The Paranormal Priority: UFOs?

For those bewildered by or obsessed with things at the fringe of reality, do such things as Sasquatch/Bigfoot/Yeti matter, or Nessie and Champ, or chupacabras, or ghosts?



Why do UFOs have more import, in our estimation, than those other “entities” listed above?

UFOs have a longevity that the listed items do not have.

What UFOs are or may be seem to have more importance in the great scheme of things.

UFOs have paranormal cachet that Bigfoot doesn’t, and certainly more than chupacabras have.



Even “ghosts” don’t impact observers in the same way that UFOs do.



And the Loch Ness monster or Lake Champlain’s Champ don’t provide any great ripples in the paranormal panoply.

UFOs have a cosmological underpinning or a metaphysical ambiance of some kind, deservedly or not.

If UFOs are extraterrestrial in origination, that is very important, for all the obvious reasons: what’s the ET culture? The intelligence? The theology? Et cetera.



If UFOs are an example of someone or something playing with the evolution or mind of mankind, that too is very important. (Need we tell you why?)



If UFOs are merely the fallout of secret military aircraft testings, that isn’t too important but it would quell the ongoing mystery assuredly.



UFOs may be observational trickery or real substantive craft, which is what we believe them to be.

Either way, they present a phenomenon that ranks up there with some of the best mysteries of history and time, like who really parted the Red Sea, or did Jesus really rise up after his crucifixion (and if so, why), or what caused Hitler’s megalomania, or does the Universe have a edge, or can we travel back or forward in time.



As a matter of fancy, UFOs may have something to do with time-travel, whereas Bigfoot doesn’t, nor Nessie, nor those other elements of the imagination.

UFOs get a priority because at the heart of the phenomenon lies a meaningful essence, it seems to us.

Time spent on the other paranormal or Fortean elements is just a waste of time, thought, and effort.

UFOs go to the top of our list of mysteries but do not replace more important issues, such as man’s inhumanity to man, or is God truly dead?



The pursuit of UFOs is, after all, only a hobby of sorts……

Who or What?

Underlying the whole discussion about UFOs lies the question of who or what promulgates the phenomenon.

A premise needs to be established, and a paper entitled Who or What Built the Universe? provides a premise that leads, or could, to a premise that should be created to address the UFO phenomenon.

Click here for a WORD document of the paper

Click here for a web-page version of the paper

UFO Abductions: The Explanations

Gerald Eberlein's paper on the UFO abduction phenomenon presents an academic take on alleged "kidnappings" by extraterrestrials.

Click here for the PDF

Life, death, life and UFOs: The witness failure(s)

The book, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience by Pim van Lommel, M.D. provides extensive data and information about the so-called near death phenomenon or the NDE (near-death experience).

The author covers virtually everything about NDEs, including an extensive account of Quantum Mechanics in relation to the experience.



Most of you have read or heard the accounts of persons who died and “came back.”

What I want to zero in on are a few of the descriptions that the dying or dead witnesses provide; namely, the beautiful music and beautiful flowers they experience, and how this relates to UFO reports, as they has been presented by persons who’ve experienced that phenomenon, also.

Every NDE account that Dr. Lommel provides from the literature and his own accumulated reports, from his practice or that of colleagues, tells of the dead/dying person’s hearing “beautiful music” [sic] and seeing “beautiful flowers” [sic] on their way to a blissful landscape after transitioning that tunnel with a light at the end of it.

But no one, and I mean no one, has reported exactly what kind of music or what kind of flowers they experienced.

Were the flowers gladiolas, petunias, roses, dandelions?



Was the music classical, operatic, chorale, jazz, rock, even hip-hop?



No one has ever provided a definitive account or identification of the music or flowers.

Did no musicologist, opera buff, composer, or musician have a NDE?

Did no horticulturist, avid gardener, or flower enthusiast ever have a NDE?

That is, why does no one provide an exact, precise descriptive of the music or flowers, if the experience is a real one and not a metaphor of the mind?

Now, this also applies to those who witness UFOs, in the sky or up close and personal.

Has ever an aeronautical engineer seen a UFO and can provide a description of the design that corresponds to his or her expertise as an engineer of aircraft?

Has ever a chemical engineer or metallurgist provided a description of the smell or patina of a UFO that has appeared near them?

