February 7, 2016 — Eric Ouelett

[SheaOlmsford]

If consciousness is a series of culturally socialized memories of our experiences + what we expect to experience through our senses (a predictory mechanism based on past experuence with faulty mechanics) then that person who thinks about seeing the UFO and then sees one is fulfilling both Kirby's & Ouelett's theories.

One person sees exactly what they expect to see and they feel they have called it. And sometimes there may be that echo wave of settings based upon collective expectations as a consequence of media publications. That seems much more likely than the Algerian conflict as a subconscious social source of some mass sightings and sighting waves.

The believer-investigator may also easily confirm paranormal events in support of anomalous perceptions and individual expectations. Look at just how much of paranormal history is in fact based upon both exaggeration from many, many internet retellings, as well as the continued retellings of previously debunked and known hoaxed material. That story has repeated on the Paracast how many times now?

Actual paranormal events are interacting with our consciousness in what may be profound, though is most often mundane, in origin. It's the telling of the tale, however, that keeps getting everyone's attention.

The confusion I experience is with the notion that the experiencer sees what he expects to see. If that was true, why aren't the many fanatically faith based Christians in the USA seeing angel hosts in the sky, rather than UFOS? Why not Jesus instead of Greys? While the UFO genre is implanted in the collective pop culture, the USA is much more emotionally connected at deep levels with religious dogma. In fact, many Christians tell me that all aliens and UFOs are demons. My confusion again is that people see strange orbs, lights, triangles and disks in the sky even though they consciously have no expectation of ever seeing such things. Yet they appear to people. Why aren't much deeper ingrained motiffs being manifested in the sky?

 

[mike]

The confusion I experience is with the notion that the experiencer sees what he expects to see. If that was true, why aren't the many fanatically faith based Christians in the USA seeing angel hosts in the sky, rather than UFOS? Why not Jesus instead of Greys? While the UFO genre is implanted in the collective pop culture, the USA is much more emotionally connected at deep levels with religious dogma. In fact, many Christians tell me that all aliens and UFOs are demons. My confusion again is that people see strange orbs, lights, triangles and disks in the sky even though they consciously have no expectation of ever seeing such things. Yet they appear to people. Why aren't much deeper ingrained motiffs being manifested in the sky?

 

[Burnt State]

The confusion I experience is with the notion that the experiencer sees what he expects to see. If that was true, why aren't the many fanatically faith based Christians in the USA seeing angel hosts in the sky, rather than UFOS? Why not Jesus instead of Greys? While the UFO genre is implanted in the collective pop culture, the USA is much more emotionally connected at deep levels with religious dogma. In fact, many Christians tell me that all aliens and UFOs are demons. My confusion again is that people see strange orbs, lights, triangles and disks in the sky even though they consciously have no expectation of ever seeing such things. Yet they appear to people. Why aren't much deeper ingrained motiffs being manifested in the sky?

Hold the applause. Perhaps they're just not receiving the attention they deserve? Perhaps faith based belief systems in Christian gods have such a deeply embedded history in the culture that many have been socialized to believe that JC or angels just don't manifest in reality because we will see them in heaven, or so the story goes.

At the start of the Cash-Landrum incident witnesses believed it was the second coming. Ray Hernandez of FREE talked UFO contact experiences on The Paracast he had with his partner as very angelic beings and couched his experience narratives in Christian ideologies and iconographies. Karla Turner's Masquerade of Angels is also very concerned with souls and white faced beings who could manipulate souls. Those are just the first ones that come to mind along with the many, many classic visions of the Virgin Mary. I'm sure the more you might dig into "aliens as angels" cases you will find many more. Similarly, there are a host of writers and people who talk about seeing and living with angels and demons all the damn time. Some appear on this show even. Maybe you just don't read those books or listen to those podcasts? I wouldn't underestimate the extent of that cultural collection of heavenly & demonic visions. So yeah, people see what they expect to see.

