20ontologically%20fundamental." style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;" target="_blank">medieval Schools</a><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">) yet
retain the structure of relationships that reliably and consistently produced
certain observable results or predictions, which could then form the basis of our understanding
of Nature: we might not know what gravity itself, metaphysically speaking, is (Descartes had proposed
that it was really a <a href="https://www.loc.gov/collections/finding-our-place-in-the-cosmos-with-carl-sagan/articles-and-essays/modeling-the-cosmos/physical-astronomy-for-the-mechanistic-universe" target="_blank">plenum of material “vortices”</a> and so really was a matter
of frictional forces pulling on things), but its formal, mathematical structure
could be given (as a certain characteristic </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">equation</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">, that expressed the right </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">structural
relationships</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> between the relevant phenomena). Fast-forward to the
breakthroughs of the late 19</span><sup style="font-family: Garamond, serif;">th</sup><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> and early 20</span><sup style="font-family: Garamond, serif;">th</sup><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> centuries:
we could now not only reproduce and control phenomena heretofore totally </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">unknown</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
to human beings (the phenomena of radiation and radioactive decay surely were all around us, but imperceptible and uncontrollable), but could bring into
being phenomena possible but not so far expressed by nature herself. For
example, fission, and of course the atomic bomb, wasn’t a process or technique nature
seemed to care to express on her own (aside from the randomness of radioactivity); yet, human beings managed to express it
for her (for better or for worse). Fusion, the basic process behind the sun,
was the very origin of our own life here on Earth (and the process behind the creation
of the atomic elements on which that life relies), is already expressed everywhere
in the universe, and is a process we are on the verge of mastering for
ourselves: </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Imitatio Dei</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">. Various quantum processes are underway everywhere—but quantum
entanglement is much rarer in nature; yet, we can bring this into being
(difficult though it is) and make nature express it. What other processes, like
fission, still yet remain entirely hidden within the bosom of nature but which, unlocked
by the key of insight, will be made manifest—perhaps for the first time in the
history of the universe? Surely the entire range of what we now call “paranormal”
might be said to be a kind of hint, a dim suggestion of what is possible on the
basis of principles of nature yet unknown to us? </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b1/Edvard_Munch_-_The_Sun_(1911).jpg/1200px-Edvard_Munch_-_The_Sun_(1911).jpg?20150116222524" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="456" data-original-width="800" height="231" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b1/Edvard_Munch_-_The_Sun_(1911).jpg/1200px-Edvard_Munch_-_The_Sun_(1911).jpg?20150116222524" width="406" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">How much of our knowledge is
simply a function of our perhaps rather peculiar portion of the universe to
which we have, for contingent reasons, a certain kind of access? We’ve been
thrown into the world at a certain time and place, and though through our
vision and our extended perception (by means of more exotic electromagnetic and
gravitational interactions) we see everywhere the things we see here in our immediate
experience, how much of what we experience </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">isn’t</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> representative of this
vast expanse of the Real? The New Science, if it taught us anything, taught us
the humility of patient empirical engagement with nature, which by a
painstaking process of experimentation and theorization, slowly but surely
reveals what is hidden. Nature is the ultimate horizon outside of which there
is nothing. Everything is within nature. Paranormal or not. We have only to go
deeper to get the unexpressed (or partially expressed) to be more fully
expressed. In this way does the human—or any other being of this kind of
transformational intelligence—become a constitutive element of the very being
of nature herself: a productive and creative element of the very unfolding of
the real of nature. </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">We</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> are an expressive function of nature even as we
make nature express what is hidden within her. I don’t know if this is why Kripal
calls the human “two”, but surely we must have patience—the patience of the empirical.</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">OK, well, that was much more of an elaboration of the insight
I had than I had intended—and one perhaps diluted because of the prolixity of
its expression. It will have to be tightened and pared down for it to be as succinct
as the original flash had seemed to me. But this is my best first attempt. Let it
stand.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">So much for the future. But what about the (immediate) past?
Let’s talk about those three ufologically oriented events I had the pleasure to
attend…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">During the week of March 13<sup>th</sup>, I attended a
workshop organized by Alex Wendt and hosted by the <a href="https://mershoncenter.osu.edu/" target="_blank">Mershon Center</a> at Ohio State
University. The title of this event was given as “Bringing SETI Home: National
Security and the Politics of UAP”. The idea was to bring in a number of
scholars from a range of disciplines to discuss various national security and
political issues raised by UAP—<i>if</i> we take UAP “seriously” (that is, as
more than misperception, hoax, or instrument error). I’m not quite at liberty
to disclose who exactly was present, since the taboo against the subject is
still strong and a number of the scholars gathered at the event don’t want their
careers jeopardized, but there were many present who are quite serious and well-respected
within their respective disciplines. Indeed, I was impressed by both the range
and the quality. It was only a two-day event, but it was exciting, dynamic and
very intellectually fruitful. Such a profound spirit of collegiality and
helpfulness dominated throughout its two days that it could be said that this
event was unique—even among more mainstream academic workshops (at least that I have
attended over the years). We were gathered in a spirit of collaboration and intellectual
exchange while recognizing the difficulties inherent to the topic—which we
always kept foregrounded as we discussed and debated. My sense was that this is
precisely the kind of thing that’s needed in a field that is so young: if these
were exercises in “UAP Studies”—which I’d argue they most certainly were—then we
went some distance in trying to experiment with methods and discourse that
could be foundational to it. It was a rich and deeply meaningful experience, to
say the very least.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">For my own part, I presented a talk (based on a very
preliminary paper) on UAP and climate change—perhaps a strange pair. But there
were papers from those involved with SETI (exploring the problematic relation
between UAP and SETI); from those concerned with the politics of any potential “disclosure”;
from those concerned with the ethics of a potential military engagement with
UAP; and from those concerned with issues of “securitization” of UAP (and this
tended to be the general concern of the workshop as a whole). We have planned
to develop our papers and talks into chapters for a volume of essays, possibly
titled with the title of the workshop itself. There will be three editors of this
potential volume, and we’re looking to attract Oxford University Press. We’re hopeful
that they’d be interested. If so, then this could very well be a watershed
moment for UAP Studies. Our due date for finished papers </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">is fixed for sometime in the middle of January
of next year, so it’ll be a while before the thing sees the light of day. But
it’s in the works, and should, when finally released, be a rather interesting
read…</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 19.26px;">On March 16</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 15px;">th </span>I arrived home. I had flown into Detroit for Columbus, OH from LA, but now found myself</span><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"> returning to LAX (which is essentially a second home
for me now) </span><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 19.26px;">on March 20</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 15px;">th,</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">for one of those late-evening departures out to Europe that seem to
be rather common. I booked myself onto the big Airbus 380—quite an experience
in modern aviation. It’s a wonder the thing can get airborne. But airborne we
were, after almost a minute of acceleration down the runway. Off to England I went
for event no. 2: a one-day colloquium held in the very old university town of
Durham, about a 3.5 hours (very pleasant) train ride up the English countryside from London.
This was the brainchild of Prof. Michael Bohlander, the German jurist and
international criminal court justice who leads up the Law department at Durham
University. The colloquium’s title—“</span><a href="https://www.durham.ac.uk/departments/academic/law/news-and-events/events/2023/march/alien-conversations/" style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;" target="_blank">Alien Conversations: An Interdisciplinary Colloquiumon the State of Research and Policy Implications Concerning UAP and other Formsof Alien Encounter</a><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">”—was a reference to a very famous (some might say </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">infamous</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">)
event, held many years ago at MIT, organized by none other than MIT professor David
Pritchard (who joined us via Zoom in Durham) along with the esteemed John E.
Mack (someone whose esteem might be considered suspect by some). That event was
more of a full-blown conference: “Alien Discussions” was the title given,
described as a “</span><a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1I8_YCK51AkaiCUufrCt-X5sG38Qkex7a/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=108974514720481942508&rtpof=true&sd=true" style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">secret
MIT conference</a><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">” by at least one reviewer in 1993. Mack’s and Pritchard’s
event, focused on the abduction phenomenon (wave?) that saw its heyday in the 1990s, yielded </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Alien-Discussions-Proceedings-Abduction-Conference/dp/0964491702" style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">a
proceedings volume</a><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">, and examining the table of contents one finds a roster
of some of the most famous names in ufology and alien abduction studies—the very
state of the art at the time.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Bohlander’s event, no less controversial even if rather less
grand in form and numbers in attendance, found several interesting talks, with mine
being perhaps the least of these, given its informational focus: I was invited
to speak about the journal <i>Limina </i>and the academic society (the <i>Society
for UAP Studies</i>) I founded last year (my talk, which, due to an unfortunate
technical glitch, failed to be recorded, nevertheless seemed to be rather well-received I
have to say). Of especial note was the talk by one of SETI’s more intrepid of
researchers—a leader in the area of post-detection SETI studies. I am speaking
of Prof. John Elliot of St. Andrews (just up the road in Scotland), who, way back
in the late 90’s, pioneered the study of the question of what sort of <i>meaningful
content</i> might be contained in a verifiably anomalous SETI signal indicative
of intelligent life abroad. It’s all well and good to find a signal, and for it
to pass the criteria set to establish it as of non-terrestrial technological
origin; but then what? Might it contain <i>meaningful </i>information? Enter
Prof. Elliot, whose expertise is in the area of computational linguistics (and
he’s quite a brilliant mind, to boot).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://m.economictimes.com/thumb/msid-93595297,width-2500,height-1998,resizemode-4,imgsize-206942/calvine-photograph.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="639" data-original-width="800" height="259" src="https://m.economictimes.com/thumb/msid-93595297,width-2500,height-1998,resizemode-4,imgsize-206942/calvine-photograph.jpg" width="325" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Also in attendance was Sheffield University professor of
media studies, communication and journalism David Clarke—of the Calvine
Photograph fame. Clarke detailed his rather extensive archival work on Britain’s
UFO files. Clarke asserted that (and I have every reason to believe him) he’s probably
the only person on the planet who has </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">actually read through</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> just about </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">every</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
document (somewhere in the vicinity of 100,000) contained in those files,
whilst he oversaw their release and archiving. And so his talk was fascinating
because of the unique access he had to once-classified information released by
the British Ministry of Defense (or M.O.D.). As we learned (and as perhaps many
of you know), David came across a number of very interesting UFO cases—not the
least of which was this set of (six I believe) photos of what appears to be a
strikingly diamond-shaped UFO, with a rather obviously conventional craft in
the more blurry background. Clarke—somewhat infamous in UFO circles for his
more skeptical-leaning disposition towards the whole UFO thing (he’s a folklorist
as well, somewhat in the tradition of well-known ufological scholar Thomas “Eddie”
Bullard)—believes this to be the real deal: a genuine photo (i.e., not a hoax)
that captured an anomalous aerial vehicle of some unknown kind. Debunkers have
tried their hardest (as they should) to demonstrate that it </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">could </i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">have
been a hoax, or something else non-anomalous. But the very down-to-earth Clarke
is adamant that these alternative accounts don’t really hold up to scrutiny:
given the physical location, which he himself visited, a hoax is all but impossible—at
least in terms of a string-and-model kind of job. (The interested reader is directed
to </span><a href="https://drdavidclarke.co.uk/" style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Clarke’s own blog</a><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> for the details.)
David’s the kind of person you want thinking really hard about these kinds of
things: clever, sober, rational, even-handed, balanced … a consummate intellectual
sincerely interested in truth. It was a great honor to have met him (and I hope
I’ll bump into him sometime in the near future).</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">The Durham colloquium was simply too short to get the kind of
energetic intellectual exchange going that Alex Wendt managed to achieve at Ohio
State—but then again, it was a <i>really</i> hard sell for Durham to get this
on the docket, and then to have senior SETI personnel to be involved. The
tensions between SETI and the UAP crowd were somewhat in evidence, especially when
one prodded Elliott a bit. But you get a sense that, if we’re looking for
signals afar, and now technological signatures beyond mere electromagnetic blips,
why not “technosignatures” <i>more generally</i>? This is the push given
momentum by Loeb’s Galileo Project, which has no problem with allowing UAP—near
the Earth or on it—to figure into their search. After all, despite the strained
attempts to distance SETI from UAP, there’s absolutely no conceptual reason to
exclude UAP as candidates for an extraterrestrial signature right in our own
backyard—the unconscious fallacy of NIMBY-ism be damned.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Finally, I should at least outline my experiences at my very first
MUFON event as <a href="https://www.mufonoc.org/upcoming-programs" target="_blank">invited speaker</a>. I thought I’d embarrass myself with my talk;
but as it turned out, I don’t think I did too badly. Perhaps I erred in terms of
the content, which might have been a bit too heavy. But I don’t think so: I think
the audience, all 10 attendees in person, and 9 or so online, appreciated what
I was trying to do, which was to find something of a middle-ground between
denialist debunkerism and credulous believerism, to move beyond this dead-end
discourse to something more open but more critical at the same time. Maybe I
wasn’t successful in achieving this; perhaps someone else cleverer than I
can do it right.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">My talk was entitled “<a href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1mON4L3PSsWk9zTyizzCy25txK6WgNx3hPsrX1Cgfo3Q/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank">Transcendental Skepticism</a>” and it’s
based on one of my very first blog posts. Now that I think of it, as I delivered
the talk on a beautiful late April evening in Orange County (it was Wednesday
the 19<sup>th</sup>), that marked almost the one-year anniversary of my blog.
Interesting coincidence. So I seem to have come full circle…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://kated.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/NAM8a-Night-Sky-Safari-Namib-Desert.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="532" data-original-width="800" height="308" src="https://kated.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/NAM8a-Night-Sky-Safari-Namib-Desert.jpg" width="464" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">What can I say about the audience and their questions? Just
that I really appreciated being there, and having the opportunity to work out
my ideas with a more-or-less friendly crowd. It was just that I can’t go all
the way with them: I just don’t think we know enough to offer much in terms of
definitive conclusions that could justify belief in the existence of specific
alien beings, forms of contact, and so on—which a lot of the crowd seemed
disposed to accept. But on what evidence, and why? Despite my (transcendental)
skepticism, I am nevertheless open to having the experiences that they might
think form the basis of such belief: contact/CE5 trips to the desert, and so
on. I am really open to it all, in the spirit of intellectual exploration. And
I’m serious about that. Maybe I will have different experiences altogether, and
maybe I will come to different conclusions on the basis of those experiences.
But above all, one must endeavor </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">to have </i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">them, to seek them out as a
treasure buried in the deepest recesses of Mother Nature. After all, if we
close down the possibility of having the widest possible scope of experience,
how can we say that we are living up to our birthright as human beings—as </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">homo
sapiens</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">? And how can one profess to love “science” in the widest possible
sense of the word? Only by the expansion of one’s horizon of experience can we
even possibly contribute to the great story of </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Scientia</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">, a book with pages
yet to be written, populated with processes and structures and beings yet unfathomable
and unfamiliar to us. It is the greatest story to be told.</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">And so there you have it—my roster of scholarly ufological explorations
for the months of March and April. All in all, a rather rewarding (if tiring) intellectual
experience. I look forward to early May, when I fly down to Houston for the <i>Archives
of the Impossible </i>extravaganza, and later that same month when I embark on
my second ufological European adventure—first to Germany, then to Paris, then
to Portugal. I will attempt to chronicle this sojourn more faithfully in real-time
than I managed for my first set of trips. But as I have too much plated for me
from now and even through until then, and beyond (including preparing for <i>Limina’s</i>
first edition), I cannot exactly promise. I can hope.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Until then, <i>pax vobiscum.</i></span><i><o:p></o:p></i></p>Mike Cifonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16910256379002179502noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7235611048140260044.post-70109529553283899012023-03-11T13:44:00.025-08:002023-03-30T00:42:06.261-07:00 Loebism: Conjectures and Refutaions<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/format:webp/1*A8e9UITo4DwvGjtqwdprHQ.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="513" data-original-width="800" height="245" src="https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/format:webp/1*A8e9UITo4DwvGjtqwdprHQ.png" width="382" /></a></div><p><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">I’m beginning to wonder whether Prof. Loeb is actually aware
of the curious details of the history of <i>actual</i> science—as opposed to the </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">hagiographical</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
stories we like to congratulate science with as we daydream about what science
must or ought to be like.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Whenever scientists wax reflexive or “philosophical”, we
really should start to get the jitters—especially in today’s post-1960s world
of Feynmanian “shut up and calculate”, where (from my personal experience) most
scientists, even the savants, have a very unsubtle (and idealistic) grasp of
real history of science, let alone the philosophy that both guides and underwrites
it.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">So I want to talk about “Loebism”. I am not sure that I can
provide a general account of Loebism yet, but I can begin to discern the
outlines of it. And it’s not particularly promising. Not for UAP study, and not
for science, either. (But maybe that’s just me being cranky yet again…)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Let’s begin with the latest outpourings from his ever-active “Medium”
blog (which is essentially what it is: a clever retooling of what we do here on the
old-fashioned Google or Wordpress platforms). Let’s start with his recent piece,
entitled with one of those awkward titles Loebism is good at spinning: “<a href="https://avi-loeb.medium.com/separating-science-from-fiction-84b8f69158df">Separating
Science From Fiction</a>”. (Although I say recent—this one is dated 5 March—but
he serves them up faster than the UAP flapjacks at the Roswell Waffle House.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Let’s just start with the image he chose, probably at random,
not knowing exactly what was going on in it. It’s a scene from <i>Star Trek III:
The Search for Spock</i>, as Kirk and his skeleton crew book it after Scotty
disabled the Excelsior’s “trans-warp” drive (Scotty was of course assigned to
the Excelsior, much to his chagrin). What was Three all about? Well, if you’ll
recall, in Two Spock dies saving the Enterprise as Khan (that “product of late
twentieth century genetic engineering” to quote Cmdr. Chekhov, who gets captured
by Khan, along with his then-captain, Cpt. Terrell) attempts to blow up everyone
by detonating the “Genesis Device”. But as all of us nerds know, just as Spock tries
to enter the “mains” thingy (he’s tying to “bring the mains back online”),
which is presumably related to the warp core for the warp drive, Spock is
stopped by Bones: “you can’t go in there!”. It’s apparently filled with lethal amounts
of ionizing radiation (due to their use of matter/anti-matter reactions I guess).
Spock seems to agree, but then does the Vulcan nerve pinch thing on Bones and as
Bones falls unconscious onto the floor, he says into his ear, quietly: “Remember”.
Spock had, as we learn in Three when Spock’s dad Sarek confronts Kirk, transferred
his “katra” to Bones, who now carries it around: a second spirit possessing
Bones, looking for its proper repository, which, of course, is the dead body of
Spock himself—shot out into the nascent “Genesis” planet in a photon torpedo.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">It’s a wonderfully imaginative set of episodes whose culmination
is the “save the whales” time-travel extravaganza that I actually watched in
the theater in the Spring or Summer of 1986 (in the opening credits, it was
dedicated to the <i>Challenger</i>, which had exploded the previous January—which
I also remember seeing on TV when I came home to my grandmother’s house for
lunch that fateful winter afternoon).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Why do I go on at length about this image? Well, because
curiously it puts us right within a sci-fi series that, as we all know, runs through
the complete gamut of UAP questions, issues, problems, speculations … you name it, it’s
all here. But it is, we’re told in order to bring our minds back to Earth, all
pure fantasy. It’s not real. It’s all “pure imagination” (can you hear Gene
Wilder singing on the boat in <i>Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory</i>?).
And none of that has any place in science, right? Well, if it does, it is just not like it is in the movies (and I suppose that<o:p></o:p></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">’s fair enough). If there is imagination, it</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">’s oh-so-tame, domesticated, put in place only with the <i>Imprimatur</i> of evidence. Well, maybe.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">When I was a kid, I used to walk out of those wonderful old <i>Star
Trek</i> films really dreading returning back to the boring old world of the 1980s
or 1990s, with its distinct lack of transporters, warp drives, phasers and
repressed ultra-logical alien species. Then, yes, I started to get curious
about actual science, and realized that, if we were to match the world of <i>Star
Trek</i>, we had a lot of homework and creative thinking to do. But I was only
interested to know the foundations of science—its history, its philosophical
origins—not in the working out of those homework problems. I wanted to try to
push against the limits of science (theoretical physics) by learning what those
limits were—or at least getting as good a sense as I could, with the intellectual
resources available to me (I’m neither a physicist nor mathematician by any stretch
of the imagination, but I have a decent-enough imagination and intellectual
background to be able to have a good conversation with them.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Back to Prof. Loeb’s Medium piece, crushing our imagination
and our sci-fi fantasies. Part of my intellectual training involved taking a close look at
the <i>actual</i>—as opposed to the idealized version of the—history of science. And by close look I mean philosophically-informed</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">—</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">a critical as opposed to hagiographical look at it. And as I had come to learn, it’s not nearly so cut-and-dry as Professor Loeb wants it to be.
So, the first “fantasy” we have to be aware of is <i>the fantasy of the</i></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><i> history of science in Loeb</i></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;"><i>’s</i></span><i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> (and your typical scientist’s) understanding of it</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Indeed: </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">What I learned quickly was that you can’t really rely on scientists
themselves for an accurate understanding of the history of their own
profession. Probably because they’re “interested parties” to the max: they </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">want
</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">it to be a certain way, so in their minds, naturally, it will be: a bastion
of “reason” or “rationalism”; a land where fact always rules over fantasy; and where
the wilds of human imagination are always carefully domesticated by the
sobriety of experiment and the dictates of the evidence, which acts ever to counteract, dispel or temper it. Or somesuch
story. In any case, probably Avi, when pressed, would say “sure imagination is
part of science, but it’s got to be disciplined by experiments, evidence, fact…”
which is surely reasonable, as far as it goes. But then </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">what about</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> that
imagination in science—especially when it challenges received wisdom? That’s
where Avi gets it wrong (though he can’t entirely be faulted, since the role he’s
given himself to play, as a relatively establishment figure, is, from a larger
perspective, just as it should be: he puts up the good fight as the “radicals”—which
sometimes he thinks of himself as, or at least a mitigated radical, using “arguments
and data”—try to argue for their tendentious hypotheses with little or no “good
data” to go on).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">What got me worked up of late, which was the immediate inspiration
for this post, was the posting of this Loeb piece on the SCU’s Facebook page.
One person highlighted a bit of the Medium article for us, asking the group to take note:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">The burden of proof is on those
who claim new physics. Progress in our scientific knowledge is not advanced by
our imagination but by indisputable supporting evidence. Without accurate
distance measurements, UAP observations cannot be used to suggest new physics. (Loeb 2023, Medium, 5 March.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Of course, that’s Loeb’s pot-shot against (I suppose) the UAP “believer”
who wants to argue that the apparently extraordinary UAP kinematics (their observed
velocities and accelerations) is evidence of new physics. But surely not “[w]ithout
accurate distance measurements…”. He has just put up a (now controversial) pre-print that <a href="https://thedebrief.org/avi-loeb-and-the-dods-chief-uap-investigator-sean-kirkpatrick-say-solving-aerial-mysteries-requires-known-physics/" target="_blank">got co-authored with the AARO chief Dr. Kirkpatrick</a>, which attempts to work out what supposedly known physics has to say about the dance of UAP kinematics, but it is not entirely clear to me that he realizes that all they are doing in that paper is setting up the rough logic of confirmation for anomalies: if UAP are conventional, then under the following conditions, here is how they must behave according to known physics (and this is what their pre-print wants to establish very clearly); so, if they do not so behave, well then, the conclusion is as inevitable as it is elementary: they are not obeying conventional physics. The logic is basic: if A implies B, but B is false, well then, it follows that A is false too. <i>Period</i>. What everyone in the Twitter-sphere and in the media don</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">’t</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> seem to understand is that Loeb & Kirkpatrick just don</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">’t</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> think the second premise obtains: there is no good evidence, they want to maintain, that UAP <i>have</i> violated physical expectations <i>because the data is, so far, poor</i> (not because they don</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">’t</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> think we can obtain it, or that it</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">’s</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> not possible, etc.). They are exactly right that no instrumented observations of known and verifiable (and readily analyzable) provenance have been produced which is acceptable for the scientific mainstream; even the best UAP cases are lacking in key, independently verifiable, datasets (like military sensor data, which remain and likely will forever remain classified). I still think that we have very good inductive evidence that we are in fact dealing with objects violating conventional science, but that is an entirely different debate (and one I will table for now).</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">(But oh this pre-print thing, and all the press surrounding it, including a <i><a href="https://www.militarytimes.com/off-duty/military-culture/2023/03/09/pentagon-ufo-chief-says-alien-mothership-in-our-solar-system-possible/" target="_blank">Military Times</a></i> piece </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">click-batingly </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">claiming that </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">“</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Pentagon UFO chief says alien mothership in our solar system possible</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">”, deserves a whole commentary all on its own, which I will hopefully get to in the midst of my upcoming travels, both domestic and foreign.)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Where shall we begin with this recent Loeb Medium article? As I said, let’s table a discussion of the paucity
of the data that can be extracted from your run-of-the-mill UAP incident. The
point is granted. (But we ought to return to that issue at some point soon.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Let’s just start with the first couple of claims in that snippet cited above. Well, they’re
all over the place. Copernicus had no “evidence” in the sense we’d accept, or which
<i>could</i> be accepted in his time. He had a simplified model that
contradicted everything the Aristotelian one (Ptolemy’s) demanded—and the
Copernican model wasn’t even any more empirically adequate as compared with the
Ptolemaic model! In fact, <a href="https://blog.richmond.edu/physicsbunn/2012/09/13/ptolemy-and-copernicus/#:~:text=Copernicus%E2%80%99s%20model%20was%20not%20any%20more%20accurate%20than,as%20many%29%20of%20the%20clunky%20features%20like%20epicycles.">the
one was just as good as the other</a> at predicting what it had to predict: the
locations of planets in the sky over time. Perhaps the dirty little secret that
we conveniently like to forget in our hagiographies of science is that the Ptolemaic
geocentric model, while more complex, was consistent with the metaphysical requirement
of the time, given by Aristotle’s demand that the Earth must be centrally
located—something taken by the “scientists” of the time to be <i>observationally
confirmed</i>. Copernicus’ model was indeed simpler—it had less complicated
planetary motions—but so what? It required something that didn’t make sense and
which contradicted the evidence: an Earth in motion. So, not only did Copernicus’
model have no more evidence to support it than did the dominant Ptolemaic model with which it contended, but it <i>also</i> contradicted the fundamentals of the
scientific paradigm of the day. If you add up the balance sheet, Ptolemaic geocentrism would, rationally, win every
argument c. 1543. And a post-facto argument that, well, Copernicus had the right
mechanics or dynamics in principle (which was lacking for the Ptolemaic model) won’t
stand, since that was a subsequent realization had decades and centuries later.
Truth and reasoning do not work with the benefit of hindsight when you’re <i>in
</i>the historical thick of things (and this is a deeper <i>philosophical</i> point worth examining further). We can only safely show the profound errors
of geocentrism (or any rejected or discarded science) <i>after</i> the
paradigm shift occurs and we get a whole new set of foundations—which typically
means that even the very concept of what does/doesn’t count as “evidence”
changes. The significance of this meta-theoretic (historical-philosophical) realization
cannot be overstated, especially as it pertains to the whole UAP quagmire now
afoot as the mainstream tries to jump into the game.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Second, progress is often (therefore) made by a <i>leap of scientific
imagination</i>, often one that <i>flies in the face of the evidence</i>—or gets
us to look at that “evidence” in an entirely new light. Loeb is, then, dead wrong. Or rather, he has a very confused (and unexamined) view of actual
science. Recall to mind the birth of relativity theory in the early twentieth
century: Einstein <i>posited</i>—that is, helped himself to a seemingly
contradictory assumption—that light’s speed was a constant. This was an
imaginative leap based on nothing more than evidence for the null hypothesis,
which was the upshot of all those experiments throughout the nineteenth century
trying to find out whether the speed of light was different in different
reference frames. Nobody could detect a difference, but yet this difference was
<i>required</i> by the Newtonian paradigm under which the physics of the time operated.
Even Einstein himself would later famously recognize the (nonrational, or “para-rational”)
role imagination plays in the history of science—without which we’d have (I
would argue) nothing but a chaotic assortment of facts with no theoretical cohesion.
Theory, I claim, <i>is imagination</i>—and <i>accepted theory</i> is just those
imaginative assumptions and hypotheses for which we can build a case for their
coherence with the evidence of experiment and observation. What happened in the
birth of relativity theory was that a crazy, speculative postulate (that the speed
of light <i>was the same for all observers and in all frames of reference</i>),
which was just an assumption, was added together with a relatively reasonable
one Newtonians (the mainstream) might accept: that the laws of physics are the same in every reference frame (which is a
principle of absolute <i>invariance</i>). In his 1905 paper, Einstein inverted
the logic of the evidence of the time: he said that rather than puzzling over
why nobody is able to discern a difference in the speed of light when there
should be (according to the then-current Newtonian paradigm), <i>let’s just
take the absence of the observation of a difference</i>—the null hypothesis—<i>as an
indication of a new fact.</i> He flipped the reasoning on its head, and upended the
<i>interpretation</i> of the evidence of the time. This, we must realize, is an
interpretive leap of Einstein’s imagination: It takes the “evidence” in a new
(theoretical) light.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">In fact, if I may be so bold: <i>Einstein took the old
evidence as evidence for new theory</i>! Now, if we return to Loeb’s final
comment, we might chuckle a bit at the professor’s clear lapse of historical
understanding: “… UAP observations cannot be used to suggest new physics”.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">How do we know that </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">“… UAP observations cannot be used to suggest new physics” </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">unless someone comes along and pulls an Einstein, <i>using their imagination</i>? It is surely a possibility that there is new physics with some UAP, and given the history of science, it is not unreasonable to suspect this given what good evidence there already is (for example, in the <i>Nimitz</i> and Aguadilla cases, which we have discussed on this blog elsewhere: and no, Mick West has not debunked them, despite the relative cogency of his narrowly-focused video analyses). Surely we need more data to build a more convincing case, but if we adopt Loebism, we would be trapped by an unimaginative loop of </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">“well, it can</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">’t be, so it isn</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">’t</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18px;">”. Trapped by evidence which we are not allowed to interpret <i>imaginatively</i>. Would it be any worse than the <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/465036a" target="_blank">visions that inspired the discovery of benzene</a> to use pretty good UAP reports, with pretty good testimony from which decent estimations can be extracted (as in Knuth <i>et al.</i> 2019)?</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18px;">Are the outlines of Loebism becoming clear...?</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">(Now, in a subsequent post, we might take up the profound
irony with the image Loeb used in making his seemingly sound, rational cut-down
to the imaginative in science, an irony we’ve suggested but not exactly clarified…)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><i>Note & Belated Postscript (30 March 2023)</i></span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif;">: this article has been modified slightly to tone down my reflexive crankiness. It should be noted that the present author in fact holds Loeb in very high regard, and has defended his work against the various confusions, confabulations and other misreadings that have been found percolating within the UAP community. Loeb’s efforts are to be lauded before they are to be criticized—but of course, criticism (if one can overlook an author’s idiosyncrasies) is part of the driving dynamic of all authentic science. It should therefore be read as an effort to improve upon the conceptual foundations of our attempt to study such a complex puzzle as UAP clearly are.</i></p>Mike Cifonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16910256379002179502noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7235611048140260044.post-52226228453641497172023-02-27T16:08:00.055-08:002023-02-28T14:42:30.378-08:00the day (or three weeks) after the party: post-event reflections, and my future odyssey into the world of ufological academia<p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcT27KY3UhJJ8gff5-7BaK9GJdfKeGZ17r5SqA&usqp=CAU" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="168" data-original-width="300" height="168" src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcT27KY3UhJJ8gff5-7BaK9GJdfKeGZ17r5SqA&usqp=CAU" width="300" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: Garamond, serif; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">W</span></span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">ell, as I sit in my darkened living room,
following the Great California Deluge (at least <i>so far</i> for the Year 2023; the gods only
know what's in store for us in the weeks, months and years hence), listening to
the <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galant_music">style galant</a> </i>of
J.S. Bach’s son J.C., I reflect that it’s been just about exactly three (very
long) weeks since the conclusion of the <a href="https://liminasymposium.vfairs.com/">three-day Symposium I organized</a>
(with some great help from some great folks), an event which I hosted virtually
from my alma mater out in Amish Country rural Pennsylvania.</span> (<a href="https://www.societyforuapstudies.org/limina-inaugural-symposium-2023" target="_blank">Post-event access</a> is still available through 16 March, if you’re interested to catch the
recordings of our 15 or so presentations—just follow the previous link.)<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">I will leave it to others to review the sessions
or the Symposium as a whole, as my role here is as plain reporter not critical evaluator.
My esteemed interlocutor, Bryan Sentes (an invitee and participant of the
event, who organized a fantastic cross-disciplinary panel at the conclusion of
the very intellectually rich first day) has tantalizingly promised a review, and
helpfully provided <a href="https://skunkworksblog.com/2023/02/08/first-rumour-of-liminas-inaugural-symposium/">reference
to perhaps the first reflection</a> on the event. We do indeed breathlessly
await this…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<div style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext .75pt; mso-element: para-border-div; padding: 0in 0in 1pt;">
<p class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext .75pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 1.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">For my part, a few
scattered reflections and recollections of the event; a log of my travels
leading up to and following it; my painful but brief interregnum; and a profile
of my upcoming foray into the world of ufological academia is perhaps in
order, as I have remained conspicuously silent in the immediate days and weeks
following <i>Limina’s Inaugural Symposium 2023</i>.</span></p></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://article-imgs.scribdassets.com/586v5zmdfk8hbx9i/images/fileW3KA212L.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="406" data-original-width="746" height="224" src="https://article-imgs.scribdassets.com/586v5zmdfk8hbx9i/images/fileW3KA212L.jpg" width="412" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: Garamond, serif; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">A</span></span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"> few presentations into Day One, Prof. Kripal,
known to many of you already as one eloquent voice within academia concerned
with the serious study of anomalous phenomena (‘anomalalia’?) broadly construed,
and one chronicler of this zone of the uncanny, had reminded us that a
strictly scientific engagement with unidentified aerial phenomena—“the
phenomenon” as some of us occasionally style it—is incomplete without a
humanist accompaniment. And that the humanities don’t merely provide the tasty
but strictly superfluous “sprinkles on the cake”. Indeed, Kripal precisely
voiced the reason I began this Symposium with esteemed ufological historian of
science Greg Eghigian, whose masterful historical overview of the emergence of
the UFO phenomenon as, variously, a topic of military, popular and (albeit falteringly)
of scientific concern, provided a rich context of meaning within which to understand
the strictly empirical engagement with the issue. Prof. Eghigian’s talk, then,
was exactly where I thought we should begin.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">And yet, at another level, we couldn’t avoid the
Fortean dimensions of the whole affair asserting themselves, despite our efforts
to strike a tone of sober-minded academic study. UFOs continue to be logged as
a topic in Forteana, and as if on cue, the day we began the Symposium was
precisely the day the whole UAP/balloons saga began—that is, with the downing
of what was quickly confirmed to be a Chinese surveillance balloon. The drama
of first a UAP being reported, then identified as a conventional craft, was a
kind of uncanny <i>wink</i> of the Universe’s eye to those of us gathered that
weekend. The Fortean dimension in this case was not so much apparent in what we
took to be the object of our focus during the Symposium (UAP), but rather in the very synchronicity
between the Symposium’s focus on UAP (and the epistemological, ontological and
methodological issues faced in studying such phenomena) and the events
unfolding in the news throughout that weekend, which were to bring the question
of UAP to the minds of almost everyone in the world. I could not have authored
a better metaphysical tale myself…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://img.i-scmp.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=contain,width=425,format=auto/sites/default/files/styles/768x768/public/d8/images/canvas/2023/02/20/403d8cba-1278-4a1f-a767-1087eb05daa0_defc0f48.jpg?itok=9h5GMfQ8&v=1676896495" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="425" data-original-width="425" height="301" src="https://img.i-scmp.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=contain,width=425,format=auto/sites/default/files/styles/768x768/public/d8/images/canvas/2023/02/20/403d8cba-1278-4a1f-a767-1087eb05daa0_defc0f48.jpg?itok=9h5GMfQ8&v=1676896495" width="301" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">The Balloon Event of 2023, that fortuitously
coincided with this Symposium, was one of those events (in a more profoundly <i>philosophical</i>
sense) that provides an occasion for a rupture: UFO “believers” and “skeptics” suddenly
are (quite unwittingly) forced to reveal themselves for what they are—well, in
any case, they are revealed as flawed and unconsciously dogmatic human
(all-too-human) thinkers, armed with (<i>a priori</i>) conclusions in search of
arguments. It can be a pitiful display, sadly. But we must accept it nonetheless
as part of the course of the overall dialectic of understanding.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">For my part, I accepted that the first “UAP” was
indeed a Chinese balloon, as was quickly announced upon its downing just off
the Carolina coast. Clear photos of the object soon emerged, and we were later
treated to the pictures and the story of debris recovery efforts. In my
acceptance, was I being gullible? I trusted the media, the government announcements—the
official, mainstream media, that is. But I also trusted the descriptions of the
object (for that was a better description: we were able to skip ‘phenomena’
and move to ‘object’ fairly unproblematically), descriptions which were not
particularly anomalous at all. Indeed, it was those initial descriptions which
licensed us in not even having to invoke the now rather loaded term ‘UAP’ <i>at
all</i>. When the object was observed, it was initially observed to be a balloon—just
of unknown <i>origin</i>. But if it’s a balloon, it’s uncontroversial that it’s
a human-fashioned object: someone, somewhere was responsible for it. And that
subsequently turned out to be the Chinese. Case closed—at least on the origins
question; as to what exactly it was doing there … well, that’s a matter of
careful investigation, apart from the obvious interpretive assumption that it’s
surveillance tech operated by a putative adversary (perhaps we make this assumption
<i>because</i> it’s built and operated by a political and economic adversary).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Now for those <i>other</i> alleged UAPs … and
here I will admit to having become extremely cranky at several of my interlocutors
at some noted UAP think-tanks, with whom I’m in touch on a number of internal
Slack accounts. What really irked me was the insistence, by some of the most
vociferous Slack participants at these think-tanks (there always seems to be
one or two of us who do all the talking), that we don’t <i>know</i> that it’s
not a “real” UAP until we get a better handle on the data. And about that data:
it’s not being fully disclosed, so <i>here we go again</i>, with the government
first admitting they don’t know what it is, then trying to convince us there’s
nothing to see here (so please move on) … echoes of Roswell, it would seem. And
indeed: or so it would <i>seem</i>—emphasis on the seeming. That’s just what
was irksome: a lot of <i>seeming</i>, and innuendo, and the insistence—justifiable as for as it goes—on patient agnosticism in the face of a paucity of data, yet it is really a disingenuous rational-seeming “agnosticism” topped with a healthy dollop of conspiratorial
worry-warting over government dissemblance. I mean, <i>maybe </i>we’re dealing
with a <i>real</i> UAP—a truly anomalous craft aloft, navigating by some
unknown propulsion system! Maybe! Right?!<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Well, wrong. Here the priors are fairly and
unproblematically straightforward: the final three objects in question are most likely rather <i>conventional</i>
objects, balloons or other dirigibles. Why do I say that? Well, simply because
the descriptions of what was observed didn’t indicate anything particularly
anomalous, despite the inconsistencies in the official accounts. At one point,
a Pentagon official, a <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/ruling-out-aliens-senior-us-general-says-not-ruling-out-anything-yet-2023-02-13/" target="_blank">general</a>, says in one breath that they’re not saying it’s
a balloon “for a reason” and then head-spinningly proceeds to concede that it <i>might</i>
be a balloon after all! (<a href="https://www.defense.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/3289888/gen-glen-vanherck-commander-north-american-aerospace-defense-command-and-united/" target="_blank">Here is the full transcript</a>.) And if you allow yourself an updated prior deriving
from the history of UAP/UFO encounters (that is, if you put any credence in the
many fairly good reports of encounters with UFOs), you’d know that the mere
fact that military aircraft were able to intercept and down these objects (or
otherwise interact successfully with them) is itself evidence <i>against</i> these craft
being anomalous UAP in the classic ufological sense. How did longtime UFO-concerned
journalist Billy Cox recently put it? “<a href="https://lifeinjonestown.substack.com/p/the-days-the-earth-sort-of-stood">Legit
UFOs don’t get shot down—and that’s the problem</a>.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Surely, we ought to wait for all of the data to
come in about these three other objects (which, quite without recent precedent,
were actually <i>downed</i> or at least shot at by military fighter jets), <i>before</i>
we make a final pronouncement on these cases. But, equally surely, we are
justified in placing a bet, bringing to bear the venerated logic of induction.