Has a pilot ever – really – provided an actual account of what a UFO did in the context of its flight; that is, has anyone with flying acumen given an account that explains or shows the proclivities of flight by a UFO, in ways that indicate they actually took in the experience in a way that was or is real – Kenneth Arnold, Gorman, or Lt. Coyne, notwithstanding?



No UFO report by a witness of a UFO has ever provided a forensic description of what was seen or experienced; the details come after the fact by UFO investigators and/or “researchers.”

No UFO report has ever been definitive, in portraying what a UFO or flying saucer was constructed of in essence.

Yes, Scully gives details that resonate in his account of the Aztec crashed flying disks, but that’s second or third-hand information, and concocted as most UFO mavens think.

But no UFO witness, with credentials that count – engineering, chemical, aeronautical – has given a report that provides actuality – no one.

This means, on the face of it, that either NDE’s and UFOs are chimeras, or that witnesses to either are incompetent or without credentials that allow them to be professional in their reportage.

The Flying Saucer from Mars and CDA

Back in the day I thought that this book by “Cedric Allingham” corroborated the Adamski alien contacts and story:



Here are the Adamski-like photos that Allingham purportedly took of a flying saucer that allegedly came fro Mars:





But the story was a hoax, concocted, for some bizarre reason, by respected and credentialed British astronomer, Patrick Moore:



And who was the journalist who unmasked the hoaxer and the exposed the hoax? Our favorite skeptical thinker, Christopher Allen, known here and in the UFO community as CDA.

Click here for the story

CDA has cachet with us and with those who like clear thought, gentlemanly argumentation, and skepticism in its revered and best sense.

So when you read his comments here and elsewhere, take a moment to appreciate his bent of mind and research acumen.

The Robert Taylor 1979 UFO Encounter

On November 9th, 1979, Robert Taylor, a forester in Scotland, had a weird encounter with a strange “craft” in Dechmont Woods near Livingston, Scotland.

The incident is often referred to as the Livingston Incident or the Dechmont Woods Encounter and can be read about at UFO Casebook:

UFO Casebook

Or at Wikipedia:

Wikipedia

And here is a link to a YouTube video about the incident:

YouTube

What interests us, besides the nature of the alleged encounter, is that the described “craft” is highly reminiscent of a Hughes prototype for a lunar or Mars capsule to house astronauts:



And here is a graphic of another UFO sighting in Scotland:



And a representation of a Scotland event in 1964 (around the time of the Lonnie Zamora/Socorro sighting, which we think was a sighting of a Hughes lunar-landing prototype):



A CIA operative, Bosco Nedlelcovic, who communicated with us in the 1970s, told us that the CIA was engaged in staged flying saucer events – The Villas Boas case (as outlined in Nick Redfern’s book, Contactees, Chapter 20) and the infamous Scoriton incident in England (covered here in an earlier blog post).

We conjecture that the Robert Taylor episode was a CIA-staged event, using the Hughes prototypical craft, which was ensconced and tested in the British Isles in the 1960s/1970s time-frame.

Fate magazine’s account in 1980 outlines the event in a way that corroborates, we think, our Hughes/CIA view:

The Need for Metaphysics and Common Sense (in ufology)

In the preliminary stages of change in the study of UFOs, sparked by Paul Kimball, Nick Redfern, and us (among a few others: Moody, CDA, Gilles Fernandez, et al.) there has to be some quiding principles of and for thought.

Mr. Kimball, at his blog -- The Other Side of Truth -- is addressing some of the issues for the new ufology.

And, for our part, we keep the ball rolling with a paper by James Williams that provides an exegesis of Alfred North Whitehead's thoughts on common sense in Process and Realty.

The paper, for those with intellectual stamina, outlines how metaphysics and life can be enhanced by proper thinking and observation.

Click here for Willams' paper (a PDF)

Ufology, a term we hate and hope to see discarded in future, and the study of UFOs need a cataclysmic paradigm shift.

Kimball, Redfern, and the skeptics, Moody, Christopher Allen, Fernandez, along with our small part are at the forefront, we hope, of a major change in how UFOs are discussed, studied, commented on, and viewed by media, academe, science, and the public.

This posting is a small step in that direction.

The Socorro craft (and other UFOs) "explained"

Click here for a (technical) paper that references the Socorro craft and other UFOs, with an explanation of their propulsion et cetera.

This is a pro-UFO paper for those who desire something scientific and/or technical to bolster their views, about UFOs, including the "mysterious" Socorro craft reportedly seen by Officer Lonnie Zamora in 1964.

