ENTAUS

I just wanted to post a note about—and I think this is more or less accurate—a UFO skeptic (at least of a sort) whom I think it worth going meta-skeptical on. Luis Cayetano has a rather  rich blog  that is certainly worth a dive into, and he has gone some way in exposing the unfortunate ugly underbelly of the U.S. UFO research community, showing that some of its more prominent members not only have questionable politics (but that’s a fraught topic, and something I will not dwell on in this blog  at all ), but also a dubious relationship to the truth. However, I question whether Prof. Cayetano (a biology Ph.D.) is not setting up, with the very form and content of the blog, a kind of grand  straw man  (or even  ad hominem  or  genetic fallacy )   tactic that only serves to reinforce what we already think we know about science, truth, reason, and the usual litany of abstractions used to draw the line in the sand between what is, and what is n...

  I n part one of this series on UAP theory (or lack thereof), I provided my “explanation” as to why there is absolutely no sound (which is to say uncontroversial ) theory of UAPs, which was, as I wrote, because “neither of its physical aspects, nor indeed of its other, more pronouncedly anomalous aspects, like the “psychical” effects and phenomena that are sometimes associated with a UAP encounter (more on this psychical stuff later), neither can unproblematically be accommodated into existing science. And certainly not both aspects, the physical and the psychical. ” However, the attentive reader will have noticed that I merely asserted this; I did not attempt to demonstrate it. By way of an introduction to our preliminary remarks on the UAP theory (or theories, depending) of famed ufologist Jacques Vallée, let’s do precisely that. In this way Vallée’s “theory” will be comprehensible as a kind of attempt to decisively overcome this lack of theory . The problem as we know i...

I n any science, the most fundamental place from which it begins, is the place of evidence: and this usually takes the form of some observation or experience for which we would like to account . Accounting for what we observe or experience—this does not just happen by itself. This wanting to account for things—this is something that springs from a more fundamental mood, from the interest we take in things. And from our wonder . Why is something the way that it is, and not some other way? How has something come about, as opposed to not having come about at all, or from out of a number of ways that it could have come about—why this particular way it of appearing to us? Wondering about UAP, we are forced to ponder a number of questions, which we should seek to clearly distinguish from one another. First, the objects in UAP encounters are odd, frequently bizarre: what is it we’re seeing?—this is often the very first question. One of the most elementary, albeit rather unfortunate, asp...