After all, that’s the whole point of inductive reasoning—and especially an
induction which would invoke Bayesian premises: inductive logic is useful <i>exactly
</i>when we are dealing with a limited or even somewhat poor <i>current </i>dataset,
and we want to come up with a <i>reasonable </i>guess (an informed one) as to
what the hell might be going on. The past (both distant <i>and immediate</i>)
helps us in gauging present and future occurrences or outcomes, especially if
there’s any doubt as to what on earth (or out of it) is going on in the data we’re
getting. In this case, we’re getting reports of aerial objects floating around
U.S. (and Canadian) airspace, sometimes confirmed by ground radar. But the
immediate past context was important for reasoning about these new “UAP” occurrences:
a Chinese surveillance balloon was recently shot down; the miliary decided to
recalibrate radar arrays to stop cutting out <i>all</i> the air clutter … and <i>voila</i> … more slow-moving airborne objects were detected, seen as obvious
safety-of-flight issues, intercepted, and quickly downed.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">At first, some of the reports did seem UFO-y. “Metallic
structures”. Couldn’t immediately discern the propulsion mechanisms. Pieces of
the downed craft strewn about. And so on through the suggestive gamut of Roswell-like
utterances. (Here’s a convenient <a href="https://enigmalabs.io/blog/uap-shoot-down-timeline">timeline and play-by-play</a>
of events as they unfolded.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But not really,
of course. We are justified, as we have suggested, in guessing that we’re not dealing with anything really
extraordinary, apart from the fact of the unprecedented military interceptions (with
live fire) within U.S. airspace. What’s unusual or unfortunate is the whole kerfuffle
over these things, and the lack of clarity issuing from the putative
authorities. Because of the usual secrecy in matters Pentagon, we may never “know”
what the hell <i>did</i> go down (as it were), so I’m happy to move on…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Where were we before this tanget? Ah yes, we were
making a few scattered remarks about the Symposium I organized three weeks ago.
Let’s get back to that…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSlmYJdMCVBcVIF8d0qZa9fkBIGwZEVn9rG3Q&usqp=CAU" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="190" data-original-width="265" height="190" src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSlmYJdMCVBcVIF8d0qZa9fkBIGwZEVn9rG3Q&usqp=CAU" width="265" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">P</span></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">erhaps the highlight of the whole affair was the
Mick West (against)/Robert Powell (for) pair of talks that took a deeper look
at the <a href="https://www.explorescu.org/post/2013-aguadilla-puerto-rico-uap-incident-report-a-detailed-analysis" target="_blank">Aguadilla UAP Incident</a> of 2013, for which we possess some of the clearest
and longest video evidence (albeit video of an infrared-band visual). What was remarkable,
I think, was simply the level of respect and decorum maintained by all involved.
What was </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">especially</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> remarkable was that several UAP researchers took West’s
analysis very seriously, didn’t dismiss it, and thought that it was both
pertinent and quite well worth a careful reply. Mr. West is astute in his work
on the analysis he set himself to accomplish; the point of disagreement, and
the weakness of West’s argument, is that it focused </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">only</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> (and exclusively)
on the line-of-sight issue, not attempting to look at the whole context of evidence
(such as it is). In order to persuasively debunk this case (or any alleged anomalous
UAP case for that matter), one must have a convincing overall account of all
relevant evidence (which in this case includes not just the video, but also the
visual sightings, and the rather puzzling radar data we have access to). One
must show not only that there is a fatal discrepancy between the SCU’s calculations
of the motion of the allegedly anomalous object and a more reasonable (but
evidentially well-justified) interpretation of the UAP’s motion based on a more
accurate (or more plausible) line-of-sight calculation; one must <i>also</i> show that this
alternative interpretation (which attempts to shore up the Chinese lantern theory
as to what the object itself is) can be consistently sustained for the </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">entire
context of evidence</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">. For this case, one must explain what it was that was visually
observed by the eyewitnesses, <i>where</i> they observed it to have been; why the traffic tower
controllers were alarmed and took action; and finally, why the radar showed that there
was an object pulling 1.2 to 2.3 times the speed of sound in the vicinity
(assuming that this was the same object in question—something that ought to be
addressed but which wasn’t … maybe the return wasn’t of the UAP?). I specifically
queried Mr. Powell (who carefully presented the detailed SCU report on the case) on this last point about the anomalous radar data, and
the response I got was </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">very </i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">intriguing</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">.</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">In my question to Mr. Powell, I pointed out that in his recent book, our keynote speaker for the
final Sunday talks, Dr. Daniel Coumbe (formerly of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen), had performed some calculations for what was this anomalous radar return that occurred
during the incident—again, presumably radar returns <i>of the object in
question</i> (and again, this is something one would want to carefully evaluate:
was this the <i>same</i> allegedly anomalous object that we see on the infrared
video? … we make the assumption <i>that is was</i>). Those calculations showed above-Mach
speeds—as high as <i>twice</i> the speed of sound. That’s already strange, near
to the airport. When I asked Powell about it, he said that this very issue was
raised with an independent evaluator of the case report that SCU generated, and
what this (French) team determined was that in fact this signal was <i>due to
radar jamming interference</i>! If that’s right, then we had an anomalous object
interfering with the radar trying to track it, causing the array to
generate false kinematical readings. In any alternative account of the Aguadilla
Incident, we are owed a consistent and plausible account of this further bit of
apparently anomalous evidence.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.the-sun.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2021/04/fdasfdfdafadsfdfds.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="411" data-original-width="485" height="253" src="https://www.the-sun.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2021/04/fdasfdfdafadsfdfds.jpg" width="299" /></a></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">But West chose instead to focus exclusively on
the video, providing a convincing account of what the velocity of the object
would be, based on his (rather plausible) alternative line-of-sight analysis.
Seen in the context of the evidence as a whole, however—as some legal minds
present in the audience pointed out to me (in private communications)—the alternative
interpretation he wanted to offer as to what the object really was (that we’re
dealing with nothing more extraordinary than Chinese lanterns set aloft for
festive purposes, presumably from a nearby hotel—not an uncommon practice, at
least in 2013) could not really be convincing, simply because this alternative account
was not (or could not be) applied to the rest of the evidence.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">The problem could be mitigated somewhat by making
it clear that this account doesn’t try to encompass <i>all</i> of the evidence—it
rather just purports to offer a more perspicacious look at line-of-sight issues
as they feature in the attempt to deduce the object’s velocity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But then the question becomes: so how does
this more careful look at the line-of-sight issue impact the overall assessment
of the SCU report, namely: that what we are dealing with is a truly anomalous
unidentified aerial object of unknown nature, origin and purpose? Even if we
grant the cogency of West’s analysis (and it <i>was</i> cogent, within the
limits he set for himself), and accept that the object was moving much more
slowly than the SCU report would have us believe, this would not in itself be
enough reason to believe that this object was a mere Chinese lantern
blowing around with the prevailing winds. What about the observations of the
object at the airport? And the radar anomalies?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">To be clear, SCU does not <i>have</i> an account
of the object. It is claimed to be a genuine “UAP”: an unidentified anomalous aerial object of some
kind. Thus, SCU’s conclusion is entirely negative: <i>the object cannot be
accounted for conventionally</i>. They give extensive reasons (not, it should
be noted, dependent on the line-of-sight considerations used by West to dispute
the particular speeds the object had) as to why it can’t be a conventional
object, that is: an object of known physical nature—whether natural or manufactured.
It might be a natural phenomenon heretofore unknown to science—but then how
does it fly and move, and (apparently) divide into two? Even creatures of nature
<i>need flight or control surfaces</i>—on their bodies—to <i>control</i> their
movements. The object appeared to be in <i>controlled flight</i>, in many
instances moving against the prevailing winds (one strong reason the SCU concludes
it can’t be a lantern, which would be uncontrollably subject to those winds). It also appears
to enter the water and then reemerge (something West, in his alternative interpretation,
disputes), having divided into two. And at this particular moment the SCU had observed that there were further anomalies in the thermal data coming from this sensor: the object appears to increase, briefly, in volume, and two <i>independent</i> heat sources seem to emerge (although this fact of two heat sources would be consistent with the twin-lanterns theory West argues for, the volumetric increase observed in the thermal signature would appear to be puzzling under the West lantern interpretation). So the anomaly isn’t confined to kinematics,
or to “transmedium travel” (as it has been put: moving through air, water and other
media without altering course or speed); we have an anomaly in the very nature
of the object <i>as such</i>, and the associated thermal signature registered by the infrared camera. And if it has divided, that would suggest a biological
nature—except for its effortless travel through the air and the water without
visible flight surfaces or a means of propulsion. The Aguadilla case is truly a
remarkable, and perplexing, UAP event…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">I won’t dwell any further on the other talks
during this Symposium, except to say that I was really pleased. I wanted more skeptical
voices to be present—and I was really thankful to Mr. West for accepting our
invitation. But I was happy that we got so many excellent presentations by
really genuine thinkers and intellectuals who really care to take the subject
seriously, as everyone did.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Closing our event was a really fascinating panel
of UAP-focused journalists (next time we will endeavor to get Billy Cox to
attend), that I allowed to go into overtime. Rare is it to have the likes of
Leslie Kean, Ralph Blumenthal, Ross Coulthart, George Knapp and the German
UFO-interested independent journalist Andreas Müller all gathered together in
one event, talking together about their field—how far it has come, and what still
remains to be investigated more carefully.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">So, at the moment, I am hard at work on a number
of projects, initiatives and future events for both the <i><a href="http://www.societyforuapstudies.org/">Society for UAP Studies</a></i> and
<i>Limina</i>. I am also setting up a fairly intense travel schedule (which I’ll
get to)…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">The Society will be offering an intensive lecture
seminar series, delivered by the esteemed UAP researcher Dr. Massimo Teodorani.
Tickets are about to go on sale, but the event will be each Monday throughout
the whole month of June. Dr. Teodorani will also deliver a <a href="https://www.societyforuapstudies.org/event-details/j-allen-hynek-lectures-dr-massimo-teodorani-2" target="_blank">capstone public lecture</a>
on 1 July as part of the Society’s <a href="https://www.societyforuapstudies.org/the-j-allen-hynek-lectures" target="_blank">J. Allen Hynek Lectures</a>. (As readers
of my blog, you have the chance to register and acquire tickets for both of
these events at a discount. Just use the codes “entausSem” for the seminar and “entausLec”
for the Hynek lecture in July when checking out and you’ll get the discount. Any questions, just
email me directly using the Society’s website.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">About my travel schedule: well, I’ve been invited
to (or will attend) a few events that may interest the UFO community…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">The first is an academic workshop (invite only) in
mid-March on the politics of UAP. I can’t give you many details right now, but
I hope to be able to blog on it (and the experience should be quite a bit
different than our PhenomeCon 2022 extravaganza—which, by the way, is set for <a href="https://www.phenomecon.net/">another go this coming September</a> … apparently
my review was not enough to put the snuff on the candle. I may not be able to go.).
Here I’ll be speaking about UAP and Climate Change.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">The second, also in March (yikes!), is a <a href="https://www.durham.ac.uk/departments/academic/law/news-and-events/events/2023/march/alien-conversations/" target="_blank">colloquium on SETI/UAP issues</a> organized by the German jurist and professor of law at
Durham University in the U.K., Michael Bohlander. I might take some time,
following this event, to hop on over to Paris and meet with some UAP researchers.
That should be a great experience, as the French are arguably the most advanced
in terms of their organized (and variously government-funded) UAP research (let’s
not forget the seminal <a href="https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/sociopol_cometareport01.htm">COMETA</a>
report, which <a href="http://www.ufoevidence.org/documents/doc598.htm" target="_blank">Leslie Kean first reported on</a> in the U.S., back in 2000—she got a
copy of it soon after its release). I aim to bring key French UAP/UFO works to
the English-speaking world as part of the Society’s publishing efforts, and I hope
to have this conversation whilst in Paris (indeed, I want to do so for every language:
there are so many excellent works not available in English that should be).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">In April, I’m back home for at least a month,
when I’ll speak at an upcoming Orange County MUFON event. My talk will be a version
of one of my earlier blog posts (that was subsequently issued in the SCU’s newsletter),
“Transcendental Skepticism”. My talk should prove to have more dormative virtues
than stimulants. But we’ll see.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">In May, I go out to Houston for Prof. Kripal’s <a href="https://impossiblearchives.rice.edu/" target="_blank"><i>Archives
of the Impossible</i>, v. 2</a>. I hope to meet all manner of UFO (and sundry paranormal)
researchers—the latter of whom I’m uncertain about, or least, uncertain how I’ll
respond to. Hopefully not <i>too </i>crankily…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/08/Meeting_of_doctors_at_the_university_of_Paris.jpg/640px-Meeting_of_doctors_at_the_university_of_Paris.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="508" height="273" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/08/Meeting_of_doctors_at_the_university_of_Paris.jpg/640px-Meeting_of_doctors_at_the_university_of_Paris.jpg" width="173" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Mid-May, I’m off to Portugal, then to Italy and
then finally to Germany, where I hope to meet with Prof. Dr. Hakan Kayal (who
gave a really great talk at the <i>Limina</i> Symposium) at Würzburg University. We may end up
having a little informal colloquium, and I might be hosting Dr. Teodorani’s opening
seminar (Monday 5 June) from there. (But that’s all in the discussion phase, so stay
tuned!)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">… which is all to say that I must apolozie again
for the inconsistency of my blog posts. Hopefully I’ll sneak in some time
here-and-there for a post or two each month from March until July—even if only
to provide my reflections on these events, and the travel required to get to
them.</span></p><p></p>Mike Cifonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16910256379002179502noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7235611048140260044.post-18368277805320502322023-01-15T12:43:00.072-08:002023-02-15T23:05:38.588-08:00On the use of 'UAP' ... and speaking of which: the first-in-a-while academic conference on the subject of UAP Studies<p></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://th-thumbnailer.cdn-si-edu.com/yMQNPQbYAm116gWWg1HDbiLyeBQ=/fit-in/1072x0/filters:focal(850x656:851x657)/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/b5/4e/b54e2066-fa4a-4410-bb26-bca7d6f3ce3e/paolo_uccello_047b.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="613" data-original-width="800" height="203" src="https://th-thumbnailer.cdn-si-edu.com/yMQNPQbYAm116gWWg1HDbiLyeBQ=/fit-in/1072x0/filters:focal(850x656:851x657)/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/b5/4e/b54e2066-fa4a-4410-bb26-bca7d6f3ce3e/paolo_uccello_047b.jpeg" width="264" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">T</span></span><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">he notion that ‘UAP’ as a term is of relatively recent provenance is,
as many of you likely know, mistaken. In fact, the term goes back to what we
like to think of as the very origins of the modern fascination with and
interest in the phenomenon of unidentified aerospace anomalies (there’s another
acronym to add to our soup bowl…). We can find it used as early as 1949.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">A day or so ago, I was digging around for more information on
the “Oak Ridge” UFO case, very surprisingly cursorily sketched in Hynek’s own
excepts from the rich Project Blue Book files. As I get some of my thoughts in
order for <a href="https://www.coasttocoastam.com/show/2023-01-15-show/" target="_blank">my interview on Coast-To-Coast AM</a> with George Knapp tonight at 10pm PST
(you may be surprised or annoyed at that—and I’ll explain to you dear readers, annoyed
and delighted, just why I’ve been invited by Mr. Knapp to do the interview), I’ve
been going over some of the more classic UFO cases, sometimes reconsidering
them entirely, or reviewing what I had thought I knew about them.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Even before my upcoming interview with Knapp, this digging around was prompted by my reading of Eddie Bullard’s <i>excellent</i>
text <i>The Myth and Mystery of UFOs</i>—a book on which I plan to do a
characteristically, shall we say, long (wordy?) review. At the end of his
utterly fascinating introduction, Dr. Bullard lists what he considers to be the
cases that have withstood the test of time, as it were: those—at least for him—that
constitute what I’ve previously called the <i>recalcitrant residuum,</i> cases
stubbornly refusing to abide by the canon of conventional explanatory options utilized
by skeptics and sincere ufologists alike (yes, the best ufologist <i>proceeds
exactly like the skeptic</i>—except that they don’t try to force <i>every</i>
case into the Procrustean bed of convention). On Bullard’s list are a few that
skeptics have had their field day with—like the Fr. Gill Papua New Guinea case from
1959 (a CE3 with saucer-bound beings waving back to the priest, which has multiple witnesses)—and
some that are even harder to explain, like the eerie Coyne helicopter case of
1973, or the more recent Chicago O’Hare silvery disc (and cloud-hole) incident
of 2006 (each with multiple eyewitnesses).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">One on Bullard’s short-list caught my eye as a case I couldn’t
immediately recall the details of: the so-called incident at Exeter (New Hampshire)
of 1965, and so for a sketch of it I turned to the relevant section of Hynek’s <i>UFO
Report</i>. Turns out that John Fuller, who would go on to author perhaps one
of the most famous UFO books of all time—<i>The Interrupted Journey</i>, chronicling
the Betty and Barney Hill case (another that, perhaps surprisingly, makes it onto
Bullard’s short list of hard nuts to crack)—also wrote up an extensive monograph on <i>Exeter</i>.
It’s one of those cases that is rich in phenomenological detail, and reported
by reliable witnesses (the UFO was observed by one witness to move in a “floating leaf” like
pattern, which is an archetype of UFO movement).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">In any case, I was moved to read around in Hynek’s book while I stopped by, and ended up landing upon a case that Hynek himself considered “to be one of the most interesting
radar and visual cases … in the Blue Book files” but which, strangely enough,
is given only the scantest retelling at the end of his chapter on radar/visuals. In fact, there’s nothing much about the
actual incident beyond the mere claim of a radar contact visually confirmed,
and the (characteristic) dissimulations about the incident by the irascible Blue Book military point man, Maj. Quintanilla (with
whom Hynek would eventually but heads, as is widely known to UFO history buffs).
I’m speaking about the Oak Ridge (Tennessee) case from 1947.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Actually, I should say
<i>cases</i>, as, according to Hynek: “there is no doubt that a number of incidents
<i>had </i>occurred … beginning in June of 1947, when a photograph of a UFO was
taken by a civilian” (1977/2020, p. 137). The incidents would spread out from ’47
to at least October 1950 when the USG was still recording cases under the curiously
named “Project Grudge” (and we all probably have a theory about why that interregnal
project was so named: it’s probably better referred to as <i>project begrudgingly
undertaken</i>…).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5e0cjKq9bxYJynOVFuI46d1HQt86RzJYoN6thhsLcnYnxhE1SKp1eL-0-_xRg35sRRwq8wXYXkuLXMSASA2d2m2DN4AphE1DhN4LRwqostwoe7lxaWiSbZp8mD5cwc9nbsNbFswrhElLmi-TGVO7FDc3ah8D9rsZ1yKN2CMGEhXW5OLNriXs3qU-I/s2778/20230114_210239000_iOS.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2778" data-original-width="1284" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5e0cjKq9bxYJynOVFuI46d1HQt86RzJYoN6thhsLcnYnxhE1SKp1eL-0-_xRg35sRRwq8wXYXkuLXMSASA2d2m2DN4AphE1DhN4LRwqostwoe7lxaWiSbZp8mD5cwc9nbsNbFswrhElLmi-TGVO7FDc3ah8D9rsZ1yKN2CMGEhXW5OLNriXs3qU-I/s320/20230114_210239000_iOS.jpg" width="148" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Wanting some more information on the case, I dug around the
web, and I was intrigued to come up with a cache of images reproducing
confidential documents relating to the incident and its investigation (where
the FBI was even involved). (These documents were released, I believe, in the
flood brought on by the new FOIA in the 1970s—a law originally instituted in 1967 or
thereabouts; most of the documents I looked at were stamped with some releasement
approval dated 1973). Somewhere amidst my scrolling around the “vault.fbi.gov”
website wherein I found these scanned copies, I landed on several reams of
memoranda sent to the director of the FBI regarding the now-infamous Roswell
case—dated 1949. Since this was a very early case in the U.S. government’s UFO
files (and very iconic), I was rather surprised when I found what we consider to be very contemporary
(and recent) language used to describe the phenomenon under investigation—I was
intrigued to find the descriptor “unidentified aerial phenomena” clearly
printed in the case narrative contained in that Roswell memorandum.</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">So, not only is UAP an old and very early term used (perhaps
evasively) by the government when dealing with “the phenomenon”, it was used as
early as 1949 in official communication from SAC, El Paso (“Strategic Air Command”)
to the FBI in connection with the Roswell investigation.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">I’ve heard it said that ‘UAP’ is a recent construction used
to obfuscate, or (less tendentiously interpreted) used to shed the historical-cultural
baggage that has unfortunately accreted around ‘UFO’. Whatever one’s philological
predilections, the fact is that it seems to be a relatively neutral term that
attempts to indicate something about which we, at least initially and upon beginning
an investigation, have little idea as to what exactly (or even approximately)
we’re dealing with when it comes to the shining, sparkling, twinkling somethings
dancing and flitting and leaf-dropping in bizarre ways in the sky, that abode
of gods and angels and other assorted celestials from time immemorial.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.schilbantiquarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Rare.book-4176.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="600" height="238" src="https://www.schilbantiquarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Rare.book-4176.jpg" width="178" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">I</span></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> like ‘UAP’, probably because I like the term </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">phenomenon</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
or </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">phenomena</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> (although users of the terms often don’t get that there’s a
distinction in number at work: one </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">phenomenon</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> v. many </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">phenomena</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">).
We use the term frequently in philosophy as a somewhat technical term: </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">phenomena</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
are, as the ancient Greek origins would suggest, what manifests to us as an </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">appearance</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
through (and by means of) our senses. The term plays a crucial role in the subtle philosophical deconstruction
of human knowledge undertaken in Kant’s philosophy: the phenomena as appearance means
that what we come to know by means of our sensory engagements with the world is
already a heavily-constructed presentation, a kind of dialectical dance between the
world “as it is in itself” (as Kant would have said), and the apparatus of
accessing that world given to us by Nature (which, for Kant,
is simply the </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">mind</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">). A “phenomenon” is a dynamical object, then: part
mind-constructed, part world/reality-supplied. And this, in a nutshell, is Kant’s
genius move in the history of philosophy: the realization that the human mind
plays an <i>active</i>, determinative and therefore ineliminable role in all human knowledge. The mind just is not like a passive mirror, reflecting what is already there; it works with what is there to give us a re-presentation and in so doing informs that world, transforming the given into something we can <i>think</i>. As such human knowledge is circumscribed, beyond the horizon of which circumscription
lies no dragons, but only the demons of ignorance, the distractions of unrestricted
speculation, and the intoxications of the transcendent—about which we shall, argued
Kant, inevitably and fruitlessly debate, without end.</span><div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">I know that “phenomenon” or “phenomena”
are words used in common parlance to indicate just something </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">there</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">, a
something-or-other for which we cannot quite yet find more precise language.
But it is also a </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">phenomenon</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> in this more technical sense: a
something-out-there (coming from Nature, even if manufactured) interacting with
us (if only fleetingly, on the </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">liminal </i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">edge of our awareness or perceptual
capabilities), producing some sensory experience we then have to confront with
the strange and elusive imprecisions of language. As we don’t know what “they”
are, the genuine ‘UAP’ is a challenge more than a thing. A challenge to language,
yes, but a challenge most significantly to that attempt to more precisely grasp
the world symbolically which is science (with </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">its</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> language of
mathematics).</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://admin.greecetravelmag.com/files/images/Gastronomy/symposium-greek%20(4).jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="464" data-original-width="800" height="186" src="https://admin.greecetravelmag.com/files/images/Gastronomy/symposium-greek%20(4).jpg" width="321" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: x-large; line-height: 107%;">W</span><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">ell, dear readers, I must apologize for my trickle of posts
these days. I have been busy. VERY busy, as some of you may know…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Perhaps now is the time to out myself: I am the organizer of
a rather large and, I hope, significant academic conference devoted <i>not</i>—I
must hasten to stress—to “ufology” <i>per se </i>but rather more specifically devoted
to UAP Studies, a discipline I am hoping we can work to collectively define during this event (and beyond), especially
since mainstream academia as a whole tends to be a bit slow on the uptake (not
that that’s inherently bad).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">I am referring to the inaugural event for the <a href="http://limina.uapstudies.org" target="_blank">journal that I founded</a> almost a year ago (it will be a year this April): a “<a href="https://liminasymposium.vfairs.com/" target="_blank">Symposium</a>” of
presentations, a few panel discussions, and exhibitions set up by a number of
important UFO/UAP research organizations from around the world.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">The journal is called <i>Limina</i>, for reasons that, over
these many months of writing this blog, I have attempted to variously outline.
It is, I think, a badly needed instrument for advancing UAP Studies, and the
study of “the phenomenon” itself, to a more sophisticated level of discourse. The
journal is owned and operated by another organization which I built around it, which will
function as a learned and professional society. This is called the <i><a href="http://www.societyforuapstudies.org" target="_blank">Society for UAP Studies</a></i>, and we have incorporated officially as a nonprofit. It
will hopefully supply the discipline of UAP Studies with the international academic infrastructure we need
to sustain this subject as a serious and worthwhile one going forward.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">As we enter into this new era of concern with and attention
to UAP, we need careful guidance from our gifted scholars and researchers—and we
must attempt to move as a community from amateurism to academic professionalism, whether we
approach UAP scientifically or not. And that means we must get serious about UAP
Studies as a real academic discipline, with all the rules, regulations, and peer-created
expectations that such a thing entails. It is no longer fringe.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">I won’t belabor this blog with the Society’s more specific plans,
strategic initiatives and goals which we are currently developing for 2023; for that,
you can keep up with our activities as a subscriber to both <i>Limina’s </i>and
the Society’s websites. What I can say is that the Society wants to act to
bring together the serious-minded, and especially the serious UAP research
groups, to forge a global community of talented scholars and researchers,
enabling a sustained international and interdisciplinary dialogue—a global
ecosystem of exchange. If the <a href="https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/reports-publications/reports-publications-2023/item/2354-2022-annual-report-on-unidentified-aerial-phenomena" target="_blank">USG recently spoke</a> of the UAP issue as being a “whole-of-government”
affair, given how important the issue is, then why don’t <i>we</i>, joined together in
a global civilian network of serious scholars, combine our efforts into a </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">“</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">whole-of-global-community</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">”</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> affair? Elevate the
discourse? Forge the needed academic infrastructure </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">ourselves</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">,</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> as a prelude to inclusion within the
Academy?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">This is why we have brought both <i>Limina </i>and the <i>Society
for UAP Studies</i> into existence. And the overture, we hope, will be <a href="https://liminasymposium.vfairs.com/" target="_blank"><i>Limina’s</i>
<i>Inaugural Symposium 2023</i></a>, which goes live this coming February 3<sup>rd</sup>
at 9am EST. We have already received generous financial support for our February event from a number of private donors, and especially from the new UAP research initiative <i><a href="http://enigmalabs.io" target="_blank">EnigmaLabs</a> </i>(for which we are very grateful). We are therefore hopeful that with this kind of backing, these nonprofit ventures of ours (and others like them) will thrive.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/79/The_Celestial_Chariot_(6124515635).jpg/330px-The_Celestial_Chariot_(6124515635).jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="420" data-original-width="330" height="265" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/79/The_Celestial_Chariot_(6124515635).jpg/330px-The_Celestial_Chariot_(6124515635).jpg" width="209" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">But this is not just an academic conference—and it’s not your
typical UFO conference either. It hopes to not only bring together academics
and interested professionals from around the world, and from almost every academic
discipline (from the STEM to the humanities), to discuss the UAP issue. It hopes
to be a way for the existing UFO community to be part of collectively developing this new kind of conversation,
where we consider not necessarily the relative merits or demerits of this-or-that
particular UFO/UAP case (this, of course, is very much still important), but
where we start to think about the necessary </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">foundations</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> for the study of
the phenomenon, and how it is that humans— culturally, politically, and so on—engage
with it (whatever the “it” is—yet another foundational question, dealing with
the specific “being” of the phenomenon, as distinct from the meaning(s) it
has). Thus, the title of this Symposium is: “</span><a href="http://limina.uapstudies.org/inaugural-symposium" style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;" target="_blank">Foundations, Frontiers and Future Prospects of UAP Studies</a><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">”.</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">And this is what I’m likely going to chat about with George Knapp
tonight. I hope I won’t annoy too many in the community, especially since I’m a
rather unknown quantity (as in, “so who’s this a-hole and why should I care,
and who does he think he is, anyway?”). My hope is that I communicate a simple message:
that my role here is as a facilitator of a new level of discourse; an organizer
of our international colleagues in the best interest of cross-disciplinary dialogue;
a mediator (we’ve invited our skeptical bothers and sisters to be involved in
this event—all points of view are needed for progress to be made, as difficult as
this will likely be); and finally, someone part of an organization offering a
safe space for those academics and professionals who still find it hard to be
open about their serious interest in studying the phenomenon … safe because
open to radical disagreement, and not necessarily committed to a particular categorical thesis concerning UAP (including the view that all UAP must and can be
dismissed as mundane, or that there are no recalcitrant cases, or that all such cases are evidence of ET, and so on). We are also hoping, because of the safety of our dialogical openness, to draw into this young discipline new minds, therefore allowing fresh air into a discourse that has, in many ways, become trapped by its own sincerity. As the air lightens a bit, perhaps we can see a way out of the intellectual cul-de-sacs of believer v. skeptic, nuts-and-bolts v. high strangeness/paranormal, and so on and so forth through the litany of conceptual impasses plaguing the discourse. (Perhaps even UAP Studies will, in turn, allow fresh air to rush into those stale discourses <i>within mainstream academia itself</i>.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">We take refuge not in the power of human knowledge but in the enlightened ignorance born from self-examination—which is the initial stage of all authentic knowledge. Having passed through the humility of awareness of one’s ignorance, we
may then attain to a power greater than that of a knowledge lacking in
self-examination (knowledge merely learned, not <i>discovered</i>).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Perhaps, then, we pursue at first a spiritual rather than a
scholarly task in this undertaking on the first weekend of February 2023. Let us
at first not immediately disagree; let us at first find agreement in our common
humanity, one rooted more in epistemic fragility than unshakable certainty.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">It may be that this self-awareness is our true progress here, or
the foundation for it…</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.robriemen.nl/app/uploads/2015/02/945-450-Socrates-840x450.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="429" data-original-width="800" height="239" src="https://www.robriemen.nl/app/uploads/2015/02/945-450-Socrates-840x450.jpg" width="447" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Socrates</i></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span><p></p><p></p></div>Mike Cifonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16910256379002179502noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7235611048140260044.post-53663056845087202142022-12-12T16:10:00.017-08:002022-12-17T10:21:06.092-08:00Part II of my conceptual review of "Anomaly - A Scientific Exploration of the UFO Phenomenon" by Daniel Coumbe<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/31ueJxJQMbL.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="311" height="229" src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/31ueJxJQMbL.jpg" width="142" /></a></div><p> <span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Part Two of </span><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Anomaly: A Scientific Exploration of the UFO
Phenomenon</span></i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"> asks three “bigger picture”
questions: </span><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Where
Are All the UFOs</span></i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">? </span><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">When Are All the UFOs</span></i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">? And finally: </span><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">What
Does It All Mean?</span></i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"> 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.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://cdn.kastatic.org/ka-perseus-images/ebe2dfe4c6e143780394bec733315ce3e6338987.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="414" height="236" src="https://cdn.kastatic.org/ka-perseus-images/ebe2dfe4c6e143780394bec733315ce3e6338987.jpg" width="162" /></a></div><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">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
</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">strong </span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">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 </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">significance</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">. 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 </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">pattern</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> emerges—and it’s the consistent patterns in nature
which science likes to focus on. For the statistical patterns, we want to know:
</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">what explains the correlations
and their particular structure?</span></i><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">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 </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">r-value</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, which can be positive (one variable </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">increases</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">
with another), negative (one variable </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">decreases</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> as the other increases—we might call this
“anticorrelation”), or zero (no or negligible correlation). The second quantity
is the </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">p-value</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> 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.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">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 <a href="https://nuforc.org/">NUFORC</a> UFO reporting database.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://metrocosm.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/map-of-ufo-sightings.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="281" data-original-width="543" height="179" src="http://metrocosm.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/map-of-ufo-sightings.png" width="345" /></a></div><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">“Some attempts have been made by
NUFORC,” Coumbe notes, “to remove obvious hoaxes and corroborate reports; however
it is impossible to do so in all cases given such a large database” (p.99)—so, why
don’t we make an effort to locate and utilize databases that </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">have</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> in
fact produced a reliable set of UFO reports, eliminating not only the “obvious
hoaxes” but also those many sky-bound phenomena easily mistaken for truly
anomalous (and classic) UFOs? From the fact that NUFORC’s massive (and well-known)
database isn’t defragged (as it were), it obviously doesn’t follow that no such
database exists. So, do such cleaner databases exist? It is a really important question.</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">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 </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">humanist</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">
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 </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">all</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> 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 </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">that
cannot be conventionally accounted for</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">. 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 </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">should
start here</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 19.26px; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">But it turns out that there aren</span>’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 <a href="https://blog.adamkehoe.com/hatch-udatabase/">mostly rescued from both obscurity and deletion</a>, 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.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Those four cases examined in Part
I should have been indicative for Coumbe: they’re </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">truly</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> 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 </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">genuine</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">
unidentified aerial phenomena. Our dataset should be constituted by these cases,
and supposing our dataset were to include </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">only</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> 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 </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">this</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> 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.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">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
</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">reports</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> (or even <i>the reporting</i>) of UAP—something much less interesting to the ufologist
</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">per se</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">. 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 </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">themselves</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">,
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.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71Ft8NFGV5L._AC_UF894,1000_QL80_.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="483" data-original-width="800" height="227" src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71Ft8NFGV5L._AC_UF894,1000_QL80_.jpg" width="376" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Part II is divided into three
subsections: the first asks </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">where
are all the UFOs?</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> (that’s chapter 6);
the second asks </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">when are
all the UFOs? </span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">(that’s chapter 7)</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">; </span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">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 </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">UFO
reports</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">) 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).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">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 </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">why</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> 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 </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">per se</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">,
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 </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">genuine</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">
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 </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">at all</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">?
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)?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">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 </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">know</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> 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, human</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">oid</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">. 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, </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">when</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">. 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) </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">are us—from
the future</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41e4EHYBnSL._AC_SY780_.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="485" data-original-width="333" height="284" src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41e4EHYBnSL._AC_SY780_.jpg" width="195" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">I mean, yes, we can fully well grant
the point that, perhaps, in the distant future, </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">if</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> 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 </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">lots</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> 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</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">’ve</span><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> observed can sustain the speeds with which we</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">’</span><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">ve measured them to move, you can hop from here to another
star system, even to another galaxy altogether, </span><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"><i>in
an arbitrarily short amount of onboard ship time. </i>And </span></span><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">that’s just according to <a href="https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/21/10/939">special relativity</a>, 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.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">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 <i>into the future</i>: you just have to move fast enough relative to a well-chosen frame of reference. (If you want to go into Earth</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">’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.)</span><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> Going <i>back</i> 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
</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">that </span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">exotic, we technically don’t even know what’s going
on inside, since it’s </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">singular</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> 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 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_interpretation#:~:text=The%20transactional%20interpretation%20of%20quantum,Wheeler%E2%80%93Feynman%20handshake%20or%20transaction.">transactional interpretation</a> 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
<a href="https://www.space.com/grandfather-paradox.html">can’t kill your own grandfather</a>), or how far back in time one can go (for
example as <a href="https://youtu.be/m2-I5HUwfRg">Matt Szydagis</a> 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</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">’t</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> 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…</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://teachingwiththemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Blue-dragon-1.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="724" data-original-width="639" height="211" src="https://teachingwiththemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Blue-dragon-1.jpg" width="186" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">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 </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">The
Demon-Haunted World</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, many skeptics, Coumbe suggests, have
to wonder whether there’s a </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">there</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> there to UFOs. Sagan:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">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)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">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 </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">there</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, and there is a </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">there</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> 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 (<i>rationally</i>, we must hasten to add). Coumbe (and we quote him at length, p. 154):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">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: </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">can we
see them?</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> This corresponds to our
eyewitness testimony category of the evidence. Quickly followed by: </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">can our instruments see them?</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> 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.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">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, </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">What are they?</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">”. Here is where Coumbe is rather unsurprisingly (and
mundanely) honest—for it’s perfectly </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">possible</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"> 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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, 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 <i>is</i>, in all fairness, possible. Coumbe
again:<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Possible, yes. Likely: well, </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">much</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> less
so. Perhaps we can argue that the possibility is vanishingly small: I mean, if we have reports going back many decades</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">—</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">think of what <a href="https://archive.org/details/scienceindefault/1969+-+Science+in+Default+by+James+McDonald+AAAS+Symposium+lecture+introduced+by+Carl+Sagan.mp3">McDonald recounts in his famous lecture</a></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">—</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">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</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">’</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">s, doing speeds in excess of Mach 30, <i>since</i></span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> the 1950s</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">?! Does not really sound all that plausible.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">This, then, leaves one other category of prosaic explanation to be examined—natural
phenomena.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Nature is vast, our knowledge
vanishingly uninteresting in comparison (at least from Nature’s point of view).
But we do know </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">something
</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">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 </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">without</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> 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, </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">intelligent</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">. 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 </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">itself</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">
a new form of intelligent life … for completeness we mustn</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">’</span><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">t </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">completely</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">
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
</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">not </span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">under “intelligent control”. And we can test for
this, too, Coumbe thinks:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">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 </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">alterity</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">—an “otherness” that often violates our expectations
or the familiar categories of how things are supposed to behave </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">in our estimation, relative to our (admittedly
limited) set of experiences with Nature</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">.