How to See Angels

We can all see angels - and I'll show you how

Ten Signs That An Angel Is With You!

Angel Sightings | Sightings of Angels

 

[mike]

I dont buy the people see what they expect to see meme as a sum total explanation for this enigma

Like every other animal on the planet we are hard wired to percieve reality as accurately as our sensory organs will allow. Its a survival mechanism.
So much so that many species have developed camoflage to fox this. Either to avoid being observed by those who would eat them, or those they want to eat.

Billions of people go through life seeing nothing more than reality. There are exceptions caused by chemical imbalances either via illness or ingestion of chemicals that cause it. But for the most part the prevaling trend is people see what they see

The gosford UFO is a good example, the internet wasnt a mainstream thing here in australia in 1994. certainly the multiple accounts of the water steaming or frothing isnt a saturated meme relating to UFO's. Dogs went nuts. Police chased the craft.

UFO Incident - Gosford, Australia - 1994

That multiple witness's observed some interaction with the water, frothing or steaming or sucking it up, Is imo best explained as thats simply what they saw. Not some collective conciousness meme where they saw what they wanted to see as per some internet meme.

Again no real internet in that semi rural area in those days, same or very similar observations by multiple witnesses in a small geographic location, but also by witnesses some distance away.

The Police switch board lit up and they report hearing not only panic in the callers voices but animals going troppo in the background.

When Police sent a car crew out to investigate they saw it too.

I really think in this case people saw what they saw, not what they wanted to see.

 

[Burnt State]

I don't believe that the psycho-social theory is a sum total explanation either, but it's a good one that can respond to a great number of cases. There must be many, many different explanations for ufo sightings, and never any single ne answer. The interactions of the UFO with humanity, and our interpretations of the phenomena over time, have come to create what we know as the UFO experience.

It is multi-faceted; it is defined most primarily through human narrative. On rare occasions do we have recorded evidence through our own technology, or potential trace evidence. Most often though physical evidence is a series of discontinuous elements that we construct narratives out of after the fact, like linking fairy rings with UFO landings.

Human biology is far from exemplary when to comes to our sensory systems' attempt to replicate a virtual reality in our minds, especially using those things that are called eyes. The majority of what we see is pre-recorded data and the illusion of HD reality is the brain filling in the many missing bits in the cheesecloth vision capacity that our eyes reproduce.

Witness testimony, in general, is also routinely problematic.

Are there rare experiences with multiple witnesses though who see strange things - absolutely:

These witnesses of the Gosford 1994 case make for very compelling, consistent witness statements. One would like to think that they would be able to tell the difference between a helicopter 1/2 a kilometer away zig zagging in the sky, say for example, coming to get water for forest fire fighting and a spherical metallic object lit up like a carousel drawing water from the lake up their surface penetrating light tubes. I don't really know. But the story is a compelling one as they believe it. It almost sounds like a natural creature, a large luminesent firefly. Unfortunately, their witness evidence is alive in the memory of witness testimony alone. It is part of the oral history of Ufology, and nothing more.

As a sum collection, the UFO narratives do create a new mythology, belief systems etc. in our culture. How functional that part of Ufology is for finding any answers to the conundrum is mostly little, simply because it involves humans telling stories about what they think they saw. I don't mean to minimize that aspect of Ufological history, but it is what it is, and it's not hard evidence.

 

[Wade]

You guys can't see the forest for the trees, it's obviously T.J. Constable 's sky critters.

 

[Burnt State]

You guys can't see the forest for the trees, it's obviously T.J. Constable 's sky critters.

I definitely reserve a proportion of my thinking about what UFO's are for natural living creatures from earth that live outside of our sensory capacity but make themselves visible very now and then like fireflies in the dark.

 

[Burnt State]

 

[Burnt State]

Here's a good article that documents the limitations and nature of human sight:

Why doesn’t my camera capture a scene exactly how I see it?

Here's a scene that is a comparison between a digital camera as seen on the left and on the right we can see the limits of human sight before the mind completes its photoshopping of the raw image.