The Morpheus/Socorro Lander

This insignia is an evolved symbol, just as the Morpheus Lander is an evolved Lunar Lander, derived from the initial Hughes Aircraft designed lander that accounts for, in our estimation, the Zamora sighting in Socorro in 1964.

Morpehus is on Facebook -- click here


The "official web-site may be found by clicking here

We'll have much more about this upcoming....

The Socorro Lander/UFO?

Jeff Ritzmann of Paratopia found this image at boingboing.net.

It reminded him, and now me, of Zamora's UFO.

Note the insignia on the left, back side....

UFOs without culture? Why?

Anthony Lane‘s review of Werner Herzog’s “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” [New Yorker, May 2nd, 2011, Page 88 ff.] abutted, for this writer, a paper, discovered among others, entitled Speculations on the First Contact: Encyclopedia Galactica or the Music of the Spheres? by Guillermo A. Lemarchand of the Instituto Angentino de Radioastronomia [CONICET], Buenos Aires.



The movie review (by Lane) deals with how director Herzog presents his vision of the cave drawings on a wall in the Chauvet-Pont d’Arc, in the Ardèche reagion of France.







The Chauvet-Pont wall of drawings, from about thirty-five to thirty-eight thousand years ago, is more “cinematic” (says Herzog) than those at Lascaux, and should be compared with the shapes found at Swabia, four hundred miles away.









Lemarchand’s account of a Seminar on the Cultural Impact of Extraterrestrial Contact (sponsored by the Foundation for the Future) addressed the hypothesis that an extraterrestrial civilization worthy of contact would be much in advance of Earth, technologically, but that wouldn’t be the best premise for contact.

Lemarchand writes that mankind here has provided an advanced form of culture as represented by the art found in caves, such as Lascaux or Chauvet-Pont, and an alien civilization would have a similar esthetic culture, which any civilization of long-standing would have since they didn’t wipe themselves out with wars or cataclysmic accidents.

Lemarchand also thinks an alien culture/civilization would have a moral or ethical stance, not unlike that of the philosopher Immanuel Kant (but that’s not my point here).



Lemarchand’s paper dismisses the idea that the best way to contact alien civilizations is not by mathematics or technical formulae. Such abstract devices would not be as developed as would art (or music), which would, if the alien culture is extant, have evolved much in the way that Earth’s art (and music) has evolved, from the art of the cave(s) to what it is today. (Although I think that art has devolved from that of the caves, but that’s a matter for another time and discussion.)

Earthlings, writes Lemarchand (from ideas of Carl Sagan), are members of a Technologically Adolescent Society. Thus, communicating with a more advanced alien society would then be problematical, as we’d have a difficult time understanding advanced technological information, whereas understanding an artistic image of an alien culture would not be difficult.

Lemarchand points out that there are several patterns in art and nature that can be considered as universal as mathematics in interstellar communication attempts” (von Hoerner, 1974; Lemarchand and Lomberg, 1996).

And using artistic symbols would be a better mechanism for an interstellar communication than SETI’s mathematical approach, which is what Sagan was striving for with his golden disk attached to the Voyager spacecraft(s).



Lemarchand’s paper is rife with intellectual insights about alien communication, humanity, the arts, and science. (I can’t provide a link as the paper was found among others here, and has no provenance, although I imagine it was printed out from our Sage Publications account a few years ago. Interested parties might seek it out via Google.)

Now let me get to the point from which I have egregiously digressed….

And this point has been made before, earlier at this blog and elsewhere in our internet outings.

Nowhere has art or music been noted on (or from) UFOs.

Yes, there have been symbols or insigniae, as mentioned in the post preceding this one, but those have not been artistic or esthetic, as the drawings on the wall caves, or other human pictorials are.



No UFO or flying saucer reports have identified music as endemic to the sightings. And no art, aside from those militaristic or corporate-like insignia/symbols, has been registered – none like that which Lemarchand thinks would be intrinsic to an advanced extraterrestrial race.

What does this tell us about UFOs? That whatever they are, or whomever “mans” them, are either not advanced in a way that would include moral imperatives (as Lemarchand articulates) nor are they as advanced in even a small way as that of the Neanderthals or early man was, as indicated by the art in the caves of Lascaux and Chauvet-Pont d’Arc.

This means, for us, that UFOs are either created by Earthlings or are artifacts without a cultural or living species origination – a physical manifestation of some kind -- or UFOs belong to a race or races that are without moral imperatives (ethics) and refinements which would ameliorate contact between us and them as (we hate to note) some abduction accounts seem to warn.