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 </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">be</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> 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 </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">splitting</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, 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.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blog.artsper.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Crossing_the_River_Styx-644x399.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="399" data-original-width="644" height="228" src="https://blog.artsper.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Crossing_the_River_Styx-644x399.jpg" width="368" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">We must gesture again to the
brilliant film </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Nope</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">. Maybe what we’re dealing with—at least in </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">some</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> 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 </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">purely
from the manner in which the phenomena present themselves to us</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, 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).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Well, so much for the meaty
question “what are they?”—Coumbe’s analysis here suffers </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">because </span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">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 </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">are</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, in some cases, dealing </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">quite directly with</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> a new form of life that can work with matter itself
like a fish can work with (and </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">within</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">) 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 </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">correlation</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">!), 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 </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">not</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> 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 </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">something</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">
here. Surely we can. But we have to eek out a framework, just like Aristotle
did. And get a </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">lot</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> of stuff wrong…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">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 </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">model</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> 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.<o:p></o:p></span></p>Mike Cifonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16910256379002179502noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7235611048140260044.post-43295464578779736812022-12-01T06:51:00.049-08:002023-03-06T12:17:25.737-08:00Part I of my conceptual review of "Anomaly - A Scientific Exploration of the UFO Phenomenon" by Daniel Coumbe<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://books.google.com/books/publisher/content?id=zUWWEAAAQBAJ&pg=PP1&img=1&zoom=3&hl=en&bul=1&sig=ACfU3U0LabgakAlQEc3USt_736O0f-_xAQ&w=1280" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="497" height="322" src="https://books.google.com/books/publisher/content?id=zUWWEAAAQBAJ&pg=PP1&img=1&zoom=3&hl=en&bul=1&sig=ACfU3U0LabgakAlQEc3USt_736O0f-_xAQ&w=1280" width="200" /></a></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><i><span style="font-size: x-large;">H</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">ere we review in two parts, in a style that is most certainly not palatable to the stressed-out readership of our day, </span></i><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Anomaly – A Scientific Exploration of the UFO
Phenomenon</span><i style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> by theoretical particle physicist Daniel Coumbe (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023).</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Somehow a book published in 2023 has landed in my lap, in
2022. Well, of course there’s no real mystery, for despite what is printed on
the first few leaves of the text, the book has appeared in late 2022 (October,
I believe). Perhaps the publishers need to start populating their 2023 list…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">This is one of those books that seem to be both timely, and
to have emerged almost from out of nowhere—entering the scene quietly, but
impactfully all the same. This is a book that should be standard reading for
anyone just coming to the study of the UFO phenomenon, and part of what I want
to do here is to explain exactly why that is. But I also want to review some of
what’s in this rather short (one might even say <i>terse</i>) text, to
highlight what’s new, what’s perhaps missing, and what’s questionable—or at
least debatable (that is, in my view).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">First, about the author, Daniel Coumbe.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Coumbe is perhaps the kind of person who you want to be
involved in at least the scientific study of the phenomenon. He’s a PhD in
theoretical physics who ended up at the prestigious Niels Bohr Institute in
Copenhagen, after having held a number of research and teaching positions at
various universities in the U.S. and elsewhere. He seems to be </span><a href="https://nbi.ku.dk/english/staff/"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">no longer officially listed</span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"> at the
Institute, but rather at its host university, the University of Copenhagen (at
least according to his ResearchGate </span><a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/D-Coumbe"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">profile</span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">—something
one is never sure is exactly up-to-date).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Taking a look at his publications reveals a rather mainstream
theoretical physicist interested in some of the most foundational and
fundamental questions physical theory faces today. And that means that he looks
into foundational questions at the frontiers of high-energy and gravitational
physics, which places his thinking in the realm of what they call <i>quantum
gravity</i>. This is just a kind of label that denotes an open area of intense
research around the question of the compatibility of our best theory of
gravity—Einstein’s general relativity (or GR)—with our most sophisticated
theory of matter, which is dictated by quantum field theory (or QFT).
Einstein’s theory imposes certain demands upon the behavior of matter and
energy in space and time (or “spacetime” as physicists like to say), whereas
QFT dictates the exact behavior of it according to a very specific—and
puzzling—equation of motion. Because of the peculiarities of quantum mechanics,
the quantum equations of motion for particles and fields (matter and energy) don’t
straightforwardly evolve in spacetime itself. Rather, one must talk about a
more abstract representation space—the “configuration space”—where the basic
object (the quantum mechanical “wave” equation) lives. But what is gravity
itself? Is it a matter field of some kind? Is it more like the electromagnetic
(EM) field, which we describe in terms of fundamental particles (photons)
mediating the exchange of energy between the EM field itself and other things
(as when a radar wave bounces off a seemingly solid UAP)? If you try to subsume
gravity under quantum field theory along these lines, you get a theory that
doesn’t make any sense, and which isn’t well behaved at all. Why is this, and
why can’t you simply turn gravity into a kind of quantum-gravitational field
theory of matter? I said <i>simply</i> … the trick can in some abstract sense
be done, but the results are far from simple or straightforward. The research
area of “quantum gravity” offers various (often incompatible) proposals for how
to resolve the problem. Often this entails reconceiving the problem itself.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.physics.umass.edu/acfi/sites/acfi/files/research-slideshows/1_candidate-higgs-boson.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="412" data-original-width="618" height="211" src="https://www.physics.umass.edu/acfi/sites/acfi/files/research-slideshows/1_candidate-higgs-boson.jpg" width="316" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">This is all meant to say that Coumbe is perhaps <i>exactly</i>
the right kind of theoretical-scientific mind you want taking a crack at the
UFO enigma. He is expert in our best theory of matter <i>and </i>our best
theory of space and time, which is provided by the Einstein theory of gravity.
Space, time, and matter are perhaps the <i>most elementary</i> and therefore
the most important theoretical concepts we have in physics today. Whatever the
UAP are doing when they hop around at Mach 30+ like it was no big deal, they
are doing it with an understanding of space, time and matter which we likely
don’t have (I mean it’s possible GR alone can crack the motion mystery, but
it’s probably not as simple as that, as several in my </span><a href="https://sites.google.com/view/uap-fundamental-theory-group/team"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">fundamental
theory group</span></a><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"> are beginning to think). Or else something much
more bizarre is in play. Coumbe is the kind of thinker who will try to apply
conventional thinking to the problem of the physics of UAP, but who is open and
clever enough to realize that we may (emphasis on ‘may’) be faced with
phenomena that cannot easily fit within existing theoretical frameworks. He’s
going to know what it takes to make the case for trying to step outside the
parameters of current physics, for example, since that’s often what one must
contemplate when working on the problem of quantum gravity as he does. But what
about stepping outside the boundaries of current science <i>as such</i>? This
is a much more subtle problem. It’s a possibility to which many in the UFO
world are attracted. And it’s something that Coumbe only briefly addresses. So
to this extent, Coumbe’s text might disappoint some of the more, shall we say,
wide-ranging minds taken by the UAP enigma.</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">We have to start <i>somewhere</i> in an effort to understand
the phenomena, however enigmatic they are. Even if we must end up abandoning
our current theoretical paradigms (in physics or elsewhere), or potentially
edge towards the <i>true</i> <i>edge </i>of science itself, it must start with
a clear, a crystal clear, characterization of the problem(s) we face. And what
we really must appreciate here is that paradigm change, whenever it does
happen, does not often do so intentionally, or <i>as such</i>—as a “paradigm
shift” highlighted in the minds of the scientists and thinkers involved in its
development. Rather—and this is a fundamental point I must stress—it happens for
specific reasons, in specific contexts, for certain specific problems
undertaken in the context of an <i>existing </i>theoretical framework. Paradigm
shifts are grass-roots phenomena: bottom-up, not usually top-down. Or at least
the proposal for thinking about a <i>specific </i>problem or question in a new
way is done <i>against</i> how such is conceptually structured with existing
concepts. It starts with a concrete problem, and ends with the elaboration of a
more abstract conceptual scheme within which to situate the problem anew. And
that process of elaboration is where a new paradigm begins to take shape.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">So the question is: where do we <i>begin</i> with the UAP
enigma?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">We most certainly should not begin by insisting that UAP must
be so anomalous as to necessarily demand a Kuhnian paradigm shift. In practical
concrete terms, paradigms must be <i>made</i> to fail, in specific ways, for
specific problems—rooted in empirical data and the evidence of experience. We
must drive our theories to the point of failure by attempting to appropriate
the UAP phenomenon within existing frameworks. Then we see what happens.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.ancient-origins.net/sites/default/files/field/image/Religion-Isnt-The-Enemy-of-Science.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="604" data-original-width="800" height="216" src="https://www.ancient-origins.net/sites/default/files/field/image/Religion-Isnt-The-Enemy-of-Science.jpg" width="286" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">So we have to start with the empirical data itself, and the experiences
of those involved in a UFO encounter. This is the root of any science. The most
basic question, then, is: <i>so just what is the empirical data and the
evidence of experience? How should we evaluate it, and what is it telling us?</i>
Enter Coumbe’s text: <i>Anomaly: A Scientific Exploration of the UFO Phenomenon</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">It is surely not the first such text to engage in a
“scientific exploration” of the phenomenon. There have been many such texts
which have attempted something of a purely scientific survey of and engagement
with the evidence for the phenomenon. One thinks of Vallée’s early texts (very
carefully “nuts & bolts” oriented) <i>Anatomy of A Phenomenon</i> (1965) and
its sequel <i>Challenge To Science: The UFO Enigma</i> (1966). J. Allen Hynek’s
seminal study <i>The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry</i> (1972) brought
the topic to a much wider audience, and introduced a system of classification
and evidentiary evaluation for UFO encounters (something found in Vallée’s
early work as well). The culmination of these scientific explorations has to
have been the book which presented the findings of a panel convened in the late
1990s by the distinguished Stanford University scientist Peter Sturrock, called
<i>The UFO Enigma: A New Review of the Physical Evidence</i>, published in the
year 2000. So <i>Anomaly</i> really stands within a long tradition of scientifically
astute treatments of the evidence for UFOs.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">What is unique to the text is, however, its stark
simplicity—even the elegance of its presentation. It is, as they say,
deceptively simple, for the amount of analysis and data-processing that went
into Coumbe’s book was considerable. It is clear that Coumbe has been working
somewhat in the background of current ufology: Coumbe’s name is not generally
known, nor has there apparently been any ufological work produced by him before
this text. He presents as a concerned scientist, patiently observing and
studying (at a distance) various important UFO cases and the analysis produced
for them, crafting after some 5 years of study (he mentions the famous <i>Times
</i>article of 2017 as a catalyst for his interest) a kind of summary text that
tries to solidify—perhaps even codify—ufological evidence and shore up its analysis.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">To this end, Coumbe proposes a new kind of epistemic
filtration system that evaluates a reported UFO encounter in terms of four key
factors: (1) (trained) eyewitness testimony; (2) single sensor data; (3) multiple
sensor data; and (4) physical evidence—by which he means something (burns,
scars, ground traces, ejecta) allegedly <i>left behind </i>by a UFO. This is
then used to “quantitatively evaluate the strength of each case”. Let’s talk
about this in some detail, since, for each UFO case that Coumbe chose to
include in his (rather short) text, he actually provides the score it gets
according to his system. As we will see, we can interpret this number as a kind
of epistemic credence score, which scores can then be grouped into various epistemic
credence “tiers” (as I’ll explain in a moment).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/astrolabe.jpg?quality=85&w=726" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="567" height="264" src="https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/astrolabe.jpg?quality=85&w=726" width="187" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Let’s take a look at the first filter: eyewitness testimony. There
is already a crucial judgment just right here with this filter, since not just any
eyewitness testimony is admitted as valid; rather beyond this we’re looking for the testimony of
those with some kind of relevant training which would raise the credibility of
that testimony. So, pilots and certain military officers, and others with
specialized training (ideally giving the witness extensive familiarity with the
known phenomena of the sky) are those whose testimony are admitted first. But
how do we evaluate <i>it</i>? Coumbe introduces a sensible method which looks at
the quantity, quality, consistency and source of the testimony to come up with
a more precise epistemic evaluation of the filter. The same evaluation is
applied to the other filters as well.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Each sub-category of evaluation is given a number from 0 to 3
(a range, introduced on p. 8 without much explanation, that seems somewhat
arbitrary), and since there are four sub-categories of evaluation for each
filter, the total possible score for each filter is a number from 0 to 12. But
surely eyewitness testimony, especially if it scores rather low in terms of
quantity, quality and so on, shouldn’t be taken as on a par with the other
factors—like single or multiple sensor data associated with the reported UFO.
This would suggest that we ought to <i>weight </i>each of the four filters
differently.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Only having eyewitness testimony isn’t very good evidence to
go on in UFO cases, and even the best eyewitness testimony has to be considered
inherently unreliable <i>on its own</i>. People are convinced that they see all
sorts of things—and we know just based on general research on the issue that
eyewitness testimony is very frequently problematic. Having multiple trained or
expert witnesses all saying they saw the same thing (high quantity, quality, consistency
and source) is excellent, but what makes it better is whether this gets corroborated
by something <i>non-subjective</i>, <i>non-first person</i>: sensors of various
sorts built to detect certain phenomena. Someone might feel heat, but a sensor
measures it—and might also indicate something about the nature of the heat
source itself. Coumbe therefore weights eyewitness testimony the lowest
(assigning it a 1), and “physical evidence” the highest (assigning it a 4),
with single and multiple sensor data ranking in the middle (2 and 3
respectively).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">So the total score for each filter is just a sum of each of
the four sub-categories of evaluation, multiplied by its assigned weight. The
total score for a given UFO case as a whole, which gets scores on all four
filters used to evaluate it, is therefore the sum of each of the weighted
scorings of the individual filters, expressed as a percentage out of the total
possible (perfect) score of 120 (which is just the maximum score for each
sub-category multiplied by the four possible weights, added together).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Coumbe sets all of this out very plainly and concisely (skills
the present author would do well to develop himself), and does so precisely as
it should be done: as a preliminary <i>epistemological</i> foundation for
approaching the evidence examined in the rest of the text. Foundations and
definitions first; analysis next; hypotheses after that; conclusions (if
any—even negative ones) last. So, if anything, this text supplies us with an
excellent <i>model</i> of how a scientifically-oriented study (or
“exploration”) of the UFO phenomenon ought to proceed. Cautiously. Carefully.
Epistemologically cognizant. Honest. Coumbe perhaps manages in 162 pages to
distill the very best of scientific “ufology” from the previous seven decades,
giving us essence not excitement or exaggeration, sobriety not unrestrained
speculation. He seems to have absorbed the humble disciplinary sentiments of
Kant, who in his own philosophical explorations of the depths of the human mind
cautioned against “running amok in the transcendent”—something so easily
possible when the phenomena with which we are dealing are as elusive,
evanescent, and arresting (and therefore inspiring) as UFOs so often are to
those who encounter them.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">So, what else is in this book? Plenty more. Let me give a
quick (!) overview.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Part One of the text is entirely devoted to UFO case studies—a
staple of this particular genre of ufological writing (and I like designating this
genre “scientific explorations of the phenomenon”—‘exploration’ being the key
term). What is interesting is the structure of his exposition here and
throughout the text, which again serves to define a model of ufological
writing: statement of the facts of the case; an analysis of those facts; and an
accompanying appendix which contains all the required technicals that went into
the analysis (statistical and evaluative methods, error calculations, relevant
physical principles and mathematical formulae and the assumptions that went
into producing the numerical results, and so on).</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Having read this text
quickly, in only a few days, I can say confidently that its audience is just
the educated public at large; it’s not a book intended for specialists. Although,
as there is no discipline, formally speaking, of ufology as such, most books</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">—</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">even by the accepted “ufologists”</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">—</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">aren’t all that technical and are usually written for
general appeal. And though this might annoy some ufologists to say it, I would also hazard that not even those more academic articles found in ufological journals past
(there are <i>almost</i> none today), had very many unreadably technical research papers in
them. Although, I will admit that my standards are the many technical philosophy, philosophy of
science, and straight physics journals which I always have had to trudge through
during the course of my own research and writing. In many cases, papers here
are simply impenetrable for the untrained—and for the trained, supremely
challenging. (That’s a good thing.)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Part Two of the book—and there are only these two parts—is
devoted to “The Bigger Picture”: <i>Where Are All the UFOs? When Are All The
UFOs? </i>and <i>What Does It All Mean?</i> Rather lite questions! The bulk of
this section is devoted to statistical analysis. It serves as both a
prob&stat primer, as well as a survey of the many alleged correlations
between UFO sightings or encounters, and other things like miliary bases,
nuclear facilities—even (and this will no doubt surprise many) blood type of
the UFO witnesses. Establishing correlations of significance (something that
can be quantified but which is ultimately one of those things in science which
is something of a <i>subjective</i> judgment call) is, one might argue, the
very bedrock of science.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Correlations are what we want to explain and understand: how
and exactly why one thing is associated with another. Even when we seem to be
studying a singular phenomenon—say, the structure of the atom—when we really
get down to it, at the bottom of it all is merely a <i>structure of</i> <i>correlations</i>
which we are attempting to explain and understand. Correlations may be the <i>only
</i>thing science ever studies—or <i>can</i> study (but we leave this deeper
epistemological/ontological question for another day). Are the correlata related
by some definite mechanism or causal relationship—or are they correlated on the
basis of some third (unknown) factor to which each is independently related but
which, because of this shared relationship, manifests a consistent correlation?
Whenever there’s a thunderstorm, my joints might start to ache, but the thunder
isn’t the cause of the aches and pains—rather something else which is
correlated with both (a low pressure system) is the underlying cause (or at
least provides the basic mechanism to explain the presence of the storm and my
achy joints). So, as we’ve all been taught, just because there’s a correlation
between x and y doesn’t tell us whether or that x <i>causes</i> y.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">But it’s important to know <i>how strongly correlated</i>
those x’s and y’s are, since we think the more strongly correlated they are,
the more likely something links the two—whether through a direct causal
connection between x and y, or via some common cause which leaves x and y
themselves <i>causally unrelated</i> (except through the action of the third
factor, that “common cause”—the low pressure system in my example). We don’t
really want to investigate only very weakly correlated things (or things which
appear to be correlated but which really aren’t even weakly correlated on close
inspection of the data). We want to look at only the interesting cases—that is,
the robust correlations. So, the first task is going about trying to establish
the existence of robust (and hence interesting) correlations. That’s what Coumbe
is up to in his fascinating Part II.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Let’s go back and look at some of the material in both parts
of the book. There’s a lot that is interesting, and some which is worthy of a
critical pause. But <i>all</i> of it’s worth reading. So, if you haven’t read
the book, <i>don’t read on</i>—read the book first, and then come back to my
review (so you can tell how well I’ve reviewed the book!)…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">I was falling over myself in reading this book quickly and as
carefully as I could. I simply could not put it down—not only because I was
like “who the heck is Daniel Coumbe and why hadn’t we heard of him before?” but
because of how direct and engaging his text turned out to be. Part I is a
treasure trove of data and analysis. Let’s take a closer look.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Coumbe works through four UFO cases in detail. He does his
homework. And does some data-gathering and data-processing legwork—something
that establishes one as a <i>bona fide</i> ufologist (which I must admit that I
am not: I am a philosopher of ufological matters—which is different, but no
less important … well, at least in my humble view). Each case is chosen to help
illustrate a particular <i>type</i> of case and what is involved in not only its
epistemic evaluation (in terms of the credence we may give it, based on the
quantity and quality of the supporting evidence), but also the scientific analysis
of the data its evidence supplies.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/anchoragepress.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/b/3d/b3d23e2a-f9d6-11e9-b157-4bc746ce1e21/5db772fea4a7c.image.jpg?crop=630%2C331%2C0%2C10&resize=630%2C331&order=crop%2Cresize" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="331" data-original-width="630" height="165" src="https://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/anchoragepress.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/b/3d/b3d23e2a-f9d6-11e9-b157-4bc746ce1e21/5db772fea4a7c.image.jpg?crop=630%2C331%2C0%2C10&resize=630%2C331&order=crop%2Cresize" width="314" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Case 1 is the fascinating Japan Airlines Flight 1628
encounter, for which there is detailed radar data in the form of actual printouts of the radar target returns—an actual physical
copy that one FAA official, Mr. Callahan of Boston, managed to secure, store
and retain for many years following the incident. Coumbe obtained a copy of
this physical record, and used it to generate <i>an actual graph of the spatial
trajectory of the UAP, plotted against the movements of the airliner involved
in the incident</i>. This may be a ufological first. The graph alone is
profoundly important—revelatory.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihuCJMmKjZ8dyT0UrOhx0MYK0tTdBXCwfnNiMQDSCrkFTIpbE-qqbqr8IPHQOCF2Oplow7qeiflkT2CujbFpXS-ORNa4UJK1eYsgqLB5JCaJxVzKNA5n_BIHqt0uDl531JVzBg6pzWpi4TIRMdB_URrJ4VQ55VaXVXM18Nac_ALM4Fpp8hcXtgw0Ae/s3300/Coumbe%20(2023)%20p8%20JAL%201628%20v%20UAP%20Plot.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3300" data-original-width="2550" height="338" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihuCJMmKjZ8dyT0UrOhx0MYK0tTdBXCwfnNiMQDSCrkFTIpbE-qqbqr8IPHQOCF2Oplow7qeiflkT2CujbFpXS-ORNa4UJK1eYsgqLB5JCaJxVzKNA5n_BIHqt0uDl531JVzBg6pzWpi4TIRMdB_URrJ4VQ55VaXVXM18Nac_ALM4Fpp8hcXtgw0Ae/w261-h338/Coumbe%20(2023)%20p8%20JAL%201628%20v%20UAP%20Plot.jpg" width="261" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><span>preprint page from Coumbe 2023</span></i></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">You see the UAP </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">jumping</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> back-and-forth
in space, as if its own mass was kinematically irrelevant. You see it at one
point describe a strange kind of semi-circle, just as JAL 1628 began a somewhat
desperate 360-degree evasive maneuver to try and avoid collision with what
variously appeared to be (silhouetted eerily against the Anchorage, Alaska city
lights below) a </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">gigantic</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> craft of some kind, which the captain said
seemed to be several aircraft carriers in length. This was an unidentifiable
craft sending radar returns to the JAL crew onboard their 747; the ATC tracking
both the airliner and the uncorrelated target “identified” as the UFO; and sending
back returns to an (unspecified) NORAD radar array, which, as the ATC
controller called to confirm, had the unknown target on its scopes as well. All
of this is well-documented and, because of the efforts of the FAA official who
managed to secure the physical ATC radar printouts shortly after the incident
(Mr. Callahan, as Leslie Kean recently told me in person, has since passed
away), is a UFO encounter for which hard radar data records—analyzable by
anyone who wants them—exists. Thus, Case 1 is an excellent example of a
“radar-visual” case. Even so, Coumbe grades this case a 52 out of a possible 120 points
in his system, which is a score of 43%.</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.curiosidadesdeubatuba.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Explos%C3%A3o-de-OVNI-em-Ubatubaa.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="527" data-original-width="800" height="220" src="https://www.curiosidadesdeubatuba.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Explos%C3%A3o-de-OVNI-em-Ubatubaa.jpg" width="334" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Case 2 is the “Brazilian Fragments” case, which examines a
set of alleged ejecta from a distressed UAP flying over Ubatuba Brazil in the
mid-to-late 1950s. By now this story is well known in UFO circles. The exact
circumstances are somewhat murky, and the letter that accompanied the mail
package containing the fragments oddly deceptive (the letter’s author, notes a
researcher Coumbe cites, p. 41, “was definitely not a ‘local fisherman,’ as the
letter itself claims</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">”</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">). But the basic story is that someone (allegedly a
fisherman) caught sight of a seemingly distressed UFO in the skies over a lake.
The craft (for that’s what it appeared to be) sputtered a bit, then at some
point actually </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">exploded</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> into fragments that then rained down into the
water below, and onto the shore, whereupon the (presumably stunned) fisherman
collected the fragments (there were allegedly thousands) and sent them to a
journalist. On 13 September 1957, this strange package found itself onto the
desk of Ibrahim Sued, columnist for a Rio de Janeiro paper, </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">O Globo</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">The fragments were then sent around to various labs for more
detailed compositional analysis. What was rather odd about the sample was its
extreme purity: the samples were registering as just about 100% pure magnesium.
The first two chemical analyses performed yielded results that indicated the
samples were 100% magnesium; subsequent tests showed something more in the
vicinity of 99.8% or 99.9% pure magnesium. In 1957, that’s not entirely
impossible to obtain; what <i>is</i> odd, however, is that at that time only a
handful of manufacturers on the planet could have produced samples of magnesium
at that purity. And then there’s the impurities in the sample, that were
discovered when more sophisticated equipment could be used. One curious
impurity of note was strontium which, as Coumbe notes (p. 46), “some recent
evidence suggests that adding strontium to magnesium suppresses oxidation,
yielding a material with a higher combustion temperature.” Interesting. Coumbe
speculates: “perhaps, then, strontium was intentionally added … for
aeronautical engineering purposes?”—interesting but it would be nearly
impossible to know this. It’s yet another clue in a frustratingly elusive puzzle
of <i>physical</i> remnants of an alleged UFO.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">The final clue from the Ubatuba fragments comes when we examine
the isotopic ratios of magnesium found in the recovered fragments against what
we think are those found naturally on Earth. Importantly, Coumbe throws some cold water here on the mild excitement some in the UFO world had when
it was found that the isotopic ratios were anomalous (something Garry Nolan in
his recent work on the samples </span><a href="https://www.iflscience.com/stanford-professor-says-he-has-analyzed-ufo-materials-that-are-not-playing-by-our-rules-61920"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">highlighted</span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">). From
a statistical point of view (for this is the only scientifically reasonable
point of view to take when it comes to examining phenomena such as isotopic
ratios: we’re confined to statistical analysis of <i>large samples</i> of
material), the question is not just whether there is a measurable isotopic
deviation between the alleged UFO samples and the accepted isotopic ratios of
magnesium found naturally on Earth (which is itself a statistically derived
figure obtained from many samples from various places on Earth). The question
is whether this deviation <i>is statistically significant</i>. That is another
matter entirely, for since we are dealing with statistical facts to begin with
(isotopic ratios are inherently statistical facts derived, as we said, from
large samples of material), we can only describe isotopic deviations as more
or less statistically significant.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">In other words, it’s uninteresting and
scientifically unremarkable to find that there is an isotopic deviation in a
few samples of magnesium from an allegedly anomalous source (such as a UFO). We have to
know whether it’s a significant deviation, one worthy of further investigation.
In the social sciences, as Coumbe explains, statistical significance starts at two
sigma, or two standard deviations from the average or expected value of a
quantity of interest. In particle physics—Coumbe’s own area of expertise—the
threshold of significance, when discoveries are announced, is even higher: it
starts at <i>five</i> sigma. Coumbe shows that what was found in the Brazil
fragments is just inconclusive. Two out of the three more recent fragment
analyses showed well under a 1 sigma significance. In only one lab analysis (done
in 2017 by Centrum Labs in Austin Texas) was a two sigma deviation found—which,
in the context of the other two, might make one suspicious that even this
result is spurious. At the end of the day, Coumbe scores this case a 42 out of
120 points, yielding a grade of 35%. Not terribly compelling as a case overall,
but certainly interesting in its details and valuable for setting the standard
for physical evidence types of UFO cases—which is precisely the reason why this
case was chosen. As with the JAL 1628 case, the Brazil fragments case is
illustrative: the airliner case for “radar-visual” types of encounters; Brazil for
physical evidence types of UFO/UAP cases.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Let’s therefore take a quick look at the two remaining cases
which are examined for equally illustrative purposes: the Lonnie Zamora/Socorro
New Mexico encounter and the 2013 Aguadilla object case caught on DHS aircraft
cameras.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://d.newsweek.com/en/full/715841/gettyimages-161965016.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="641" data-original-width="800" height="222" src="https://d.newsweek.com/en/full/715841/gettyimages-161965016.jpg" width="277" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Case 3: Socorro, NM. We’re all (presumably) familiar with the Zamora encounter: the
matter-of-factly Lonnie Zamora breaks off his pursuit of a speeding car to
investigate a strange object that seemed to land—only to find not only a landed
egg-like object on landing gear, but <i>two beings</i> in “coveralls” milling
about the landed craft who are subsequently startled by Zamora’s approach,
causing them to scurry back into the craft, which then ascends with rocket-like
flames and dashes off out of sight. But in Coumbe’s careful retelling, it’s the
subtle details of the UFO’s phenomenology that seems to count just as much as
the bizarre beings accompanying the landed egg: a roaring “bright
flame-like” object first sighted, which Zamora moves his car to locate whereupon he
finds it coming into clearer focus as a “brilliant blue and orange flame,
gradually descending. The flame had a thin, funnel shape,” Coumbe continues,
which produced “no smoke” (p. 58). All of which description is quite
fascinating—but something really only seen by one witness (Zamora himself,
perhaps corroborated fleetingly by a gas station customer filling up minutes
before). No corroborating radar data, or photos, or anything that terribly
compelling (aside from the testimony itself) … except the physical traces the
alleged UFO left behind. And that’s why this case makes Coumbe’s rather slim roster
of UFO case studies: the object landed, making contact with the ground, <i>and
left a depression in the ground which was then measured</i>. Can we weigh a
UFO? As it turns out, yes we most certainly can. And we can use exactly the
same method used to estimate the weight of dinosaurs. Rather “simple physics”
as Coumbe points out: “put simply, we can estimate the weight of an object based
on the surface area and depth of the imprint it leaves in the floor” since the
pressure exerted by the object on the ground is inversely proportional to the
downward force due to the object’s weight, in addition to the fact that
pressure itself is inversely proportional to the surface area of the bottom of
the object making contact with the ground (p. 62). We can weigh a UFO…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Doing the math indicated above, we get a simple result: the
Zamora “egg” (presumably with the beings inside) weighed in, as it alighted
onto the ground, at around 1789.7 kg plus or minus 509.2kg—quite a bit of
error, but that’s not really a problem since all we want is a ballpark figure,
just to get a sense of what we’re dealing with. It’s between 2500 and 5000
pounds. That’s pretty heavy, but not particularly remarkable: the weight of a
small car, up to a Ford F-150 (in 2022 terms that is). Probably the weight of
your average 1960s-era automobile. Now what’s important about Coumbe’s analysis
is not just the plain-and-simple derivation of the actual weight range of an
allegedly landed UFO using accepted methods in other areas of science. But what’s
really important, illustrative and foundational for ufology going forward is
the simple-and-straightforward reasoning he employs in order to rule <i>out</i>
alternative hypotheses as to what the hell Zamora—a reliable witness if ever
there was one—could have seen. Now, on the question of witness reliability,
let’s pause for a moment…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">What Coumbe could have done was take a look at the literature
on witness reliability—it’s something that interests our criminal justice
system, for very obvious reasons, and it is something modern psychology has
examined in some depth. Human perception is notoriously unreliable; this is
something realized even by philosophers thousands of years ago (East and West
the world over, by the way), and well accepted as just one initial condition
with which human epistemology has to begin. The architects of our modern (physical)
sciences arguably managed to escape Aristotelianism precisely by critiquing in
a serious way the exigencies of human perception (what was Galileo’s “ship and
tower” argument in his <i>Dialogues</i> all about but the foibles of uncritical
acceptance of human perception as it is given to us aboriginally—something that
constituted the foundation of Aristotelian science). So we know that human
perception alone is not very reliable as a source of data. It <i>is</i> data,
let’s be clear, but it has to be positioned in a larger context of evidence,
and critiqued accordingly. But Coumbe doesn’t really need to dive down into
this literature on human perception—at least not immediately and for this text.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Clearly when it comes to eyewitness accounts of this-or-that, there is no doubt
a scale of reliability that is, we might say, a function of the time during
which one is having a perceptual experience: the shorter it is (and this is my
off-the-cuff hypothesis) the more unreliable it will be (and hence the less
credence we can assign to it, as reflected in Coumbe’s multi-dimensional UFO
case scoring system). A fleeting glance of a hooded figure shrouded in darkness
is one thing (it gets worse: a guy in a gorilla suit in the middle of the day
walking through a crowd <i>might be missed</i> if the background perceptual
conditions are right, as one famous study demonstrated). But a landing object
enwrapped in blue and orange flames, alighting on the ground on extended
landing gear, with beings in white coveralls milling around, who then become
startled, enter what is presumably their craft, which then quickly shoots
flames out the bottom before dashing away in the blink of an eye, leaving
smoldering brush behind—well, that’s kind of hard to mistake. Such an extended
perceptual experience is fairly reliable, especially from someone who otherwise
is a perfectly well-functioning human being. And then there’s the <i>physical
evidence left behind</i>: measurements of the soil impressions left by the
craft, and an examination of the charred remains of brush still smoldering when
Zamora’s backup finally arrived (the arriving officer on the scene found Zamora
in something like a state of shock: famously Lonnie asks first to see a
priest). Evidence from which actual weight calculations can be made. That’s
compelling. And it’s what enables Coumbe to quickly discharge any number of
competing hypotheses as to what Zamora could have been witnessing that
afternoon in the New Mexico desert, just outside of town.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a7/Apollo12ConradSurveyor.jpg/440px-Apollo12ConradSurveyor.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="406" data-original-width="440" height="219" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a7/Apollo12ConradSurveyor.jpg/440px-Apollo12ConradSurveyor.jpg" width="238" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">As it happened, NASA was testing some of their assets for
launch into space—tens of kilometers away. And those assets (the Surveyor
modules used in the lead-up to the famous Apollo missions) needed <i>a
helicopter</i> to get carted around. What’s more, those assets’ weights are
known—around 860kg. That’s inconsistent with the physical depressions made in
the soil at the alleged landing site. What’s also inconsistent with the
evidence, taking Zamora’s perceptions as evidence, is the actual appearance of
the Surveyor modules: they look <i>nothing like</i> what Zamora claims to have
seen: a smooth egg-like object sitting on extended landing gear, as opposed to the
rather angular contraption of those landing modules. And so on and so forth. In
this case it’s pretty clear that, unless Zamora hallucinated the whole thing
(although how do you hallucinate five-thousand pound soil depressions or
smoldering brush?), we’re not dealing with a NASA prototype. Or anything else
mundane: how can you get, in the 1960s (or even today for that matter), a two-
to five thousand pound smooth egg-like object to lift off the ground, aflame,
then dash off into the distant mountains in the blink of an eye? At this point
debunkerism devolves into a desperate attempt to save our conventional view of
the world, of physics, of a human-centric universe, and so on … one starts to
wonder whether the debunkers are a bit off their own rational rockers…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">To round out this fascinatingly in-depth examination of the
Zamora/Socorro landing case Coumbe looks at another bit of evidence found at
the scene: small rectangular impression made in the ground, described as
footprints. Using the same methods to calculate the weight of the landed craft,
we arrive at an intriguing figure: about 42kg if the weight was distributed
over two legs, or 84kg if distributed over four. So, it could have been a
human-like creature, or perhaps a mountain lion. But what Zamora claims he saw
near the “egg” were two human-like but diminutive beings scurrying about the
craft—so the 42kg seems consistent with this.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Overall, Coumbe scores this case interestingly higher than
either the Japan Airlines or Brazilian fragments cases, largely because of the
quantity, quality and consistency of both the eyewitness testimony <i>and </i>the
physical evidence which is largely consistent with that testimony. The score
(p. 70) comes in at 67 out of 120, or a 57% (an enviable exam score for me when I
was doing hard-core general relativity many years ago). Not bad—and perhaps
rather surprising, given that this case has no known radar data to corroborate the
presence of the alleged craft in the skies over Socorro, NM.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Case 4: The Aguadilla, PR Object. Finally—much to the likely consternation of a number of
skeptics out there in the vast reaches of the debunking badlands—we have the
highest-scoring case in Coumbe’s lineup: the Aguadilla object incident. Here we
have a classic case of multiple sensors corroborating the (multiple) eyewitness
testimony: there was primary radar contact, in addition to a very
intriguing—even beguiling—extended FLIR thermal video of the object flying
about effortlessly in the vicinity of the Aguadilla airport, having come in,
seemingly, from somewhere over the ocean (to which it eventually returns). And
while there was no physical evidence to speak of (other than the videos), the
quality, quantity, consistency and the source of the evidence we have is fairly
high in Coumbe’s estimation. So the Aguadilla case gets a 71 out of 120, or a
59%. There are two remarkable features of the evidence that we should remark on
before we move to our review of the second part of Coumbe’s short text (one we
hope not to overtake with our review), features which, unless they are simply false
readings, rule out a great many more conventional hypotheses as to just what
the hell this object could have been. Let’s look at the primary radar data, and
that FLIR footage (or rather, you can do that by examining pp. 76-82).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.the-sun.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2021/04/COMP_RR_UFO.jpg?strip=all&quality=100&w=960&h=640&crop=1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="533" data-original-width="800" height="253" src="https://www.the-sun.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2021/04/COMP_RR_UFO.jpg?strip=all&quality=100&w=960&h=640&crop=1" width="380" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">From the primary radar data that Coumbe obtains, he generates
a simple spatial plot of the UAP’s movements <i>out over the ocean</i> (i.e.,
away from a potential hotel launch site for Chinese lanterns, let’s note). Not
many discussions of Aguadilla have noted that these primary radar returns (for <i>the
only uncorrelated targets on the ATC’s scope</i>) indicate that a UAP was hopping
around the open ocean near to the airfield at one to two <i>times</i> the speed
of sound. In one “jump”, Coumbe finds that object to have traveled at about
Mach 2.1; in another, it moves at about Mach 1.3. This for what would later be
witnessed on FLIR (and yes, we’re making a continuity assumption which no doubt
the skeptic will question), which you can see for yourself, as a flying
spheroid doing between 85 and 90 miles per hour, <i>even as it dips below the
ocean surface </i>(this towards the end of the released and confirmed DHS
video).</span><div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Examining the FLIR video itself turns up phenomena no less puzzling:
the momentary increase in thermal signature, which also seems to surge in
physical size (volumetrically increasing), before <i>splitting into two </i>as
its thermal signature intensifies. Yes: splitting into two, not unlike cellular
mitosis (as Coumbe comments, p. 82). What are we dealing with? Certainly not a
Chinese lantern. But it’s not clear what kind of an object could simply divide,
and continue to move as if nothing had happened. (Kevin Knuth thinks it could
be not a splitting into two, physically, but rather an optical-gravitational effect produced
by some modification of the surrounding spacetime—although Coumbe
interestingly tries to answer just such a possibility, with an
under-substantiated assertion: “nor is there any indication that the second
object is an infrared reflection of the first” … well, how is that argument to
go, exactly?).</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Whatever it is, it’s neither human-originated, nor necessarily
manufactured. Maybe its presentation as a kind of cellular mitosis (purely as a
phenomenological not biological fact) challenges our insistence on the
nature/manufacture distinction, or the nature/intelligence dichotomy (that the
processes of nature are unintelligent and “random” whereas those of
intelligence are deliberate, nonrandom and therefore “unnatural” or artificial).
It’s ultimately a bad, and philosophically unsophisticated, unsubtle dichotomy,
one challenged in philosophy for centuries (but which still seems to linger).
Maybe the object or “craft” <i>is the intelligence</i> guiding it. Maybe it is
organismic in some way (<i>Star Trek The Next Generation</i>, that unbelievably
rich sci-fi opera, toyed with the idea a few times—most notably in the episode </span><a href="https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Tin_Man_(episode)"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">“Tin
Man” from its brilliant Third Season</span></a><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">). We don’t really know, and may
never know since we couldn’t really interact with the object itself,
directly—only passively via radar and infrared sensors. If some UAP are capable
of dividing themselves into two, and this <i>is</i> a technological process, then
it could just be that with this level of subtle control over matter/energy, the
nature/manufacture dichotomy just <i>ipso facto</i> becomes irrelevant: as we
are building living forms up from the atomic and molecular level, if we suppose
exacting control over the atoms and molecules themselves, well, then, what’s
the difference here? I suppose dependency: matter/energy can do its own thing,
unprovoked, as it were, by some intelligence—it acts independently. But
intelligence may produce states of matter/energy that are utterly dependent on the whims of that creative agency manipulating it. But again, with this level of subtle control <i>over</i> matter/energy, it would stand to reason that the creators here stand
in a relation of absolute control … which begs the question as to what the
limits of such control would be or are.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">And then, as with so much ufological
speculation, we are well on our way down the rabbit hole of endless possibility.