 

[Wade]

I don't know if it's the same thing but if we assign an intelligence to "it" maybe it's more appropriate to consider that we see what it wants us to see. This could be especially true if the intelligence behind these occurances are the result of human shenanigans.

Knowing me as I do i have to wonder if I DID have an experience if I saw what my mind it was prepared to comprehend it would probably be Pooh Bear otherwise I suspect it will be just a boring glowing hunk of metal.

 

[mike]

These witnesses of the Gosford 1994 case make for very compelling, consistent witness statements. One would like to think that they would be able to tell the difference between a helicopter 1/2 a kilometer away zig zagging in the sky

Keep in mind the first witness in that clip lindsay carter was a former air trafiic controller, hes hardly likely to mistake a helicopter.

And as the Police officer said all the witness had NO varience in what they described. A Huge chrome ball with lights at its base.

Also bushfires are always a big news item, And from direct experience i can tell you aerial water bombing is suspended at night. Its just too dangerous.

The sound was like a million humming bees, again not typical of the thud thud thud of a choppers rotor. Ive seen choppers taking up water in local fires and they simply drop a large black hose, again inconsistant with the 5 beams of light as described. One witness saw the water taken up and then discharged.

Getting back to cultural memes, were there for the sake of discussion some real incidents of craft unknown to us, its actually quite predictable that such memes would spring up, but to me this is a confirmation of the real phenomena not an explanation for it.

Which makes me question how much importance we should place on this aspect, Its chaff not wheat and is only peripheral to the study of this genre. Like those obvious hoaxes, its there its to be expected even. But its a distraction from the very real cases that warrant our greater attention imo

 

[Burnt State]

Keep in mind the first witness in that clip lindsay carter was a former air trafiic controller, hes hardly likely to mistake a helicopter.

And as the Police officer said all the witness had NO varience in what they described. A Huge chrome ball with lights at its base.

Also bushfires are always a big news item, And from direct experience i can tell you aerial water bombing is suspended at night. Its just too dangerous.

The sound was like a million humming bees, again not typical of the thud thud thud of a choppers rotor. Ive seen choppers taking up water in local fires and they simply drop a large black hose, again inconsistant with the 5 beams of light as described. One witness saw the water taken up and then discharged.

Getting back to cultural memes, were there for the sake of discussion some real incidents of craft unknown to us, its actually quite predictable that such memes would spring up, but to me this is a confirmation of the real phenomena not an explanation for it.

Which makes me question how much importance we should place on this aspect, Its chaff not wheat and is only peripheral to the study of this genre. Like those obvious hoaxes, its there its to be expected even. But its a distraction from the very real cases that warrant our greater attention imo

I agree with most of the points you bring up regarding the helicopter option though you can see how there are some parallels. Still it remains as only an intriguing experience anomaly. Identifying core cases and measuring others is the necessity. For me then the focus is multi-fold:

a) there are the hardcore cases, actual event anomalies as Jerome Clark would call them, with both witness and multiple radar confirmations. These are at the centre of the phenomena and are arguably very few in number.
b) there are experience anomalies where there may be one or many witnesses who all report a significant consistent experience that highlights even broader potentials for the phenomena. They live only in the memory of people.
c) and there is the meme generation as a result of both of the above. These are the messengers of deception, the perception management teams, the mythologists, hoaxers and practitioners of ostention.

While the last component appears to be interacting with the culture in the most profound way I would also say that this is what dominates Ufology as opposed to actual investigation and scientific examination. It's the "narrative" that dominates our society on all fronts and is why individuas believe what they believe.

"Genuine" experience anomalies deserve attention, especially the witnesses themselves. More specific examination of who they were before, during and after their sighting experience needs in depth examination over much longer periods of time. These are profound experiences and their impact on individuals is also another way to measure the phenomena. As UFO's are not easy to study, witnesses are, and they really should be a core focus of future directions for UFO study.