I’ve gone far afield here, and have departed from any cogent hypothesis. But I’m hopeful that some readers might comprehend that UFOs present alternatives to thought besides the usual cavil that permeates discussions here and all over the UFO community.

And that a civilized discourse might take us into new directions, away from the classic, banal UFO cases that usurp innovative energies and keep us mired in obsequious back-and-forths which lead nowhere and have for a long time now.

We can hope….

A Socorro Confusion (that flummoxes researchers)

This symbol is ostensibly the “insignia” that Lonnie Zamora saw and drew (for the public) which was on the UFO craft he reportedly observed in Socorro, New Mexico in 1964:



This is the “actual” symbol seen by Zamora, according to Allen Hynek, Ray Sanford, and Air Force files – it has been duplicated by an observer of a later UFO sighting, as outlined below the image (here):



We’ve added the horizontal lines, to approximate what officer Zamora saw and drew, but which was kept secret, supposedly to prevent hoaxers from using it for mischief.

The symbol/insignia that Zamora provided, and seen in 1973 by Gary Chopic on a triangular UFO, was an insignia used to identify a U.S. military prototype we believe, and confirms, for us, that Zamora’s UFO was a test vehicle of Earth manufacture in 1964.

Keeping Zamora’s original, true drawing sub rosa has prevented UFO researchers from reaching the same conclusion, and has allowed the false assumption by UFO mavens (Jerry Clark, for example) that Socorro is one of the best UFO sightings on record.

This subterfuge is part and parcel of the UFO story: persons and agencies holding back information and details that could clarify and even explain, perhaps, what UFO are.

Why does the government becloud UFO sightings and information? One can guess.

Why do UFO researchers becloud UFO material? To adopt a façade of illuminated secrecy and alchemical-like mystery. But that practice has only made the study of UFOs more daunting and difficult for those who would like to use scientific-like methodology and/or forensics to get at the UFO enigma.

For us this means that older, classic UFO sightings have to be re-examined or scrapped, and new sightings pursued without all the convoluted clutter and devious detritus that has accreted to UFO sightings of the past (by flawed “ufologists”).

We hope you agree….

Not exactly rats, but...

UFO mavens are abandoning, in droves, UFO UpDates, that slovenly hovel where UFO geezers and close-minded. fascistic-like UFO aficionados have congregated for years, to hawk their mind-numbing hypotheses about flying saucers while stifling open discussion and intelligence.

A foul-stenching clique has arisen at UpDates, containing such one time UFO luminaries at Jerome Clark, Don Ledger, Bruce Maccabee, Kentaro Mori, among others.

But those luminary-lights have dimmed considerably in recent years, and what we’ve noted for some time now, about the UpDate list-master, Errol Bruce-Knapp and his minions, has finally come to awareness by slow-to-get-the-message UFO hobbyists.

Our friend Paul Kimball, at his blog – The Other Side of Truth – has relieved himself, once again, of UpDate visitations, because of how Bruce-Knapp closed the door on Carol Rainey, whose excoriation of Budd Hopkins’ abduction methodology brought opprobrium in spades, to Hopkins, Ms. Rainey herself, and advocates on both sides.

You can see Mr. Kimball’s rejoinder and reasons for abandoning UpDates about this matter by clicking here.

Brit UFO researcher and folklore expert David Clarke left UpDates several months ago, after suffering megalomaniacal attacks by Jerry Clark, who uses UpDates to showcase his past UFO acumen and lost-stature as a bona fide UFO writer/researcher.

Others have left because they were held at bay or bludgeoned by the likes of Bruce-Knapp’s lapdogs whom we know, first hand, to be a truth-bending, sociopathic personalities, jealous of thinkers who capture the UFO audience, while they lie fallow in the muck of their disgusting mind-sets and hatred of the truths that they pervert.

At any rate, UpDates is in its final decline, and will be out of business by the end of 2011.

We’ve told you so, and now persons with more street cred than us are doing so also.

Frankenstein's Monster and Roswell

Christopher Allen [CDA], a Roswell skeptic and the story’s most intellectual debunker, often points out that Roswell was dead almost immediately after it came to light in 1947.

And he’s right, of course.

The headline(s), touting a captured flying disk, moved from the front pages of newspapers to those newspapers’ morgues, within hours of the original outing.