Kant: <i>please don’t run amok in the
transcendent</i>. Please rein yourself in. But how? Well, by simply sticking to and stating the facts as
plainly, as elegantly, and as <i>directly</i> as you can. Which is exactly what Coumbe
tries to do. And I think he well succeeds.</span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">In the second and final part of my conceptual review, we will work through Part II of <i>Anomaly</i>, which is devoted to the <i>where,</i> the <i>when</i> and the <i>meaning</i> of it all. (Much thanks goes out to Mark Rodeghier for cautioning me to be <i>very careful</i> with this part of my review, as I will endeavor to explain....)</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.bc.edu/content/bc-web/academics/sites/ila/events/metaphor-making-and-mysticism/_jcr_content/par/bc_tabbed_content/tab-1/bc_image_content/image.img.jpg/1627475742813.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="472" data-original-width="350" height="302" src="https://www.bc.edu/content/bc-web/academics/sites/ila/events/metaphor-making-and-mysticism/_jcr_content/par/bc_tabbed_content/tab-1/bc_image_content/image.img.jpg/1627475742813.jpg" width="224" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span><p></p></div>Mike Cifonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16910256379002179502noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7235611048140260044.post-17251798483465584732022-10-21T03:01:00.054-07:002023-01-07T10:24:58.596-08:00my final word on Phenomecon 2022, in which we first comment on the current state of play of ufological matters<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://philipstanfielddotcom.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/picasso-cubist-portrait-of-wilhelm-uhde-1910-from-artchive-comuhde1.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="590" height="276" src="https://philipstanfielddotcom.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/picasso-cubist-portrait-of-wilhelm-uhde-1910-from-artchive-comuhde1.jpg" width="203" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">E</span></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">very now and then it’s advisable to take a step back from
one’s affairs and to examine them from afar. To afford oneself the luxury of an
estimate of the situation. This contemplative withdraw is the condition of philosophy
itself, and given just how universal and necessary this gesture really is, this
makes philosophy universal. The philosophical cannot be avoided. It is, indeed,
a condition of life itself—at least a life worthy of a human being (and let’s
not too easily forget the dimension of the human all-too-human in our ufological
endeavors).</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">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”).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">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 <i>sill</i> 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 <i>could not be explained</i>—and not necessarily for
lack of sufficient “data”), while the mainstream opinion that there’s no real <i>there</i>
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 <i>still </i>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 <i>interstellar</i>)
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 <i>Voyager</i> 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.)</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">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 <i>very
</i>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 <i>et al</i>. 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 <i>there</i> 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,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>but <i>first as tragedy, then as farce</i>.
(And we leftist academics love quoting our Marxian corrections of Hegelian
nostrums.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://media.sciencephoto.com/image/c0090899/800wm" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="564" height="323" src="https://media.sciencephoto.com/image/c0090899/800wm" width="228" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">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 <i>kind</i> 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
<i>so much harder</i>, because with that better and richer dataset comes the
much more fundamental task of <i>theorizing </i>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 <i>warping</i> 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, <i>ufology is confined to observational science</i>.
As I keep stressing, we are at the <a href="http://galileo.rice.edu/sci/brahe.html" target="_blank">Tycho Brahean</a> 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 <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt22336526/?ref_=ttep_ep2">second episode of
the new <i>Unsolved Mysteries</i></a> 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 <i>exactly</i> 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 <i>reality</i> as such (Aristotle valiantly engaged in a radical program of phenomenological description of things he really did not end up understanding <i>beyond the mode of appearance of the things he was observing and classifying</i>; 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 <i>general laws of the phenomena</i>).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Which brings me back to our old friend <i>Phenomecon 2022</i>.
No, I didn’t forget her. She’s still with us…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">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 <i>Phenomencon</i>
(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 <i>remove</i> 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 <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Harald-Atmanspacher-2" target="_blank">Harald Atmanspacher</a> 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 <i>add</i> it in—for, as Atmanspacher
was attempting to demonstrate, the deeper point is that <i>it was never gone to
begin with</i>. Matter and Mind constitute <i>an essential relation</i>, such that,
at the more fundamental ontological level of reality itself, <i>there is
neither mind nor matter</i>, 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). <i>This</i> 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 <i>estimate of the situation</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">The affable Rich Hoffman (a deeply genuine and consummately <i>human</i>
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 <i>USS Princeton</i> those fateful days during the <i>Nimitz</i> 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 <i>puffed</i> right in a circle, towards the tops of the
wheat stalks. I’d heard of the <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Compelling-Scientific-Evidence-UFOs-Analysis/dp/150271552X?asin=150271552X&revisionId=&format=4&depth=1">Delphos
case</a> (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 <i>meta-</i>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).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Books/Pix/pictures/2009/1/26/1232964114343/Sir-Isaac-Newton-001.jpg?width=700&quality=45&dpr=2&s=none" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="276" data-original-width="460" height="158" src="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Books/Pix/pictures/2009/1/26/1232964114343/Sir-Isaac-Newton-001.jpg?width=700&quality=45&dpr=2&s=none" width="265" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">We might sum up their main point thusly: It is boring. The
real work is tediously boring, and mostly uneventful. While they went in with
certain hopes and perhaps certain expectations for those hopes, they did what
every good scientist must do: they let go of their own subjectivity (personal
biases and all) by relegating the work to the operations of their largely
unintelligent material instrumentation. Record first, react and reflect later.
What the great quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli once called the “ideal of the
detached observer” makes its way into science in a number of forms, but the
intermediation of relatively inert, unintelligent equipment is part of this “ideal”.</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">However, it is impossible to remain absolutely detached; no
observation as such (as an act of an intelligent, minded being) <i>can be</i> “detached”.
That is, at some point, <i>every datum must be meaningfully interpreted</i> by
someone, somewhere, with respect to some set of implicit or explicit
interpretive concepts (a <i>framework</i>). Even if, as UAPx has done, that
data gets filtered through any number of software/AI layers, not only are those
software layers <i>already</i> the manifestation of some human intelligence
(and therefore already a form of interpretation), the results of that
filtration must <i>mean</i> 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 <i>is indispensable</i>, 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 <i>think</i>, 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 <i>breakthrough </i>of great magnitude
(say, in the transition from one paradigm to another), <i>this is exactly what
is happening: the background is breaking down, and must be meta-theoretically clarified,
and surpassed</i>. 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, <i>it doesn’t think its own
presuppositions</i> … that’s left to philosophy as such. At least, that’s what
I claim.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">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 <i>that can be solved</i>, 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”, <i>the UFO is and
always will be a part of nature</i>) that, when accommodated by the standard
set of scientific concepts, <i>leads to a determinate inconsistency or contradiction
in some (conventional) theory</i>. 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 <i>set</i> of <i>justifiably related phenomena</i>),
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 <i>relative to a set of background assumptions
about how nature ought to be</i>. 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 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether's_theorem">Noether’s
Theorem</a>, you should learn something about it as it’s absolutely of fundamental
importance in all of physics).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://hips.hearstapps.com/pop.h-cdn.co/assets/16/32/1470689757-gettyimages-170074155.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="485" data-original-width="800" height="217" src="https://hips.hearstapps.com/pop.h-cdn.co/assets/16/32/1470689757-gettyimages-170074155.jpg" width="358" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">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 <i>stipulated</i>
that this is not true, and asserted that there must only be a <i>discrete</i>
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 <i>a new fundamental theory</i> 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 <i>the most precise theory humankind has ever written down</i>,
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</span><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ascii-font-family: Garamond; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-hansi-font-family: Garamond; mso-symbol-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-char-type: symbol; mso-symbol-font-family: Symbol;">®<span style="mso-char-type: symbol; mso-symbol-font-family: Symbol;">¥</span></span></span><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">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 <i>stipulated</i>
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.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">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 <i>Phenomecon</i> 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).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">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 <i>actual</i>
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.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">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 <i>bogus</i> 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.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">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 <i>is</i> 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 <i>do</i> 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 <i>then</i> 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, <i>disaster</i>. 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.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.8newsnow.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/59/2021/04/SKW_4.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="536" data-original-width="800" height="224" src="https://www.8newsnow.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/59/2021/04/SKW_4.jpg" width="334" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">That public consciousness, that media visibility, matters,
especially as the serious researchers and investigators of the UFO phenomenon
are trying to connect with those structures and persons of government that are,
once again, making motions towards a “study” of the phenomenon (please refer to
comments on this above, as we enter the merry-go-round of governmental interest
in the subject). Progress is only made by surpassing the defunct, the
inoperable, the failed procedures of inquiry and conception that found itself
trapped in a cul-de-sac of incredibility—failures which threaten to be
reproduced and amplified as the n-th podcast host broaches the subject of UFOs-qua-alien-craft,
or UFOs-and-consciousness theme, or the CE5&dime attempt at “contact” and so on
and so forth. Knowledge of the thing itself is a desert, silent of conception
as the thing speaks its language to us as it confuses our categories of understanding.
The confusion is, paradoxically, constitutive of the act of knowing, for </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">we
are simultaneously changed by the knowledge as we come to know the object of it</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">.
I cannot stress how relevant the subtleties of Hegel’s thinking on this question
of constitutive, catalytical you-change-with-what-it-is-you-come-to-know effect
of the fundamental epistemological act itself. True discovery entails a kind of
epistemic </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">break</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> or a rupture that, because of its shattering effect on
prior understanding, entails a simultaneous </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">ontological</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> shift of profound
significance. Yet this is something only really fully appreciated </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">in
hindsight</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">. It’s Hegel’s Owl of Minerva taking flight when the sun goes down,
after the fact and the act. We’re always coming to learn, much later, just how
significantly our existential situation had altered as a consequence of epistemic
shifts, tectonic movements just beneath the surface of ideas we habitually work
with individually and collectively. The “Middle Ages” was born </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">after </i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">the
Renaissance wound down into the Age of Reason, which morphed into the long Nineteenth
Century, and so on. The slow realization of the nature of what we are really dealing
with in the UFO phenomenon will likely be momentous, now that we are gaining a
firm sense of how frequent the phenomenon has been and continues to be—despite its
frustratingly fleeting quality (though Ryan Graves’ discussion on a recent—and admittedly
thoughtful—Rogan podcast, well worth encountering, leaves you with the
impression that, at least around some remote, ocean-bound military deployments,
the UFO is rather persistently common). But it will surely be momentous only
truly so </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">as we look back</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> to see the effects of this gradual realization
of just how deeply inexplicable an important subset of all UFO reports really is
(and what data is possessed but under careful governmental wraps—all conspiratorial
bugaboo aside, there’s every indication of lots of significant data and
information not accessible by the public). Yet if the past is any guide, the
phenomenon will likely remain elusive but perhaps not so elusive as to remain
forever outside the purview of empirical science—if they wake up to more
sophisticated ways of dealing with potentially </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">agentive</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> objects of study (and on this precise point the reader is again referred to what may well amount to one of the greatest ufological <a href="https://www.academia.edu/30227708/Trust_No_One_UFOs_Anthropology_and_Problems_of_Knowledge" target="_blank">samizdat essays</a> recently penned).</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">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…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Taylor seems to be a con who believes his own con, and is
thus unaware of its existence or extent. I mean, he <i>thinks</i> 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 <i>desires</i> to
have—a very dangerous dilemma to have to negotiate in one’s soul).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">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 <i>more
or less</i> <i>innocuous</i> Bigfootalia).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Taylor dropped the quantum consciousness bomb on us poor
unwitting insiders. And that’s a bomb that’s exploded near me <i>many</i> a
time, at <i>many</i> 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 <i>laugh</i> 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 <i>did</i> happen—as we are told (and
we’re always <i>told</i> 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…)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.uah.edu/images/news/campus/skinwalker-ranch-1.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="800" height="167" src="https://www.uah.edu/images/news/campus/skinwalker-ranch-1.jpg" width="296" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Getting back to the technicals: we wonder just what in the
hell this “participatory” experiment was meant to test or establish (besides clever
alien abduction lore references). Can I have a theory please (line…!)? Since Taylor
has long lost the habit of actually publishing scientific work (though there’s
this </span><a href="https://www.uah.edu/eng/departments/mae/news/15032-uah-scientists-brave-curses-spooky-anomalies-to-unravel-secrets-at-skinwalker-ranch" style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">news
article</a><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> by the University of Alabama Huntsville, Taylor’s </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">alma mater</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">,
where UAH has no qualms about owning the intrepidity of their rogue-ish PhD
grad and his backyard experimentalism), it’s not clear just what he’s actually up
to, besides producing media content for “Prometheus Entertainment”, the (aptly-named?)
media production company ultimately behind the SWR series that, it seems, is so
wildly popular (at least with a certain segment of the American Heartland).</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">OK, so an examination of his <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/travis-taylor-8375915a/">LinkedIn profile</a>,
advertising of his own design, makes it clear that he’s a PhD-holder in <i>engineering
</i>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: <i>he is not an “astrophysicist”</i>—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 <i>masters
</i>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.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Engineering, let’s be absolutely clear, is most definitely not
<i>theoretical physics</i>. Most of the UFO world’s scientific minds <i>are not
theoretical physicists in any meaningful sense. </i>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 <i>not </i>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 <i>solving concrete problems</i> in the description and
modeling of astrophysical phenomena for which we have significant and rich data—modeling
the phenomena with <i>known</i> 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
<i>explanations</i> for their observational data (and it is a purely <i>observational</i>
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 <i>development of theory itself</i> (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 <i>of the fundamental theories which are used in achieving an explanation
and understanding of the various phenomena of the world</i>, 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 <i>concepts</i> with which any theoretical physicist thinks.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">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 <i>by the relations between things or processes</i>.
On this view, “spacetime” and the structure of relations among the material
processes and things of reality are one and the same. Spacetime just <i>is</i>
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.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">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.<i><o:p></o:p></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://i.pinimg.com/736x/cd/c8/a2/cdc8a2b01b166aa56acd52665f2e49dc.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="672" data-original-width="736" height="291" src="https://i.pinimg.com/736x/cd/c8/a2/cdc8a2b01b166aa56acd52665f2e49dc.jpg" width="319" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">There has always been this philosophically interesting (and
philosophically motivated) dichotomy between theory and experiment, ever since
the days of the Scientific Revolution itself. But figures such as Galileo and
later scientific minds like Robert Boyle, demonstrated that there’s an intimate
relationship between experimentalism and theorizing: that latter must make
contact with and ultimately be grounded in the results obtained in the former;
and the former can only be guided by some sense of the latter—of how it is, that
is by what “first principles”, we think nature in its fundamental structure is
organized. Aristotle taught us that you can’t really know anything about the
true nature of reality unless you look at how reality actually unfolds—and the
experimentalists went a step further and argued that you had to muck around
with it to get it to reveal its true, inner structure: you can’t </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">just</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
observe and watch things from a distance. You have to </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">close </i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">that distance—and
that’s exactly what the experimentalists try to do: to use theory to design a
physical structure in which you can </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">control</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> some relevant aspect of
nature so as to reveal to you some other aspect you’re interested in studying. In
particle accelerators, we create structures and systems that in turn create
particles and smash them together, and the results of this crash test reveal very
fundamental facts about the structure of nature itself. Particle physicists
might be interested in detection in other ways—building very sensitive
instrumental systems to observe, say, a fleeting pulse of energy attributable to
the action of the elusive neutrino, for example. In each case, the experimentalist
(or detective, as the case may be), sets up their equipment with a particular
theory in mind, and conceives of the whole operation with that theory as a
structuring principle (literally and figuratively). There is theory that governs
our understanding of the nature of the behavior of elementary particles of matter,
and the experiments (in detection or smashing) we design are effectively </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">testing</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
those theories. But the theory which they employ has the virtue of having a
sound </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">conceptual basis</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> from which to design their experiments (quantum field
theory, for example, is a solid, well-confirmed theory, even if its conceptual foundations are
a bit rough around the edges).</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">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 <i>somewhere</i>
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 <i>per se</i>).
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.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">What was morally and intellectually outrageous about Dr. T.
T.’s “quantum consciousness” excursus was that <i>it was radically uninformed</i>,
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 <i>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</i>—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; <i>but you
have to have done your damn homework</i>. As an intellectual, you’re
responsible for saying <i>something</i> 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 <i>wisdom</i>, 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 <i>stain</i> of unknowing sophistical
conceit behind.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">I am now <i>really</i> tired talking about the whole <i>Phenomecon</i>
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).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">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 <i>anomalies</i>. Some of the core cast <i>themselves</i> don’t even believe
half the crap that’s being said—<i>they</i> admit much of it is nonsense.
Nevertheless, some say there <i>is</i> 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 <i>some</i>
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 <i>per se</i>, 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.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">And here is where I will leave the matter of <i>Phenomecon 2022</i>.
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.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://post.healthline.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/full-moon-night-landscape-732x549-thumbnail-1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="549" data-original-width="732" height="294" src="https://post.healthline.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/full-moon-night-landscape-732x549-thumbnail-1.jpg" width="392" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span><p></p>Mike Cifonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16910256379002179502noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7235611048140260044.post-67128465435056696512022-09-27T14:27:00.037-07:002022-10-26T09:30:10.268-07:00Phenomecon 2022 - A Review (Part Two)<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.historyhit.com/app/uploads/2020/07/cynocephaly-1.jpg?x76921" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="619" data-original-width="690" height="220" src="https://www.historyhit.com/app/uploads/2020/07/cynocephaly-1.jpg?x76921" width="244" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: x-large;">D</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">ay Two’s opener of course follows on from the Bigfoot fest we
found (but quickly departed) in the open-air cinema from last night. We are in
for an astute, academically-inclined actual “talk” by none other than the
inimitable Dr. Jeffrey Meldrum of formal sasquatch studies. It is a remarkable
exercise (as we shall see) attempting to re-frame such a fringe topic of
cryptozoology in a scientifically respectable context of description,
explanation and understanding. (Whether such was in fact </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">successful</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> is a
question we shall entertain forthwith.)</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Meldrum will, it seems, offer a “naturalistic” framework for
what is already a seemingly absurd topic: the existence of a large ape-like
creature, unknown to current science, inhabiting the arboreal depths of
America’s forested lands (and not only in America!). In other words the question
which Meldrum proposes to tackle in a “naturalistic” framework is whether
Bigfoot (“sasquatch”) exists and, if so, how to explain (and possibly justify)
its existence.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">The existential question—does it exist?—is of course the one
that most haunts the topic, for according to conventional thinking, such a
creature simply does not exist and is the subject more of myth and lore than of
real, confirmed science. What is it <i>supposed to be</i>? is perhaps the
better initiating question. Here, there is (predictably we might observe) a
puzzling array of claims. As with the equally fraught (though evidentially-epistemically
somewhat distinct) topic of UFOs, there are, broadly speaking, two general
views on the matter of Bigfoot’s nature (of course they all presuppose its <i>existence</i>—naturally):
in the first camp—housing perhaps the <i>most</i> fringe of the fringe views on
Bigfoot (!)—we find those who think that it is something like an
“interdimensional” being, or otherwise not even remotely supposed to be part of
the biological world recognized by conventional scientific thinking (not part
of the natural evolutionary great chain-of-being); the second camp (into which
we might place Meldrum the <i>bone fide</i> biological scientist—he’s an
anatomist and anthropologist by doctoral training) accepts that, whatever
sasquatch are, they’re going to be part of the world of Earthly evolutionary
biology (a heretofore unrecognized and therefore uncategorized biological
species, e.g.). So from this latter camp—the naturalists, we might denominate
them—Meldrum launches his investigations.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://travel.home.sndimg.com/content/dam/images/travel/fullrights/2022/6/jack-osbournes-night-of-terror-bigfoot.png.rend.hgtvcom.1280.960.suffix/1656448464175.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="261" src="https://travel.home.sndimg.com/content/dam/images/travel/fullrights/2022/6/jack-osbournes-night-of-terror-bigfoot.png.rend.hgtvcom.1280.960.suffix/1656448464175.png" width="348" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">For Meldrum, the consistency of the footprint evidence,
coupled with that set of (allegedly) veridical, and therefore convincing,
photographic and video evidence (let’s not forget the infamous Patterson-Gimlin
footage), is evidence enough that a potential species (of something—for
Meldrum, it’s a “relict” hominid) exists that answers to the sasquatch
description. Since it’s real, we must then determine its place in the
evolutionary biological grand scheme of things. And so, quickly dispatching with
the troublesome existential question, Meldrum moves into that territory
that is, for him, most comfortable.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Let’s talk about biological niches. If
sasquatch exist, and are part of the grand clan <i>Hominidae</i>, then we ought
to be able to determine whether and to what extent those places where they are
said to dwell are consistent with that habitat in which a relict hominid (such
as sasquatch are presumed to be) would be able to thrive. While we’re at it, we
also should try to determine if the purported physical evidence (such as it is)
is also consistent with the physical characteristics of a relict hominid from <i>Hominidae</i>.
In other words, Meldrum is trying to argue that there exists an actual hominid
species coeval with but evolutionarily distinct from <i>Homo sapiens
sapiens</i>—and that is Bigfoot. It’s a real human relative. It’s not
supernatural. It’s not “interdimensional”. It’s not quite a “monster” (as the
talk outlines, that’s akin to <i>unnatural</i> and the claim is that it’s
anything but!). It’s just a low-population and therefore quite rare species of
relict hominid that has thus far gone unnoticed and unacknowledged by the
biological/life sciences.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">I got the eerie and slightly disturbing sense that I’ve heard
all of this before. Not, surely, the specific content about Bigfoot, sasquatch
and the like (I admit I really don’t much pay attention to it, or at least not
before this conference; now I’m slightly interested in what’s going on here…).
But the structure of the discussion, and the form of the arguments: it’s all
disturbingly homologous with what’s found in ufology. In the discussions of the
evidence for/against the existence of genuinely unidentified aerial phenomena
(i.e., as something more than misperception, hoax). In the talk about how
credible or not a particular eyewitness is. Or how authentic a certain video or
photo is—if they’re all hoaxes or fuzzy pics of known phenomena, or simply of
indeterminate somethings. All these things are there in the Bigfoot discussions
and debates. Yet, for being a supposed corporeal (or corporeal-manifesting, to
wax a bit more ontologically ambiguous, as needed) entity, stomping around,
surreptitiously, in (often strikingly beautiful) arboreal environs, the alleged
evidence is just that much more ambiguous. As if the ambiguity is inversely
proportional to the physicality of the thing: the more allegedly animal/real
it’s supposed to be (at least while in <i>our </i>dimension), the less unambiguous
the evidence for it seems to be (if you can pardon the grammatical
constructions here). In other words, somehow the “evidence” is more ambiguous <i>precisely
because it is of a phenomenon that is already contained within the known domain
of accepted physical, zoological morphology</i> (at least according to
Meldrum’s working supposition regarding the nature of Bigfoot <i>qua</i> relict
hominid). Ironically, the “naturalism” Meldrum wants to presuppose dooms his
Bigfootology from the get-go: it’s disconfirmable for lack of (or for contradictory)
evidence. Yes, I know the constant refrain in these matters: “you can’t prove a
negative” … and “absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence”. Except we have
a concept of the <i>fossil record</i>, and, more to the point: we have collections
of <i>bones</i>. If these creatures are as-yet unrecognized actual biological
species, even if they are rare, <i>they ought to leave physical traces behind
in the form of fossilized bones or recently-deposited skeletons</i>. We have to
wait for the Q&A to extract a comment on this important point…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">A bit of a wince moment—where Meldrum appeared suddenly
extremely tone deaf—came when he wanted to do a bit of comparative anatomy
(presumably one of those subjects on which he can claim real conventional
expertise). He wanted to give us in the audience a sense of the comparative
size of the sasquatch. And whom did he choose in order to give us this sense? A
<i>black</i> football player—whose picture was juxtaposed with a depiction of a
sasquatch specimen (rendered by an artist’s hand). There was not so much as a
huff of air in the 90% white crowd. I simply couldn’t believe my eyes and ears:
was I really seeing/hearing this comparison? It seems so. Of all very large
human beings that one could have chosen, we had this choice. Interesting.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTijeJ4rQn5TS_RWSP3e_XmAocE5IjyPk36xg&usqp=CAU" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="220" data-original-width="230" height="220" src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTijeJ4rQn5TS_RWSP3e_XmAocE5IjyPk36xg&usqp=CAU" width="230" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">So we have a good sense, now, of what Meldrum is up to (even
if we’re not exactly sure he’s aware of the racist tropes he manages to invoke
in some of his comparative examples—which, it must be admitted, have no bearing
on the scientific soundness, or not, of his claims). He is at pains to
demonstrate that, quite simply, the physical evidence (such as it is) is
consistent with the existence of an heretofore unknown and unacknowledged
“relict” hominid inhabiting arboreal environs (in America and potentially elsewhere).
But inevitably, the thesis—that such a species of hominid actually exists and
inhabits those places where it’s alleged to have been seen)—raises a number of
other questions (as all good theses should). One obvious one is: </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">but whence
cometh these hominids</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">? Presumably they can’t be </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">native</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> to the
Americas, so they would have had to have migrated from their point of origin
(African, Asia?) to the Americas. That’s not particularly troubling. All sorts
of species radiate from their origins (the places where their species was born,
as it were—where speciation occurred) and move elsewhere. What </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">is</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
troubling is the apparent lack of fossilized remains: I mean, over the aeons
(and I am assuming that Meldrum is not assuming that this species is a very
recent deposition to the Americas, evolutionarily speaking—that it has radiated
from its point of origin in the timeframe typical for other hominids: many tens
of thousands of years) you’d expect there to be plenty of fossilized remains to
indicate even the trajectory of migration. I cannot speak to the existence of
this very crucial physical evidence, since I don’t care to follow Bigfootalia
(and given who all was in attendance at Phenomecon—including the Giant
humanoid/androgynous ETs guy—I can imagine someone standing up and confidently
asserting that there </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">are</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> such fossils: cryptoidal fossils that would
confirm this!), but when Meldrum was asked about it not only did he not produce
it, </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">he attempted to explain why we don’t have it</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">. Thus we may infer
that, if the top naturalistic theorist of Bigfoot can’t produce it, </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">then
probably it doesn’t exist</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">. Or at least it’s not something generally
acknowledged as being had by the Bigfoot naturalists. In my mind, this was the
real 800lb. gorilla in the room. This would have been the real Bigfoot.</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">And his reply, you ask? As I said, he proceeded to explain why
we don’t have such evidence—but did so in classic academic-expert fashion: we
don’t have it because we can’t or shouldn’t have it: the physical forces in
this case have conspired to erase such evidence. Or, something to that effect.
In his remarks to the innocent questioner (because of whom we even got this
consideration at all), he asserted the following as the reasons for the
nonexistence of the fossil record one would expect to exist: (1) the rarity of
the species precludes it; (2) nature “mops up after herself quite well” (a direct
quote if my real-time notes are trustworthy—an issue since my ADHD mind tends
to wander). Are we really meant to buy this B.S. response from the world’s
“leading expert” on the sasquatch? It was an utterly unscientific moment, one
where the pretense of science momentarily dropped, and the man behind the
curtain was revealed: maybe it’s all smoke-and-mirrors, or rather, a show meant
to distract from the core implausibility of it all. Everything else in
Meldrum’s talk came across as pleasantly acceptable (biological,
anthropological) technobabble to the uninitiated, giving the right allure (the needed
patina) of scientific respectability for so fringe a topic. Yet with this
absurdly dismissive and dissembling reply to an innocent—yet
fundamental—question, science was suspended. It was an otherwise rather
conventional talk, working through the heavy-duty evolutionary biology, physical
anthropology and relevant anatomical details of a hypothetical “relict” arboreal
hominid species. There was plenty of fact and some theory to go along with it.
But it’s one thing to work through an argument to the effect that it’s possible
for there to exist, within the relevant evolutionary biological niche, a
relatively rare hominid (or perhaps less tendentiously and more generally, a
species of large arboreal simian) not generally accepted as part of current zoological
taxa. It’s quite another thing altogether to attempt to then <i>explain away</i>
the glaringly contradictory fact that there are neither skeletons nor fossilized remains answering to the physical descriptions of these hypothetical
creatures. Even if it is comparatively rare a species (and Meldrum did engage
in an extended analysis of not only the existence of low-population, and
therefore rare, species, but the conditions under which a population could
thrive with low numbers—giving us a sense of what’s biologically possible: a <i>minimum
viable population</i>), it seems that it would be exceedingly unlikely that
there be <i>no</i> fossils <i>or</i> skeletal remains to anchor the species in
the realm of zoologic fact. After all, if the species exists on any
evolutionary timescale at all, <i>some</i> of its remains would, well, remain. Oh,
but “nature mops up after herself quite well”—so well that she provides
convenient cover for your hypothesis….<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/04/03/science/07obs-fossil-web/07obs-fossil-web-superJumbo.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="573" height="267" src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/04/03/science/07obs-fossil-web/07obs-fossil-web-superJumbo.jpg" width="192" /></a></div><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: x-large; line-height: 107%;">A</span><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">nd now we come to one gem of a talk—a premonition (I would
soon learn) of things to come from the SWR crew. After a pause (at which point
I think I departed with my friend to go and secure some delicious Mexican
lunch), we find the entrance of the petroglyph guru of the Uintah Basin
himself, the one and only James Keenan.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">He’s another “researcher” with a number of “books” (ok, yes,
they are real physical structures with pages in bound folios) to his name
(eight I believe was the number floated). And here I am, scribbling away at one
of my notebooks, with no tomes in ufology yet to my name. How could I? Who is
this imbecile? Well, I am the reaper of the logically dubious low-hanging
fruit, clearing the epistemic road of the debris occluding travel by more
competent and gifted minds. I am just the John the Baptist, preparing the way,
a sympathetic essayist wanting to see true science emerge even where it seems
it cannot. I am a hopeful. I am not a debunker, nor am I a “believer” (how
could I be—me, an academic where belief is always held at some distance).Yet I
somehow see <i>something</i> in the cracks and the breakdown here of rational,
conventional thought—an image of what is possible even as we shy away from the
impossible (without elevating it as Kripal does: nothing is truly impossible so
much as it’s improbable <i>given what we know under the conditions of knowledge
with which we must humbly operate</i> … accepting of course <i>that we’re
likely wrong in almost all of what we know</i>).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://i.pinimg.com/736x/22/f3/eb/22f3eb120fc3a4069ce5d876cb589cfc--native-american-indians-native-americans.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="370" data-original-width="480" height="212" src="https://i.pinimg.com/736x/22/f3/eb/22f3eb120fc3a4069ce5d876cb589cfc--native-american-indians-native-americans.jpg" width="275" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Many may know Keenan as having been a guest (and I have not
bothered to count the number of such appearances he’s made) on the hit series </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">The
Secrets of Skinwalker Ranch</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> (about which more later—more </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">from those on
the inside</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">). He was called in to examine and comment on the petroglyphs
found scattered about the Ranch. One wonders what authority he has to
comment—at least comment as some kind of an expert. Apparently he has, like
many of the speakers (I mean, these days </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">who doesn’t?</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">), a degree—though
it’s not said what degree it is. On his boilerplate bio we read he “has a
degree in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of California Santa
Barbara” and that “his main curriculum was anthropology and archaeology. He did
the majority of his field work,” the boilerplate continues, “in Mexico” and
that “his most recent research”—unsurprisingly of course—“has taken place in
Northeastern Utah”. And that’s exactly where we are today. His home research
turf it would seem.</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Yes, I will complain. That same boilerplate lets us know that
before his now-current “research” (I’m reluctant to modify that with either
‘anthropological’ or ‘archaeological’—though in <i>some</i> sense that’s
correct), Keenan was a law-enforcement officer for some decades, thus making him
rather typical of “paranormal researchers” it would seem (somehow the
law-enforcement crowd has a distinct predilection for the uncanny). Following
this career—which, presumably, didn’t involve much formal anthropology <i>or</i>
archaeology—he enters into <i>paranormal</i> field research (for that is what I
am assuming “field work” is meant to describe of Keenan’s post-police activity).
It is curious as to how this would become anthropological or archaeological “field
work” except that, as far as I can tell, this is the dimension of study or
interest that he adds to his brand of paranormal sleuthing (and we <i>are</i>
talking about brands and branding here: each of these so-called researchers has,
it always turns out, some connection to the entertainment industry … a very
curious fact). In other words, as he looks into paranormal phenomena of all
sorts, he tries to contextualize it anthropologically (many cultures the world
over have tales of various sorts of occurrences <i>we </i>might term paranormal—and
so Keenan seems to pass over conceptual/foundational issue #1) or
archaeologically, by the examination of cultural artefacts which indicate the
presence of, at some point in the (possibly distant) past, some paranormality
that seems to persist into the present. Like those petroglyphs at SWR: isn’t it a depiction of some kind of a trans-dimensional “portal” (the infamous portal!)
that makes its appearance <i>even today</i>? Keenan’s job therefore is
interpretive-historical: that swirly thing carved into the rock some unknown
number of years ago (interestingly he’s rather vague on dating), which looks
(to Keenan) like a portal, <i>is</i> a depiction of the portal allegedly seen
on the Ranch. So it must be something which the native tribes <i>also</i>
encountered. “Ancient human history” and the paranormal, Keenan declares, “may
be intertwined”. And we might place the emphasis on what in logic we call a
“weasel word”: <i>may</i>. Sure, many things <i>may</i> be the case…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">And so, dear readers, I am not attempting to discount the
possibility that any of what Mr. Keenan wants to claim is true. My complaint is
much more basic, and more foundational than that: I am simply not convinced at
all that he knows what the hell he is, anthropologically and archaeologically,
talking about. Not primarily because he doesn’t have an advanced degree—for
example, an actual research degree that certifies you as an expert in the eyes
of other experts in the field (which is what earning a Ph.D. from a reputable
university and decent academic department establishes); but because for <i>several
decades</i> Mr. Keenan occupied himself doing something else altogether—something
that is only tangentially related to either anthropology or archaeology as
formal academic disciplines. Keenan is just not credible as an expert there,
making his pronouncements on the paranormal in connection with anthropological
or archaeological matters no better than mine (if I would do a bit of reading
up on the subjects). And it takes <i>years</i> of actual, formal, disciplined technical
<i>work</i> to become a credible expert in those fields—following your formal Ph.D.
training. Having a “background” in anthropology (as he announces early on in
his talk) ain’t gonna cut it if we’re talking about trying to come to some plausibly<i>
expert</i> understanding of the archaeological and/or anthropological phenomena
he’s keen on investigating. Otherwise, how is his view supposed to be any better
than a random (well-educated) person off the street?</span> <span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">I personally
doubt that any of it is, so let’s move on to his hypotheses. They provide a
kind of case study in the pitfalls of amateurish dabbling. (And not to dis the
true amateur—many a great thing has come from the non-expert, for true authority
here is not about paper credentials, but actual meaningful and lasting <i>insight</i>
or the demonstrated capacity thereof… and on this score I again would hasten to
doubt.)</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Did I mention that he took pot-shots against “university
standards” and “expectations”? Well, I know enough of the history of actual
science to know that part of what explains the rise of science (in its distinctive
European form—which is the model with which we’re still essentially operating) is
precisely those “university standards” and “expectations”: a formal system of
authentication and validation, a filtration mechanism for quackery and ignorance.
Not only formally within the university system itself, but also those adjunct but
significant learned societies—like the British Royal Society, or its
counterpart in France—which confer honor and respect (and therefore
credibility) among intellectual peers. Of course, many decades of philosophical
(and sociological) criticism of such institutions has taught us to moderate our
adulation of these structures, but even so they play a valuable role in society,
helping us keep track of what it is we can say we know with some measure of substance
grounding that knowledge, as opposed to what is mere opinion, conjecture,
speculation or just plain nonsense. Such institutional structures do not provide
us with an absolute guarantee of intellectual substance or soundness; they’re
guides, ways of vetting or testing the soundness of someone’s supposed “expert”
views against the informed opinion of the relevant <i>collective</i> of peer
experts. Yes, the “truth” here <i>is</i> a collective, social product and thus
subject to the usual criticisms. The pronouncements, determinations, judgments
and views so determined are not in themselves categorically, unconditionally right;
but rather an indication of what we can with justification come to believe is
right, and what we cannot. Some of Galileo’s claims, for example, could not be
entirely justified <i>given the state of knowledge and technological precision
that was possible during his time</i>. What is perhaps painful to realize is
that the Church’s position (notoriously tortured—no pun intended) <i>was in
several instances rather justifiable</i>. The epistemological history of
science is complicated. Epistemology is complicated always by the fact of our
being eternally embedded in the present, whilst at the same time we develop the
conceit of knowingness as we look to the past. <i>We</i> are never the past; we
are always the present, and a receding ancestor to the future of knowledge. But
we must remain true to our limitations <i>now</i>, while we recognize the
potential for overcoming them sometime later (potentially—not necessarily, for
we cannot think ourselves <i>universally wiser in future</i>).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">What follows from this is that, of course, the decidedly <i>unconventional</i>—which
precisely <i>Phenomecon</i> is all about—has in fact got to face a perhaps long
and protracted uphill battle in order to get through the intellectual
gatekeepers. I like that fact. It’s epistemically healthy. It’s what we have to
do battle against in ufology. It means that potentially insightful minds will
be dismissed as quacks or kooks, important (and indeed key) evidence ignored or
missed. That’s the price we pay for academic discipline. And it’s this
dialectic that perpetually sustains both intellectual conventionalists and
their assailants (though I am again reluctant to camp Keenan here, since I
couldn’t find much systematic <i>thought</i> in his talk—but that’s my opinion).
But it is a <i>necessary</i> dialectic, the dialectic of knowledge as such (a
mention of Adorno would seem to be apropos here, who, with a slight bit of high-handed
haughtiness, noted that those fighting against “The System” needed that System
as much as the System needed them—an inexorably unresolvable rift that was
constitutive of any social structure).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.treehugger.com/thmb/YgP0TMV5qi7kAu42FsSUfMq3r34=/500x0/filters:no_upscale():max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():gifv():format(webp)/luray-underground-1203414271-694cc05a0220496eb1b4b06e6012ddb0.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="281" data-original-width="500" height="182" src="https://www.treehugger.com/thmb/YgP0TMV5qi7kAu42FsSUfMq3r34=/500x0/filters:no_upscale():max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():gifv():format(webp)/luray-underground-1203414271-694cc05a0220496eb1b4b06e6012ddb0.jpg" width="324" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Well, back to those “hypotheses”. (I don’t think he used the
word, so I may very well be overstating the case.) From what I could gather
(trying not to dip out from my heavy Mexican lunch), he was fascinated by
underground caverns—and found them under the Uintah basin. Almost everywhere.
There was something about electromagnetic radiation as well. The Skinwalker
Ranch kind of stuff. I think he was trying to connect the dots. He found some
kind of a NASA seismological study (at the McCoy Flats) that had buried, long
ago (well, maybe in the 1960s), wiring that could be loaded with lots of
voltage. His argument, though, was some mixture of suggestion and
associationism—lots of circumstantial evidence, in the end, as best I could
make out. What was distinctly lacking was a </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">theory</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> that connected the
dots supposedly being connected: paranormality (especially at SWR),
electromagnetic phenomena, caverns, seismological studies. It would have been
better if this was all a show-and-tell us your ghost/UFO/wolfman/orb stories,
but no, we had the distinct </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">pretense</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> of “investigation” and the
suggestion of some kind of insight. Yeah, no. Like much of this kind of
“research” and “investigation”, when you remove that patina of expertise
(bucking the academic system!), and get right down to what’s there, </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">it is
just a repetition of some collection of stories of paranormality</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">. Stories.
