ENTAUS

T 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. 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 my interview on Coast-To-Coast AM 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. Even befo...

  Part Two of Anomaly: A Scientific Exploration of the UFO Phenomenon asks three “bigger picture” questions: Where Are All the UFOs ? When Are All the UFOs ? And finally: What Does It All Mean?  The main sections of Part II are concerned with ferreting out important correlations, or at least seeing if those that are frequently claimed or discussed in ufology actually pan out. Are UFOs significantly correlated with miliary bases, bodies of water, earthquakes, the time of the year, or the release of UFO- or alien-themed movies? This would give us a sense of the where and the when. What are they and what do they want? This would give us a sense of what it all means. But what’s most valuable in this section, besides the actual analysis itself, is the primer he gives to the reader who mightn’t be familiar with the basics of prob and stat (as we said above). Let us dive in a bit more. There’re all sorts of things we think are associated with one another, and in the UFO community ...

  H ere we review in two parts, in a style that is most certainly not palatable to the stressed-out readership of our day, Anomaly – A Scientific Exploration of the UFO Phenomenon by theoretical particle physicist Daniel Coumbe (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023). 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… 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 terse ) text, to h...