As a subset of experience anomalies, the abduction & contact experiences also are deserving of very special attention especially in trying to identify true mysteries that may include evidence of any that could be deemed an event anomaly. I listed four potential ones in the Strieber thread that neither @Honey-Pot nor @Liminalist wanted to approach as their focus is on another kind of theory: the MILAB. I have to say I'm not one for extending the MKULTRA practices into the UFO abduction experience. While enticing, it is also entirely conspiracist. That type of thinking for me also obfuscates the phenomena. While I believe various gov't agencies have indeed used the UFO meme for achieving a wide array of personal ends I don't subscribe to the ferreting out of various discontinuos historic events and rescripting or interpreting variables for the purpose of supporting conspiratorial thinking. That way of thinking just takes us back into the realm of mythology, meme construction and perception management. Whitley Strieber has to own a lot of that nonsense, as does Jacobs and Hopkins imo.

Identifying which are the actual event anomalies is very hard. There are no real abduction or contact events that fulfill a very stringent approach. This leaves very few examples that we can do much about beyond the summary of points Vallée listed at the last GEIPAN conference in his presentation around future directions for investigation. Limits placed on rigorous investigation combined with our own scientifc limitations to comprehend and properly study the phenomena leaves us drinking beer (or poison of your choice) in the bar or backyard and having some good conversation with some active minds, which is what I'm going to do now. Thanks, mike, for getting me to delineate these points.

 

[Honey-Pot]

As a subset of experience anomalies, the abduction & contact experiences also are deserving of very special attention especially in trying to identify true mysteries that may include evidence of any that could be deemed an event anomaly. I listed four potential ones in the Strieber thread that neither @Honey-Pot nor @Liminalist wanted to approach as their focus is on another kind of theory: the MILAB.

I posted more about the Cahill incident, what still needs to be learned, and I think it could be caused by humans for a variety of unknown reasons. The drawings of the UFO near the ground indicate it could have been anchored by many tie downs to keep it in place to set-up people driving nearby.

Did you read her book or investigate it much? I'm interested in what you and Mike think about it. Your analysis. You ought to review what I was suggesting that makes her case run into a dead end without more verification. I'm hoping you or Mike will know more about the case and her book.

Do you know she posted here a few times at this forum? See the Cahill thread I replied to today. I can't possibly come close to understanding what happened without more information and ideas from other people like you and Mike. There are many possible explanations and rabbit holes, so I'm only able to explore the possibilities. If you have other ideas and information, then please share your possible explanations.

I read the Cahill book reviews at Amazon, and someone said Cahill mentioned she had read WS's book Transformations! IF that is true, and we can learn a date when that happened... it might give us some clues as to what may be going on...

 

[Burnt State]

I'm not really there for the Cahill case. I saw her posts. There's not much there worth investigating despite who it looks on the surface. Like the infamous Zanfretta case, these feel like they have multiple points of external confirmation by third party witnesses, physical evidence etc. that just make you go wow - aliens! But when you look more deeply into them you can see that perhaps these have more to do with agitations of the mind and the construction of the story than anything solid from external reality. While they are compelling as they are written there are wholes all over the place. For Zanfretta his mental health is the primary issue and with Cahill, we understand that her experience is more of a contactee, spiritual things as she couches it in more of a spiritual event. The lack of the defined report as Chalker comments on it, identifies the primary weaknesses. It's a case that has more excuses about its data than any real compelling data to look at. I don't buy it and believe that much like the Betty and Barney Hill event there is more of a confabulist experience taking place that was written after the fact to read as aliens. All three cases identify a familiar pattern of something really strange happening but then the dots are connected together after the fact and I just don't buy it. They've been well discussed on this forum and are worth a search. I put them under the category of UFO abduction as delusion.