And I’m fine with the stories. But let’s drop everything else and do a good
storytelling. I mean, what in the hell does flowing water (a typical concern of
the paranormal researcher/investigator) have to do with paranormality? I’ve
heard this numerous times, especially in connection with hauntings (and I will
admit that in my family we have a real case of a poltergeist haunting—I’d be
happy to Zoom with anyone about it): </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">is there flowing water nearby? </i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">goes
the question. So what?! How is flowing water related? What’s the theory of that
connection? Consistent association of X and Y explains neither X nor Y; in
other words: a correlation between X and Y doesn’t show what the actual
connection there is between them such that X and Y are correlated. And they may just not be causally related at all. Correlation
isn’t causation, as they say. But ok: we’re dealing with the paranormal, you
say. Fine. But then provide to me an analysis of why the association is
determinative in this case (if that’s what’s being said), or otherwise explain
to me how to resolve the relation between the two phenomena in such a way that
that relation is thereby </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">explained</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">. And along the way you might have to
tell me what it means to ‘explain’ things in this case—why conventional notions
or categories or concepts of explanation are inapplicable, </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">and what is to be
their replacement.</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> It is </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">that</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> which I mean by saying that Keenan
provides </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">no insight</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> here. It’s pretty much a useless talk, </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">beside vaguely
characterizing the contours of some sort of uncanniness</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">. And even by </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">that</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
standard, the talk failed. It was actually quite tediously boring, neither
convincingly expert, nor entertainingly interesting. At least for me. But what
the hell do I know. (Apparently just that water is scarce…)</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">I will move passed several pages of my notes, but they go on and
on about magnetic anomalies, and “high energy” flows, more about underground
water (isn’t Utah in a severe drought, I wonder—so maybe, just maybe, we’d
expect a reduction in paranormality longitudinally?) … oh and the descriptions
of what appears to Keenan to be a <i>beam</i> of some energetic kind being shot
into space—apparently found on a petroglyph! Now we’re getting somewhere…but we
somehow end up nowhere that we haven’t already been a hundred thousand times
before. Which is what every “paranormal researcher” or “investigator” has said,
done, written about <i>and exploited for personal gain</i>. Yes, Phenome<i>con</i>
was, as a colleague of mine reminded me, quite aptly named.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://flxt.tmsimg.com/assets/p17982764_i_h9_ac.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="205" src="https://flxt.tmsimg.com/assets/p17982764_i_h9_ac.jpg" width="274" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">A</span></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">nd then there was Erik “the Bard” hailing from the
protected realms of </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">. I almost want to
suggest that </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Secret</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> is not Skinwalker Ranch itself; that this burgeoning
media Empire (a virtuality that brushes up against Brandon Fugal’s very
physical real estate mogulalia), is </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">not the real thing</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">. But will that </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">real
thing </i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">please stand the hell up and announce itself?! It never seems to do so
with any degree of surety. We’re always edging on the cusp of having </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">it</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
finally documented, demonstrated, shown, disclosed, portered by a wolfman
beamed to Earth from a ufological portal in the sky, silhouetted by orange-and-blue
orbs delight…</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">I will preface my review of The Bard here by noting that Erik
is quite possibly the most erudite, intelligent, well-spoken and thoughtful of
the entire crowd of Phenomecons—and by far a gem within the unfortunate media
trappings of <i>Secret</i>. Someone at casting did a good thing, and got
someone with a real (as opposed to a ‘roided) mind to take the lead. Which is
curious, if we pause to think about it for a moment: why, you might ask, is
Bard—who does not hold a Ph.D. (according to a “net worth” <a href="https://www.apumone.com/erik-bard-net-worth/">snoop site</a>, he’s got a
Masters in “plasma physics”, presumably from Brigham Young U in Utah … so he’s
a Utahian)—why is Bard the “principal investigator” over Dr. Mr. T.T., who has <i>several</i>
Ph.D.’s (as we are always reminded), and who’s done work for the USG (most
infamously as lead on their somewhat abortive UAPTF)?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Bard’s got the <i>feel</i> for what you want in a principal
investigator, at least from a casting standpoint: he’s staid, educated, somewhat
silver-tongued (in an understated sort of way), well-mannered and
well-intentioned … the outer presentation of The Bard is excellent. And I don’t
think it’s at all an act (other than the kind of acting we <i>all</i> do). He’s
the real deal in terms of that quiet American ingenuity, practicality, know-how
and entrepreneurialism, and all that. He seems to be a (Masters-level)
scientist who, like many, made it for himself by capitalizing on his training
and interests—in this case, scientific instrumentation. According to that snoop
site, and his own <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/ecbard/">LinkdIn</a>
profile, he’s the co-founder of “<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/ml3-scientific/">ML3 Scientific</a>” (whose
website link from their LinkdIn profile is oddly inoperative). Looking for the
website for this company turns up little but puzzlement—“<a href="http://www.ml3scientific.com/">forbidden</a>” links and a <a href="https://www.sbir.gov/sbc/ml3-scientific-inc">public listing</a> of nominal
value (if I were more journalistically inclined, I’d dig deeper, but I want to
finish this article before the next total solar eclipse). The company seems to
be into X-ray technology, among other things.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">And X-rays—or more specifically, those <i>gammas</i> higher
up on the EM spectrum—are all the rage on Skinwalker these days. So naturally,
The Bard takes up his rightful position as lead down at the Ranch.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">We enter a cloistered, hallowed space filled with the believers,
and the paying-to-play “insiders” gathered breathlessly to watch The Bard (this
is his actual on-set nickname!) deliver his afternoon (post-lunch) talk. I was <i>not</i>
about to let my n-th visit to the Mexican place (with Dr. Knuth) induce a
drowsiness sufficient to cause my dipping out of this one. Oh no. This is what
I came for. Well, I had hoped I’d somehow get myself a trip out to said Ranch,
but as I soon discovered, you have to really be <i>somebody</i> to get inside—even
beyond the insiders. And, as I’m nobody, I had to watch from the crowds, melded
into the <i>hoi polli</i> as rightfully I should be.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">It was quite a show. But I should write “show” for what I am
about to describe was, to the best of my knowledge (and intuition) neither
planned nor expected. The real tends to emerge from within the fake—don’t
forget to read my review of the cinematic masterpiece <i>Nope</i>. We’re right
inside the mind of Jordan Peele. We’re in the truth of the matter, the real
thing at last. Well, as Bard took up his wireless mic—a hand-held unit—it immediately
cut out. The battery appeared to have been drained!?! And so, the audience
members, we looked at each other: <i>here it goes again</i>. The Skinwalker
effect. And so the mic was fussed with, with Dr. T.T. chiming in for comic
effect. And then another mic unit was handed over. Same thing! It went out,
just like that—the instant Bard handled it. Unbelievable, I thought (with about
150 others). So, as the jokes and comedy goes a’flyin’, Bard starts his spiel unamplified,
as if we are being taught a lesson in reduction to the primitive by the phenomenon—again,
<i>Nope</i>ian themes pour forth from art-film space (… a portal?). Few can pay
attention, since now our attention is garnered by this phenomenon we are all
prepped to intuit (how can we control for confirmation bias?).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Another mic is brought in, and finally all seems to be
restored back to some functional normalcy. We can now begin the talk itself…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Bard, after now having gotten comfortable with the crowd (he
did seem a bit jittery—like an introvert forced to endure the emotional chaos
of a social crowd), starts his talk off by (and oddly he’s not quite aware of
the irony) recounting tales of electronic mishaps that started up very soon
after his having been hired to be principal down at the Ranch. He wants us to
understand (they all do!) that he’s not making any of this up; that this, and
what else he’s about to discuss, <i>actually happened</i>. I wish fact or truth
worked assertorically like that: by declaring that X actually happened, the
statement to the effect that X happened <i>actually happened</i> (by
assertorical implication). Wouldn’t it be nice …<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">According to Bard, the loci of anomalous activity (such as it
is—more about that alleged activity in a moment) is both the “Command Center”
and “Homestead 2”, especially the latter. But the weirdness is, as we all know,
much more general than that. Allegedly. There is the ambiguous “electromagnetic
interference” we have all come to expect at the Ranch, but then there are perhaps
the more vexatious physiological anomalies—some of which seem to correlate with
that alleged EM interference. Bard describes one incident that happened to him
early after starting his tenure at SWR: while atop a mesa doing some data
gathering, as the EM interference starts to be detected, he gets a sudden dizzy
spell. “What am I in for?” goes his (comedically replayed) reaction. Another incident
he tells us about is a case of seeming paralysis or cognitive aphasia: a
visitor at one point stops in his tracks, and goes blank—while still standing.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">With the purported correlation (<i>very </i>loosely speaking)
between these physiological effects and the EM disturbances, could the latter
be a physical cause of the former? That question isn’t addressed, presumably
because even if one can establish a casual relationship between the two, the
question would still remain: what was the initiating cause of the EM
disturbance to begin with? Which is always the question with SWR phenomena:
aside from the all-important question as to whether what’s being claimed to have
occurred <i>actually did occur</i>, that is: aside from whether the reports we’re
constantly getting are <i>veridical</i>—and this is the point at which most of
us jump off the train and remain incredulous—there always remains the question
of why <i>this</i> phenomenon at <i>that</i> time, under <i>those </i>circumstances?
As Dr. Knuth pointed out to me very succinctly: there’s plenty of ambiguity
here (what exactly was the timing and exact character of the allegedly strange
phenomena?), but ambiguities don’t equate to <i>anomalies</i>. We have to keep
that distinction in mind. It is the crucial distinction as we try to think
through what’s being said—or what’s being suggested, on film—about what’s actually
going on at the Ranch. (We’ll see a case of this distinction being ignored in a
moment.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://brewminate.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/111918-28-History-Science-Electricity-Technology.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="661" data-original-width="385" height="368" src="https://brewminate.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/111918-28-History-Science-Electricity-Technology.png" width="214" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">I mean, the whole set up is fairly ridiculous, both from a
basic critical thinking 101 standpoint, and from the more rigorous and disciplined
standpoint of real, bone fide scientific inquiry. Not only are we offered
allegations based on the testimony of paid cast members on a show whose primary
aim must be, if capitalism is at all in play (remember that?), to turn a profit
for the show (the primary vehicle for that being interested and perpetually
intrigued </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">viewership</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">), but from an entire media entourage operating
under any number of NDAs, from a place to which access is severely restricted—even
to any interested third party scientists! Add to that the fact that, while Bard
is seemingly a competent science guy who knows his way around </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">some</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> set
of real scientific instrumentation (though his exact credentials and bone fides
are somewhat murky, if his aforementioned profile is any indication), we have and
are provided absolutely </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">no </i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">real insight into the nature and functioning
of those scientific instruments which dance before our minds like mere Hollywood
props. If they want us to move from incredulity to acceptance that this is in
fact a true scientific endeavor, then we need details, transparency and
independent confirmation of what’s being alleged. We need to know the instrumentation.
We need to have any alleged anomalies recorded on those instruments evaluated
and assessed by the right experts who know the nature of the instruments used
(and whether they’re being used properly, effectively, and so on)—and what
artefact we can expect therein. We need to have someone other than Erik Bard
and Dr. Mr. T.T. doing this work. Or we at least have to have some real documentation
written up, explicating their methods, their equipment, their recordings, and the
accompanying written testimony—and then </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">that all has to be independently
confirmed and verified</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">. Short of this what we’re dealing with is a whole
lot of ambiguity. Not anomaly. I mean, we—the audience, those who can’t gain
access to the inner sanctum itself—are perfectly justified in remaining
entirely incredulous and disbelieving. Even if there’s some </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">there</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> there
(and I have it on good authority from someone I know who </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">did </i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">gain access
to the secret of the secrets that there </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">is</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> something strange in the data—just
not what’s really being dished up for consumption by the paying fans, and so
something that is likely too tenuous to make for good reel), on general principles
of reasoned thought, </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">no one has any real justification for believing what’s
being claimed</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">. Let me say that again: in the manner in which the
information, the claims, the allegations are dished up to us, we, outsiders,
have no good reason to believe what’s going on inside the Ranch. Period.</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Now, it does not follow that there is, consequently, no <i>there
</i>there; all that follows from the set-up the SWR team has in place is that
there’s no good reason to take any of it seriously. If they want to (a) operate
as a media entertainment group hosting and bankrolling scientific research, and
(b) prevent anyone from talking about what’s going on that isn’t approved by said
media group, and (c) disallow independent verification or confirmation, then we
on the outside can say: bullshit; you ain’t got nothing until (a) through (c) is
eliminated. We’re all entitled to take that position.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">To wrap up this frustrating waltz through the presentation of
what could very well turn out to be nothing but more dissimulation from an
otherwise honest-seeming guy, let’s take the final two cases as examples of precisely
what we’ve been complaining about: the “lightning” videos Bard presents to the
awed audience, and the strangely distorted live-feed from somewhere in the
Command Center/Living complex. (Oh, there was a sound thing too which Bard, just
before these final two videos, presented to us; a hum that became a kind of deafening
roar of some ambiguous sort—to which members of the audience started claiming
physiological effects in response!)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://i.pinimg.com/originals/36/ed/42/36ed427f9f778430eb85e65995bc608d.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="536" height="338" src="https://i.pinimg.com/originals/36/ed/42/36ed427f9f778430eb85e65995bc608d.jpg" width="226" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">First, the lightning</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> video. So, we had a video of a (very
hauntingly beautiful) lightning strike one late evening (it was just after 11pm
local). It was striking “right where we put the launch pad” Taylor indicates,
referring to what must be his favorite backyard experiment he oversaw: the
rocket launching. A bit of background is in order at this point, before we
move on to the enigma itself. So, as many who’ve seen the show will know, there
is supposed to be an anomalous zone of space above a certain area of the Ranch
(near or over the infamous “Triangle”). It goes to about 5000ft above ground
(add an extra 5 or 6k on top of that for altitude above sea level, since we’re
already atop a high desert plain). That’s where they claim (primarily it’s
Taylor) to have seen strange visual distortions and deflections of light beams
(remember that episode where they shined a high-powered laser into the night
sky?)—distortions suggestive of some kind of a spacetime/gravimetric bending
(at least that’s Taylor’s going hypothesis—not surprising given that he’s next-of-kin
to ufological insiders like Eric Davis and Hal Puthoff , who favor some kind of
a spacetime approach to some UAP/UFO observations … “advanced propulsion” concepts,
let’s not forget, is rather big small business for Davis </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">et al.</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">, and a
number of other DOD contractors, as their salaries are tied to getting this
idea to fly in warped spacetime; everyone has some pet theory). Well, Bard
(along with Taylor’s suggestive comments as Bard does his talk) thinks that’s
about where the lightning is striking: through this allegedly anomalous zone of
space above the Ranch. Now, back to our program…</span><div><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">When the video is slowed down, something—yet another
ambiguity that is presented as an “anomaly”—happens to the crooked blade of lightning:
it isn’t exactly continuous, as you’d expect it to be. It appears that it’s a <i>broken</i>
streak, with the break itself (at about 5/6ths the way up the streak) oddly
haloed by what appeared to me (little old me) to be a small cloud or vaporous
formation of some indistinct kind. Bard gets the audience to focus on that
break; it’s anomalous, right!? Lightning doesn’t just have breaks in it,
right?! Lightning streaks are smooth and continuous, right!? Well, hell if I
know the answer to that question—and thus once again the absurd proposition
seems to be that, to a roomful of non-experts (there are atmospheric physicists
who study this stuff!), which by the way <i>includes both Taylor and Bard
himself</i> (for neither I am sure can claim expertise in the phenomenon of lighting,
even if Bard has some level of degree in “plasma physics”), we’re supposed to
concluded by mere visual inspection that we have an anomaly. Hell no. We have
something that, to the non-expert and untrained eyes of everyone there, <i>must
be considered ambiguous before it’s anomalous</i>. Doing one’s due diligence
would suggest that one submits the videographic evidence to those who know,
and with that checked out, then report on the results of this—even if it’s a
mere preliminary analysis—to the audience, not to stand up there and wow the
audience with what is in all likelihood going to turn out to be what UAPx science
team member Dr. Matt Szydagis (also in attendance for two of the four days)
likes to call a “nothing burger”. The point I’m making, of course, is: <i>we just
don’t know what it is we’re looking at</i>. I don’t study lightning, and I’m
sure 99.9% of everyone there doesn’t either, so no one present is qualified to
really comment on such a phenomenon <i>of nature</i>. Sure, it’s seems odd. But
it’s just seeming.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://christ.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/angel-gabriel.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="533" data-original-width="800" height="192" src="https://christ.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/angel-gabriel.jpg" width="288" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">It gets better, of course, for towards the end of the video
clip we were wowed with, there is this bright </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">flash</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">—and Dr. Mr. T.T.
refers to this Dr Who thing called a “weeping angel”. </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">It looks like a
weeping angel!</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> he blurts out at one point from the corner where he was
seated (and I was unfortunately directly aside of him, interfering with his
line-of-sight to The Bard, with my trusty American-flag cowboy hat I’d bought for
this trip out to Utah). I must admit (and will have to go back to my audio recordings)
that Dr. T in his infinite science fictional wisdom had some </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">other </i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">point
to make about the phenomenon of the </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">weeping angels</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> (it’s supposed to be related to some kind of </span><a href="https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Weeping_Angel" style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">quantum
something or other</a><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">) in relation to the lighting and other supposedly anomalous
phenomena being recounted that late afternoon (as a slow hunger grew for
another hit of that delicious </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">mole </i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">chimichanga Dr. Knuth and I enjoyed earlier).
What was odd was that first Taylor mentioned the </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">weeping angels</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> not for
its physical depictions in the famed science fiction series, but somehow the audience
took us there anyways, with Taylor happily going along for the ride of credulity.</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">The final act for the lightning enigma was some claim about an
anomalous effect that happened to the sophisticated (gaming) computer purchased
for examining in detail recorded video frames. Bard tells us that, as the storm
system approached, he unplugged the gaming computer, not wanting it to be damaged;
cameras were still of course recording as the storm rolled in. The next day,
Bard says he was examining the footage those cameras recorded (which included
those enigmatically discontinuous lightning streaks and the orby flashy “angels”).
As he’s watching the footage on that computer—which he specifically had unplugged
during the storm, let’s not forget—he thinks “glad I turned it off during the
storm!” and not just a few moments after he thinks this … yes, you guessed it
(Bard actually delivers this aside to the audience!), the computer on which the
recording plays <i>turns suddenly off</i>. Ok, fine. Happens all the time,
right? Well, when he tries turning it on, it “does something in Bios”, as if it’s
<i>attempting</i> to boot, but then immediately powers down. And it keeps up
this pattern, powering up, going into the Bios screen, then powering down and
off. <i>It’s a twenty thousand dollar machine!</i> So, he reaches out to the
laptop man (“Dan”): what’s going on?! He brings it back to the facility where
they built the computer platform itself to have it looked over, and as the lead
tech opens the computer up they discovered that <i>the CPU had melted</i>. Now
we have the puzzle in place: an originally disconnected computer, while <i>playing</i> footage
of an electrical storm and a (seemingly strange-looking) lightning strike, later experiences a malfunction that turns out to be something like what <i>would
have </i>happened had the machine been plugged in and lightning caused a power
surge, which in turn (through known physical processes) caused the CPU to melt.
The reading of this event, spreading rapidly around the room, was, of course, that the lightning had retroactively (and
paranormally) <i>caused</i> the CPU to melt—or else that the mere replay of the footage of the lightning strike precipitated the meltdown. But all we had, again, was an
allegation and a purported correlation: between video viewing, specific video
content viewed, and prior natural phenomenon (precisely of a sort that <i>could</i>
have caused the melting of the CPU had it gotten a surge from a lightning
strike—just like the one that was actually recorded and being viewed when the melting
happened). And it is <i>this </i>phenomenon that makes Taylor think of the <i>weeping
angles </i>in Dr Who, since one of their powers is to be able, like Medusa, to
cause someone to turn to stone—something that could happen even if you caught
sight of them on a <a href="https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Weeping_Angel">computer
or TV monitor</a>! (There is a notion of “quantum locking” that is relevant
here, to be exactly accurate to the science fictional details, but it is something
I have passed over in absolute unknowing silence.) This is classic Skinwalker…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">(If my admittedly—and I <i>did</i> admit to this at the
get-go—mottled review has you wondering what actually the hell was being said,
claimed, speculated, proffered and so on … then the effect should be to inspire
you to attend with me at next year’s paranormality gala—maybe I can be coaxed
into more seriousness.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">In any case, after the <i>weeping angles</i> moment, we got hit
with what could only be Bard’s best shot at intensifying the intrigue and mystique
surrounding the Ranch (certainly his production bosses were watching him: I noticed
some spooks—not Men In Black, but Men In Kakis—manning the doors and the tables
and the official SWR booths all around us). We got a Paranormal Activity video!
So let’s set this one up carefully. It was spooky, I’ll admit.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">So they had this live video-feed camera set up in a “Living
Room” (in one of the trailers) whilst other recording and sciency activity was
going on elsewhere. Bard sets himself to receive alerts to notify him whenever
there was movement in the room where the live-feed was being recorded. He gets
a stream of them late one night, so he decides to sit by the monitor and watch
the feed live to try and locate what was triggering the sensors constantly pinging him with those annoying cell-phone push-notifications. He
entered into a kind of trance, a “stupor” as he admits, since his viewing went
on just about all night. In his somewhat altered state of mind, he addresses
the screen itself and demands: “if ya got somethin you want to tell me, then
tell me!”. And for the drumroll: we get a response, or so it seems (a whole lot
a’seemin on the Ranch, ain’t there?). The live-feed camera goes a bit haywire,
and gets all distorted, freezing on an eerily distorted display: over in the upper
left-hand corner, some kind of a mathematical-looking “equation” appears; the word
“living” is distortedly smeared across the lower right-hand side of the video frame.
What I couldn’t figure out was why this was interesting, except if you’re
already spooked by being at the Ranch itself (which he admits to having been).
The “equation” was a distortion of the numerical time display; the “living” was
just “Living Room” smeared out to just the first word of that phrase. I guess
it’s odd that the thing distorted <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">when it
did</i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">. But what can we really
conclude? As many on the Ranch admit: not much, since the phenomenon seems to
be operating on another level, a more playful level. And so that’s where we
are: at the level of play, filtered through the distorting lens of a Hollywood
Production Team, embedded in the private property of a Real Estate Mogul of
questionable socio-political leanings (social, political and economic factors
are oddly washed out of all consideration here, as in ufology generally—except when
it comes to the question of gov’t secrecy and all that).<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">At this point I have had enough,
and, after the Q&A (which I pass over in silence), I look forward to my dinner.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Speaking of which, I am presently
feeling some hunger as I have to dash off to meet once again my Greek friend in
Downtown LA for dinner first, and <i>then</i> yet another phenomenal meeting—a moderated colloquium of sorts
on <a href="https://www.eventbrite.com/e/how-should-we-prepare-for-aliens-to-arrive-on-earth-tickets-379988855897?aff=eemailordconf&ref=eemailordconf&utm_campaign=order_confirm&utm_medium=email&utm_source=eventbrite&utm_term=viewevent">how
we should prepare for aliens to arrive on Earth</a>. I don’t know if I’ll
review this one, but we can surely move on in the next (and final part) of this
review to some of the last of the scheduled events of this wonderfully kooky </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Phenomecon 2022</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">.</span><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://weirditaly.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Benandanti-good-walkers-1024x627.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="490" data-original-width="800" height="269" src="https://weirditaly.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Benandanti-good-walkers-1024x627.jpg" width="439" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><br /></span><p></p></div>Mike Cifonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16910256379002179502noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7235611048140260044.post-50837151427125916432022-09-20T22:11:00.021-07:002022-10-26T11:31:23.004-07:00Phenomecon 2022 - A Review (Part One)<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://ychef.files.bbci.co.uk/976x549/p029q354.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="800" height="186" src="https://ychef.files.bbci.co.uk/976x549/p029q354.jpg" width="331" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">F</span></span><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">lying into Utah from where I live in Los Angeles for <i><a href="https://www.phenomecon.net/" target="_blank">Phenomecon 2022</a> </i>was like
going from the Earth to Mars. In this case, not only was the landscape alien
(but wickedly beautiful—arresting even), so was the crowd. Or at least, to
me—someone who has only ever really attended strict academic conferences.
Phenomecon was a funky paranormality fest packed with speakers from a broad
range of intellectual, academic and professional backgrounds. Everything from
bone fide scientists and academics, to your run-of-the-mill “paranormal
investigator” whose profile is fairly predictable: either former military or
police, with some training of some unknown quality in some kind of
investigative methodology (CSI and forensics seems to be common), often with
just an undergrad degree in something (not necessarily relevant to paranormal
studies or investigation). Many are just self-created, <i>sui generis</i>
“investigators” and “researchers” (and therefore “experts”) who’ve devoted
their lives to the strange, the bizarre, the fringe and the kooky. (And I mean
it gets kooky: the comically passionate Bostonian James Vieira, oddly unlisted
in the accompanying booklet of speakers, events and activities, gave us a wild
tour of his inner psyche with a talk on Giant humanoid creatures and—if I am
remembering the talk I so wanted to forget entirely correctly—androgynous
extraterrestrial visitors possibly mating with humans now or in the distant
past … or some such thing.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Of course the highlight of the whole event was the presence
of, and talks delivered by, the current crop of Skinwalker Ranch researchers
(although I should benight the word with quotation marks), with supporting cast
members (the “Dragon”, the cowboy-hat-guy, the security dude, and so on,
real-life families in tow). Out of all, and by a long shot, we had the most
vociferous of the SWR crew: the inimitable Dr. Travis (The Incredible academic-degree-wielding Hulk) S. </span><a href="https://www.apumone.com/travis-taylor-net-worth/"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Taylor</span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">—the
now-infamous “<a href="https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/travis-taylor-admits-to-being-a-paid-government-ufo-researcher" target="_blank">principal investigator</a>” (at least for a time) for the since re-named,
re-branded, shuffled, shaken and stirred </span><a href="https://www.apumone.com/travis-taylor-net-worth/"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">UAPTF</span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">, which
the USG, somewhat haphazardly, cobbled together hurriedly in 2020 in response
to a Congressional mandate. For a certain additional fee (the basic conference
package was about 90 bucks), one could dine with the cast (wedding-banquet
style, with the guest of honor placed on a dais above the crowd), as part of
the lower caste. It was 75 bucks a pop for special lunches or dinners with the
SWR crew (or someone else to your liking—maybe the Bigfoot or demon-hauntings
guy?). And, to top it off, 100 bucks gets you driven by tour bus out to the <i>perimeter</i>
(the pearly gates) of the famed Ranch, to chat through the (locked) black iron
gate with one or more cast members. No unauthorized visitors allowed—not even
for your cool 100. Yeah, I demurred and stuck close to the civilized encampment
which is Vernal City, far away from Skinwalkers, wolf-men, shadow forms,
luminous orbs and the mighty march of the UAP high overhead. (Why didn’t Jordan
Peele think to film <i>Nope </i>in Utah—or did he?)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">We will have occasion shortly to revisit the Skinwalker crew
and then get down to the brass (or </span><a href="https://twitter.com/noeldecan2/status/1494740571855933440?s=20&t=K2CkGWw8WczPafMi5akrvA"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">iridium</span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">) tacks
of their talks: Erik Bard (principal scientific investigator, Masters-degree
holder, curiously enough) and Dr. T (vociferous backyard experimentalist and science
fictionalist <i>extraordinaire</i>). I was not impressed, despite the ooh-ing
and ahh-ing over the two “scientists” that permeated the rooms where they
manifested (first in the general assemblyroom—the “Ballroom”, where an actual
costume ball was held one night—and the second in the “insiders” only
conference room where paying members of the burgeoning realtime media-feed
Empire got to see the crew up close and personal).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://basinnow.com/upload/imgs/620a8eb229937.jpeg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="474" data-original-width="800" height="205" src="https://basinnow.com/upload/imgs/620a8eb229937.jpeg" width="345" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">I will admit that my attendance at the conference talks and
other sundry events was spotty. There’s only so much crappy, imprecise, vague
or shallow thinking one can tolerate in a day, and so I therefore spent much of
my time trying to get to know the UAPx team, who managed to strike quite a contrasting
note of actual scientific sincerity regarding a topic so easily consumed by the
true-believing “woo” denizens that the core enigma—which stubbornly remains so—quickly
and frequently gets exorcised in favor of so much ambiguity of indeterminate
quality, authenticity or relevance. I mean surely there’s some </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">there</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> to
all the paranormality, but with this cast of characters (showmen, con-artists
and plain kooks) thrown at the problem, we enter into a new world medieval with
little hope of gaining some modicum of knowledge about that </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">there</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">. You
ain’t finding it </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">here</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">…</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Let’s talk about this Greg Lawson character for a moment. His
was the first talk/presentation I stumbled upon as Dr. Kevin Knuth and I
arrived late to the paranormal party, having traversed the hundred and fifty
odd miles from Salt Lake City to Vernal in just under three hours of amazing
high mountain and desert views—mesmerizing to the point of spiritual quietude.
Leaving Salt Lake, a relatively normal (if oddly antiseptic) American city
behind, you enter into this magical landscape of mountains, reservoirs, occasional
rolling hills, mesas and canyons with cattle and horses lowing about. At one
point I am struck, almost dumb, with a profound sense of connection to the
land, the place, as if I’d started to arrive home after having taking a long
hiatus some unknown time in the past. (And that was about the only dose of
possible paranormality I can, sadly, report; everything else was thoroughly
this-worldly—most especially the delicious Mexican cuisine, the most delicious
I have ever had.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Lawson was concerned about “the evidence”. Oh no, I thought.
This should be good. He provided a list of its types: physical; latent; trace;
associative; circumstantial; testimonial; historical … a decent list and certainly
epistemically interesting if we were to dive into each one and starting
thinking more deeply about what each is, and when it comes up. But here was a
kind of expert—in forensics it would seem (at least that’s the </span><a href="https://www.phenomecon.net/team-4"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">bio we got on the web</span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">:
30-year law enforcement officer, SWAT team member, 10 year military vet, and so
on … no stranger to the act, art and maybe science of forensic investigations).
Not an academic by any stretch. So for his bone fides, he spreads the whole
range of investigative techniques and categories out before the audience. We
have to know he’s a serious guy about the paranormal. It gets boringer, of
course, since the paranormalist if often confined to the archival research
carrel, working through newspapers, magazines and the whole lot of paper
materials that haven’t (yet, at least) made it into the all-encompassing,
all-consuming Uber-Archive in the Cloud which is the omniscient Internet
(although in a more sober and serious moment, we should pause to note that it
is not knowledge that is present there, but rather mere <i>information</i>—knowledge-in-waiting).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">It suddenly struck me in a flash of realization: I had
figured it all out (perhaps conveniently, so that I could move on to the
delicious Mexican cuisine calling for me). Paranormal investigation turns out
to be a concatenation of various professional disciplines or trades not
concerned with the paranormal as such, but with the investigation of events of
interest—a reconstructive art in which, by some forensic methodology, you
attempt to flesh the bones of the reports of what happened. You’re always
arriving to the scene too late (much like philosophy, as Hegel once wrote: “The
Owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk.”), or trying to coax back into existence
something which has receded into the mist of the possible (or, as Kripal might
put it: the <i>impossible</i>). The paranormal investigator vacillates between
conjurer and collector, ending up with a curiosity cabinet of tales to chill
the soul during the night—possibles, and maybes taunting the mundane-minded to
dip out to the reaches of the inner and outer cosmos of whatever <i>is</i>. And
the fuel for this fire of the possible is, of course, the very limitations of
human knowing that keep us wondering. After all, we just don’t know very much,
do we? <i>Do</i> we?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">And that’s the point, really—isn’t it? Knowledge. Or at
least, <i>coming</i> to know something about the world which we didn’t really know
(or couldn’t honestly say we knew). But then, what is knowledge? I don’t
think you can answer that without also relating what you say to control or
mastery—or at least consistent and controllable interaction with your
epistemological object (that which you desire to know). Science, as
distinguished from religious faith-based traditions, seeks controllable,
consistent, predictable and reproducible repetitions from nature—a structure of
activity or behavior amenable to <i>law</i>. Science wants engagement with
nature in ways that elude other intellectual traditions, other thought-systems.
A religion is not necessarily to be excluded from this category of knowing, but
its work is often in inner and not outer space (as it were)—a domain science
unfortunately has grown to be uncomfortable with. But the paranormal is
precisely that: phenomena that seem to persist in this scientifically hazy
nether-region in between matter and mind (so to speak). And it is this
nether-region that, in my view, is what originates religion and the religious:
religions spring from this slippery region of neither-quite-matter, nor-quite-mind—a
region that makes us feel that we’re not who or what we might think we are when
all we focus on is the outer space of things subject to the laws of constant
change. We get a sense of a <i>beyond</i> as we contrast it with what the
materialistically-inflected sciences are all about. And this sense of a <i>beyond</i>
is something peculiar to our historical moment, for cultures past had an easier
time reconciling the nether-world to the world as such. We, so-called “moderns”
have this difficulty with the strange or uncanny. Even so, science (in very
practical ways) struggles with it, and only by a slow progression of concerted
and systematic thought will we be able to entertain a more sophisticated
intellectual system capable of not only comprehending the <i>full</i> range of
what there really is (from the normal to the paranormal), but also of
potentially interacting with paranormality in ways that, for now, seem purely
ridiculously fictional.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">What’s the goal for the paranormal researcher? Not, seemingly
explanation—for the typical researcher in this field (and let me be clear: in
the field dominated by the entertainment-types: the Taylors, the Lawsons, … the
roster of Phenomecons) has neither the temperament nor the intellectual
training or discipline to work out something like an explanatory framework
within which to situate their curiosities. It remains, frustratingly, mere
compilation, collection, collation, aggregation, and archival research. But we
must ask: what would explanation look like? Since science dominates the
conceptual terrain in this regard, but yet paranormality by its nature eludes
science (for reasons we must seriously investigate—and are scientists the best
suited for this task, we wonder? Perhaps not…), paranormal research is doomed
to circle in the abyssal whirlpool of incredulity, incapacity,
indeterminateness and ambiguity.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Perhaps then the question is <i>even more</i> fundamental
that all that: what is ‘research’? What is ‘evidence’? And who can
authoritatively conduct the research, gather the evidence, and pronounce on the
results? Again, the nature of the phenomena—which are not even generally
accepted as <i>real</i> features of nature (and yes ‘real’ is a fraught
category screaming for deeper critical scrutiny—but where would this leave us?)—is
such as to cripple a scientific explanation that isn’t guaranteed to be
reductive: show that this or that paranormality is in fact a misidentified
natural phenomenon that is already understood, a pure fiction, or—when it’s
accepted at all—a mere extension of something we already understand
(electromagnetism, say). Ghosts, hauntings, spirits, apparitions … all of it
part of nature, you say? Indeed, that <i>has</i> to be right. But discarnate entities
manifesting what seems like a form of consciousness, able to somehow interact
with the “material” world with which we interact as incarnate beings? It all
seems so unlikely—but is that because of our categories, or because the
phenomena are simply nonexistent? It would seem you don’t need to be possessed
for your head to start a’spinnin’…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Surely the whole phenomenon of Phenomecon is one of the breaking
through—and breakdown—of evidential standards, scientific criteria of
demonstration, and the whole range of conventional epistemic structures that
keep the business—the work—of science (and so-called rational explanation) in
play. It ends up being somehow rogue in a very <i>conventional</i> way, for it
is short on <i>bone fide</i> science and long on the tallest of tales. Yet, we
wonder: what if? What if there’s something here in the rubble (willfully created)
of conventional epistemology?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Yet, all the same, we have to recognize that this kind of a
thing has its place after all—in the great dialectic of knowledge; and that
this dialectic mightn’t be aimed toward anything like a recognizable
explanation of whatever phenomena are targeted here (and exploited). This kind
of thing may just be the padding on the walls of our wagon driving towards a
new age of quasi-scientific experience-mongering, an age not unlike the prior
Middle Ages, where faith mixes with practical know-how in a confusing sea of
phenomena we know little about. If we end up abdicating our role as knowers to
the designs of artificial intelligence of all kinds, at the same time that
governments the world over tip towards self-serving authoritarian monarchies
unkind to fact, then this is the kind of world we may very well end up
inhabiting, where we sleep for a while on the concept of “fundamental
principles of nature” as the basis for explanation and understanding. Who
knows?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">The speakers with the inner circle of invitees and
paying-to-play <i>hoi polli</i> retire on this Day One of the Phenomecon to
dine at their banquet, watched over by the speaker/guest of honor at their
raised dais of dignity. For that cool 75, I could have lunched there with
Lawson or Taylor or “Dragon” Bryant Arnold, or Erik “The Bard”, but alas, I
found sustenance elsewhere that late afternoon.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">As is obvious, I opted for the cheaper option. The 90 I paid
got you access not just to the conference itself, but to at least one opening
reception—an oddly middling soirée (for the mostly non-soirée types) given an
absurdly bounteous cocktail spread of somewhat random foodstuffs arrayed neatly,
with great care but lacking in the finer accoutrement of a more civilized
affair: I mean, we got neither napkin nor utensil. (But we did get beer: my poison
was a Coors—<i>not</i> a CoorsLite, but the real deal, brewed with that
deliciously cold mountain-spring water from Colorado … or at least that was the
tantalizing admission on the pounder can I got for free with my single blue
ticket.) The reception was indeed rather odd. It opened approximately 12
minutes before the “Film Festival” where about 100 of us settled into an amphitheater
of sorts, nestled (as much as possible—for there’s little nestling in Utah
country) behind the main conference venue (Vernal City has a real conference
center!). Though poorly conceived as a whole (totalities aren’t the caterers’
thing, apparently), individually (and we’ve got lots of individualism on offer
in America, don’t we?) each selection was quite delectable. Cheeses, breads,
crackers, pickled things, hummuses, dips, salads, sliced meats (charcuterie
would be going <i>too</i> far, but sort of) … it was a Boschian delight. It was
abundant. Having neither napkin nor utensil lent a strange sense of the
pathetic to our foraging. Almost like we were left behind, and the real action
was elsewhere—in the banquet hall with the guests of honor (<i>none</i> of whom
stepped out of the palace to deign make their appearance at this our plebian
festival). While we foraged, the repast was held elsewhere, and it
conflicted—oddly, again lending an air of the pathetic to our little thing—with
the cinematic fest (so I suppose the elect <i>couldn’t</i> come: was this a design
flaw?). Well I wasn’t about to pay to play, so I stuck it out—until I could
tolerate it no more.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">As I dined, the smell of unseen chicken (or horse?) manure
and urine wafted my way, drawing across my effete plate of <i>hors d’oeuvrs</i>
(some loudly protested the idea of this French offense, accordingly refusing to
eat it). Clearly, our dining area (peppered with curvilinear benches enwrapping
circular concrete tables) was somewhat ill-placed. But I pressed on with not
one, or two—but with <i>three</i> overloaded dessert plates-full of goodies.