Roswell’s flying saucer incident remained moribund for thirty years, until it was resurrected by a few opportunistic writers and UFO “researchers” – including Stanton Friedman, Charles Berlitz, William Moore, Kevin Randle, and a few others.

The story was dead until those mad men raised it from the grave in the late 1970s.

And ever since, the original story has been accreted or enhanced by a slew of UFO mavens, among them David Rudiak, a full-blown Roswell extraterrestrial supporter/believer.

Christopher Allen’s scenario of a dead story brought to life by men with an agenda to “prove” extraterrestrial visitors crashed near Roswell reminds this writer of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s gothic tale Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus.



In the Shelley story, as you know, a body is created by Dr. Frankenstein putting together a creature from dead body parts, some human, some not.

Frankenstein comes to loathe his creation, just as some UFO investigators [Kevin Randle?] have come to loathe their initial Roswell ET support.

But the creature – Roswell – lives on imbued with a life that isn’t easily snuffed out, no matter how hard intelligent people like CDA try to kill it.

The Roswell creature is composed of all kinds of mouldering additions, each with a history and one-time life, but none salient as a living, true experience, only alive now because of their creative addition to a form that was dead but is now alive by alchemical-like machinations.

Killing Roswell is as daunting as it is in the original story and every film or story that has followed Ms. Shelley’s 1818 tale.

Real Contactees?

A man, Wilbur J Wilkinson, provided this script, claiming it was from a race using the moon as a way-station for its people from the planet Maser.:



Here’s the almost unknown story as recounted by Jerome Clark in one of his books:

Hunrath and Wilkinson account

In the script above, nothing registers, except the word Enlil, which represents, in Sumerian “theology” the Lord of the Air and Lord of the Command (whose mother was Ki).

Yes, the story is goofy on the face of it, but the disappearance of the two men, like the mysterious disappearance of pilot Fredrick Valentich, is intriguing.

Valentich YouTube video

The contactee stories, while mostly fictional, should not be dismissed out of hand.

There may be a truth or a reality inside them, somewhere….

Crashed Roswell Flying Saucer(s)? Not so fast...

Paul Kimball has addressed the “crashed flying saucer” scenario of Roswell several times, most recently during a Kevin Smith radio show (Wednesday, 4/15/11) and at his blog, The Other Side of Truth.



Mr. Kimball’s thesis, if we understand him correctly, is that it seems unlikely that hypothetical extraterrestrial beings, able to traverse vast reaches of the Universe, time, or other dimensions would end up crashed on Earth (near Roswell) because of a mishap.

Kimball’s view makes sense, and counters the idea posed by Anthony Bragalia (here at this blog, just below) and ourselves (also here and elsewhere) that an unfortunate confluence of events brought down a flying disk that was recovered, perhaps, at or near Roswell.

Indeed, how could an interstellar ship escape all the dynamic vicissitudes of the Universe and then end up on the desert ground of New Mexico?



Mr. Bragalia presents a well-reasoned explanation in his blog posting (below), but his conjecture flies in the face of Mr. Kimball’s contrary assessment.

One can suggest that extraterrestrial beings may have come from a planet or world where such things as lightning, radar, or meteorological maelstroms do not exist and they encountered an environment that was totally foreign to them.

(This begs the question, of course, about their reconnoitering acumen or preliminary evaluation of Earth.)

Time travelers would know about Earth’s weather patterns or its radar facilities.



Inter-dimensional travelers, on the other hand, would not, and may come from a dimensional existence that has physics totally different from ours.



Visitors from galaxies far, far away would hardly make such frequent stops at Earth, letting all the other wonders of the Universe go unvisited, as we’ve argued elsewhere.

And if they should make Earth a continual stopping point, would they do so in craft so flimsy that crashes are an inevitability?



Mr. Kimball adopts the reasonable view, but does accept the possibility of a (Mac Tonnies) crypto-terrestrial crash.



We accept that something unusual happened near Roswell in 1947, something possibly extraterrestrial or, more reasonably (for us), something involving Earth’s military arm, such as a test flight gone wrong or a missile/balloon mishap that has become configured by a contrived extraterrestrial mythology, engineered by the likes of guys named Schmitt, Moore, Friedman, Randle, Berlitz, et al.



Either way, Paul Kimball’s assessment that a crash of an advanced extraterrestrial craft seems highly improbable, and unlikely goes to common sense which is in short supply amongst UFO aficionados