In the Strieber thread you were looking for other abduction cases to defeat in the context of being more of a mind control experience. Betty and Barney could also fit something like that given their closeness to the military base and their position in society as civil rights leaders and as a mixed race couple - plus Barney's alcoholism makes them a good target. But that's just supposition. I listed these cases to look at: I don't really see any strong evidence of proven alien abduction, but there are some strange stories told by people whose circumstances merit further contemplation. Pascagoula is one of them with the excellent non-hypnotized interviews in the police station, and the Polish case, Emilcin, is the other whose full story and secondary witness, along with who the experiencer was, makes for the most compelling of all alien abduction tales IMHO. Michalak is also very curious as is the Dechmont Woods case for their unique bits of physical evidence. These all speak to more than just stories and they do not fit in any way with humans as instigators. (unless you count Michalak as one of those imaginative hoaxers - I don't think we will know about this case fully until Rutkowski finally writes the definitive book about it as he has the best collection of evidence on this case.)

 

[mike]

The lack of the final report is something i know a little about.

What happened is one of the extra witness's decided she didnt want to be involved anymore, she simply did not want the public scrutiny.
She threatened the reporter with an injunction and lawsuit.
He, having put considerable time and effort into the report was angry. Not only at the time wasted but the risk he might lose his family home in a lawsuit. he walked away in disgust and the report was essentially shredded.

 

[Burnt State]

Why not eliminate that witness from the piece altogether and proceed with all the other masses of information? Sounds more like an excuse for not showing the data or that there's more to that story. If massive effort was undertaken then why not just excise that part of the report or blank them out - name unwind etc. Somehow that just doesn't sound reasonable and I always had the impression that there was a lot of infighting in UFO circles down under,with support given and then supoort removed for the case.

 

[mike]

Have you ever been served with a court summons for a law suit ?

 

[Honey-Pot]

Why not eliminate that witness from the piece altogether and proceed with all the other masses of information? Sounds more like an excuse for not showing the data or that there's more to that story.

It's a well known media technique and protective practice to allow people on camera altering or hiding their face and voice, so these people are protected from identification. The paper reports definitely could have eliminated any personal identification information. Drawings were published from at least one other witness.

Btw, there were 3 other witnesses alleged to have come forward to the UFO investigator, so it's very weird they would go to the trouble to report the event and then just not cooperate with their information going public anonymously? There's definitely some smoke and mirrors going on with this case.

The 6th unknown witness never came forward, but the other 3 witnesses did come forward according to the story. It would seem after all these years these people would not care if their information came out anonymously. It could even be done on the Internet without being able to be traced back to anyone.

But, Cahill has been willing to be interviewed even in recent years, so the Paracast should get her, imo. Does Mike have a copy of her book?

 

[Burnt State]

Have you ever been served with a court summons for a law suit ?

That could be annoying or scary depending on the situation, but from a research perspective i find it difficult to believe that you could not excise the involvement of that witness altogether and proceed from there. Sounds more than spurious as far as an excuse for no report. Chalker's withdrawn support speaks volumes and he does not entertain the law suit as a reason, or he might have been more sympathetic towards original researchers.

 

[mike]

That could be annoying or scary depending on the situation, but from a research perspective i find it difficult to believe that you could not excise the involvement of that witness altogether and proceed from there. Sounds more than spurious as far as an excuse for no report. Chalker's withdrawn support speaks volumes and he does not entertain the law suit as a reason, or he might have been more sympathetic towards original researchers.

Scary doesnt even scratch the surface of how it feels, Ive had it happen to me (defended sucessfully) and i can tell you it consumes your every waking thought and then kicks ass in your dreams. But from experience when you have that summons in your hands and it says the plaintif wants 40 thousand dollars from you and they intend to ask a court to make you pay it.
Anything that might make that go away is something you would grasp with both hands.

John just wanted this threat to go away, anything less than just shredding the report was a risk to him, i get it that bill wanted to get a copy of the report before it was destroyed, but john was worried that if he didnt do what he was told it would cost him the family home. He erred on the side of his family and home and washed his hands of the affair