That was my (free) dinner. I was satisfied.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglJ_9hkVynSBMx-23IVd9ddre_SuhobRpdjPf6wxEzxWzaTkOBtfFJiEx3UcoK7ZL6gJk9aJ7K4Jz_0YqmTqUGrnN3kDeg96_g5ymf-IJ3-tEx2h5mw-5bIAwvjYfhW8Mq1J9T679DYsdyj2aniwGYZbwYyjHoaz8YnMiRTiHrlUGelyqn3g6Fu_mX/s479/Phenomecon%202022%20Film%20Fest.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="479" data-original-width="475" height="280" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglJ_9hkVynSBMx-23IVd9ddre_SuhobRpdjPf6wxEzxWzaTkOBtfFJiEx3UcoK7ZL6gJk9aJ7K4Jz_0YqmTqUGrnN3kDeg96_g5ymf-IJ3-tEx2h5mw-5bIAwvjYfhW8Mq1J9T679DYsdyj2aniwGYZbwYyjHoaz8YnMiRTiHrlUGelyqn3g6Fu_mX/w277-h280/Phenomecon%202022%20Film%20Fest.png" width="277" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">I</span></span><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"> can’t quite bring myself to do a review of the films shown;
I honestly tuned mostly out in honor of the incredible landscape and
sunset/moonrise on display like a forgotten treasure. I can provide the photo
of the adverts for each of them: <i>two</i> Bigfoot flicks, one “alien contact”
reel, and the customary ghost flick (a lá <i>BlairWitch</i>). They seemed to be
well-done, documentary-style—in HD and all that. Well … ok, maybe a bit of a
(mottled) review, just to say I was there…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">The first film, which I admittedly arrived late to (having
been absorbed in my finger food a bit too long—I did use a piece of bread and
one of my empty plates as a makeshift napkin, which confirmed to myself my
astute improvisatory abilities as a true homesteader) was the usual <i>BlairWitch</i>
mock-up, perhaps worse in this case for the realistic pretenses as a true ghost-hunting
saga. OK, <i>Witch</i> had those realistic pretenses too (but it wasn’t about
ghost hunting <i>per se</i>); nonetheless, every subsequent version of it could
no longer keep the question (is this “real”?!) suspended, and so suffer from
being the imitator—thus collapsing the pretense altogether. Accordingly, every
post-<i>Witch</i> flick could only be worse: they <i>want</i> me to believe
it’s “real”—yet <i>Witch</i> didn’t want anything from you but your engagement
with the <i>scare</i> of it all. Ghosts, spirits, demons, premonitions,
clairvoyance … it was all there (if only notionally), and therefore present in
the subsequent Q&A with the film crew. I continued to sip my authentic
Coors-non-lite.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Surely, all ironic chiding aside, there is <i>some</i>
phenomenon (or phenomena) here which is not entirely a notion, fabrication,
mistaken perception, fantasy or wishful thinking (driving constructed
perceptions—we <i>can</i>, let’s not forget, be fooled by our own designs in
the moment, of course). But what is the nature of the phenomena beyond the
stories, beyond the alleged experiences? It is elusive by its nature, dealing,
as it does, with that nether-region of mind/matter interactions. Science is
comfortable only with one-half of that divide (and this divide <i>does</i>
remain, as I have remarked elsewhere and as is well known in the serious
scholarly literature that cares to tackle the issue head-on), and so it looks
for only what it can see (that “matter” side). There is plenty of “matter”
going on, but it all just seems so absurd—necessarily so, since that other half
(the “mind” part of the phenomenon) goes absent or ignored or (more fairly
stated) unanalyzed in a coherent explanatory framework encompassing both matter
and mind. Nothing like the latter exists, because whenever an attempt is made,
either mind is reduced to matter, or matter to mind. (The more neutral position—the
“monism” about which we’ve written previously—is just not generally accepted
and, consequently, remains un- or underappreciated as a potential way of
resolving, or at least beginning to resolve, the puzzle.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">So there is a missing element here: the element that everyone
wants to discount because of its apparent conventionality: that these
paranormal occurrences (from apparitions, hauntings, and ghosts, to the
so-called “psychic phenomena” of PK and telepathy) <i>are indeed</i> a function
of someone’s (or of some) state of “mind”, and/or the emotional context within
which these phenomena are encountered. Stephen Braude tried valiantly to
expound on this possibility—it could be <i>you</i>, not “them”. Maybe it is a
(paranormal) projection from out of the misery or darkness of your own being
that is the “cause” of a whole range of paranormality. Maybe it’s <i>us</i>
after all. Without a more sophisticated—and accurate—theory of the mind/matter
relation, in which neither matter nor mind theories are taken as fundamental to
every empirically established fact of paranormal occurrence (if such there
be—an admittedly controversial and unavoidably tendentious claim), we will
never have a good grasp of the phenomena, and won’t really know what we’re
experiencing. Just <i>that</i> we’re experiencing it. And that’s not an
explanation so much as an assertion of what needs explaining. (And here the
chill of medievalism drifts towards us.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">The bright full moon now rises strikingly behind the self-illuminated
HD movie screen parked before us. It is an eerie benediction to the world we
ignore as we peer into the filmmakers’ worlds…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">In the ensuing discussion of the film, breathless, it’s all
about “energy”, “it” feeding on it, from it, out of it. What is ‘energy’,
though, but a mere <i>term</i> to cloak our ignorance of the nature of
phenomena we only encounter without being able to master? The trajectory of
knowledge moves along a decisive course, does it not? Encounter, engaged
interaction, control, then, finally, mastery: bringing it forth at will. Very
little of our world material can we do this for—but we <i>can</i> do it. True
knowledge, then, is had for little but it <i>is had</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">The moon, bright, is consumed by dark clouds—witches’ clouds.
The show, the real show, is elsewhere. In the now darkened outdoor amphitheater,
I look around me at the crowd, which has achieved its critical mass for the evening
(numbering maybe 75?). All seem sincere. Yet on the stage I wonder:
disingenuous? The crowd: hungry, even after their <i>hors d’oeuvre</i>, for
phenomena. The filmmakers: ready to supply the repast.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">The second film, served up shortly after the conclusion of
the first’s Q&A, was about—Bigfoot. The title is wonderful: <i>Flash of
Beauty: Bigfoot Revealed</i>. Now we’re talking art films…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">… And I had had enough, exiting, quietly, in a flash …<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSGViJTJH-G8ZKDER9u7pO1IIYBX7n70GVlrQ&usqp=CAU" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="168" data-original-width="300" height="168" src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSGViJTJH-G8ZKDER9u7pO1IIYBX7n70GVlrQ&usqp=CAU" width="300" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span><p></p>Mike Cifonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16910256379002179502noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7235611048140260044.post-12277652157946247832022-08-26T16:46:00.011-07:002022-09-05T09:23:01.308-07:00The Eye and the Sky: Machian Themes (Part Two)<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/91KlMGuXqmL._AC_SL1500_.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="576" height="331" src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/91KlMGuXqmL._AC_SL1500_.jpg" width="238" /></a></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: x-large;">S</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">till in the shadow of his teacher Plato, Aristotle defined “metaphysics,” famously, as the study of Being <i>qua</i> Being. Ever since, the meaning of this discipline has confused, and fascinated. If physics was the study of nature (<i>qua</i> nature, we might say—for Aristotle this boiled down to the study of movement or change), then what is meta-physika—the study after or about (or maybe above) <i>that</i>? Well if nature is all (Aristotle in a way brought everything back down to Earth after the transcendent orientation of Plato with his enigmatic ‘forms’ that were supposed to be the existential archetypes of anything, set somehow apart from the world with which we interact while living), then metaphysics is about that ‘all’ as an object of investigation. But how to study this ‘is’ we are part of, that ‘all’ we seek to know in total? One thing has to stand somewhat withdrawn from the totality to be able to encompass it, and the only thing that could accomplish that was thought itself. Thus we have the primitive dichotomy laid down in the very origins of Western philosophy: the divide between thought v. “Being”. For Aristotle this meant an investigation into how nature as a whole (everything or anything that could or will exist) was structured. Aristotle provides a series of “categories” that describe this primitive structure—those things we can predicate to anything that exists. Quality, quantity, substance, etc.: this is the manner in which things “are”. But can such really be disclosed purely by thought thinking Being as a whole? What couldn’t really be grasped it would seem was Being apart from the individual kinds of beings that actually manifest to us. Only those manifest entities disclose anything true about anything that might exist; thus the emphasis fell on the entities and predicating the categories of Being to them—as if it was a structure that was disclosed to us in time (the essential dimension that Aristotle reintroduced to Western thought in this regard). But again, was it possible to know “Being” truly in this manner of withdrawal to the safety, the standpoint of one who witnesses as if from a distance? “Theory” is born in this moment, which connotes this knowing distance. And this reflective procedure would become canonical in philosophy: deducing the truth about things and about nature itself by deducing the true structure of Being as such. What this ended up introducing into philosophy was a confident hypothetical procedure for finding the “first principles” that would dictate the structure of things, and this meant looking for the “essence” on which they depend, the deeper and hidden truth disclosed in time. But what would limit this hypothetical act? Since Aristotle’s system doesn’t allow you to change or alter or intervene in what nature is doing by itself (remember the concept of “theory” requires a kind of withdrawal from things!), thought alone reigns supreme. And so if you think it well enough, then, it has to be true.</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> Well, this didn’t exactly go as well as you might think (!) … enter the Aristotelian system of a science of nature that dominated Western/Middle Eastern thought for about a millennium and a half.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">The history of metaphysics is the history of an error—at
least that’s how Heidegger understood it. It is the history of the gradual
separation of what is at first a unity (the unity of experience, of </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">presence</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">)
into a metaphysics of substances in which distinct entities emerge against a
metaphysical substratum (a kind of backdrop that guarantees the </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">independence</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
of reality). If we sweep this away, we are left with no metaphysically grounded
differences (distinctions given to us as a function of metaphysical bearers of
substantial essences, like mind or matter), but rather the </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">surface</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> of differences given to us as irreducible relations between the phenomena that manifest to us in experience. We find ourselves confronted by a radically </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">plural</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> ontological field of “Being”—of what is. Such is the stance of a </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">radical</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
form of empiricism that makes it clear that presence of Being (what we can call a more primal metaphysic) is more fundamental than the metaphysics of substance. In this regard we may distinguish metaphysics (in the substances/entities sense) from ontology as such, which has us starting off in that field of what James would call pure presence, Mach the relations between the manifest phenomena of experience, or Heidegger the <i>lichtung</i> (clearing) against which phenomena are foregrounded.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="https://www.globalflagsunlimited.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2020/06/209788_1-3-600x289.png.webp" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="289" data-original-width="600" height="190" src="https://www.globalflagsunlimited.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2020/06/209788_1-3-600x289.png.webp" width="396" /></a></span></div><p><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">As I understand it, the crucial move that William James made,
after wrangling over his own demon of metaphysical dualism (he had not denied
the dualism of mind and matter, but hadn’t rejected it either by the time he
sat down to write his monumental </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">The Principles of Psychology</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> in the
1890s) was an entirely </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">epistemological</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> move that was at the same time
ontologically rather significant. And this brings us to our own claim at the
beginning of this (admittedly heady) post: that all knowledge is really </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">appropriation</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">.
But we cannot appropriate unless we, in some sense, come to interact with—or
better: participate—that which becomes the object of our knowledge. We cannot maintain the passive stance of withdrawal (of “theory” in the ancient sense). Nothing can
really be known except to the extent that it interacts or participates </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">with
us</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">. Generally, this occurs as a function of our perception. For James, perception
is “knowledge by acquaintance”. I believe this is profoundly significant for
our attempt to reconcile the physical and the psychical in ufology…</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">James’ theory is ultimately supported by his radical
empiricism, and only really comprehensible once we give up on the metaphysics
of substance in general, and the dualism of mind/matter in particular (or for
that matter, on materialism and its various alternatives: idealism,
spiritualism and so on). According to James, as John R. Shook in his edited
volume of the writings of James explains to us: “</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">when [an] object is perceived there
is no relation between two things, </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">because the knower and the known are the
same experience</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">. … this kind of knowledge [by acquaintance] does not happen
because something in consciousness has correctly represented something that is
not in consciousness. Knowledge by acquaintance happens because the thing
perceived </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">is a part of the stream of consciousness</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">” itself. (p. 20)</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">In
other words, the object being perceived and the subject perceiving it are not
external (and therefore transcendent) to each other, such that the one (the
subject) represents the other as something outside of and opposed to it. There
is no such opposition. Rather, <i>they are both internal to each other</i>. The
subject is already internal to the thing (as perceived object), and the thing
is already internal to the subject. In fact, it is slightly more integrated
than even this description would suggest, because the claim James advances is
that <i>both</i> object perceived, and subject perceiving <i>constitute one and
the same undivided phenomenon</i>. Perceiving, which James calls “knowledge by
acquaintance” is not the creation of a mental copy of a thing “outside” of the
“mind” (which defines the contours of the subject in opposition to perceived
objects external to it). Rather, what is being said is quite radical, but
almost common-sensical: the object perceived <i>is already a constitutive part
of the subject</i>, and vice versa: the “subject” is already a constitutive
part of the object known (Hegel would awkwardly try to explain it as that “substance is already subject”). They are, as it were “co-relational”. There is not
one thing distinct from another in this relation; rather, to repeat in other
words, the two form <i>a single undivided relation</i>. And this, for James is
“pure experience”. Knowledge is only possible because of this internal relation
of <i>immanence</i>: whatever I know, I know because I am already a
constitutive part of what it is that is known (and vice versa); my perception <i>of</i>
an object <i>is the object itself as far as I am acquainted with it in
experience</i>. Perception is the activity of the object internal to the
percipient. Perception is ontological: I am a constitutive part of the object,
and it is a constitutive part of me. Again, we have an undivided relation;
together we have a co-relation. Science breaks us out of the passivity of a merely theoretical relation (withdrawn to the safety of mere appearance) to establish for us a <i>functional</i> one: a logic of the <i>specific movement of the thing in relation to it concept(s)</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">James can argue that there is a “world” apart from “my
consciousness” (a sense of an “independent” and “objective” world not a function
of consciousness or perception itself) because, Shook continues, he holds that</span></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">it is possible for a perceived
object to join one or more streams of experience without becoming dependent on
any of those streams of experience for its existence. The relations between a
perceived object and the rest of a stream of experience are within the stream
of experience, so that the relationship itself is experienced. But the relation
between a perceived object and a stream of experience is not a necessary
relation but instead a contingent relation. The perceived object does not
always have to be a part of a stream of experience, but it is possible for it
to occasionally join a stream of experience. furthermore, we can only conceive
of the perceived object as experienceable, because we do not know how to
conceive of the object in any other way. If we remove from our conception of an
object all of its features that it has inexperienced, there would be nothing
left of the object to think about. Therefore, we must conceive the object as
continuing to be a set of related experiences even when it is not part of any
other stream of experience. (pp.19-20)</span></p></blockquote>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">This is not a form of “idealism” (that all that exists is
dependent on my mind or some grand universal Mind, or is constituted by ideas
alone, etc. etc.) because “experience” has <i>no such metaphysical status</i>—rather,
the question is a question of <i>what exists independently</i> … but
independently <i>of what</i>, exactly? If we say “independently of experience”,
well, the answer is simple: apart from the relation internal to experience,
there is nothing we can say about any<i>thing</i>—it is a meaningless question.
That there <i>must be</i> something independent of experience (that is not
itself experiential) is to ask for there to be something underlying or
underwriting or guaranteeing a “reality” apart from the experience. But there
is no such thing. “Reality” <i>does not exist</i>. And I </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_9K_fPacZ8"><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">really</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"> mean
that</span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">…
The question itself presupposes exactly the kind of “metaphysical” standpoint
we are rejecting, which James is rejecting with his radical empiricism.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">“To be radical,” James was to write in </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">“</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">A World of Pure Experience</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">”</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> (</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">1904),</span></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">an empiricism must neither admit
into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor
exclude from them any element that is directly experienced. For such a
philosophy, </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">the relations that connect experiences must themselves be
experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted
as ‘real’ as anything else in the system</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">. Elements may indeed be
redistributed, the original placing of things getting corrected, but a real
place must be found for every kind of thing experience, whether term or relation,
in the final philosophic arrangement. (</span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">ibid</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">., p. 124)</span></p></blockquote>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Because we are no longer constrained to introduce an
unjustifiable metaphysical distinction between “mind” and “matter”, and because
of the fundamental place accorded to experience, we are no longer vexed by either
the possibility (or actuality) of paranormality (on the one hand), or its
potential significance in the context of some UFO encounter (on the other).
Indeed, we are now able to take each case in which a UFO encounter comes along
with some instance of paranormality as simply a case in which subject (or
percipient) and ufological object (the UFO, which might itself contain yet
another percipient <i>from its own side</i>)—which are already internally
related to each other according to our radical empiricist positivism—bear some
closer relation that must be examined from the point of view of a potentially <i>new</i>
law relating “mind” and “matter” or “mind” and “mind”. But these terms take on quite
new significance, once we discharge the metaphysical nimbus that attends them…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">James was to go on to talk in terms of a “stuff of which
everything is composed”—“pure experience”—but this language of compositional
determination (the language of making and being produced) is itself misleading,
for it seems to require us to think in terms of things somehow being produced or brought into being <i>by the stuff of experience</i>,
when in fact all we begin with are the given relations <i>within</i> an
experience that is not then related to something else (a third underwriting something
outside of the mutual relations). James (understandably perhaps) still feels the force
of the <i>substantialist</i> metaphysics we are here abandoning, and which must be
abandoned if James’ own philosophy is to be properly appreciated for how
radical it was (and still is). If we abandon “mind” as substance, <i>then we
also abandon matter as substance as well</i>. That is, we abandon <i>substantialist
metaphysics as such</i>. With this goes the language of compositional determination. To repeat: what is left over after this abandonment is
nothing but a <i>surface</i> of infinite plurality, of relations given within
experience. Objectively described, this is a “world of pure experience” not, crucially, a world that emerges from, or is somehow composed of (or brought into existence by) the </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">“</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">stuff</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">”</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> of </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">“</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">experience</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">”</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">. James,
the psychologist, makes the case for ditching “consciousness” as a
metaphysically grounded entity or stuff, but seems not to go after matter, the third-person exclusionary ground of objective determination—the
equivalent metaphysical ghost haunting the sciences. Mach, the physicist, does.
Thus, to complete the radical empiricism of James we require the final gesture
accomplished by Mach’s empiricist “positivism”: the ditching and </span><span style="font-size: 18px;">delegitimizing</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> of matter itself. We have here neither a mind-dependent </span><span style="font-size: 18px;">perspective</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">, nor a mind-independent perspective. Rather, we have only the immanent relation between knower and known: neither first- nor second-person. This is something entirely new (and not something necessarily appreciated by James himself. (The result, I am arguing, can
best be understood as a form of Spinozism—but that is an issue we can’t
specifically elaborate upon here.)</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">“For twenty years past,” James writes,</span></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">I have mistrusted ‘consciousness’ as an entity; for seven or eight years past I have suggested its nonexistence
to my students, and tried to give them its pragmatic equivalent in realities
of experience. It seems to me that the HR is ripe for it to be openly and
universally discarded. … To deny plumply that ‘consciousness’ exists seems so
absurd on the face of it—for undeniably thoughts do exist—that I fear some
readers will follow me no further period let me then immediately explain that I
mean only to deny that the word stands for an entity, but to insist most
emphatically that it does stand for a function. There is, I mean, no aboriginal
stuff or quality of being, contrasted with that of which material objects are
made, out of which our thoughts of them are made; but there is a function an
experience, which thoughts perform, and for the performance of which this
quality of being is invoked. That function is <i>knowing</i>. ‘Consciousness’
is supposed necessary to explain the fact that things not only are, but get
reported, are known. Whoever blots out the notion of consciousness from his
list of first principles must still provide in some way for that function’s
being carried on. … My thesis is that if we start with the supposition that
there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which
everything is composed, and if we call that stuff pure experience, then knowing
can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another into
which portions of pure experience may enter. The relation itself is a part of
pure experience; one of its ‘terms’ becomes the subject or bearer of the
knowledge the knower, the other becomes the object known. (</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">“</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Does </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">‘</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Consciousness</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">’</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> Exist?</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">”</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> in </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">ibid</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">, p. 106)</span></p></blockquote>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Mach was to be equally critical of matter (and specifically
of the atomic theory under development during his time), ultimately dismissing
the concept, arguably, as a meaningless vestige of a bankrupt metaphysical obsession of
philosophic thought introduced by Plato (or, if Heidegger is correct, by a certain
persistent <i>misreading </i>of him). What has troubled so
many about Mach’s position (even <a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/05/27/1000444659/helgoland-offers-a-new-way-to-understand-the-world-and-our-place-in-it" target="_blank">for Rovelli</a>) is his insistence that we find the <i>root</i> of our <i>concepts</i>
of the “physical” world in experience—or, as Mach himself puts the point: in “sensations”. But having
already undertaken James’ withering critique of the matter/mind split (or, more
generally, the distorting dichotomy of subject/object that gets problematically correlated to the mind/matter duality), we can
better appreciate what Mach was trying to accomplish within the heart of
physics—right within physical science itself.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">In the next part of this series, we move on to that naivety that perhaps only a brilliant young Heisenberg could be free to explore for fundamental theory, once he had taken to heart the positivism of Mach. This move which Heisenberg makes is the crucial one, the one that indicates for us a potential research program—perhaps the “new paradigm” sought after by so many in ufology (and beyond)—or at least a first shot at a more robust theory that can handle the normal and the potential paranormal without breaking with </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">science as such. Without, that is, drifting too quickly into gnosticism, the “occult”, or the reactionary materialism meant, we can only assume, to restore and defend <i>rationalism</i> (whatever that’s supposed to be).</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/hei1-1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="548" data-original-width="800" height="330" src="https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/hei1-1.jpg" width="481" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span><p></p>Mike Cifonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16910256379002179502noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7235611048140260044.post-66289510863449296892022-08-19T08:40:00.015-07:002022-08-19T15:57:01.925-07:00Nope - Hypotheses Non Fingo<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 19.26px;">[Prefatory Remark: the following is not meant to be an exhaustive review. It constitutes my raw, initial reflections and impression of the film as I experienced it last week. I may compose a more detailed analytical review, but the film is, I believe, of such rare artistic quality that my intuitive reactions are as important to capture as it is important to produce a more considered and reflective second pass. For those readers who have not yet seen the film, I would recommend postponing your reading of this post until you see it, for I am bound to spoil some of the magic of the film itself. You are warned.]</span></i></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://miro.medium.com/max/1024/0*6ZXQP6BVVOeleG1-.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><br /><img border="0" data-original-height="589" data-original-width="800" height="269" src="https://miro.medium.com/max/1024/0*6ZXQP6BVVOeleG1-.png" width="366" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">F</span></span><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">amously, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotheses_non_fingo" target="_blank">Newton refused to offer an hypothesis</a> about what ‘gravity’—the
new theoretical entity introduced within his theory—really was. “I feign no hypothesis,”
he declared, claiming only to be proposing in his new theory the <i>mathematical
form</i> of the observed behavior of gravitating objects. Whatever else gravity
“is”, here is how things <i>act</i> gravitationally … here is the law of the (observed)
phenomena. It was almost naïve. It was brilliant.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">But do <i>we</i> feign hypotheses for UFOs—perhaps unconsciously?
This is the deeper question of <i>Nope</i>. And like Newton, it asks us not to …
to suspend our categories for a moment, and perhaps also to laugh at ourselves
in our obsessions with capturing “it” (whatever “it” is). Eluding the capture, <i>Nope</i>
asks us to consider maybe the evasion is part of what “it” is—but no less “real”
for that.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">In our drive to produce the evidence for the UFO, the puzzling
but elusive aerial phenomena that have recaptured the public imagination after
some decades of hiatus, and which is now square on the agenda of the government
and many newly formed research coalitions, have we forgotten that nature
herself is the very first enigma? Have we forgotten that nature will not be long
contained by our designs? That a chaos swirls in the heart of she who has for
long been our object of wonder, but also of exploitation? Have we exhausted
ourselves in our attempt to frame, to capture—the image, the “evidence”? Will
nature always remain a kind of excessive “other”, not quite fitting into the camera’s
lens—the </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">“</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">lens</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">”</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> of culture? What if the UAP is nature herself? Not an
interplanetary phenomenon representing the pinnacle of some distant
civilization’s long reach into the empty cosmos for the loving hand of wonder,
but the spectacle of nature so intimate with us that we miss it—melted into the
very clouds above our heads? Part of our environs, and so close as to be a
particle of our own world—as close as the self-same electrons dancing forth at the
reaches of the earliest universe, as dazzling images reflected to us recently by
Webb disclose?</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2022/07/12/southern-ring-nebula-2-_slide-a3a8e822e83865c920e973c41c579a054b7b77fc.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="533" data-original-width="800" height="266" src="https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2022/07/12/southern-ring-nebula-2-_slide-a3a8e822e83865c920e973c41c579a054b7b77fc.jpg" width="398" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">T</span></span><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">he point of <i>Nope </i>is not to demonstrate a definite thesis
and so collapse the divisions between the skeptic and the believer, but to raise
out of this mire a suspended third option—eliding the conventional thought-lines
drawn by the scientific materialists (or skeptical “rationalists”) and the enthusiastic
spiritualists who would design for us a newfangled religion out of an enigma
(and perhaps this <i>is</i> the wellspring of true religion: an attempt to
contain, to harbor, to exploit the architecture of an enigma which, in truth,
only calls for the spirit of <i>in</i>quiry: of going inside, to connect, to
know, and finally just to be with whatever is in the patient hope of one day <i>mastering</i>
that which presents to us as first enigmatic. We may say in this regard that science
is merely obverse to religion.). In other words: Nope. We’re not gonna do
that. We have to say outside looking in, but to what we do not know, even as we
are consumed by it—and as we attempt to consume it.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">The Object in <i>Nope </i>refuses to be contained or
reproduced as a purely technological object—a saucer. It is a very contemporary
“UFO” film, in that it reverses the persistent technofantasy which is perhaps
the foundational intellectual inhibition preventing true (scientific) progress
on the phenomenon. Indeed, the Object in the film is a reversal—a deconstruction
of the “object” in UFO: nope, it is a pure <i>phenomenon</i>, about which we
have no understanding. It’s camouflage. The Object itself hides itself in your
expectations, in <i>your</i> world, in <i>your</i> objects. In this way, <i>Nope</i>
attains to the level of a profound philosophical and deconstructive meditation
on the very concept of the UFO <i>qua</i> object—a supposed technology that we are
forced to concede is more an ambiguous phenomenon. Hence, “UFO” reverts to the
more primal “UAP”: unidentifiable aerial <i>phenomenon</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTGSIUu1xedyQ9BpY7Cql9Jedbfs8LEQaFZgQ&usqp=CAU" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="168" data-original-width="300" height="168" src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTGSIUu1xedyQ9BpY7Cql9Jedbfs8LEQaFZgQ&usqp=CAU" width="300" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Continuing in this direction of deconstructive reversion to
the primal level, the phenomenon presents us with a kind of animality. Indeed, <i>Nope
</i>begins with an act of pure animality, that chaos of nature herself we learn
to dialectically appropriate through the convenient fictions of culture.
Nature, instinct: we find the chimp on the Hollywood set as a pathetically, stupidly
(mercilessly?) entrapped wild animal used as a cheap prop, awkwardly and
ultimately futilely forced into the trappings (the gaudy 90s clothes) of human culture. The chimp is close enough to us, right? With the sudden and frightful bursting of (the hot air in) the balloons,
we soon find a chimp touched off in a wild, murderously violent tantrum of destruction.
The chimp tears up the set. Nature red in tooth and claw, as Darwin had
reminded his readers: nature will not be contained by your fantasies, or your
dreamworks.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQDshZVESW35ZH56st4nnNzGCRSBCZgacK9xA&usqp=CAU" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="174" data-original-width="290" height="174" src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQDshZVESW35ZH56st4nnNzGCRSBCZgacK9xA&usqp=CAU" width="290" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">But we find no better a circumstance down on the Ranch, where
horses (horsing around) are trained for spectacular Hollywood exploitation. It
is not cattle that this UAP is attracted by. It is horses. The events of the film
are touched off by a sudden UAP encounter: the loss of a horse, leading to an
earthly tremor and the raining down of all manner of metallic objects in a
deadly torrent—the excessive remainder to exploitative human culture. What kills
the ranch-owner by cutting into his skull but a simple, silvery disc, a coin—money,
the very thing, of course, the Ranch is after with its horse-training.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">It was last Sunday afternoon—another virtually cloudless,
hot, dry afternoon with that infinite Southern California sun overhead. I drove
out to downtown LA to see my great friend (a Greek who happens to also own an
apartment just near the Acropolis in Athens). We were headed to see <i>Nope</i>—he
for the second time, me for the first. On the drive out to see my friend for
our film engagement, I somehow noticed something as new which I should have
taken to be boringly familiar: a big sign atop a strangely institutional-looking
building between Hollywood where I live and downtown LA where lives my friend: “The Dream Factory”.
It’s a route I’ve driven many times on the frequently congested 101. I would realize later what a moment of strange synchronicity this would prove to be, as <i>Nope</i> turned </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">out to be a “UFO” film that somehow also was a powerful (comedic)
critique of Hollywood, the Dreamworks. The Dream Factory. The most obvious and
the most familiar of scenes on that marvelous far-away Ranch was missed as where the phenomenon would end up hiding in plain sight—the cloud. Looking
into the cloud (into one’s dreams), this one cloud was, </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">per impossible, </i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">immovable,
static. You’ve got your head-in-the-clouds but … that’s where your “saucer” lives. In plain sight.
A frozen, immovable dream.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTDXKR_cNXW17e8db_gta9Gw-9T7zObIL1Prg&usqp=CAU" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="259" data-original-width="194" height="259" src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTDXKR_cNXW17e8db_gta9Gw-9T7zObIL1Prg&usqp=CAU" width="194" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">The object-phenomenon in <i>Nope </i>presented itself as a silvery
disc. But was it such? Early in the film it was only glanced fleetingly,
slipping into and out of the clouds, and sometimes violently rushing forth from
them and down toward the ground. Frequently it is disturbingly silent. Shadow-like. At night, sometimes luminous. Plotinus—that
fascinating ancient mage of a thinker—writes that the essence of a
thing is disclosed in its movement, the <i>grace</i> of its characteristic motions.
“Observe </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">the meanderings of each thing</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">,” da Vinci writes centuries later, perhaps himself suffused with luxurious Plotinian
mysticism, now deftly converted by him to pragmatic Renaissance intellectual craftwork. “If, in other words, you want to know a thing well and depict it
well, observe the type of grace that is peculiar to it”.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">At one point, as the phenomenon-object
tilts and rotates, we see that it is as if it’s </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">covered by cloth,</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
billowing slightly in the windswept California mountain plains, suggesting
there’s something behind the curtain… It’s an organism (is it?), like living, cloaked origami, a hungry beast, searching. Consuming. It “processes” humanity as
nature does, but spits back out from its interiors an excessive remainder—humanity’s
extras, its manufactured products: jewelry, watches, coins. The origami phenomenon
is nature taking back into herself only what is part of herself, leaving the
rest as useless empty symbol of what amounts to a deadly evanescence (culture,
canceled by the sheer impenetrability of the phenomenon as enigma).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">The object-phenomenon is like an <i>anti</i>-organic other (almost
a direct opposite to the reactionary Romanticism of the <i><a href="https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/naturphilosophie/v-1/sections/major-doctrines-of-naturphilosophie">Naturphilosophie</a></i>),
uncategorizable. It is at the same time very anti-sexual: the aperture or
opening into which it brings humans and other animals of the earth is the
antipode of the sexual encounter which (biologically speaking) leads to the
production of human beings. Rather than being born out into the world (out onto
the Earth through the birthing canal of the mother), this object draws you inside and up through a passage in which you
are consumed and removed from the world—taken from the Earth while simultaneously becoming part of
the object itself, which then leaves all your belongings behind, spitting them
violently back to Earth, where they are capable now of fatally injuring the living. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRzUl0SPZBAlus7Ta8a2tsSqXsgnrKKwfvcDA&usqp=CAU" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="168" data-original-width="300" height="168" src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRzUl0SPZBAlus7Ta8a2tsSqXsgnrKKwfvcDA&usqp=CAU" width="300" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">This phenomenon will not be captured on camera. It’s not that
kind of thing. Stop trying to frame it, contain it, and exploit it, the film
seems to suggest. Whatever “it” is, it exceeds technological enframing, it exceeds the conveniences of culture, including language, and frustratingly evades therefore human appropriation. Nope:
can’t film it. Nope: no “evidence”. What </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">exactly</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> are we to see in the
wishing-well snapshot taken towards the very end of the film—but yet another ambiguous photo, </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">endlessly
debatable</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">. There is no “money shot” which is what the main characters are
all, in classic Hollywood fashion, after. And yet the film reverses the typical logic the skeptical seek to demonstrate: the characters are not out to make money </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">from a hoax. No(pe), they intend to make it </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">from the real McCoy</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">.
A persistent fallacy of the skeptic is that some UAP footage is fake because it
was a hoax </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">for fame or money</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">; but what if (in a playful Hegelian
inversion) it’s the very opposite? What if the real is the “hoax” itself—and
this be the true money shot? It is significant therefore that in order to truly
capture the “raw” of this real world—of nature as it is—the film forces Hollywood to revert
to its primitive technological origins (unpowered hand-cranked cameras) in an effort to try and capture the real
of what is always beyond the Hollywood fake: nature. Thus arrives onto the scene, after some coaxing,
the eccentric rogue Hollywood camera wonder-worker Antlers Holst with his
hand-cranked filming camera, ready to capture the raw of nature, enframing and
thus rendering exploitable the unidentifiable—the impossible which he is supposedly
known for being able to capture on film.</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Here we must shift registers, for <i>Nope </i>is not strictly
a UFO film. The UFO/UAP acts as a cypher, a dual commentary both on the
obsession with images, evidence and the technological enframing of what may
very well perpetually elude such easy and familiar conceptual schema, and a reflexive
commentary on Hollywood and the cinema itself in its obsession with the exploitable
spectacle. The object-phenomenon is another cinematic eye, an aperture (indeed,
its “mouth” is just that: a puzzling but mesmerizing aperture that from an ovular slit opens into a perfectly square exploding palm of an orifice—a graceful
paradox). But the eye is totally other. Something which cannot be captured,
which refuses capture. It doesn’t see you so much as it acts to <i>consume you</i>. That is, it does to you physically what Hollywood does to nature ideationally and imaginatively. The object-phenomenon is itself </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">like a Hollywood prop, concealing
itself, but in its concealment </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">discloses</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> what it really is: a </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">real</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
fake, as opposed to Hollywood’s (vulgar) faked real—which of course (from a psychoanalytical register) leads to Hollywood’s
obsessions with filming, framing, capturing, “documenting” nature or the Real
in reverse: reproducing and consuming the Real and spitting back out the
unreal. The object-phenomenon central to the film reverses this logic entirely: it takes
in the unreal and leaves behind the excessive remainder of real human life: the
“real” of human culture. A reverse birth: </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">consumed to death</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Of course, the film should not be read as a new explanation
for the UAP phenomenon but rather as a reminder that, as we don’t understand
“it”, we should be wary of easy categorization or unwittingly limiting the
phenomena by an uncritical technological enframing. But strictly speaking, from
what evidence there is, the manner in which UAP present themselves to us is
highly varied, showing great morphological variation between incidences. Thus,
we should never seek one grand explanation for all UAP. Hence the film’s critique (such
as it is) is adequate only as far as it goes. In some cases, a technological
presentation is apparent (but we should always wonder, as the film prompts us: <i>but
is it?</i>), and thus a reasonable first pass. But we should take the spirit if not the letter of
the critique presented by the film very seriously: we must ask what
‘technology’ is. What are we doing to the phenomena when we insist on using ‘technology’
as a framing concept? What might be lost of the phenomena when we do this? What will we fail to see? It is a hard question.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcS6LkT0MeC9eeOfYmljOLUSMkWuSHDHfK-UxQ&usqp=CAU" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="193" data-original-width="262" height="175" src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcS6LkT0MeC9eeOfYmljOLUSMkWuSHDHfK-UxQ&usqp=CAU" width="238" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game</i></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">The object disclosed within the cinematic bounds of the film
itself suggests a kind of inversion or hyper-realized (hyperbolic) version of </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Naturphilosophie</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">,
the “organicist” movement that flourished in German philosophy in the wake of
Kant’s brilliant critique of science and philosophy. Its main proponents were philosophers
like Hegel and Schelling. It was a product of the “Romantic” reaction to
Enlightenment “Rationalism” (although this characterization is doubtless
unsubtle to the scholar of philosophy). It really amounted to an attempted new philosophy of
matter, or rather, a critique of the debasement of matter by strict scientific
rationalism which seems to banish “spirit” or mind from nature, leaving only
“dead” matter-in-random-motion as the basic structural component of all things,
both living and non (suggesting of course that all things whether alive or not
reduce to the same things: what is essentially a dead thing, unintelligent,
nonliving matter itself). So, the object-phenomenon in the film is an opening
for a profound question: </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">what is matter?</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> And hence the object is
effectively a (meta) commentary on our own perhaps rather impoverished
conception of matter—something we too quickly make </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">conform to purely technological conceptions
(matter, that is, is rendered suitable to mechanism, leading to the view that mechanism is the required
philosophy for matter). Or it is a commentary on our unjustified implicit assumption
that technology is distinct or distanced from nature and the organic?
Perhaps the technological/natural divide is not so much an essential difference
as it is a superficial difference of </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">style</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">—not necessary but rather
quite contingent. We for peculiar reasons have (unconsciously?) constructed the technological to
be (seemingly, awkwardly, </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">destructively</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">) opposed to the natural, but it
needn’t be so (need it?). We might imagine here the science fictional worlds of </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octavia_E._Butler" style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Octavia Butler</a><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">, or perhaps even <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Tender_Carnivore_and_the_Sacred_Game.html?id=a3z5L8UMXJkC" target="_blank">Paul Shephard</a> with his </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">bio/organic technologies</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">. (The mostly unread cultural critic and
historian Morris Berman writes at length on the question of searching for this
contingent alternative in a </span><a href="https://medium.com/@matt.flownotes/morris-bermans-trilogy-of-consciousness-books-a-recap-c2964d8e464a" style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">series
of probing works</a><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">—products of their time, but still invaluable as exercises
in the mechanics of alternative thought-scapes.). But are</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> we not headed into this
direction already—albeit a nightmarish form of it? Is this biotechno merger not already our dream, but one twisted to suit our ‘machinist’ techno-fantasies? To suture the
machine to the man, as it were? The <i>cyborg</i>: biology becoming ‘machinic’,
machines becoming biological. Working the wire directly into the human, closing
the gap between technology and nature within human nature itself. Is this Musk’s
fantasy—which will undemocratically be enforced as the will-to-power of future
biotech firms pushing their wares on the unwary? (History, I must admit, is </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">anything</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
but democratic.) The evolution of the techno-natural divide can go in any
number of ways…</span><div><div><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSUjzuoakcFE_snTXP6uqirKKKkib8ZBhon7w&usqp=CAU" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="168" data-original-width="300" height="168" src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSUjzuoakcFE_snTXP6uqirKKKkib8ZBhon7w&usqp=CAU" width="300" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">What a beautifully anticlimactic ending does </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Nope </i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">present
us with: after the phenomenon consumes the bloated fake human, the silly cowboy float (filled with
nothing but gas), sent into the air in a desperate attempt to arrest the chaotic rampage of
this object-phenomenon, the object—by now all blowing sheets, like an elegant
wind sail (</span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">La</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Pinta</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> on the clouds)—explodes into … well, nothing
but torn curtains drifting back down to the Earth. There is nothing behind the
curtain: the curtain hiding something “real”, which we all want so badly to see
(to have “disclosed” to us) … the curtain-hiding-something </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">is</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> the real
itself. The UFO phenomenon is said to be an enigma wrapped inside a mystery… </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">swaddled by
a puzzle, packaged inside of a myth. But in the center, like with a Kinder
chocolate, what we desire is the </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">treasure</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">, the secret, the Socratic ‘</span><a href="https://nosubject.com/Agalma" style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">agalma</a><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">’ that seems to be waiting hidden inside. But what
if the hiding is all there is? Or is all that will be given to us? Or all that we
are able to experience? What if the hiding just reflects our peculiar obsession
with disclosures, revelations, dramatic truth-bombs that show all? Thus, beautiful
crass Emerald Haywood, sister to the somewhat hapless but sincere rancher, tempts the cinematographer Antlers Holst: this is real,
man, come and get it. If anyone can capture the impossible, </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">he</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> can, Emerald
hopes, confident. Yet when he finally arrives, what do we find? The
cinematographer with his hand-cranked machine is pulled up and into the object
of his filmic fascination, brought into the reverse birthing canal to himself
be consumed to death for the life of this object, his camera spit back
haplessly to the Earth, crushed, red (baptized) with his blood.</span></div><div><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p></div></div>Mike Cifonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16910256379002179502noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7235611048140260044.post-26126578666277430382022-08-10T14:18:00.018-07:002022-08-15T05:44:15.126-07:00a funny thing happened on the way to the library<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://classicalwisdom.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Screen-Shot-2021-05-19-at-20.54.51.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="800" height="299" src="https://classicalwisdom.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Screen-Shot-2021-05-19-at-20.54.51.png" width="443" /></a></div><p></p><p><span style="color: black; font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: x-large;">T</span><span style="color: black; font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">he
favorite theme of the skeptic is, unsurprisingly, “evidence”. Many who like to
consider themselves critical thinkers digging around the anomalous like to
sniff for “the evidence” for this or that ostensibly extraordinary claim—be it
a UFO sighting or your run-of-the-mill paranormality. When they think “the
evidence” doesn’t turn up, skepticism is confirmed in its convictions that it’s
all normal, Bob. Nothing to worry about. See? Now go back to bed and rest easy…</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Well,
it’s not so easy, and we have to rouse ourselves from our dogmatic slumber, as
Kant was by his reading of the empiricist David Hume, having unwittingly fallen
asleep to certain assumptions or requirements that keep the epistemological
game up and running—and keep it <i>real</i>. And what’s the real issue
here, with “evidence”? What evidence and for what do we need it?</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
Let’s get right down to the point. So I was on my way to the library one day,
to get some books on an assortment of topics that must occupy my mind as I work
carefully and philosophically on the issues one must face in the study of the
UFO phenomenon, when I was, to put it simply, harassed—threatened even. It was
a frightening encounter that reminded me of the sorry sociocultural and
economic state of affairs that has taken root in the US (the guy harassing and
threatening me was clearly deranged, possibly suffering any number of
mental-health crises, and most likely socioeconomically distressed—maybe even
homeless).</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
Curiously, I think you automatically believe me when I recount this story to
you; at least I hope you do. But could I supply you with “evidence” of or for
what occurred? Maybe. There might have been videos in the subway car; but as I
didn’t react at all to the guy (I ignored him using my earphones as convenient
alibi), what would they have shown but me standing there, ignoring someone who
might have been shouting and menacing in my general direction (a soundless
video is only suggestive). There may be some who were present in the car with
me who would be willing to corroborate my testimony (a mildly frightened woman
was clutching her belongings as she stared, bemused, at the seething contortion
of a man ostensibly aiming his anger my way). But by and large you simply have
to take my word for it that something rather (mildly) anomalous happened to me.
And since I was cut off from the world by my earphones (turned up to surround
me with the comforting sounds of obscure 18th-century composers’ music—a <a href="https://open.spotify.com/album/4bRsLA9UxbenmmtGM7H49v?si=4VPLXpaFRemYF3TJ6wxEJg" target="_blank">“bassoon” cantata</a> by Graupner, if you know him), for all I know my frightening
impressions could have been totally misguided: I may have been wrong about the
events I would subsequently go on to recount as my brush with the ugliness
which is the LA subway experience in a city—one among so many—dying under the
crushing weight of American sociopolitical collapse.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
In many cases of UFO encounters, all we have is (human) witness testimony. But
the fact is that <i>for the vast majority of all our experiences</i>, for
the vast majority of what we say we encounter in daily life—all we have is
our own personal witness testimony, possibly corroborated by someone else (or a
few others). So if asked to produce “evidence” that something or other actually
happened, we’d doubtless be hard-pressed to come up with it. What then
distinguishes my everyday reports of relatively (or putatively) mundane goings
on from those of a UFO encounter, or of the experience of paranormality (and
let’s throw that in while we’re having a general discussion of the epistemology
of evidence)? Let’s see.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
So I report that I was harassed and threatened. But what was the actual
experience that led me to report this? In other words we must take account of
the elementary fact—which is a subtle realization—that even a report that “X
happened” is already interpreted. It’s already <i>attributive</i>. It’s
already “theory-laden” as the philosopher of science might say (<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/7235611048140260044/3239796216675114776" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Russell Norwood Hanson</span></a> was
particularly bothered by this fact, long ignored in the epistemology of science
at the time he set his mind to thinking critically about the foundations of our
sciences in the 1950s and 60s). Right out of the gate I am already trying to
make sense of—to interpret—the experiences I have or am having. Indeed the
attributive dimension is <i>constitutive</i> of the experience—it
cannot be eliminated. What the experience itself is, is partly already
constituted by its interpretation. Attribution happens <i>along with</i> the
experiences to which we make attributions (we might go a step further into the
heady realms of philosophy and argue that there is a kind of <i>dialectic</i> at
work, but let us not get too involved too quickly). What “really happened” is
something of an evanescence, a kind of myth with which we operate, when in
truth the truth is a product of different attributive interpretations
negotiating the form of an event. It’s an agreement, almost democratic in
nature. It never ends.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
Surely though, <i>something</i> “objectively true” happened, you
might insist. At some point there is no negotiation—as in when someone is
injured or killed. Or when what we like to think of as physical forces and
effects are in play (<i>gravity</i> after all is not just attributive; it
is factual: you will without assistance fall from an elevated window out of
which you might step). That is surely true, but those events are poor
indicators of what we are truly <i>interested</i> in, the matter
subjectively considered: the attribution of moral or social or any other kind
of <i>responsibility</i>. The fact is that the world really has two
perspectives that don’t coincide in any unambiguous way: “what happened” may be
given in the seemingly neutral terms of events in coordinate space and
chronological time, or in biophysiological space (someone stopped living, was
injured, and so on), and these accounts might have the virtue of being accounts
of events for which general agreement might be possible, based on a certain
discernible structure of reality given by natural laws over which we would seem
to have no absolute control; but what happened has always happened <i>to</i> someone
for whom there is a particular perspective—and every such report of <i>anything
whatever</i> is always given from a certain point of view. Science
therefore is originally a human act, come whatever we may in the course of our
researches discover about nature or ourselves. In this way we must accept that all
testimony is equal in principle. Whether it is in point of fact <i>veridical</i>,
is something, then, that can only be established as a matter of degree—all
testimony is of the <i>same epistemic kind</i>. All testimony is created
equal (which doesn’t mean it is of equal veridical merit, of course).</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*Z5radYFsZTL1jgbMoCmkXw.jpeg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="349" src="https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*Z5radYFsZTL1jgbMoCmkXw.jpeg" width="465" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Not the actual UAP I saw...</i></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: x-large; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">S</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">o I saw a UAP last week. Or so I thought. In fact I thought I saw a
few. In one incident, I was enjoying a book on my balcony, when I looked
over to the distant hills and suddenly noticed a very bright light hovering over
the hill (I live just a half-mile in front of the beautiful Hollywood Hills,
not far from Griffith Observatory). Or at least I <i>thought</i> it
was hovering; in point of fact my visual acuity is rather poor (especially at
night), the conditions surrounding my observations were not exactly ideal, and,
to boot, I could not really make out the light very clearly. In any case, it
began to flash in an on-off kind of way. What was so striking to me was that
not only had I not observed this ever before (at least not in that particular
area), but the light was so intense, flashing slowly and at the very top of (or
just slightly above) the hill, away from the homes nestled lower on its slopes.
But I convinced myself it was just a bright flashlight; probably some kids at the
hill. It did feel to me, however, as though the light was flashing
intentionally to me; I felt in a way almost stunned. But this, too, I
attributed simply to the suddenness of the event, and to my own puzzlement. In
other words this is most likely one of the many thousands of “nocturnal lights”
sightings that can be attributed to mundane causes. But this is only at this
stage attributive, or hypothetical: I do not <i>actually</i> know
what it was, so I must go only on supposition, in lieu of more investigation
(which in any case would not be possible as the event is long over—unless,
intriguingly, it <i>recurs</i>). In another incident I was much more
startled, the sight much more arresting: a distinct but relatively small green
hovering light that moved up and down in a seemingly controlled fashion. In
fact I observed it while it made an initial and fairly rapid ascent
(presumably from the ground) to approximately the height of a tall palm tree
that seemed to be near this strange moving light (though it was hard to say
what was located at what, given the effects of spatial perspective: the light
could have been hundreds of feet distant from the palm; and as for the altitude
the light reached, it couldn’t have been much but I couldn’t exactly
say—although I might have bothered to try to do some elementary trigonometric
calculations to estimate it—maybe one or two hundred feet?). The light was
clearly under control, as its motions were seemingly deliberate. It hovered for
a moment, then, just as suddenly as it has ascended, it descended out of sight.
It might have made another appearance or two, with equally sudden (and
startling) vertical ascension, but eventually it descended and didn’t come back
to altitude. My supposition: probably someone’s toy drone. But again, I don’t
actually know.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
Let’s be clear: Do you believe me that I experienced these events? Do you
believe that these events <i>occurred</i>? Do you believe that they
occurred in the manner in which I reported them to have occurred? I cannot
supply any proof that they did occur; I can only <i>tell</i> you <i>that</i> they
occurred to me. I don’t know exactly what these nocturnal lights were, I can
only describe to you what I saw and how they behaved. From there, we go with
the most likely explanation in lieu of an actual investigation, and that set of
likely explanations is determined—how exactly? Using some prior assignment of
probabilities to what <i>we think it has to have been</i>, given quite
ordinary experience of ordinary things we have encountered in the past. That
is, we are making an inductive inference based on a certain presumed set of
prior experiences with a set of phenomena with which we are <i>already</i>,
again presumably, familiar. But this Bayesian assignment of priors is only as
secure as are the presumptive ordinary experiences upon which it is necessarily
based. And once we begin to exit the ordinary, we exit that particular
parameter space, and so it inevitably follows that our Bayesian priors are not
going to be of much use once we so exit that space. But the absolutely most
foundational question here, the one not really being asked by the so-called
skeptics or debunkers to the UFO phenomenon (or for that matter to the
paranormality that every skeptic or debunker loves to hate) is: how <i>exactly</i> do
we know we’ve begun that flight from the usual into the unusual, from the
ordinary to the extraordinary, if in interpreting the phenomena we are always
basing our Bayesian priors on a set of relatively mundane past experiences? I
suppose it depends on the character of the experience itself: of the phenomena
one encounters. Surely the exact character of the phenomena of one’s experience
matters for assessing the relevance of one’s Bayesian priors. But yet we are
teetering on the knife edge of a paradox: what must rule our judgment of the matter? What
comes first: the priors, or the phenomena themselves? And what do we say when
we factor into this discussion the always-already theory-ladenness of our
judgments of fact (which the principle of prior probabilities threatens to
secure for us as immovable dogma)? There comes a time, of course (as the sober statistician will no doubt inform us), when we must <i>update</i> those priors, based on new information. But the philosopher (who is hard to find in ufology) is quick to respond: easier said than done, my dear lover of probability theory…</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
Late one evening sometime in the 1970s, my father was heading to his
architecture classes over at Drexel University in Philadelphia when all of a
sudden, he says, this glowing object, football-shaped, caught his attention. As
it flew through the night sky, he was mesmerized, stunned. But he was late for
classes and the mundane soon broke him from his heavenly observations.
Regretfully he lost sight of the object, but managed to get to class. Later he
found out that, indeed, others had saw something that night: it was all over
the local news the next day. A meteor? Nothing definite was confirmed. Who
knows? Although we could try to find out more: whether anyone did a follow-up
investigation of the event, and so on (I have not myself yet checked into the
matter). My father cannot produce evidence that this event happened; but cannot
say that he knows what exactly it was that he saw, either. Although he can cite the fact that a new story broke, corroborating his account of something or other that appeared anomalous to some. But </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">it remains a
mystery. It remains, that is—at least for him—a UFO.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://ak3.picdn.net/shutterstock/videos/13850723/thumb/1.jpg?ip=x480" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="270" data-original-width="480" height="254" src="https://ak3.picdn.net/shutterstock/videos/13850723/thumb/1.jpg?ip=x480" width="452" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Sometime also in that marvelous decade, two of my father’s aunts were engaged
in their summer weekend ritual, taking a trip down to Atlantic City for a fun
getaway sixty or seventy miles southeast of Philadelphia. They liked to drive
very late at night to beat the traffic that would otherwise paralyze travel in
the mornings and afternoons. During the summers the Atlantic City expressway
can in daytime be a slowly moving parking lot for sixty odd miles of confined
road. As they pushed the metal on their 70s era car (a Pontiac or something),
breaking out of the pitch black of the night was this rapidly moving and
intensely glowing object—a light?—that seemed to be headed directly for them.
They were utterly terrified, screaming out for their lives. It flew right over
their car, silently but forcefully making its way elsewhere into the night. And
that was it. It didn’t hover and so they only got a fleeting view of it as
it dashed quickly away and out of sight. It’s unknown what “it” was. No
evidence could be produced for the incident as actually having occurred. It is
just the testimony of two people who say they saw something, and
something <i>very</i> strange, <i>very</i> frightening.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
In another incident, much later (in 2007 or so), my grandmother (whom I sadly
lost suddenly in 2017) was reading to my very young cousin in a small back room
on the second floor of the family house in Philadelphia (bought in 1921 for
about a thousand hard-earned dollars). On one subsequent evening in 2010, while
we were sitting out back in our postage stamp yard, enjoying wine and each
other’s company, my grandmother told me that as she read to my little cousin
(barely one or two years old at the time) she noticed through the window
something very strange out in the sky: she says she saw a <i>craft</i>,
hovering there, with a number of brilliant lights surrounding it. A classic UFO
form. I asked her to describe it more, and all that she could say was that it was
as clear as anything she had ever seen. It was just, of a sudden, <i>there</i>,
silently hovering, clearly visible to her and the bemused little child to whom
she was reading a bedtime story. I was dumbfounded by the account, especially
since my grandmother never talked of such things (being very religious her
thoughts were more theological than technological). I can still see her face,
her look of deep puzzlement as she told me this incredible tale. Is that what
she saw? Well, <i>what</i> did she see? Apparently she told almost no
one else (not even my aunt, the little boy’s mom, could recall this story). It
was a very curious event which I can no longer inquire about, since my grandma
is no longer with us and my cousin was too young to recall it now. It must
evaporate into the forever dark reaches of lost personal memory, but I am left
convinced she did see something, since she’d have no reason to fabricate or
prevaricate. Indeed she seemed to tell the story wholly unprovoked. I will
never forget it…</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
The stories I am recounting are as it were on a journey, ascending the ladder
of immediacy, of that kind of clarity and distinctness that renders the
experiences, as Descartes put it centuries ago, self-evidently true—true not,
of course, in attribution or interpretation (of what the objects or phenomena <i>were</i>)
but true in actual objective presentation. True as a phenomenon<i> per se</i>.
We may not be able to rule out entirely misperception, but for sightings that
witnesses (credible ones) say was (as they often will do) “clear as day” or was
“as apparent to me as you are sitting here before me—<i>that</i> clear”
they attain the very same evidentiary-epistemic status as the <i>rest</i> of
our relatively mundane goings on we report to each other on a daily basis with
little to no skeptical recoil. Indeed, by any general standard we cannot
categorically rule out misperception or misidentification <i>for more of
what we experience each and every moment of the day than we would like to think</i>. Thus with my first
tale, we must admit as real phenomena that there was at least a man, in a
subway car, contorted enough emotionally, psychologically, physically to be
angrily causing something of a commotion that afternoon as I tried to make my
way, very simply, over to the library to retrieve my research books. With the
many hundreds of credible witnesses describing over and over again in as much
detail as is possible for such seemingly incredible sightings and encounters as
they have experienced—not only does a clear pattern emerge phenomenologically
(a scientifically significant fact in itself), but we also have as little
skeptical recourse to fall back on as for anything else we experience (whether
supposedly anomalous or not), <i>except</i> those Bayesian priors
tutored under circumstances that would seem in these more anomalous instances
to challenge, if not wholly supersede those priors. That is, all we would have is hypothetical
as opposed to specific skepticism: a skepticism tutored by what we think, <i>a
priori</i>, the world must be like (something that is a function of prior
experiences and the most likely <i>uncritical and unanalyzed</i> interpretations
we have already adopted for them), rather than as the world is presenting
itself within one’s experience <i>presently</i>. I hope I have made the
epistemological paradox that rears its head (right at the heart of the
phenomenon of putative anomalous experience) very painfully clear. If we’re not
careful, vigilant and honest about the character of experience itself, we risk
getting trapped in the immobility of that wisdom proffered in the Book of
Wisdom itself...</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
The thought that there is “nothing new under the Sun” (it is from <a href="http://web.mit.edu/jywang/www/cef/Bible/NIV/NIV_Bible/ECC+1.html#:~:text=The%20eye%20never%20has%20enough,This%20is%20something%20new%22%3F" target="_blank">Ecclesiastes</a>) is a problem that is of
course not confined to Judeo-Christian thought. It is a problem of
thought <i>as such</i>: the problem of the recognition of actual
difference, of the truly new or different that comes crashing into the
supposedly ordinary course of our experience. This problem is always waiting in
the wings. And it has to do with assimilation. Thought tends to assimilate what
is encountered, it tends to join to what has <i>already</i> been
encountered to what is being encountered—thus making the new or different a
development or alteration of something <i>already internal to itself</i>.
Nothing new. This is the little lie of thinking: We think <i>as if</i> what
presents itself to us is only a development of something already given to us,
thus obscuring the fact of difference itself. Yet we must acknowledge that,
philosophically considered, we cannot take thought to be absolutely different
from (and remain so) what presents itself to us in experience which we then are
able to think. What is thought is already the operation of the things thought
internal to us the thinker, but it is not the essence of what is thought that
is presented to us, just its phenomenal manifestation as a something-present.
Essence is what is determined only after <i>appropriation</i>, not just
assimilation of the thing in thought. To appropriate is to make a thing <i>your
own</i>, to possess in terms of mastery. To master is to know how to control,
to intervene, and this is what we have come to mean by science: knowledge by
appropriation of the thing. True knowledge yields scientific knowledge of how
to determine, to govern, to control and create; it is as much craft as it is
conceptual.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">So let us be clear: a true skeptic is asking for knowledge by appropriation,
which is scientific knowledge of the thing, whereas we are left confounded by
our knowledge by assimilation which does not easily allow the anomalous </span><i style="color: black; font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">qua</i><span style="color: black; font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> anomalous
to appear to us. The skeptic then is mostly wrong in tripping over or getting
hung up on the fact of the </span><i style="color: black; font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">manifestation</i><span style="color: black; font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> of the phenomenon as
such (however supposedly anomalous it is)—which manifestation, in
those instances of credible witnesses reporting incredible things, is
coequal with every other experience in life: is true as the phenomenon one says
it is (an angry man in a subway, a structured craft flying or hovering in place
overhead). Rather the work of the true skeptic is the work every ufologist
should be engaged in, and which should not appreciably differ in its essential
aspects from the work of a true skeptic who wants to know the truth: the work
of moving beyond the stage of assimilation to the stage of appropriation, from
mere conceptualization to analytical understanding of the </span><i style="color: black; font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">nature</i><span style="color: black; font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> of
the phenomenon in detail. In other words both skeptic and ufologist should not
differ that there are the phenomena being credibly reported; and both should
agree we don’t know in detail what the phenomena are as we are able to
appropriate very little of it. The only difference between skeptic and
ufologist is a difference in epistemic range: the one (the ufologist) is
willing to grant that there are some phenomena that escape the grip of the
familiar (and hence must tutor new Bayesian priors, rather than being tutored
by them), that therefore </span><i style="color: black; font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">elude</i><span style="color: black; font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> the Bayesian priors, whereas
the skeptic as such cannot or simply will not make that </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">jump</i><span style="color: black; font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> out
of the familiar, to countenance a range of possible interpretations that put
the phenomenon potentially outside the horizon of purely human-centered or
humanly-appropriated (or appropriable) fact. For in truth what no “skeptic”
seems prepared to accept is the possibility of a real nonhuman subjectivity
gesturing towards their </span><i style="color: black; font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">own</i><span style="color: black; font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> forms of appropriation, of
scientific understanding. Such has already been decided upon: it is not
possible and so it cannot therefore exist.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
The skeptic, then, is bound by the paradox of the new I have here attempted to
foreground, and, if left unanalyzed, will only serve to continue the
intellectually debilitating <i>impasse</i> that inhibits the truth
growth of human knowledge. For true scientific creativity is a creative act of
the mind (as Einstein well knew), leaping to meet the phenomena of experience,
but subtle enough to work within the region of the liminal in which our
judgment of what there is is forced to act not in determining the phenomena to
be what we already have categories available on hand with which to assimilate
the unknown to the known (a procedure that we already know is <i>always</i> guaranteed
by the very uncritical habits of thought which philosophy seeks to perturb),
but is an act of what Kant called <i>reflective</i> judgment in which
we are forced to determine new categories not yet in use for what is not yet
known. Again, to paraphrase my friend Bryan Sentes’ (of <a href="https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/7235611048140260044/3239796216675114776" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Skunkworks</span></a>) brilliant
realization: we must consider that, in those small percentage of genuine UAP
incidents, what we are dealing with is a radically <i>aesthetic</i> object
in Kant’s sense, not a purely natural one (in which categories of understanding
are readily available to assimilate an object into the realm of the
known—indeed we may <i>define </i>the natural in this purely
epistemological way, foregrounding our humble position of original <i>ignorance</i> of
all things: the natural is what is assimilable by our existing categories of
understanding, rendering anything outside of their purview a mere temporary
epistemic embarrassment).</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I will have much more to say by about the epistemology of skepticism, and the associated but different phenomenon of debunkerism, but let these reflections constitute for now my initial foray into what should be a much more subtle accounting of the nature of evidence, and how it plays into the question of disclosing the <i>reality</i> of the phenomenon. I hope we have seen how we are, as a matter of fact, dealing with two evidentiary registers: the one concerned with the simple establishment <i>that</i> a certain phenomenon or other <i>actually occurred</i>, and the other concerned with an entirely different issue: how the evidence (the reports, testimony, and so on) of an anomaly <i>should actually get interpreted, </i>or how it should be explained and understood. Just even getting the skeptic to admit that there is an actually anomalous phenomenon is hard enough; but then arguing over the interpretation of that admittedly anomalous content (of experience, reports, and so on) is where things begin to quickly fall apart, for we discover that, in fact, for the <i>a priori </i>skeptic, the interpretation comes before the evidence, and in fact the act of looking at the evidence turns into an act to dissolve the anomaly into an ordinary phenomenon, which suggests that, for this skeptic, there really was no real anomaly to begin with.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: black; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Hopefully, we now can see that, embedded in this seeming act of due-diligence and critical thinking (another favorite trope of the skeptic and debunker), there is a more profound epistemological paradox that threatens to disable the future progress or growth of knowledge</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">—</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">a threat we have seen played out countless times in the history of science (with the phenomena of meteors striking the earth from outer space, or the theories of plate </span><span style="font-size: 18px;">tectonics</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> and evolutionary biology). I suppose the historical-critical argument that’s on the table now (and many of us are putting this argument flat out on the table) is that, with the UFO phenomenon, we are precisely in this very situation now. We are at the <i>limina</i>, so to speak, of scientific knowledge. If I am right, and there is this paradox lurking here, then there is no strictly rational procedure to get from one side of the liminal boundary to the other. There is just a leap. Not of faith, but of theory and (one ultimately hopes) experiment. But getting to the stage of the theory of the UFO phenomenon requires us to leave behind not only the insidious, uncritical habits of thought preventing our authentic encounter with the new, with difference (and I have argued that this is a perpetual defect of thought as such, and has nothing to do with UFOs or the paranormal <i>per se</i>), but also those accumulative metaphysical dogmas of materialism and spiritualism which keep thought neatly divided along unsustainable disciplinary-conceptual lines. We have, do we not, a great wealth of data and information already present and waiting for theory (and maybe for experiment) to examine; but we have no idea of how to proceed</span><span style="font-size: 18px;">—except perhaps in piecemeal fashion. But what if we return to the foundations of any science, to the simple relations between phenomena as they manifest to us in the experience of the UFO (or even of the so-called paranormal), confirmed in the main whenever they form a definite structure or pattern (and hence indicative of some kind of as-yet unknown </span></span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">laws</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18px;">)? I have proposed, at least as an initial functional-operating strategy, taking the standpoint of a certain positivism. Let us now return to that theme, and see if we can deepen our employment of this doctrine.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 18px;">What we look for, in the end, is a modicum of that brilliant naivety accomplished on Helgoland by Heisenberg, with his systematic tables displaying the crucial thing: the relations between </span><i style="color: black; font-size: 18px;">observables</i><span style="color: black; font-size: 18px;">. Let us proceed with a neutral, and a very naïve, frame of mind...</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://c8.alamy.com/comp/PNX5A8/the-ashburnham-pentateuch-or-tours-pentateuch-late-6th-or-early-7th-century-latin-illuminated-manuscript-of-the-pentateuch-the-first-five-book-of-the-old-testament-miniature-of-moses-national-library-of-france-paris-PNX5A8.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="584" height="626" src="https://c8.alamy.com/comp/PNX5A8/the-ashburnham-pentateuch-or-tours-pentateuch-late-6th-or-early-7th-century-latin-illuminated-manuscript-of-the-pentateuch-the-first-five-book-of-the-old-testament-miniature-of-moses-national-library-of-france-paris-PNX5A8.jpg" width="458" /></a></div><br /><span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span><p></p>Mike Cifonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16910256379002179502noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7235611048140260044.post-45860625661391663372022-08-01T21:56:00.006-07:002022-08-08T22:21:54.912-07:00The Eye and the Sky: Machian Themes (Part One)<p><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><a href="https://media.gettyimages.com/photos/engraving-of-british-philosopher-scientist-statesman-and-author-sir-picture-id149418159?k=20&m=149418159&s=612x612&w=0&h=bgjUq0RCS0cDPgsp6B4_WehcVSLqGHurrlnlRN3BNYg=" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="612" data-original-width="465" height="428" src="https://media.gettyimages.com/photos/engraving-of-british-philosopher-scientist-statesman-and-author-sir-picture-id149418159?k=20&m=149418159&s=612x612&w=0&h=bgjUq0RCS0cDPgsp6B4_WehcVSLqGHurrlnlRN3BNYg=" width="325" /></a></span></div></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">T</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">he series which we begin here has been rather difficult to write (just even to begin), following on from the last. The difficulty is as much conceptual as it is existential. I am proceeding slowly, painfully, and, I must frankly admit, uncertainly. I do not know exactly where I will end up. Perhaps having painted myself into a corner. But I suppose the very purpose (at least in my own mind) with this blog is to be a kind of journal of my own reflections on the very fraught subject of a future science of the UFO phenomenon, but, crucially, one that proceeds free of the dogmas of our age (</span><span style="font-size: 18px;">materialism</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> and spiritualism being the two poles of our peculiar and perhaps long-standing conceptual dogmatism). This science does not exist, and so as I understand my role here, I must be one who attempts to bring it into being. But I am not a scientist. I am, if anything at all, an essayist of a philosophical persuasion, perhaps in the spirit of <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/francis-bacon/" target="_blank">Sir Francis Bacon</a>. Or at least I may inspire a Bacon to emerge from the shadows, to essay us into the future of this young subject (even after seventy-odd years, we have only managed to compile a record of a phenomenon; only now are we trying to collect evidence of unassailable provenance with which we may, I hope, conduct the next and most important stage of our science: the stage of </span></span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">theory</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">, buttressed by experiment</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">). </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">My intention with this posting is not to write a definitive
statement concerning the problem of relating matter and mind in the context
of a scientific approach (attempted) to the UFO phenomenon. It is, rather, to
merely open up a line of inquiry that, perhaps, has remained obscured as the
phenomenon gets herded together with all manner of paranormality and “high
strangeness”. Reality—or whatever is, whatever it is—is a buzzing confusion of
phenomena, hidden or obscured, sometimes apparent. But knowledge (and this is
my dogma) is found </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">only </i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">in the movement </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">from</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> that region of undisclosed
non-knowing (where things are hidden or obscure, intuitive, at the edge of our
awareness, or occupying that </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">liminal </i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">zone of half known, half unknown) </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">to the domain of the unhidden</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">. Something
is not known simply by virtue of its being unhidden, or apparent, or observed.
To know is not </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">just</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> to see, or to experience—or even to conceptualize.
To know is the purview of a </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">science</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">—knowledge is its essence—but by
knowledge I mean</span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> appropriation</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">: the forging of a concrete (and
relatively stable) </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">relation</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> between two things: knower and known. This
dynamic conjunction </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">is</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> knowledge. Outside of this relation there is
nothing known at all—which doesn’t, of course, imply that there is nothing to </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">be</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
known, or that there is nothing </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">apart from</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> this relation. It most
certainly does </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">not</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> mean that. It is a dual statement: an assertion of
what constitutes knowledge as such, and where (and when) absolute agnosticism
begins (and where and when it is to end).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">In the course of this series of posts, I want to explore (and
finally to posit) a heretical doctrine, one which I hope will help clarify how
we must orient ourselves if ufology is to attain to the status of a science.
(It may of course in time <i>leave this doctrine behind</i>, as all early
sciences grow into their more mature forms and discharge their initial naïve
but necessary doctrines which aided their climb out of pure speculative fancy
to tested theory.) The doctrine is (or has been) even a heresy in theoretical reflection
on <i>conventional</i> science—a doctrine, the philosophers of science will
doubtless remind us, that has long been abandoned, and for good reason (or so
we might have been told). It is the doctrine of <i>positivism</i>. But as I am not fond of
the ‘ism’ per se, I will restrict it to perhaps the most profound (and largely
forgotten—or dismissed) form of it: the positivism of Ernst Mach. It is
remarkably subtle, flexible, adaptable, and—importantly—amenable to <i>whatever
may exist</i> (as far as observation and experience will allow). The latter
parenthetical remark is, of course, rather crucial as we make our way towards
what perhaps even Mach would have considered heretical, and that is the
paranormal—that dimension of the “psychical” in the UFO phenomenon that presents
to ufology its deepest <i>vexata quaestio</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Previously, we had undertaken a somewhat combative
deconstruction of the attempted overcoming of “materialism” breezily (but
frustratingly inadequately) addressed by a relatively new “neo-gnostic”
ufological writer, Joshua Cutchin. We did this by looking at the opposition between
matter and “consciousness” from a playful Hegelian point of view, seeing that the
opposition dissolves in favor of a deeper unity. But, crucially, we discovered
that this deeper unity is <i>not</i> a unity between mind and matter! Both
those categories are not so much overcome by synthesizing them into some kind
of a unity, so much as they are simultaneously <i>superseded </i>by returning
to the unity of a field of <i>experience</i> in which “mind” and “matter” are
simply aspects of something which is itself <i>neither</i> mental nor
physical—but infinitely plural, and hence admitting of any number of <i>empirical
relations</i> between those aspects of nature which we would, conventionally,
choose to distinguish (and we do so for various reasons <i>specific to the scientific
work we want to accomplish</i>).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">The critique I offered leads to a certain philosophy of
science that is, I must admit, underwritten by a rather idiosyncratic
philosophical foundation: an infinite <i>pluralism</i> that can be explained in
the terms of Spinoza’s philosophy, reinforced by William James’ “radical
empiricism”. Though I draw on Spinoza and James, I believe what I am saying is
not just a synthesis of these two thinkers, but a step away from both.
(But I have to leave that to others to judge. I cannot say so myself.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">This philosophy of science first begins with a deconstruction
that leads to an abandonment of the metaphysical nimbus surrounding our
concepts of matter and mind. These concepts are fundamental (even foundational)
to what we think our sciences are, or are not, about: science is about “matter”
and if it’s about “mind”, then whatever is conceptualized by this term is <i>also</i>
going to be about “matter”—thus setting up the most basic problem science faces
(a problem, of course, only if we hope to have something of a unified picture
of nature where mind is <i>ontologically no different from</i> the rest of the things
science investigates and tries to explain). If we abandon the metaphysics of matter that leads to the exclusion of mind, and, simultaneously, if we abandon the metaphysics of mind that leads to its being problematically related to the material, then we find ourselves in a sense where science<o:p></o:p></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">—or what we should more properly call, in this earliest of stages, a natural philosophy</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18px;">—beings: with a neutral stance towards </span></span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">everything</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18px;"> that presents to us as a phenomenon of nature. And our axiom shall be Spinoza</span></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">’</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18px;">s: </span></span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">everything that manifests to us as a phenomenon is a phenomenon of nature.</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18px;"> There is nothing beyond nature, nothing apart from nature. Our axiom, then, is that nature (or if you prefer to use spiritual terms: God) is absolutely infinite. (Spinoza called it <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spinoza/#GodNatu" target="_blank">infinite substance</a>, but one <i>not</i> to be confused with the oppositional and dichotomous <i>metaphysical</i> substances of matter and mind.) Nature is infinitely plural. It is also infinitely democratic: everything that manifests to us as a phenomenon, being of nature, is also of the same ontological kind as nature itself (for there is in truth only and exactly <i>one</i> ontological kind: nature itself). Everything, therefore, is natural. Every normal or ordinary phenomenon that science and common sense accept as a real phenomenon, is a phenomenon of nature. But every paranormality is </span></span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">also </i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18px;">a phenomenon of nature, albeit one we cannot yet appropriate within those paradigms of explanation accepted by our sciences. (For us this will mean that it is our sciences which must expand to accommodate a more expansive normality, not that we break with science and allow, for example, supernaturality</span></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">—whatever that would be.)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Let’s pause to reflect for a moment. I am
saying that our concepts “matter” and “mind” are suffused with illegitimate and
even untoward metaphysical connotations and that these, when allowed to operate
unchecked within science (or even in our general explanatory speculations,
however fanciful), invariably lead us into any number of contradictions and
paradoxes, leaving our sciences in a sorry epistemic state—of abject failure to
provide adequate explanation and understanding of ourselves, our world and the
relations therein. The metaphysics of “matter” leaves the physical sciences in
a conceptual shamble. And the metaphysics of “mind” (or, closely associated
with that, of “spirit”) leaves our religions and spiritualities in a hopeless
morass of notions that would seem to pit them against the sciences of nature.
This consequently leaves us with seemingly disconnected domains of inquiry, or
“nonoverlapping magisteria” to quote the late evolutionary biologist Stephen J.
Gould. It leads to the methodological, and therefore disciplinary, rift between
the so-called “humanities” and the various sciences (the “STEM” if you prefer).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">But the solution to the quagmires of materialism v. spiritualism
(or mentalism)—to “science” v. the “humanities”, and so on—is not synthetic
unity, and certainly not the doubling-down on materialism or a reactionary, nebulous
“consciousness-based” paradigm of some unknown sort or other (and most <i>certainly</i>
<i>not</i> the retreat into a “gnostic” worldview—whatever or however we may
define that). (A side note: of course I must explain in depth my negative reaction
here to the gnostic standpoint, and in fairness I have not yet done that in any
sort of rigorous way; I must hold off on that for later.) This sorry state of
radical disunity (where science operates blissfully unconcerned with the
“humanities” and the humanities, for their part, operate mostly in painful
ignorance of the sciences, unable to enter into an <i>internal</i> dialogue
with them) is addressed only by a <i>simultaneous deconstruction</i> of matter <i>and</i>
mind, (scientific) materialism <i>and</i> (religious) spiritualism, after which
we are returned to a simplified field of “pure experience”. Here, we are
afforded the chance to <i>begin science again</i>. A new science.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/Science_and_literature_in_the_Middle_Ages_and_the_Renaissance_(1878)_(14578138899).jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="550" data-original-width="800" height="268" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/Science_and_literature_in_the_Middle_Ages_and_the_Renaissance_(1878)_(14578138899).jpg" width="388" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">But let us not dwell too long in these somewhat polemical
reflections. We must quickly move on to the more practical point of finding
some way forward. I have (perhaps tendentiously) suggested, but
have not yet adequately expounded upon, a version of </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">positivism</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> in the hopes
of moving ufology along with confidence not only into the already difficult
terrain of trying to explain those physical anomalies the UFO phenomenon
presents, but also those more psychical enigmas that seem to arise in many
cases. Our objective here is to explore a way of </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">thinking through</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> the
issues that must be faced as we advance into this treacherous terrain. I am
only hoping, as I have said, to </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">suggest</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> a way of thinking, and to work the proposal out
in some small detail. It may ultimately have to be abandoned—but if we can say
why and how, we will perhaps have made some progress.</span><div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18px;"><br /></span></span><p></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">◊◊<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">P</span></span><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">ositivism in general takes a position against “metaphysics” in
science. As a more general philosophical doctrine, it attempts to discharge
metaphysics altogether, and so it has a narrower and a broader construal. But
let us be clear what its standpoint <i>against </i>metaphysics really is, since
the anti-metaphysical positivists (whoever they may be) are always in a sense
taking a “metaphysical” stance themselves! The confusion arises in the very
concept of “metaphysics” itself, and without proper clarification we will be
doomed to get into a tangle, a verbal tangle. To clear up any confusion we have
to take a certain position which, it must be admitted, is going to seem to be
(at least to some other professional philosophers) controversial—idiosyncratic
again. So be it.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">If we examine the history of science (at least the “physical”
sciences of astronomy, mechanics and so on), we see a curious series of moves
made by theoreticians. Confronted by a certain definite set of observations,
they are sometimes moved to <i>posit</i> an explanation and understanding of those
observations in terms of <i>stuff</i>: things that have certain inherent
properties that, in interaction with other, similar things, yield the
observations we are trying to explain and understand. This ability to reproduce
observations based on our theoretical representations, which themselves
introduce a number of potentially unobservable phenomena in order to explain
and understand the observable phenomena that present a mystery or curiosity to
us—this is the hallmark of a science. We see the movements of the planets and
other celestial bodies, we find that (as <a href="https://www.britannica.com/science/Keplers-laws-of-planetary-motion" target="_blank">Kepler eventually did</a>) the simplest
mathematical representation of their orbits is in terms of ellipsoids with the
sun as the primary fixed body around which everything else revolves, and we
then <i>posit</i> an unobservable force or substance (gravity) which explains how
it is that everything is kept in this orbital system. Based on the observations
we can deduce, as Newton did, what the mathematical form of this force or
substance of gravity must be: it must be given in the form of an inverse square
law, with the magnitude of the force dependent on the relevant properties of
the various objects involved in the relationship (in this case, the relevant
property would be the <i>masses</i> of the objects). But what is gravity? What
is mass? The positivist direction, which Mach was to take, eschewed any
implicit structures not themselves entering into a direct relationship with those
explicit structures manifesting to us as a phenomenon. But there is a choice,
and from a purely logical, formal standpoint, it does not matter which you
choose. Either gravity is a force <i>in addition</i> to the masses
gravitationally interacting, <i>or the interactions among (or more specifically:
the behavior of) the masses is the gravity</i>. One can view the positivist
move as the move towards simplicity: if given a choice between more entities
and structure, and less—where between the two there is no corresponding loss of
precision or exactitude—then the preference is for the simpler of the two. One
might also attempt to justify positivist simplification on empiricist grounds:
that, on balance, we ought to prefer any system of nature in which a minimum of
unobserved or implicit structures are introduced into our theories—the thought
being that we should progress in our science only on the basis of what can be
observed, interacted with or otherwise detected by we who are trying to know
something about our world.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">But it is important to see that what the
positivist-empiricist is concerned with is having our sciences articulate the
right (minimalized) </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">structure</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> of interactions or relations between the
phenomena that present themselves to us, come whatever other suppositions we
want to make about those phenomena. Beyond this structure is the extraneous,
the “metaphysical”—that is, that structure which goes beyond what is necessary
in order to adequately describe the phenomena we experience. Apart from the
structure of explicit interactions between the phenomena, there really can’t be
anything at all to worry about.</span></p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">“Metaphysics” in the sense that bothers the positivist-empiricist
is the product—or perhaps better: is the echo or image—of an age of passive, <i>a
priori</i> speculative reflection on the “nature” of “reality”. It is a vestige
of an illegitimate hypostatization, an essentialization of posited “substances”
ultimately brought into being by either a “first cause” or, in its
religious-theological incarnation, by a transcendent God. <i>Substance</i> is
what the positivist-empiricist is abandoning here: metaphysical substances and
the entities that are their supposed manifestations. Things like “matter” as a
metaphysically grounded substance that underwrites what is supposed to be
“real” (for the “materialist”). Things like “mind” which is also supposed to be
the underwriting substance of what makes human beings so unique: our capacity
for thought, for consciousness. Matter and Mind, therefore, are the
foundational categories for metaphysics as such: as the positing of mutually
opposed but independently existing realities that are supposed to underwrite
the existence of an objectively real cosmos of things. <i>This</i> quite
theologically exorbitant metaphysic is what the positivist-empiricist seeks to
avoid. I am arguing that the denial is best accomplished by a deconstruction.
But it doesn’t end there, of course. What is after substance? What is after
metaphysics?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">What is after those things is—what comes <i>before</i> them:
experience itself. The positivist-empiricist wants to return to experience, and
to the relations between phenomena that are given to us in experience. The
positivist-empiricist adopts the belief that all knowledge is knowledge of empirically
given relations. But abandoning metaphysics in favor of this
positivist-empiricist stance does not mean abandoning the more primitive
concern in philosophy with “Being” as such. The recourse to experience might
seem naïve, even reactionary, but we have learned that it is not. It is the
original gesture of philosophy—of a philosophy of nature. And it is at this
point that we must make available to ourselves the pragmatic empiricism of
<a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/james/" target="_blank">William James</a>, an empiricism he referred to as “radical”. This we will take up
in our next post, as we develop our concept of empiricist positivism further
towards the ultimate goal of building a framework for thinking about the physical,
the psychological and the psychical aspects of the UFO phenomenon in a way that
does not <i>a priori</i> embrace either materialism or spiritualism, but which
proceeds to study the phenomenon from an entirely <i>neutral perspective</i>
regarding those fraught categories of “mind” and “matter”.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.philosopher.eu/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/WilliamJames-booksml.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="595" height="464" src="http://www.philosopher.eu/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/WilliamJames-booksml.jpg" width="345" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span><p></p><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span><p></p></div>Mike Cifonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16910256379002179502noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7235611048140260044.post-46760252447989667662022-07-19T16:50:00.024-07:002022-07-20T14:01:10.809-07:00moving beyond the "moving beyond materialism" of Josh Cutchin<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a2679409262_10.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="800" height="396" src="https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a2679409262_10.jpg" width="396" /></a></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">E</span></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">very so often, I will throw a (precious) book across the
room in abject frustration. Late last night, as I was struggling to finally
throw off my procrastination (which I am told might not even exist, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/17/opinion/sunday/why-i-taught-myself-to-procrastinate.html" target="_blank">at least not in the way we think of it</a>), I read
an essay by a writer an email group I’m part of had started to sing the
praises of: Joshua Cutchin, a seeming <a href="https://www.joshuacutchin.com/about" target="_blank">American prodigy</a> who writes voluminously
on matters paranormal and uncanny. It was perhaps an uncanny email chain to have
received at the time I received it, since I was in the process of collecting my
thoughts for what I was going to dub a “heretical” ufological post—one that
will doubtless strike many as anathema, worthy of my disbarment. It was going
to suggest a line of thinking that is the very last thing on anyone’s mind, ufologically speaking: I was going to write a post on </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">positivism</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">.
More specifically, the curiously open-minded form of positivism espoused
(somewhat problematically—but positivism is almost always problematic) by <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ernst-mach/" target="_blank">Ernst Mach</a>, a philosopher-physicist who was an immediate inspiration for Einstein,
and many of the developments of modern theoretical physics that broke onto the
scene in </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">fin de siècle </i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Europe (that is, at the turn of the </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">last </i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">century).
I believe it to be a fruitful line of inquiry, the road not (yet) taken in
ufology, and something it ought to try given the tendency it sometimes has of
letting all the paranormality </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">go to its head</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">. And I was inspired to take this line by reading the brilliant and breezy (but substantial) book on quantum theory by Carlo Rovelli, called <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpWf2wyGQ0Q" target="_blank"><i>Helgoland</i> </a>(after the island to which Heisenberg escaped to work out his version of the quantum mechanics).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">I cannot and will not speak in general about the thinking of
Cutchin, but what I read in this <a href="https://www.amazon.com/UFOs-Reframing-Debate-Robbie-Graham/dp/1786770237">essay</a>—putatively about “moving beyond
materialism” (by now a rather worn and quite frankly to me, tiresome topic)—wasn’t
really <i>thinking</i>, so much as a kind of intuitive lurching about certain
concepts with no grasp of their (deeper) meaning beyond a lexicon’s. We might
call this “lexicographical” thought: a thinking that proceeds by surface definitions
(not to bemoan surfaces—that celebrated topic within the reaches of Nietzsche’s
philosophy, for example). I will try to get right to the point.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">After setting up his main problematic—that the “Nuts and
Bolts” ufologists, who are sanguine about the “extraterrestrial hypothesis” as
it accords with the implicit “materialism” of this standpoint, find themselves
in a bind when it comes to the “high strangeness” and paranormality a certain set
of UFO encounters manifest—Cutchin several pages in finally says <i>something</i>
(on the ninth page) about the thing he wants to reject or “move beyond”. “Materialism,”
he informs us “holds that only the tangible is real” (Cutchin 2017, 57). So,
materialism—a doctrine whose history is about twenty-five centuries in the West
(and even arguably older in ancient India)—is the position that whatever is “tangible”
is what is real. Right. And what is that troublesome bit of paranormality that
forces the “N&B” ufologists, with their predilection for the ETH, into a troublesome materialist bind? Telepathy, which is “a phenomenon whose existence is roundly
accepted by N&B/ETH advocates [which] accompanies,” he writes, “nearly all
such examples” of UFO encounters—presumably referring to a “UFO literature
[that] is rife with witnesses who experience such activity” like telepathy and
a host of other psychic/paranormal phenomena (<i>ibid</i>., 53). Earlier he had
primed us for this declaration, writing that<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">While plenty of cases
superficially support the N&B/ETH view, its materialist foundations are
shaken when confronted with the high strangeness characteristic of a majority
of UFO close encounters (<i>ibid</i>., 51).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">A “majority”? That’s quite a claim, especially since <i>no</i>
rigorous statistical study (which may well have to suffice with a <i>meta-study
</i>of all vetted close encounter reports) has yet been done to establish that
as a fact (although many, like Cutchin, suspect this to be the case). It
remains a hunch, supported, it is true, by <i>many</i> anecdotal reports. But more
importantly: when does the <i>feeling</i> of adventitious thoughts and images
(such as were reported by some of the children in the Ariel School case) during a UFO encounter rise
to the level of confirmed paranormality—telepathy, for example? It is a very
subtle and challenging problem, one that cuts to the core—not of “materialism”
(as I’ll explain in a moment)—but of the <i>methodology</i> (and epistemological
presuppositions) of our sciences. For very deep reasons is it so, having to do
with what is implied by the existence of the kind of matter-mind (or in this
case, mind-mind) relations that a world with various kinds of psychokinesis in
it would suggest. Cutchin has some awareness of this, as is hinted at by his
quotation from a (rather dated) text by “philosopher-physicist” Mario Bunge (Bunge points out
some epistemological incompatibilities between PK and key principles of conventional
scientific cognition); but we get <i>no</i> analysis, and <i>no</i> substantial
arguments as to why or how this might be the case—other than the mere assertion
<i>that</i> it is so. Which leaves one wondering, well: is it, or must it be
so? Why, and what are the arguments in support of the purported incompatibility?
Are there any <i>good</i> reasons for this incompatibility—or is it just unfounded
scientistic <i>dogma</i>? Indeed, we might at this point ask: just what the hell is materialism, anyway, and how defensible of a position is it? We don</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">’</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">t (and won</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">’</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">t) know, because there</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">’</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">s no analysis. (Here is where in a student’s paper I would become </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">very
</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">cranky.)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">In a paper whose express purpose is to “move beyond materialism” (and moreover to try and reframe the UFO debate), then that paper <i>must</i> engage in some more sophisticated analysis of the
deeper epistemological, methodological and ontological issues at the foundations
of a scientific mindset that would adhere to materialism in order to disclaim (and
discount) paranormality—precisely the issue Cutchin is, presumably, trying to
force the “N&B” crowd to face. Let’s circle back around to materialism, and
try to tease out some of the deeper issues Cutchin leaves dangling in a woo-woo soup of suggestions.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">To begin with, Cutchin perhaps unwittingly reproduces the
very thing he wishes to undermine, by opposing “consciousness”—or in his terms,
a “consciousness paradigm”—to materialism. For example, he writes how “extended
consciousness effects” (although we have no idea what that is, since he doesn’t
say anything about it, we have to assume it’s a stand-in for telepathy and
other mind-centered paranormality) “have no place in a materialist paradigm, period”.
Well, really? It surely depends on what you mean by “materialism”, or rather,
what it is opposed to. He seems to imply that consciousness is non-material
(since elsewhere he wants to make sure we don’t equate “nonmaterial” to “nonscientific”
when we’re going about discussing PK, etc.—which are surely <i>nonmaterial</i>
influences, right?), and so Cutchin is basically some form of a metaphysical dualist
(assuming he doesn’t also discount the reality of the “material”; consistent dualists have to grant <i>equal</i> ontological status to mind and matter). If that is
the case, then he faces immediately a classic problem Descartes (the classical European originator of substance dualism</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">—though this is somewhat in dispute</span><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">) had to face, while the materialist he opposes has to face the (perhaps more challenging) <a href="https://iep.utm.edu/hard-problem-of-conciousness/" target="_blank">“hard problem” of consciousness</a> well
known to philosophers of mind and cognition for many decades now. It is a problem that must be faced by materialists because they accept that, generally, only matter</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">—</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">in the sense of physics</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">—</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">is real. Dualists face an another problem, that of <i>interaction</i> between nonmaterial mind and matter. Curiously, we see no mention of the issues that arise here, issues which have to be kept distinct.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://64.media.tumblr.com/00748b7d02648c8623110fac5ba1d067/tumblr_mvasubvUUm1sksqofo1_1280.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="706" data-original-width="800" height="363" src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/00748b7d02648c8623110fac5ba1d067/tumblr_mvasubvUUm1sksqofo1_1280.jpg" width="412" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">How could nonmaterial things
(like minds) have </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">influence</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> upon or be the causes of/for material things? (The materialist does not have this problem, because there is nothing that is nonmaterial</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">—thus one early cause for going materialist.)</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> Let’s call this the “interaction” problem. The other issue, which is the “hard problem”
proper, is: how could there even </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">be</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> something called “consciousness” in
a world of only </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">matter in motion</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">, for surely whatever else consciousness
is, there’s “something it’s like to be” conscious in a way which isn’t true of
purely material things (rocks, chairs, planets). This is a problem that arises <i>especially</i> for a would-be materialist (and <i>most especially</i> for one who would try to take the more extreme materialist standpoint known as reductive materialism, where mind is simply reduced to</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">—identified with</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">—the matter known to physics</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">). The problem here seems to be
that my </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">experience</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> of color in itself has no objective color; the
experience of anything in itself would not seem to be a part of the “objective”
material world in any straightforward way. Certainly not in a way that is isomorphic
or identical to that experience: a musical tune I recall in my mind makes no
sound, like the chirping bird I am hearing right now does not chirp when it becomes my experience.</span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">The interaction and the “hard” problems are different but related problems. When I go to raise up my hand
to take the glass of (sugar-free!) soda that’s sitting by my computer monitor,
or when I plan to do something and then execute that plan, something curious
happens: I think something, and then I act on that. Consciousness is implicated
here in terms of my thoughts and feelings, and they seem to have some </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">influence</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
upon the actions that occur later on: the drinking of my soda, the getting up
out of my chair to refill my pipe to smoke it, and so on, happen as a </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">result</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
of my (conscious) intentions. Therefore consciousness in this sense may be said
to have a causal role in the world. In fact, it’s worse, since if we oppose my “mind”
to the matter that makes up my body and the rest of the world around me, then
my “mind” causes the stuff in my body to do its thing, which in turn brings
about certain results (certain definite actions) in the material world: mind
acts </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">on</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> matter. <i>Something</i> is wrong with this view</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">…</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRc8_9wnXoA4McLWWT5rH5Bf1THInb8FHNrjfSPEfGabX64j4qmkwoKdV8xjHju_L8aguQ&usqp=CAU" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="264" data-original-width="191" height="264" src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRc8_9wnXoA4McLWWT5rH5Bf1THInb8FHNrjfSPEfGabX64j4qmkwoKdV8xjHju_L8aguQ&usqp=CAU" width="191" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">If we spend a few moments thinking about this curious
situation, we can see a couple of important conceptual implications here. The
first is that if we radically segregate consciousness/mind and material/matter
along the metaphysical lines the dualist accepts, then it makes the causal
connections between the two utterly mysterious, since matter is understood to be acted upon only by some
kind of equally material <i>force</i>, and forces are created either by some kind of direct </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">contact</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
between two material things, or the </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">result</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> of some kind of material
interaction between things that come into some kind of contact (and yes,
quantum mechanics complicates this picture—but the interactions are still
plausibly </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">material</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> even though they don’t behave exactly according to what
physicists call “classical” intuitions about how the world works, mechanically).
How can something (consciousness, according to the dualist) that is nonmaterial
have an influence upon something that is? By what mechanism of action does this
influence happen? What mediates the interaction? It cannot, </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">ex hypothesi</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">,
be anything material; but if it’s not material, then how can there be a </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">nonmaterial</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
influence? But if we accept that the two can’t interact, then how can we
explain the strict correlation between my conscious intentions and the things I
am able to accomplish on their basis? (Although there are <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4747633/" target="_blank">curious results</a> that show something of a disconnect between intention and action.) Dualism seems to be something of a
philosophical mess, a quagmire even. Surely that’s not what Cutchin would go
for, so what, we ask, is a “consciousness-based paradigm”? It’s a “magical paradigm”!
This, finally, is to where we move on after materialism. It’s the post-materialist
paradigm that embraces all manner of paranormality in a way that conventional
materialist science (presumably) cannot. Unfortunately, we’re not quite done with “materialism”…</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">The problem with Cutchin’s whole approach (or non-approach, since
there’s not much substantial analytical <i>thought</i> going on here) is that it
is lopsided. Or rather, to slip into the jargon of the Hegelian-Marxist
tradition, it is <i>one-sided</i>. It is too much interested in toppling “materialism”
that it does not also see that the gesture of radicality (Cutchin’s somewhat
sublimated pretention) is completed when one <i>also</i> topples “spiritualism”,
or “mentalism” … the woo-woo <i>alternatives</i> to “materialism”. The final gesture
is the one arguing <i>neither </i>in favor of a materialism, <i>nor</i> in favor
of a non-materialist “magicalism” (whatever that is supposed to be; he quotes
the “chaos magician” Gordon White: “Magic is a culture-specific response to naturally
occurring consciousness effects”—Cutchin’s favored placeholder—“like telepathy,
and precognition, and all these normal things that as humans, with a normal-functioning
mind, we experience…”). Or should we say: “consciousness-ism” since that to
which the materialist paradigm he wishes to critique and overcome (by opposing it
to “consciousness”) is opposed <i>is never explicated</i>. In other words, Cutchin is
concerned to diss matter in favor of mind, leaving us with a half-ass dualism.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://thegreatthinkers.org/hegel/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2012/12/hegel.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="450" height="413" src="https://thegreatthinkers.org/hegel/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2012/12/hegel.jpg" width="310" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">L</span></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">et’s play a little game of Hegelian hopscotch for a moment.
One of Hegel’s enduring contributions to the history of thought (and the history
of philosophy) was the patient if tedious critique of </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">all</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> conceptual
oppositions, walking up a dizzying hierarchy from the more particular and
specific, to the more general and universal. It is a truly multidimensional,
fractal-like thought-system on which many a thinker has foundered (a word to
the wise). In any case, what Hegel really tries to show (and this actually
follows from his engagement with <a href="chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www3.nd.edu/~jspeaks/courses/2009-10/20229/LECTURES/5-antinomies.pdf" target="_blank">Kant</a> on this problem, but that’s a way longer
story) is that those distinctions we try to draw between things we encounter in
our experience—here we are talking about our own “mind” and the “matter” that
is all around us which appears to be somehow of a different sort of thing—are
really very poor (but in a certain sense </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">necessary</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">) approximations to reality
as such. (“Reality as such” is something that really troubled Hegel, and has
troubled many since: it was something we couldn’t really get a handle on completely
as human beings, except in the fullness of time as humanity underwent a series of historical-existential/ontological alterations, leading to our </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">becoming</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">, Hegel thought,</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> the very thing we sought to know (reality as such) in the first place—yes, a bit
“mystical”, and convoluted, but yet another long story we don’t have time to
really fully explain.) Hegel’s method of critique has been called the “<a href="https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/help/easy.htm" target="_blank">dialectic</a>”,
and a dialectical critique aims to show that between any two oppositions, the
one is already (secretly or tacitly) implied by the other, so that they are
actually intimately related—a relation that, when explicated, leads to a new
concept that moves beyond the previous two, and closer towards the more realistic unity of a reality we only see as if through a glass, darkly. The problem is that their deeper
relationship is obscured by ideologies or dogmas or conventional beliefs that
act to suppress or destroy the underlying unity, leaving us with a tedious
surface-level dispute between hardened believers clinging to one-sided notions.</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Precisely such occurs when it comes to the whole “consciousness”
quagmire into which Cutchin willingly (if unthinkingly) steps (and to be fair,
he’s by far not alone: there is so much woo-woo silliness around the UFO <i>and</i>
paranormal literature, that Cutchin is a rather conservative voice here—the oppositional
stance he takes to the “N&B” ufological crowd being yet another instance of
a tediously superficial opposition obscuring a deeper unity). With a bit of
playful Hegeliana, we might begin the dialectical critique by asking what is “consciousness”
if it is not something already physically (which is to say, <i>materially</i>) experienced?
And, at the point where the consciousness-ist wants to pound their anti-Cartesian
fist on the table and insist on the uniqueness and non-physicalist/non-materialist “nature” of consciousness—its
<i>opposition</i> to things material—is precisely the point at which we flip
our perspective, and ask: what is “matter” if not already <i>suffused with mind</i>?
How could a material world be experienced if that material world did not already
partake of mind itself (<a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/" target="_blank">panpsychists </a>of the world unite)? In other words, if matter
is not spiritual or mental (or “minded”), then <i>matter is not material either</i>.
If consciousness or “mind” is not material, then <i>mind is not mental or spiritual
either</i>. Which is to say that <i>both</i> “mind” and “matter” must exist on
the very same plane of reality—they are democratic ontological partners. They
are equal, not separate but <i>the same</i>. Which is to say that their opposition dissolves. We deconstruct “consciousness” or “mind” at the same time we deconstruct “matter” or the “material world”. We end up
with something as rich as all we have ever experienced (and much more), something that is <i>neither</i>
mental or spiritual, nor material or physical. In the language of the <a href="https://iep.utm.edu/madhyamaka-buddhist-philosophy/" target="_blank">Madhamaka Buddhists</a>: mind is empty; matter is empty; neither matter nor mind are existents, nowhere are they to be found (so that we arrive at mind and matter just as they are: conventionally real, but metaphysically empty of their own substantial existence, something over which we nonetheless endlessly wrangle in a fruitless metaphysical register).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">The problem is that “materialism” (just like its opponents) is
just a stupid doctrine that puts the criteria of differentiation in the wrong
place, or rather: saddles the epistemologically necessary act of conceptual differentiation
(between “mind” and “matter”) with <i>unjustifiably restrictive</i> a set of criteria,
such that so-called psychokinesis (and in general paranormal influence) is ruled
out <i>a priori</i> (and here Cutchin is quite right to complain, being right
for the wrong—or inadequately expressed—reasons). The mind-matter relation (and
now we can freely invoke these terms, since we have abandoned any stupid metaphysics, like dualism) indicates a perfectly general set of relations that describe perfectly
“natural” and perfectly “physical” or “material” (or whatever you want to call
it) relationships of law-like fact. Does it really matter (!) if we want to call it material or not?</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/07/22/science/22JOHN/22JOHN-superJumbo.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="617" height="380" src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/07/22/science/22JOHN/22JOHN-superJumbo.jpg" width="293" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">If you allow that the “mind” acts </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">on</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">
the “matter” of the body (without also stupidly metaphysically segregating
these two aspects of the world we encounter), as is happening right now as I
type these words, then you have </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">already </i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">admitted “psychokinesis”—albeit of
a very restrictive form. In other words, PK has a very specific form (local to
our own individual persons: my body and my mind), and a very general form (a “nonlocal”
one: a mind affecting another body or mind, or part of the physical world not strictly
associated with it in space and time). It’s that very general form that is so
troubling, of course, but which one must accept at least the existence of </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">in
principle</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> if one also accepts the restrictive PK that persists between one’s
own mind and body. If the general form of PK </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">is</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">, however, a law-like
fact of the universe at large, well, then, it’s not that materialism comes
crashing down (for that was never really the problem); it’s the scientific method
itself (irrespective of whether one wants to attend that with a materialism) that
is potentially quite out to sea: if PK influences are generally in operation,
then </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">no</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> experiment could be truly controlled in the way required to demonstrate
conclusively the existence or statistical significance of </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">anything </i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">(independently of mind)</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">—unless
such influences can be themselves controlled or shielded. (We cannot further explore
this very deeply troubling implication here, but it is something we all must
keep in the back of our mind as we wrestle with the phenomena of “high strangeness”
in the context of our major question in this blog: </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">is a science of UFOs possible</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">? What we are dealing with here would be a very pernicious and pervasive </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">nonlinearity</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> that has major epistemological implications, and which any future science which would hope to encompass the high strangeness of the UFO phenomenon, or paranormality more generally, must systematically address. It is something that Thomas Raberyon addressed in a </span><a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7530246/" style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;" target="_blank">recent fundamental paper</a><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> on psi phenomena: a must-read for the serious deep-diver.)</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">By casting off the one-sidedness of a materialist or a “consciousness-based”
(“magical”) paradigm, we end up simply with <i>relations</i> between phenomena in
a fundamentally <i>undivided</i> (but distinctive and differentiable) world as <i>the
starting point in any scientific study of that world</i>. This, in fact, is the
true starting point for Ernst Mach’s “positivism”. It is the starting point I
have determined by a bit of a passage through a playful Hegelian dialectic,
where we arrive at a philosophical outlook that, besides giving Mach’s positivism
a useful philosophical foundation, helps to disabuse us simultaneously of
materialism and magical spiritualism. If God is dead, then so is matter.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">In the next post I want to take up the post I had <i>intended</i> to
write, before getting (usefully I might add) sidetracked with the one-sided detractor
of “materialism” we find in the frustratingly stridently confident prose of
one neo-gnostic (yet another), Joshua Cutchin.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Next time, we go really rogue. We go <i>positivist</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/40/Mach%2C_Ernst_(1905).jpg/494px-Mach%2C_Ernst_(1905).jpg?20070609124925" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="599" data-original-width="494" height="522" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/40/Mach%2C_Ernst_(1905).jpg/494px-Mach%2C_Ernst_(1905).jpg?20070609124925" width="430" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>Mike Cifonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16910256379002179502noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7235611048140260044.post-47304677291988400422022-07-08T14:13:00.012-07:002022-07-12T20:32:02.516-07:00To Go Where No One Has Gone Before: the SCU “Anomalous Aerospace Phenomena” Conference (AAPC) 2022 - Day Three (Part Two of Two)<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRIs-J8CsZo9YKpwb6ectaC90m0k3qseyXbtg&usqp=CAU" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="183" data-original-width="275" height="182" src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRIs-J8CsZo9YKpwb6ectaC90m0k3qseyXbtg&usqp=CAU" width="273" /></a></div><br /> <span style="font-size: x-large;">W</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">ith Col. John Alexander’s talk “UFOs/UAPs: Enigmas and
Complexities” the SCU’s AAPC 2022 effectively concludes—except for a final
panel discussion (which will not be covered in my review). I will admit that I found it rather hard to make sense of
Alexander’s presentation as a whole, because, quite literally, there
were approximately half a dozen presentations somehow stuffed into one giant,
all-encompassing Magical Mystery Tour of a talk. If up to this point the SCU’s
conference had gingerly avoided the woo-woo and the “high strangeness” that frequently is attached to the UFO phenomenon, well,
here it was—and back with quite a vengeance. Was this a kind of Freudian return
of the repressed? It’s hard to resist such a theory (and I think a theory </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">of <i>some</i> kind is needed to help us bring the enormous complexity of the talk under
control)…</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Where to begin? Well, Alexander certainly did so with quite a
bang: a rather bombastic (and dated) video introduction to Col. John Alexander
The Man, The Mystery, The Psi Guy at the Pentagon. As many readers of this blog
doubtless already know, Alexander was many things during his tenure at the
Pentagon and in the military, but he is especially known for his participation
in that somewhat dubious flirtation the U.S. government had with research into so-called
“psi” phenomena back in the 1960s and 1970s (spilling into the Reagan Years),
when this sort of thing enjoyed widespread popularity. I say “dubious” not
because psi-phenomena (or what we might refer to as parapsychological and
paranormal phenomena: things like “psychokinesis” or PK, ESP, mental
mediumship, telepathy and so on) ought to be considered inherently dubious (although
we ought to be especially careful when considering such reports); rather, I say
“dubious” because of the motivations driving the USG’s involvement (though
Alexander in part pursued psi for ostensibly </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-lethal_weapon"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">noble purposes</span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">)—a
factor that, arguably at least, had a negative impact on the integrity of any
attempted “science” of the phenomena. (This is a whole other story worthy of a
future blog post unto itself.) Yes, it was Alexander and colleagues (Hal
Puthoff being one) who were the inspiration for that odd little flick that
appeared a number of years ago entitled <i>The Men Who Stare At Goats</i> (and
Alexander informs us that goats <i>did</i> die—but not apparently from psi),
and the journalistic book a few years before that of the same name (</span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Men_Who_Stare_at_Goats"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">penned
by Jon Ronson</span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">). It was also Alexander who founded the “Advanced Theoretical
Physics Project” or ATPP (though his PhD is in education), which in some sense
was the forerunner of the now-infamous AATIP, where all manner of fringe science (or should we say physics?) was pursued.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">In slide one of approximately six hundred and fifty,
Alexander gives us a sense—however futile—of “where” (if that’s the right
concept here) he’s going in his talk overall, a talk which covers <i>everything</i>
from remote viewing, entheogens/hallucinogens, animal consciousness,
alien/entity encounters, <i>consciousness</i> consciousness, to séances and …
oh, yes: UFOs as well. It’s truly the Magical Mystery Tour Summer 2022
Extravaganza—a kind of conference all unto itself. Bravely I have to say,
Alexander is the woo-woo guy. In a sense the <i>original</i> (or at least his
military/Pentagon brand of it).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">All joking and irony aside, at the core of Alexander’s
enigma-overload of a talk is a sincere question, and if we were to actually
boil this unruly presentation down to one thing, it’s just that: it constitutes
a very long but basically simple question. And the question is this: is it
possible that consciousness, in some <i>fundamental</i> way, is the unifying
principle of <i>every</i> paranormal, parapsychological and ufological
phenomenon human beings have ever experienced? He tells us that “all of these
phenomena go together—somehow”, which he calls his “bias”. That is, he is
biased towards the belief in what he goes on to call “integrated
presentations”: that all these phenomena are integrated with consciousness
being the “key component”. It is a very rough hypothesis, a suspicion really.
But it suffers from being <i>just</i> that—a suspicion, a suggestion. What
makes Alexander’s presentation so frustrating, therefore, is its lack of
theoretical cohesion. It is really a jumble and, because he insists on forcing <i>every
</i>possible kind of paranormality into his talk, he ends up having to ramble
through any number of topics that, had they been isolated and focused on, could
have made for a rather interesting talk. It is really a classic case of putting
the cart before the horse: he suspects a theoretical unity but, not having
actually worked out that unifying theory, he begins with only the desire for it
driving everything else he wants to unify. We are left simply baffled by the
jumbled complexity of it all. <i>Maybe</i> there’s something there, but if so,
Alexander certainly has not articulated it for us. This is the problem of the
woo-woo meisters in general, of course: too much speculation, too much
unconventionality, too little original theoretical incisiveness. This is indeed what makes it woo-woo in the first place…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">What remains of my review of Alexander’s talk must content
itself with a list-like rundown of the really disconnected series of points
Alexander proceeds to make throughout his talk (transitions from one slide to
the next appear almost like the quantum discontinuities of electron orbits in the
atomic nucleus, without the benefit of there being the same theoretical object</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">—the electron</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">—</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">in transition from orbit-to-orbit). It would seem that not even consciousness
can save us (maybe only a god</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 18px;">—</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">as the German philosopher Heidegger famously once quipped in a rare newspaper interview with </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Der Spiegel</i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">In the few slides (although “few” is highly relative: for
Alexander’s talk, “few” means about a dozen) devoted to the actual subject
matter of the conference—UAPs—we don’t really learn very much that already
isn’t fairly well known (and much more systematically presented elsewhere).
Although, to Alexander’s credit, he was one of the first to have either
received or reviewed many of the cases in UFO history that are now canonical
and well known in the ufological community (like the Iranian fighter jet
dogfight case of the late 1970s, in which the pilot’s launch control system
went dead precisely as he attempted to fire his missiles at a UAP). So
whatever one’s opinion, Alexander is indisputably an important figure in ufological
history. That’s not to say an <i>uncontroversial</i> figure. He surely is
controversial—and not just for the goat-staring stuff either.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.e-flux.com/legacy/2010/11/wpid-1117736760whitney.jpg?b8c429,750" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="249" data-original-width="342" height="253" src="https://www.e-flux.com/legacy/2010/11/wpid-1117736760whitney.jpg?b8c429,750" width="348" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">If one didn’t know some of the history surrounding
Alexander’s engagement (or disengagement) with the UFO community, one could
easily miss the controversy flowing like lava out of one or two of the hundreds
of Alexander’s slides. And it has to do with the very, very fraught question as
to whether or not the USG has in its possession any UFO crash materials—any
materials of that sort whatsoever. The assumption among many has been that
almost assuredly there is. I don’t have to mention Roswell—but there, we did.
This is taken to be in a sense the original sin of ufological-government cover-ups: with a newspaper article first announcing, then later denying, that crash
remains of a “saucer” were recovered. Tens of thousands of pages of ufological
study and journalism have been devoted to the matter. (Did I mention it’s a
fraught topic?) I won’t bother adding anything to that, except to note here that
Alexander is perhaps infamous not just for goat-staring, but for his denials
that the USG has <i>any</i> such UFO crash materials (for Roswellian
dogmatists, there’s a whole intact craft). Such was one theme of his 2011 book <i>UFOs:
Myths, Conspiracies and Realities</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">What is perhaps most curious of all is his denial (here at
the AAPC and in his 2011 book) of <i>any</i> conspiracy of coverup within the
government—something unlikely to be convincing precisely because, well, to us
civilians anyway, he <i>is</i> (or was) the government. The paradox is that he implicitly disavows <i>being</i> government, like many government officials do—the government is
always other (witness the absurd line Pres. Ronald Regan popularized: “government
is the problem”, uttered by the chief executive of the US government itself, and repeated by many a government official of a certain political leaning).
To our incredulity Alexander offers a platitudinous deflationary theory, one
that has become a kind of trope in ufology: that the right hand of the
government doesn’t really know what the left hand is doing—that all
conspiracist thinking, when applied to government machinations, rests on the
false assumption that “the government” is a coherent and internally consistent
organization (to which, Alexander further explains, we attribute near-omniscience).
Which it is most definitely <i>not</i>, of course. And so, we are supposed to
draw the comforting conclusion that conspiracies are just not possible in
government.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Well, as a matter of logic and critical thinking (a 101-level
college course), that’s just a bad argument—more of an affect than an argument,
really. It is perhaps no wonder that Alexander was </span><a href="chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https:/skepticalinquirer.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/2012/03/p58.pdf"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">jeered</span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"> by a
MUFON conference audience a decade or so ago (no doubt jeered because he was
throwing water on the fire of the MUFON crowd’s misplaced mystery, not because
of his fallacious logic. We should point out that Alexander’s denials <i>do</i>
tend to stretch the plausible: despite what he claims, the USG <i>is</i>
notorious for their dissimulation, disinformation, harassment and attempted silencing
of some UFO witnesses). In any case, I am not going to pursue this toxic, fraught issue
any further. It really amounts, in my opinion, to a cesspool of distraction and
poisonous thinking. As with a lot of what Alexander flew by in his sweeping
presentation, there is <i>some</i> real issue here (or issues: having to do with
accountability, transparency, over-classification, dark budgets disappearing tax-payer
dollars, and so on), but the retired Col. Alexander doesn’t seem to be too much
concerned to systematically <i>argue</i> for (or even <i>explicate</i>) anything. It seems that his presentation would
have been better presented as a media collage—more like an elaborate poster-presentation
than a talk per se.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://momblogsociety.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/1-10.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="534" data-original-width="800" height="281" src="https://momblogsociety.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/1-10.jpg" width="421" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Towards the end of the Magical Mystery Tour we’re treated to
a few (!) slides on the interesting case of one Chris Bledsoe. It was a winter’s
night, January 7<sup>th</sup> 2007 when, sat at Cape Fear River, Bledsoe (and his
son, along with a couple of chums) have a UFO encounter that also became an
episode of “missing time” and an entity encounter. (Oh and yes, there’s <a href="https://poddtoppen.se/podcast/419458838/the-higherside-chats/chris-bledsoe-entity-encounters-the-invisible-college-the-lady">plenty
of media</a> to digest on this case.) Alexander meets up with Bledsoe, who
reports having intermittent contact (telepathic, naturally) with whatever it
was he is supposed to have encountered. One evening during Alexander’s site-visit,
Bledsoe announces that he thinks “they’re here” and, low and behold, Alexander,
along with Bledsoe himself, sights a UFO flying high in the sky. Alexander at this
point repeats the appearance of shock he perhaps experienced that night; he certainly
came away from the whole thing convinced Bledsoe wasn’t fraudulent. After Bledsoe’s
initial encounter, where he and the group were allegedly harassed by some sort
of “creatures” (although from Alexander’s account it wasn’t quite clear whether
these were Bledsoe’s alleged abductors, or cryptids, or just plain ol’ earthly forest
creatures), we’re told that Bledsoe experienced a “healing” (he had suffered
from Crohn’s Disease for years) and that the telepathic connection he would go
on to speak about was established. By 2008, naturally, Bledsoe is featured in “<a href="https://thetvdb.com/series/ufos-over-earth/episodes/4119455">UFOs Over
Earth</a>”, a TV series which portrays MUFON investigators doing their
thing (not without a measure of incredulity regarding the Bledsoe case).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">“‘It’ is in control”—whatever “it” turns out to be, Alexander announces. Before
running through every (and I mean <i>every</i>) remaining sort of paranormality
out there (and the truth, presumably, <i>is</i> out there), we’re left with the
Vallée-style thesis, which Alexander asserted in a recent <a href="https://www.history.com/shows/the-secret-of-skinwalker-ranch" target="_blank">“Secrets of Skinwalker Ranch”</a> episode: human beings are not in control but are under control.
Joking and irony aside, there is, again, another serious point to consider here,
one made succinctly by the cultural anthropologist Ryan Cook in a brilliant essay (largely unknown to ufology) he delivered in conjunction with a media exhibit at the Arizona
Museum of Anthropology in 2007, called “<a href="https://www.academia.edu/81426208/Trust_No_One_UFOs_Anthropology_and_Problems_of_Knowledge">Trust
No One: UFOs, Anthropology and Problems of Knowledge</a>”. It is a deep
question, by turns ontological and methodological (and Cook’s essay is particularly
informative and brilliant here). “If we take seriously,” writes Cook,<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">the claims of our ufological
informants … it would seem that both ufology and anthropology have agentive,
interactive objects of study. This has a profound effect on how they can be approached
and what tools can be used to understand them. How do we study something that
we must assume is able to study us back? or is at the very least in some kind
of feedback relationship with us? (2007, unpublished, p. 18.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Anthropologists can be of immense value to ufology here,
Cook concludes. Over the decades they developed methodologies to deal with
precisely this problem (whether they have been successful is quite another matter;
but maybe ufology and anthropology together, as I think Cook is suggesting at
the end of his essay, can enter fruitful dialogue on exactly this
methodological point). Rather than stick with a strictly information-theory or “meta-logical”
point of view, which theorists like Vallée seem to prefer, we may well do
better by bringing to the table exactly those <i>humanistic</i> sciences which
are geared towards the “agentive”, the reflexive, the mutually interactive. Such meaning-systems are—and this is essential—nonlinear. The nonlinearity means that as we
interact with “them” (“it”?), we introduce a necessary disturbance into the
system such that we cannot factor out our engagement as subject (for we are as
much subject to their study as they are to ours) or isolate the object we wish
to study (for the object is responsive to our own attempts to render <i>it</i> an object of study, much like with any human culture an anthropologist would like to study). In this sense the object is also subject, but we are also object to
the other subjects we are attempting to study. This Möbius-like enfoldment of subject/object
is <i>the</i> fundamental problem inhibiting the confident development of any
future science of UFOs. And yet, we somehow have an anthropological science of
cultures housed within mainstream academia—something long denied to the study of
UAP. (Perhaps this returns us back to an important theme of one of the most
interesting talks of the AAPC: the assumption of anthropocentric sovereignty,
structuring even what kinds of academic disciplines are minimally acceptable. To admit a science of UFOs into the academy would be to admit a science that admits that human beings themselves might be the subject of a nonhuman “science”—that part of the structure of the objects studied includes a subjectivity that takes an interest in humanity itself.</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Alexander’s talk, however, did not attempt such a sincere and
sophisticated reflection on the deeper methodological, epistemological or
ontological questions that are foundational to any serious academic study of
the phenomenon (let alone a science of it). But I guess that’s not the guy Alexander is. His pioneering is
to be found elsewhere.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">With this, we will conclude our reflections on the SCU’s <i>Anomalous
Aerospace Phenomena Conference 2022</i>, an overall satisfying (if at times frustrating)
experience. We await SCU’s future work (hopefully to be presented at next
year’s conference). If what executive board member Peter Reali indicated were
the projects either in the works, or being planned, ufology is in for quite an important
infusion of hard, serious study in the coming years—likely to become yet another
standard-setting set of papers. Yet, we can expect the problems of paranormality and of high-strangeness to continue to haunt such study, and for the deeper, and more challenging methodological, epistemological and ontological complexities of subject/object enfoldment to persist. We can only hope SCU can bring to bear some more sophisticated response to such problems, if only to be able to justifiably segregate them.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;">I only hope, personally, that next year, at least <i>one</i> philosopher gets
a seat at the table.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://uploads2.wikiart.org/images/rembrandt/philosopher-in-meditation-1632.jpg!Large.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="750" height="427" src="https://uploads2.wikiart.org/images/rembrandt/philosopher-in-meditation-1632.jpg!Large.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span><p></p>Mike Cifonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16910256379002179502noreply@blogger.com4